Jill Culiner investigates why Jews who had survived the Holocaust vanished from a village in Hungary in 1946 and about the centuries of propaganda that led up to a wave of violence in the country.
In 2001, while preparing a photographic exhibition about Europe’s vanished Jews, I heard about the pogrom in Kunmadaras, Hungary: in May 1946, Holocaust survivors were accused of kidnapping Christian children and using their blood to make kosher sausage. Seizing any weapon they could find, town residents went on a rampage, pillaging and murdering.
The accusation of ritual murder dates from the first century AD when Apion, the Alexandrian writer, claimed that each year Jews kidnapped a Greek, fattened, then sacrificed him in order to eat his entrails. By the 12th century, encouraged by the Church and the Crusades, Jews were accused of grinding the host to obtain Christ’s blood, and murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious ritual.
Centuries of horrific persecution ensued, and so deeply ingrained was the belief that starving Christians were known to offer their children to Jews in exchange for money. But how could such an accusation have been levelled at Holocaust survivors in 1946?
I headed for Kunmadaras, where I was befriended by the habitués of a local watering hole, and although no one resented my questioning, all denied local participation in the pogrom:
“People from elsewhere came in trucks.”
“The Jews were killed by retreating German soldiers. Or Russian.”
Settling in Tiszaors, a neighbouring village, I began searching for the vanished Jewish community; for, forbidden to own land until the late 19th century, excluded from guilds, the law, the civil service, and education, local Jews had been peddlers, rag and bone men, cobblers and tailors. Others ran the nobles’ bars, mills, and lumberyards, and those more influential were negotiators for the estates’ produce. But, to my surprise, all denied that Jews had lived here.
Hungarians see themselves as history’s victims. Decimated by Mongols in 1241, under Ottoman hegemony after 1541; then the Habsburg Monarchy became the dominant power with the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699.
Defeat in the First World War saw the collapse of the Habsburg Alliance and the loss of two-thirds of Hungary’s pre-war territory; defeat in WWII heralded in Soviet domination. Someone had to be responsible for such failure, and who better than those eternal scapegoats, the Jews?
When Christian debtors were disinclined to repay loans to Jewish moneylenders, when royal or state coffers were empty, when shopkeepers wished to destroy Jewish rivals, charges of blood libel were invoked, and they resulted in torture, burnings, and executions. When Jewish writers, scholars and musicians were active in creating the new Hungarian culture in the 19th century, and Jewish business acumen was greatly benefiting the country, fresh charges of blood libel spread.
Around 825,000 Jews lived in Hungary when Fascist Germany occupied the country in 1944. Already in the grip of defeat, Germany needed Hungarian cooperation to eradicate the community, but far from resisting, the government saw the advantage in confiscating Jewish real estate, furniture, jewellery, artwork, businesses, industries, livestock, stocks, cash and bank accounts.
In May 1944, with the active participation of the Hungarian police, rural Jews were marched to improvised ghettoes before their transfer to the death camps. As they left, locals plundered their homes. Within three months, over 500,000 Jews had been murdered.
At the war’s end, survivors drifted back to their villages. Former Jewish businesses were open, but selling the merchandise of murdered owners; one-time Christian friends were those who had jeered when Jews had been driven off to the ghettoes; possessions — lamps, pictures, quilts, pots, and furniture — were now snug in neighbourhood homes. One joke told of a Jew meeting a Christian friend on the street:
“How are you?” asked the friend.
“Don’t ask,” answered the Jew. “I just got back from the camp and, apart from the clothes you have on your back, I’ve nothing left.”
Before the war, 371 Jews had lived in Kunmadaras. Of these, 175 had died in deportation, and 75 chose to return. Now, to local consternation, the Jews were urging neighbours to return what had been plundered! What right did they have to do so? Hadn’t Fascist propaganda labelled Jews subhuman parasites? How could parasites be Hungarian citizens?
