Pogroms.
We tend to assume that the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, which immediately after the war had made the dreadful consequences of prejudice clear for everyone to see, diminished anti-Semitism in European and American societies. However this was not the case at all. On the contrary, at least in Eastern Europe, the opposite occurred. To be sure, the situation of the Jews and the nature and strength of anti-Semitism varied from country to country and everywhere there were special circumstances. In the Soviet Union during the years between the end of the world war and the death of Stalin anti-Semitism was almost explicit, and it was a government inspired policy: Jews were singled out for special persecution. This was the time of the “anti-cosmopolitan campaign”, (“cosmopolitan” being a transparent allusion to Jew) and the time of the infamous “doctors’ plot” in which almost all the accused--doctors who were alleged to plan to murder their highly placed patients--just happened to have obviously Jewish sounding names. In the Czechoslovak purge trials Jewish Communists were the most likely victims. The worst anti-Jewish attacks, however, took place in a country where Jews had suffered the most: Poland. With tragic irony, popular anti-Semitism was strongest where there had been the largest number of victims. Some Poles asked this obscene question from their returning fellow Jewish citizens: how come you have survived? The mention of Kielce, the town where the largest post-war pogrom took place, terrified many Eastern European Jews at the time. It is estimated that 2000 Jews were killed in post-war Poland between 1945 and 1947.
In Hungary the anti-Semitic outbursts were not as bloody as in Poland, but here also, there were tragic incidents. The character of post-war Hungarian anti-Semitism differed from previous versions. In the inter-war period it had been the government that had been primarily responsible: immediately after World War I, it passed anti-Jewish laws, most significantly a numerus clausus limiting the number of Jews in institutions of higher education. (After the passage of a few years the government quietly allowed this law to lapse.) However, beginning in 1938, under the impact of Hitler’s Germany, the government once again passed a series of ever more stringent laws restricting Jewish economic activity. This government also tolerated, indeed, inspired, anti-Semitic propaganda. There is no way to measure the strength of popular anti-Semitism, but there is little doubt that simple people, especially the lower classes in the cities, were anti-Semitic, and accepted the demagogic accusations against Jews on face value. The vast majority of them certainly showed little sympathy to Jews at the time of their greatest tragedy. On the other hand, in the inter-war period there had been no spontaneous outbursts of violence against Jews.
The situation changed after 1945. Immediately after the defeat of the Nazis, of course, the new Provisional government abrogated all anti-Jewish legislation, (though it said nothing about the necessity of returning to the Jews their lost property) . At the same time archival records show a great increase of anti-Semitic sentiments among the common folk, especially among the peasantry. But it was not only the common folk, but also journalists and politicians who expressed if not open anti-Semitism, but what seems to us as remarkable insensitivity. In this respect there was no difference among the political parties. Hungarians, including the intellectuals, took it for granted that the destruction of the Jewry had been entirely the work of the Germans and a handful of native helpers, who now were punished. They explicitly rejected the claim of special Jewish suffering. József Darvas, a crypto communist leader of the National Peasant Party wrote in the communist daily, Szabad Nép on March 25, 1945, that is even before all the camps were liberated and the surviving inmates could return: “There is today a part of the Jewry, fortunately a smaller part, especially those bourgeois figures, who have done nothing against fascism and for democracy, who expect, indeed, demand recognition for special suffering. The workers and peasants also suffered and et now they work. Those who do not want to work will be expelled from society together with the other saboteurs, and reactionaries. ” His fellow leader in the NPP, Péter Veres said in a mass gathering: “In the peasant party there are only Hungarians, we do not need foreigners, neither Shwabs, nor Jews” Dezsö Sulyok, a liberal, who had voted against the anti-Jewish laws of the late 1930s, nevertheless regarded the Jewish leaders of the communist party as non Hungarians, and explained the pogroms as a response of the behavior of the Jews in the police . Leaders of all political parties agreed that there were too many Jews in positions of power, especially in the police.
