The Last Days of Budapest by Adam LeBor: I almost hope my family died in an air raid –
The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance by Adam LeBor (Apollo £27.99, 512pp)
The Last Days of Budapest is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The fizzing nightlife of Budapest scintillated the future Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson when they visited in 1934.
On the surface, the Hungarian capital was a place of non-stop gaiety, music and dance to the accompaniment of Tokaj wine and delicious goulash.
At the glamorous Arizona nightclub, scantily-clad dancers swung from poles, and cavorted down a catwalk between the diners. At the nearby famous restaurant Kakkuk, gypsy violinists serenaded the guests.
The main shopping avenue of the Jewish quarter, Király Street, was one of the city’s liveliest thoroughfares, bustling with thriving shops. But beneath the surface, Hungary’s dark strain of vicious anti-Semitism was beginning to make itself felt.
Far-Right thugs had already enjoyed a brief taste of power in the early 1920s, meting out violent revenge on anyone who’d supported the two-year Soviet-style government.
As LeBor writes in his powerful book on the catastrophe that would befall Budapest during the Second World War, ‘that savagery would erupt again in the winter of 1944-5, but on a much larger scale.’
In the 1930s, Admiral Horthy, Hungary’s weak regent and head of state, enacted the first anti-Semitic laws, for example, that only 20 per cent of employees in any business could be Jewish. This kind of thing normalised anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, those thugs nursed their taste for sadism.
It would re-emerge after the Nazi invasion in 1944, when they re-formed as the terrifying Arrow Cross Party: feral, sadistic, psychopathic Hungarian anti-Semites, who would rampage through the streets, raiding ‘yellowstar’ houses (where Jews were forced to live, 14 to a room) and murdering tens of thousands of men, women and children, mainly by shooting them on the banks of the Danube so they could fall into the river.
Guarded: A German soldier stands guard as Jews are rounded up in the Hungarian capital in late 1944
My Jewish great-grandmother Etelka Tannert and her son, my great-uncle Ferenc, died in Budapest in 1944.
I’ve never known exactly how they met their deaths. Reading this haunting book opens all kinds of ghastly possibilities for how it might have happened.
The thought that it could have been in an Allied air raid is almost comforting, compared with the other forms of slow death described here, some of them in torture chambers in the basements of what used to be Budapest’s most elegant hotels.
What LeBor shows us with horrifying clarity is how life became steadily worse for Budapest’s Jews – from the mid-1930s until the final horror of the Siege of Budapest, which began in December 1944 and ended in January 1945, when the Russians smashed through the gates of the ghetto in which Jews were crammed together in a state of starvation and disease. The psychological strain on the inhabitants through those years is unimaginable.
In some ways, they were the lucky ones. At least they weren’t all murdered at Auschwitz, which is was what happened to almost all the Jews from provincial Hungary, in one of the most industrially efficient programmes of mass-murder in history, overseen by Adolf Eichmann, who unleashed his program as soon as Germany invaded the country in March 1944.
Unforgettable: four young siblings, Judit, Tibor, Zoltan and Pál Ornstein
A quarter of a million Hungarian Jews were ripped from their towns and villages, and forced into cattle trucks and gas chambers.
The deportations from central Budapest were just about to start on June 26, when President Roosevelt presented an ultimatum to Admiral Horthy: if the deportations did not stop, he would be treated as a war criminal.
News of what really happened to Jews when they were ‘relocated’ had trickled out. The deportations were drastically curtailed. ‘The Jews of Budapest were “safe, for now” ’, writes LeBor.
And thanks to the work of heroic figures, such as Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and Jewish-Hungarian forger David Gur, who provided Jews with false documents, thousands were saved. This book celebrates figures such as these.
There are unforgettable photographs. One is of four young siblings: Judit, Tibor, Zoltan and Pál Ornstein. Judit (working at a children’s home in Budapest) kept a diary in 1944 in which she described her worry about her provincial family.
Little did she know, four of them were already dead. Three of her little brothers (including her youngest brother Laszio, who was not in the photo) died at Auschwitz, along with their mother. Judit would be killed in an Allied air raid, but her diary survived – as did Pál, who would go on to become a renowned professor in the US, living until 2017.
Train in a Budapest train station, 1944
It often seemed that indigenous populations turned out to be the most vicious anti-Semites, as bad as the Nazis themselves.
In the Netherlands, Dutch locals relished hunting down and betraying hidden Jews. In France, local policemen savoured providing ‘quotas’ of Jews to be deported. And Budapest, LeBor writes, was ‘a city of snitches’. Its own strain of thuggery was particularly violent.
By the end of 1944, the city was heaped with dead bodies on the streets or washed up from the Danube. ‘Nowhere else in Europe were Jews killed in public in such large numbers over such a long period,’ LeBor writes. For this to happen, there had to be unspoken assent to the violence.
The final showdown, when the city was pounded to smithereens by the Russians, levelling much of the historic quarter of Buda, feels like the result of allowing a city to descend into a state of moral depravity.