Faced with post-war economic chaos, the government took advantage of the still-virulent anti-Semitism. Denouncing Jewish speculators and ‘capitalist criminals’, anti-Fascist myth forbade mention of the extermination camps. Caricatures, those used by the German Nazi Party, were again disseminated, rumours of kidnapped Christian children abounded, and the Communist press urged revenge on exploiters who used Christian blood in the Passover ceremony.
“When the Jews came back, they had nothing,” said Eszter Kabai Tóth, a Kunmadaras resident. “Now they’re eating white bread, while I toil the fields.” It was she who claimed that local Jews had forced a Christian girl into a basement and tried to take her blood. Another resident, Zsigmund Tóth, member of the Slovakian fascist Hlinka, said: “Christian children disappeared when I lived in Slovakia. When that happened, we hung Jews from lamp posts. How long will you tolerate them making salami out of your children?”
The Kunmadaras pogrom started in the marketplace when Eszter Tóth screamed that a Christian boy had just been kidnapped. In the ensuing violence, four Jews died and 20 were badly wounded. No one searched for an abducted child. Wasn’t it more agreeable to spread myth than admit complicity in pillaging, deportation and murder?
“Jews started the whole thing. Weinberger wanted to recover a mirror and a quilt!”
“The Germans gave me Rosinger’s furniture, and he wanted it back. He wanted his cows back, too.”
“I beat the Jews to death because everyone else did.”
Two months later, in Kielce, Poland, Jews were again accused of kidnapping a Christian child. Forty-four were murdered and 80 wounded.
Travelling through Hungary, I searched for village synagogues. Some are ruins; others are showrooms or offices. In the town of Egyek on the Great Plain, a local history teacher marched furiously along vanished walls.
“Here’s where the synagogue was, right here,” he said. “They tore it down, then covered everything over with cement. Why? So no one would remember what they’d done.”
When my photo exhibition of Europe’s vanished Jews came to Hungary, press coverage turned me, temporarily, into a local celebrity (“We’re proud of you. You’ve put this village on the map”). And suddenly it was acceptable to mention local Jews.
Two men admitted to being present when the Deutsch home was ransacked; others mentioned the ‘nice’ men who had died in labour battalions or the camps. Former Jewish houses emerged, so did a bar, a pharmacy, and a doctor’s surgery. And one elderly gentleman confessed to having taken part in the Kunmadaras pogrom. “When the Jews came back from the camps, they were weak. They needed children’s blood. From our children, Hungarian children.”
The blood libel is still very much present, evoked in the Arab world for anti-Jewish propaganda, it is part of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory, and in 2014, during a pro-Hamas rally in Seattle, marchers brandished posters showing Jews drinking the blood of Christian children.1
My next-door neighbour, Gizi, a schoolteacher, mentioned that the librarian’s mother had once worked for a Jewish family, and each time a baby was born, she’d been forced to give her blood for the baby to drink. “Are you really certain this story isn’t true?”
“Of course, I’m certain,” I insisted.
She looked confused, even embarrassed. “But why do Jews need Christian blood?”
Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain by Jill Culiner was published on 28 February, 2024.
Jill Culiner is a writer, social critical artist, satirist, and photographer.
www.jillculiner-writer.com
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1 https://forward.com/culture/320281/why-the-blood-libel-wont-die/
Other features about the history of Hungary include:
Vampire or victim? The real Countess Báthory by Sonia Velton
The real Dracula: monster by nature – or nurture? by Ethan Bale
Carolyn Kirby writes about another cover up in Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre.
Images:
- Monument in Kunmadaras to the victims of the 1946 pogrom: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Ritual murder (blood libel), martyrdom of Simon von Trent from the Nuremberg World Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel, 1493: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Mongol invasion in Hungary from the Chronica Hungarorum by Johannes de Thurocz, 1488: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Antisemitic propaganda in Nazi Germany: a depiction of Capitalist/Communist Vermin in Der Stürmer, September 1944: Partynia for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Propaganda posters in Budapest, 1944: Fortepan / Lissák Tivadar via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Burial of the victims of the Kielce pogrom, 1946: Wikimedia (public domain)
