Limmud: A Hungarian Jew's experience living under Fascism and Communism

“You have to work out the psychology of all that for yourself; it’s a pretty rapid way of growing up.”

There are few nations which have denied their role in the Holocaust quite as comprehensively as the Hungarians.

“[Adolf] Eichmann came to Hungary with 200 Gestapo and SS people,” Mr Komoly said.

“There were no other Germans concerned with the deportation of the Jews. The rest was all willing Hungarians.

“They deported something like 600,000 Jews, the fastest move ever in the whole history of the Holocaust. In Poland, it took two and a half years to deport the Jewish population. The 600,000 disappeared from the Hungarian provinces in something like two and a half months.”

Mr Komoly lost his father during the Holocaust, as well as a number of members of his extended family. 

The Fascist Arrow Cross, not content with waiting for the Jews to be deported to death camps, marched tens of thousands of Jews down to the banks of the River Danube. They made them undress, shot them, and let the current carry away the bodies.

But even in 2005, when a now-famous memorial featuring metal shoes was erected on the banks of the Danube, the Hungarians could not bring themselves to acknowledge what had happened. The plaque at the memorial pays tribute not to Jews, killed by Hungarians, but to “victims of the Nazis.”

Mr Komoly said that this narrative – the idea that “the Hungarians were victims of the Germans” – continues in Hungary today.

“Hungary got a European Union grant to raise a Holocaust Memorial. They created a statue, which is an eagle, supposed to represent the Germans, and St Gabriel, the patron saint of Hungary. The wording on the memorial says ‘Memorial to the victims of the German Occupation.’ No word about the Jews, it’s ‘here we are, poor Hungarians, the victims of the Germans’.

“There was a year-long demonstration when the design for the memorial was leaked. Jewish people held a 24/7 vigil against it. In the end, they had to lift the statue in by helicopter.”

Mr Komoly discussed in detail his experiences both under Fascist and then Communist rule in Hungary.

There were a number of Hungarian Jewish Communist leaders, but, as Mr Komoly said, “a lot of people believed that the Communist Secret Police came directly from the [Fascist] Arrow Cross”, he said.

He described the party’s policies as ruinous – describing “a ridiculous industrial policy” which led inhabitants of a country which had previously been one of the world’s largest producers of wheat, to near starvation.

Born in 1936, Mr Komoly managed to leave the country in 1956 following the Hungarian Uprising, along with 200,000 other Hungarians, including 20,000 Jews. During the uprising, Hungarian students had freed political prisoners of the Communists – including Fascists, who promptly tried to co-opt the uprising for their own ends. People were hanged, with notices attached to them reading “this will happen to every Communist and Jew.”

Mr Komoly also spoke scathingly of Hungary’s currrent Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.

“The current Prime Minister very proudly defends his antisemitic policies, he turns around and says ‘you Jews must be very pleased with my politics because I’m keeping the Muslims out’. That’s his take on the situation.”

He also passed judgement on the Labour party in the UK. “If you look at what John McDonnell is trying to do, the deselection process going on in the Labour party, where you want to make sure that the decent, centre-of-the-road Labour party MPs are kicked out and they are bringing in the extreme Left," he said, "I have a very strong suspicion that Mr McDonnell is just about the only one in the Labour party who has read his history books and learned from the Hungarian [Communist] example.

“I’m very fearful of where it will all end up.”