In 1946 there were a series of small-scale pogroms, something that had not happened in the inter-war period. How are we to explain this phenomenon? One can only speculate. Several factors contributed to this unfortunate development. First of all, one should not underestimate the power of Nazi propaganda that obviously outlived Hitler. Indeed, it would have been surprising if all those Nazi stereotypes about Jews in which people came to believe, had disappeared overnight. Perhaps a more powerful explanation is a psychological one. By and large people in Eastern Europe and in Hungary in particular, to put it mildly, did not acquit themselves well during the years of Nazi rule. Too many became accomplices, but even those who did not, could not have had a clear conscience, knowing that they had done nothing to save their innocent fellow citizens. Under the circumstances it was comforting to believe that Jews had deserved their fate: they were in fact an alien, subversive and exploitative people. It is a well-known psychological phenomenon that the worse we behave toward an individual the more we dislike him. It lessens our sense of guilt if we can believe that the person we mistreated was in fact a wicked human being. Undoubtedly, the same mechanism also works on the level of social groups.
Furthermore, non-Jewish Hungarians also suffered during the war. The Second Hungarian Army fighting on the Don in January 1943 was for all practical purposes eliminated. Tens of thousands of soldiers died and an even larger number fell into Soviet captivity. In 1944 Hungarian territory was bitterly fought over, causing enormous destruction, and Budapest became one of the most heavily damaged European cities. Under the circumstances, the Hungarians liked to regard themselves as victims, and were not impressed by the obvious fact that their Jewish countrymen suffered incomparably more. They were unwilling to accept responsibility for the destruction of the Hungarian Jewry, and liked to believe, incorrectly, that the entire guilt fell on the Germans. The very notion that they also might be responsible added to their natural hostility.
Another explanation for the wave of anti-Semitic outbursts might be that while pre-war Jewry had played extraordinarily significant roles in the economy and cultural life of the nation, it had been completely excluded from political power. Now, not only in the powerful Communist and Socialist parties were there Jews in leadership positions, but also in the political police. Peasants in particular found it hard to accept Jews in positions of authority, and were willing to listen to demagogic voices deploring Jewish power. In anti-Semitic discourse it was a reoccurring theme that now Jews control everything and they are determined to take revenge. In the mind of the Hungarians, justifiably or not, Jews and Communists came to be identified. As we shall see, the Communist Party did everything within its power to counteract this identification, but it ultimately failed. This identification had considerable significance in post-war Hungarian political developments, and it did great damage both to Communists and to Jews.
Hungarian Jewry, and especially the Jews of Budapest, was like no other Jewry anywhere in the world: it was a Western type of Jewry, living in an Eastern European economic and political environment . For our purposes Western European Jewry means: high degree of assimilation, large number of converts, low birth-rate, substantial Christian-Jewish intermarriage, speaking the local languages instead of Yiddish, and making contributions not to a particular Jewish culture, but to a native, in this instance Hungarian culture. Hungarian Jewry was every bit as well assimilated as the German Jewry, and it regarded itself as “Hungarian” just as enthusiastically as the Germans regarded themselves “German”. The difference was that Hungary was an Eastern European country: before 1945 the last genuine European feudal ruling class governed it. The country was largely agricultural and the landed gentry owned most of the land. As a consequence of the particular Hungarian social structure, in the late 19th century a tacit compromise was reached between the aristocracy and the Jewry: middle class occupations, trade and industry and the liberal professions were conceded to Jews. The aristocracy had no interest in such affairs, but at the same time was keen to advance economic modernization.
After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, gradually a new Hungarian middle class developed which competed for jobs with Jews, and with it suddenly a modern type of anti-Semitism appeared. A justification for this new found anti-Semitism was the extraordinarily large role that Jews played in the short lived Hungarian Soviet republic of 1919. Although at this time only a small proportion of the Jews were attracted to Communism, nevertheless the small Communist Party’s leadership was largely in Jewish hands: after all, Jews made up a dominant part of the intelligentsia, people who were traditionally attracted to radical, socialist politics. Hungary, which had been an excellent place for Jews, suddenly became much less than excellent. In spite of the anti-Semitic laws that were introduced in inter-war Hungary, the extraordinary role of Jews in economic and intellectual lives did not altogether vanish. Very few Jews became manual workers, and there were practically no Jewish peasants. The Jews who had been deported by the Nazis to death camps in 1944 were a relatively prosperous group, in spite of the previous Hungarian government’s attempts to reduce their roles in the economy, and impoverish them. Most of them had been merchants, clerks, and professional people. There was much to be taken away from them when they were deported and much there was to be claimed on their return, which, as we shall see, came to be a major source of conflict.
