Hungary: still too many Jews there, it seems

It is not a secret that during the period between 1941 and 1945 Hungarians have done their considerable best to eliminate their Jewish population.

Two-thirds of Hungarian Jewry was destroyed between 1941 and 1945. More than half a million people fell victim to the labour service, the deportations organised by German Nazis and their Hungarian henchmen, the brutality of the Hungarian authorities, the death marches, the gassings in Auschwitz, the mass executions, and the terrible circumstances of the concentration camps. Hungarian Jews were murdered on the Ukrainian snow-fields, on the streets of Budapest, in the countryside ghettos, behind the barbed wires of German concentration camps, in the gas chambers of Birkenau, and on the country roads. Every tenth victim of the Holocaust and every third victim of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi extermination camp, were Hungarian.

The mass murder wasn't solely a result of Nazi domination. The Hungarian fascists were quite active themselves in preparations for the slaughter.

Starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed a series of anti-Jewish measures in emulation of Germany's Nürnberg Laws.

Jewish Holocaust survivors remember the Nyilas (Arrow Cross) Party quite well. The Nyilas' Jew-hate was so overpowering that they continued slaughtering the remaining Jews even when the end was nearing and Soviet troops were closing in...

You would think that with estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Jews out of almost 800,000 before the WWII, Hungarians would be content to forget their Jew-hate and concentrate on creating some kind of a new future in the free world to which they are now officially belonging. But no, you are apparently wrong to think so.

Hungarian political scene is leaning more and more to the Fascist positions espoused by Arrow Cross once. And a certain Ms Krisztina Morvai, a subject of a spoof on Simply Jews some three years ago, one of the leaders of openly neo-fascist Jobbik, is aiming to become a president of Hungary. No less and no more (for now). And here is another symptom* of the wide-spread malady:

The photo and the following text come from a Hungarian blogger, with my thanks. My friend, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, agreed to translate it for this blog post. So here we go.

This poster is not coming from a Polish movie from seventies. It was located at Teréz square in Őrmezőn neighborhood of Budapest. But everyone who will see it shall immediately understand that posters of this kind will soon spread in all parts of metropolis, covering walls and penetrating many brains to start acting there vigorously.

From the uniform that the young man in the poster wears it may seem that he is a member of Sturmabteilung (SA), also that the ideas of Arrow Cross' members are not alien to him.

The poster, in spite of the Hungarian laws and regulations, proclaims and proudly displays that it is Nazi and antisemitic. It also intends to be the Balaam's donkey, but we already know this, of course.

The matter is that the antisemitic posters appeared in the city that once was considered as an all-European capital city that deserved a more relaxed fate. In the posters you can see a big man dressed in Arrow Cross uniform with a sword in his right hand, holding in his left hand a hook with a Jewish banker hanging from it. The poster is inciting the Hungarian citizens with time on their hands to "join the struggle".

What are the goals of this struggle and what are its details? The answers already don't interest anyone. The contents of the poster are quite enough by themselves. One can assume that this war will start with a military organization and parades, followed by antisemitic acts, pogroms and rapes. The said recipe didn't change from the times of ancient Alexandria. Only we are living here and now.

Even the majority of the citizens with right wing views object to things like these. They too don't like revolutions, coups, murders and economic hardships that usually accompany actions of this kind. Even more they don't like the waves of bankruptcies that will follow.

People who spread these posters are, apparently, great "patriots" and are very calculative men. The fate of the country, e.g. its delivery from financial bankruptcy, depends currently on the decision of IMF. As the things look now, it seems that the decision will not be a positive one. Instead of trying to improve their country image and strengthen it to receive the required assistance, a momentary snapshot of the nation's life, as it reflects in the posters that appeared in Budapest, could totally destroy the creaking and falling apart cart of the Orban's cabinet.

The Covenant of Blood seeks to take over the control, even at the price of losing the country. In normal places it is called treason.

It is preferable not to describe the feeling of a Jewish observer of the poster. But these crazies don't really know whom they hate so much and whom they want to fight. The opinion accepted today in the Hungarian ultra-right circles is that there are two to three million Jews in the country. Oi - in reality there isn't even a fifth or sixth of that number, and only a few among them are practicing their religion, most live the full life in the community.

Relax. As we know them [the neo-Nazis], they will declare that a lot of people are Jewish, and it wouldn't matter that they are not.

Afterword:

To start with, sourcing: The source of the picture is the Hungarian newspaper Népszava - according to the blogger. This should dispel (for a while, at least) the doubts about veracity of the story.

The veracity is only strengthened by the translated above post itself. An objective reader can easily deduce that the author of the post is not overly concerned by the fate of the Jews. The main theme of his article is the possible internal political turmoil in Hungary and its impact on the ailing economy, as a result of IMF unwillingness to assist the Hungarian government in its financial dire straits.

(*) The text under the picture in the poster says: "Join the struggle"


More info (including some doubts about legitimacy of the story) from Elder of Ziyon. And from CFCA.