1944 was the year when a series of tragic events, without parallel in Hungarian history, unfolded. The country's government had been aligning its foreign policy course with Nazi Germany, and this shift had been mirrored in domestic politics, as well. A series of anti-Jewish laws were passed from 1938 onwards, and, as Hungary joined the 2nd World War on the side of the Axis powers, the government became complicit in genocidal actions including the expulsion and transfer of 18,000 Jews to Nazi authorities in 1941, which culminated in the Kamenets-Podolsk massacre. Citizens classified as Jewish were drafted into unarmed labour service, facing discrimination and arbitrary violence in addition to enemy fire.
Despite such horrors, until 1944 the large majority of Jewish Hungarians held hopes of surviving the war, as deportations on a nation-wide scale had not taken place. When in spring 1944, Germany decided to occupy Hungary, considered as an untrustworthy ally, conditions rapidly changed. The pro-German Hungarian government, in cooperation with the Nazi bureau set up by Eichmann and in possession of a carte blanche regarding its actions against Jewish Hungarians from Regent Horthy, the head of state, changed course and pro-actively pursued the deportation of all persons classified as Jewish to concentration camps. In spring and summer 1944, almost half a million people were deported in the single largest genocidal operation of the war, most of them never to return.
Following Regent Horthy's belated change of mind and stopping of the deportations in July 1944, mass murder continued after the Nazis installed a puppet Arrowcross government in the fall of that year. Further tens of thousands were murdered in Budapest or in so-called death marches headed for Germany. Altogether, Hungary lost over half a million citizens in the Holocaust, and well over 400,000 in the single fateful year of 1944, with hundreds of thousands more suffering injury and persecution.
This tragedy was made possible by the abandonment and active genocidal persecution of its own citizens by the state machinery, in cooperation with Nazi Germany and under the passive gaze of the majority of society, representing an episode in Hungarian history that its citizens continue to grapple with.
The work of remastering history is a particularly challenging one especially in the context of a resurgent extreme right in many countries, Hungary not being an exception. Through representing the richness of the culture of the martyrs, we hope we can both raise awareness about the tragedy itself and also warn against the dangers of intolerance and exclusion. Naturally, we are working to bring this project to Hungary as well, so that audiences there are also offered this chance to reflect on the past in the spirit of joint commemoration and facing up to our shared responsibility of preventing forgetting and fighting hatred.