The demagogic accusation that Jews were exploiters and that at the same time subversives, have been used by anti-Semites often and in many societies. It was obviously a part of Nazi propaganda and appeal. In Hungary, however, these charges was especially powerful for the simple reason that in fact Jews were both the captains of industry and at the same time the leaders of the Communist Party. This duality had much to do with the character of post-war anti-Semitism and also with the behavior of the Jews at this time.
Since Hungary was an ally (or a satellite) of Germany in the war and was occupied by the Nazis only on March 19th, 1944, the destruction of the Jewry began only on that date (there had been some exceptions: from the Carpatho-Ukraine thousands of Jews had been sent to their deaths earlier). The fact that Hungary was an ally, rather than an occupied land had another consequence: military age Jewish males were not drafted into the army, but were organized into labor battalions. This particular institution existed nowhere else in Nazi dominated Europe. In the labor battalions the chances of survival depended on the decency of the Hungarian officers, but by and large survival rates were much better than in concentration camps. When these men returned after the war, and could not find their murdered families, they were likely to join the Communists. Many of them felt an understandable bitterness toward their Hungarian compatriots, which influenced their actions and behavior.
Calculating the losses of the Jewry during the Holocaust is a difficult task. First of all, there is a difference between who was Jewish according to the census data, and according to the Nazis. In the territory of wartime Hungary, according to census figures there were 725,000 Jews, after Poland and the Soviet Union, the largest Jewry in Europe. These figures do not include converted Jews, whose number, especially in Budapest, was sizeable. So, if we look at the number from the point of view of those who were victimized by the Nazis, we must add another 100,000.
This was not a homogeneous Jewry. About half of the Jews lived in territories that Hungary acquired just before the war, as rewards for its alliance with Nazi Germany. These newly occupied territories contained a very large number of Jews, whose social and economic situation was quite different from the “original” Hungarian Jewry, especially from the Jewry in Budapest. When we look at the post-war situation, it is more relevant to look at the number of victims and survivors, only from the territory of so called “Trianon” Hungary. (The Hungarian peace treaty at the end of World War I was signed at Trianon.) According to the Nazi definition, approximately 490,000 Jews lived in Trianon Hungary at the outbreak of the war. At the end of 1945--that is, by the time those who had survived returned from camps and from labor battalions--there were fewer than 100,000 Jews in Budapest and fewer than 50,000 in the rest of the country. Hungary lost more than two thirds of its Jewry and in absolute numbers only Poland and the Soviet Union lost more Jewish citizens to Nazi slaughter.
The behavior of the Hungarian people in 1944, and let us immediately add that it was not very different from that of other Eastern European peoples, convinced many Jews that their assimilation had been a sham, that they had not been accepted, that their lives and livelihood would never be assured in the country of their birth, and many decided to emigrate. We do not have precise data, but estimates put the number between 20,000 and 50,000 people. Most of them went to the United States and to Palestine. The Zionists for the first time achieved considerable influence, especially among the youth. The possibility of leaving the country, however, ended by 1949, at which time the borders came to be hermetically sealed.
For our purposes, however, the relevant part of the Jewry is the one that either because of inertia or because of conviction decided to stay. A disproportionate number of these Jews came to be attracted to leftist, radical policies and came to support either the Socialist or, in particular, the Communist Party. Even though the economic policies of the Communist Party threatened the economic interests, indeed, livelihood of the Jews, the Communists appeared to them as the only force capable of protecting them against the anti-Semitic Hungarian people. After all, the Communist and Socialist parties possessed a nearly perfect record of opposing the fascists. (Not counting the years of 1939-1941). This was particularly true about the Communist Party that had been illegal before 1945. The Soviet Union, the Red Army stood behind the Communists. That fact was a great handicap in the eyes of many Hungarians, but for the Jews it was the other way around. The majority of Hungarians did not greet the Soviet occupation with pleasure. Russians had never been popular in Hungary, and the behavior of Soviet troops in 1945 turned this unpopularity into hatred among many Hungarians. But for Jews it was an obvious and indisputable fact that the Red Army saved their lives. Jews and perhaps only Jews could regard the Soviet occupation of 1945 as unambiguous liberation. Jews naively, understood Soviet ideology as an ideology of internationalism, the exact opposite of German and Hungarian nationalism that, in their view, culminated in Nazism.
The promise of socialism was the promise of transcending nationalist and racist prejudice. This pro-Sovietism was an essential feature of Jewish thinking, which led thousands of Jews into the Communist party and into communist bureaucracy and political police, into the organs of repression. Even when the party pursued policies that were almost explicitly anti-Semitic, most Jews could not forget the experience of 1945, when their lives had been saved by the arrival of the Red Army. For Jews joining the Communist party was once again an act of assimilation.
Let us admit that some Jews who joined the Communist Party, especially the communist instrument of coercion, the infamous AVO, (Allamvedelmi Osztaly State Defense Department) joined not only because they wanted to fight for communism but also because that organization offered the opportunity to take revenge on those who had abused them in the past. (Indeed, there was one instance of unlawful retaliation by Jews on their enemies. In 1945 Jewish men who had returned from worker battalions to the village of Gyömrö and found that all their relatives had been killed, joined the Communist political police and with weapons that they had received from the Red Army killed some 16 people whom they considered responsible for Nazi atrocities.) The Communists employed Jews in these capacities because for obvious reasons Jews were reliable, and association with the previous regime had not compromised them. Nowhere else could the Party have found so many educated and reliable cadres as among the Jews. No precise numbers exist and anti-Semites and anti-Communists no doubt for their own reason overestimated the number and percentage of Jews in the Communist Party and especially in the AVO. At the same time there can be no question that Jews were over-represented in this organization and also in the Party. According to the best estimates about one seventh of the Party membership was Jewish in 1945 at a time when Jews made up between 1% and 2% of the population. At the same time it is also evident that the great majority of Jews did not become Communists Party members.
According to contemporary figures, no doubt imprecise, approximately a quarter of the Jewish population voted for the Communists in the 1945 elections. (Nationally the Communist received 17% of the vote.) For the 1947 elections we have no comparable figures, but it is estimated that the Communist received an even larger share of the Jewish vote than in 1945. The Party not only did nothing to gain the allegiance of the Jews, but on the contrary, it took steps to emphasize that it was not beholden to Jews. Jewish voting behavior becomes comprehensible only when we remember that in 1946 there was a wave of anti-Semitic outbursts. The Party did nothing to prevent these; indeed, its anti “bourgeois” rhetoric contributed to the anti-Semitic atmosphere, yet from the point of view of the Jews the Communist Party remained their only protection.
The unusual aspect of the Hungarian situation was that the government was largely in Jewish hands. Jews played prominent roles in the other Eastern European countries also, but nowhere was their domination as complete as in Hungary. All the four most prominent and powerful leaders of the Communist Party were Jewish (Mátyás Rákosi, Ernö Gerö, Mihály Farkas and József Révai). It is true that these Communists were not in full control of the government until 1948, but from the very outset, they had behind them the power of the Red Army and therefore, unquestionably, the Communist Party was the decisive force in Hungarian politics. How Jewish Communists made possible, and in some ways even encouraged native anti-Semitism, is an interesting psychological and political phenomenon, which deserves further exploration. The communist leaders, of course, did not think of themselves as Jewish. They naively believed that by becoming communists, they ceased to be Jewish. They all survived the Nazi era, not in German occupied Hungary, but in the Soviet Union. Perhaps if they had experienced the Holocaust in close contact, their sense of community with their fellow Jews who had just experienced an extraordinary tragedy would have grown stronger, and they would have understood that no one is entirely free to choose his or her identity.
Nowhere else do we find such a clear example of anti-Semitic policies carried out by Jews than in post war Hungary. The behavior of the top Communist leaders was entirely cynical. Of course a Rákosi or a Gerö was not an anti-Semite in the narrow sense of the word. They nevertheless carried out policies that harmed their fellow Jews and on several occasions led to pogroms. They well understood that the association of the Party with Jews was harmful to the communist cause. (It was not only harmful within Hungary, but also was a serious handicap in their relationship with an increasingly anti-Semitic Stalin. It is true that he tolerated Jews in the top leadership positions in Hungary, but that was perhaps, because these were the people who had lived through the war years in Moscow and therefore Stalin knew them or knew of them and consequently believed that they could be trusted to carry out obediently policies that were favorable to Soviet interests.) The Communist leaders did everything within their power to deny their Jewish background. They went to ridiculous length to cover up this background. Rákosi, for example, went so far as to imitate a peasant accent and peppered his speeches with what seemed to him as village expressions. Needless to say, such attempts were in vain. Indeed, in the eyes of the Hungarians, the Party was doubly alien: Jews led it and it was the agent of a foreign power, namely the Soviet Union. The party did everything to counteract this identification with Jews. It sent out instructions that “In house to house agitation a person with a Jewish face or Jewish behavior should not participate under any circumstances”. One wonders what they had in mind as constituting “Jewish behavior”. The circular went on to explain: “That is the explanation of the lack of success of Madisz and MNDSZ”. (Madisz was a youth organization and MNDSZ was a mass organization for women).
Most reprehensibly, the top leaders openly courted low ranking members of the Hungarian Nazi Party (Nyilaskeresztes Part). The party needed new members in order to penetrate into Hungarian society, and also to be able to assume a nationalist mantle. Rákosi explicitly stated that in his opinion it is easier to make good communists out of the little Nazis (kis nyilasok) than out of Jewish intellectuals. Rákosi, Gerö, Révai, and indeed most members of the top leadership came from precisely those social circles in which the top leader of the party expressed no confidence. One may describe this attitude either as a result of remarkable self-knowledge, or, perhaps more likely, self-loathing. Many of the new members of the party were indeed ill educated and came from lower class, peasant and worker background. They had many reasons to join. First of all, by becoming communists, they could cover up their unsavory past. Indeed, the Party in its recruiting work made it explicit: join and your missteps would be forgiven. Given ever increasing communist dominance in politics, it was easy to see that membership in the victorious party would lead to material benefits. But in any case, moving from one radical organization into another was intellectually and psychologically not very difficult. In Hungary in the inter-war period it was the extreme right (in absence of the discredited and outlawed Communist Party) that stood for much needed social reforms. During the war often it was a matter chance whether a young radical joined one party or the other. There were several instances where brothers ended up in opposite sides of the political fence, but sharing radical social commitments. These ex-nazis, of course, brought with them their deeply ingrained anti-Semitism. Low ranking Communist activists often made crude anti-Semitic statements. The anti-Semitism of these new communists was a different order than the cynicism of the top leaders who were simply willing to take advantage of the anti-Semitism of others.
The Jewish communist leaders were capable of using anti-Semitic code words, anti-Semitic verbiage in order to free themselves from their unwelcomed background, but in vain. It was historical justice that Rákosi was dismissed from his post as Premier by the post-Stalin leadership in 1953 at least largely if not entirely because he was Jewish. The one thing, which recommended Imre Nagy to the Russians that, he was the only prominent person in the leadership who was not born a Jew.
The source of Communist behavior is easily comprehensible. Given the anti-Semitism of a substantial part of the Hungarian people, open identification with Jewish issues, Jewish interests would be damaging to the Communist cause. Able propagandists as they were, they clearly understood that it was in their interests to identify themselves as much as it was possible under the circumstances with Hungarian nationalism. Communists made transparent efforts to cover themselves with the Hungarian flag. They claimed as their ancestors outstanding figures of Hungarian history, they made every attempt to identify the party with nationalist symbols. In this respect, as in so many others, they learned from their Soviet comrades.
Of course, people, whose primary interest was to advance the Communist cause, had every reason to counteract the impression that the party was beholden to Jewish interests. The archives of the Communist Party from these years are full of news about anti-Semitic sentiments and outbursts. Reports came flooding in which demonstrated this prejudice. When the government decided to nationalize church-run schools in 1948, for example, women demonstrated against nationalization saying that the government was going to hire Jewish teachers. In 1947 a silly rumor spread in the countryside that since the war in Palestine was not going well for the Jews, the government was going to import thousands from there to Hungary. (This was at a time when thousands of Hungarian Jews were in fact, going from Hungary to Palestine) The peasants professed to believe that Jews did not have to pay taxes.
Anti-Semitism had a particularly long tradition in Szabolcs County, the district where in the 19th century the last Hungarian blood libel trial took place. A communist functionary reported from this county that in the village of Kisvárad a worker when he was interrogated said, “everyone knows that it is the Jews who are in power here”. He also wrote: “In the village of Nyirbátor, when someone is arrested by the police, people simply say: ‘the Jews took him’”.
Anti-Semitism was also strong among workers. A functionary reported in1947: “There is a strong anti-Semitic wave in the factories. There were no Jews among the workers before deportations and there is none there now. Among Communist leaders there are many Jews who defend the special privileges of Jews.” “Minority rules and majority starves”. In a trade union meeting of the bookbinding trade a communist speaker by the same of József Sárközi said: “Only Jews benefited. We have achieved nothing”. Ferenc Katona, a trade union official went further: “In the past also Jewish capitalists ruled over us, and they still do. This cannot continue.”
Beyond the usual sources of anti-Semitism there were several new and specific ones in the post war period that the Party had to deal with. One of these was the issue of property taken from Jews in the previous years and the understandable desire of the Jews to reclaim what had been theirs. For many Christians it was an insult that someone wanted to take away what they had come to regard as their own. A sad joke that Jews were telling to another at the time was revealing: a Jew was talking to a Christian friend: “How are you? Asked the friend. The Jew replied: Don’t even ask. I have returned from the camp, and I have nothing now, except the clothes you are wearing.” It was explicit Communist policy not to support Jewish efforts to take back what was legally theirs. In case of Jewish apartments and houses that Christians took over, the police were instructed not to allow the removal of the Christian tenants.
The post-war economic situation was catastrophic: cities were in ruins, Soviet demands for reparations were exorbitant, and the soldiers of the Red Army carried away much that was moveable. In 1946 the country suffered an inflation that was greater than the great German inflation of 1923. Money became worthless. Almost everything was in short supply. Under the circumstances black markets flourished. The Communists, given their hostility to free markets, naturally blamed problems on speculators. On this volatile issue their demagogy, based on their visceral dislike of private enterprise, easily slipped into anti-Semitism, at times with tragic consequences.
For the series of pogroms that took place in 1946 the responsibility of the Communist Party was undeniable. The Party for demagogic reasons decided to use the dreadful economic situation and misery, which followed for “sharpening the class struggle” which in reality meant that it made small traders scapegoats for the genuine problems. In this struggle the communists explicitly approved, indeed, advocated mass movements, spontaneous demonstrations, and even lynching. The party had organized a struggle against “speculators” by promising to hang black marketers. The leaders knew or certainly should have known that many of these traders were Jewish, and even if they were not, in the eyes of the common folk they were. It published posters in which the “enemy”, the capitalist, the speculator, often had Semitic features. The Communists did not create anti-Semitism, but consciously or unconsciously they contributed to it. In effect the party attempted to turn the powerful anti-Semitic currents which had been present, to its own advantage in its struggle for power, and in the process sacrificed the interests and in a handful of cases the lives of Jewish citizens.
The disturbances in Ozd, a mining town, in February 1946, showed the complexity of the situation and the dilemmas faced by the Communist leadership. A communist leader, a well-known anti-Semite, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. The following day a large crown of miners and workers came to demonstrate. The Communist party welcomed the demonstration for it at first regarded it as a move against “reactionaries” and “fascists”. However the mood quickly turned into something different: the masses demonstrated against communists and Jews and looted Jewish owned stores and apartments. When the police arrested some of the looters, the masses were increasingly incensed and maintained that there could be no solution to the social and political problems until we get rid of the Jews. Révai, the man responsible for ideology, reported to the Central Committee: “The demonstration which was undoubtedly justified and correct as a move against a fascist assassination, soon turned into looting, provoked by fascists.”
Although there were anti-Jewish demonstrations, and attacks on individual Jews at least in a dozen places in 1946, the bloodiest and worst manifestation took place in Kunmadaras in May and in Miskolc in July. The Kunmadaras affair even included the ancient anti-Jewish calumny of blood libel, which, especially among the ignorant peasantry was still widespread all around the country. The rumor spread in Kunmadaras, that Jews made sausage out of Christian children, and it was said that in the near-by town of Karcag several Christian children had mysteriously disappeared. The pogrom, however, against the tiny local Jewry (out of a 250 Jewish population before the war only 73 survived) began only when the police arrested and attempted to transfer to Karcag, a popular person, who had collaborated with the Nazis. The crowd prevented taking the man to court, and the aroused people beat up the local Socialist party secretary. The socialist functionary later reported: “When the crowd kicked out of my teeth I suddenly realized that I was beaten not because I was a socialist, but because I was a Jew.” Next day the crowd attacked local Jews, killing two and wounding 15. Here, just as in Ozd, violence against Jews quickly turned into looting. Although in this instance the Communist Party could not be held directly responsible for the events, the Communists attempted to make political capital out of the pogrom, by unjustly blaming their political enemies, members of the Smallholder Party for it.
The situation was different in Miskolc. Here the Communist Party was directly responsible. Miskolc was an industrial town, where the working class was in particularly dire straits. The communists crudely used this disaffection for their own political purposes. They attempted to mobilize the people and make speculators and black marketers scapegoats for the genuine problems. In the summer of 1946, the misery was the greatest and inflation reached unheard of proportions. Plans called for the introduction of a new and stable currency, the forint, and, it must be admitted, that in the work of financial stabilization the Communist party played a major role. In June and July prominent communist leaders came to Miskolc and harangued the workers. Gerö said: “ why have you not hanged a single black marketer?” Rákosi himself came to Miskolc and in his speech demanded death to those who speculated, and were therefore the enemies of the new, stable currency. The complexity of the situation, and the inherent dangers for the Communist Party for its policies is shown by the fact that before Rakosi’s arrival in the town anti-Jewish graffiti appeared in the wall calling Rakosi a rotten Jew. Instead of attempting to calm the crowds, the communists’ policy was to demonstrate that it was not a “Jewish party”. The local communist organization was aware of the anti-Semitic mood of the workers, and instead of attempting to combat this anti-Semitism, it decided to remove party functionaries who came from the Jewish bourgeoisie.
Violence broke out on July 30, on a day when the workers came to the streets demonstrating against economic hardships. News spread that three “speculators” had been arrested and that they were being moved to an internment camp outside of the city. It seems likely that the demonstrators had been notified ahead of time where and when the prisoners would be marched. The crowds attacked the unfortunate men and killed one, wounded another and let the third one escape. It could not have been an accident that of the three he alone was not Jewish. The police stood by without attempting to stop the lynching. After the tragic events the police did arrest some of the participants in the lynching. However, on August 1st the crowds attacked the police station where the men were kept and there lynched the Jewish-Communist police lieutenant.
Later it transpired that the “speculators” had become victims of a provocation. The communist head of the county, István Oszip, persuaded three mill owners to sell flour several times above the fixed price. He did this in order to show the crowds that the authorities were fighting against the black market. Clearly, he did not foresee the consequences. It is remarkable that Rakosi, writing his memoirs in Soviet exile in the late 1960s or early 1970 would say only that about the Miskolc pogrom:
“ In the days preceding August 1st {the date of the introduction of the new currency] at two places there were serious disturbances. In Diosgyör the Political Police arrested a few troublemakers, and consequently the enemy managed to persuade some of the workers to march to Miskolc, and in the confusion two workers of the Political Police were killed. It was possible to reestablish order quickly.” That is all that Rakosi in the distance of several decades found necessary to say about this sorry event.
After 1946, the wave of pogroms attacks on Jewish life and property subsided. The political and economic situation stabilized, and the regime, increasingly under Communist domination, was able to maintain order. While the party was struggling for power, mass movements, and demonstrations served its purpose. Once the Communists were in power, disorder not only did not serve their interests, but on the contrary, it became dangerous. The lack of spontaneous violence against Jews, of course, did not mean that anti-Semitism disappeared. At the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, once again there were some anti-Semitic incidents, though, in view of the shortness of the revolutionary period it is difficult to say how important and wide spread they were.
The Communist Party in the immediate post-war period pursued a contradictory and confused policy. This confusion followed from the facts that the leadership of the Party was largely in Jewish hands, and that, especially in these years, popular anti-Semitism was strong. As far as the communist leadership was concerned, the interests of the communist cause were far more important than the defense of a persecuted minority. The leaders believed that by not defending Jews, and by demagogic agitation aimed against speculators, (even though it was clear that this was have an anti-Semitic edge and encourage anti Jewish violence), they could distance the party from Jews and make people forget that they themselves were Jewish. Such policy was bound to be unsuccessful and without making people less anti-Communist, it only imposed more misery on the Jews.
