A Summer of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal for the Hungarian Holocaust

In the acknowledgement to his book, A Summer of Mass Murder, George Eisen poses what he calls the “unaskable” question: “do we really need one more book on the Holocaust?” (p. 265). This is indeed a question that many Holocaust researchers ask themselves. The scholarly literature on the topic is expansive, and compared to almost any other historical event, there seems to be a strong familiarity with the subject among the public. Eisen answers the unaskable question with a meek “hopefully.” Considering the impressive research and compelling arguments packed into A Summer of Mass Murder, an emphatic “yes” would be the more appropriate response.In telling the story of Hungary's deportation of “foreign” Jews in 1941 and their subsequent extermination by Germans and their collaborators, Eisen has taken on a formidable task. As is the case with many histories of the Holocaust, this research requires engaging in several nested historiographies—the international history of the Final Solution, Hungarian-Jewish history, and the specificities of genocide in German-occupied Galicia. The early chapters of the book situate the reader within these historiographies. Eisen starts by describing a bifurcated community of Jews in Hungary, which in the popular imagination was split between assimilated Jews who spoke Hungarian and embraced the Hungarian national project and “Galicianers,” who hailed from the East, were unassimilated and culturally backwards, and a pernicious threat to the nation, either due to their wealth (usurers), poverty (parasites), or political ideology (Bolsheviks) (p. 25). Moreover, during the interwar period, the term Galicianer “became more flexible,” eventually encompassing not only refugees from Galicia but “those whose ancestors originated from the East” and “almost anyone who came from the provinces, even those who might have lived in the area for many decades and professed full identification with Hungarian nationalist sentiments” (p. 33).The book next turns to the July 1941 deportations and the repercussions that followed. Though the Hungarian government's initial order called for the expulsion of “Polish or Russian stateless persons,” it was, in fact, an operation targeting Jews, many of whom had been born in Hungary (p. 58). The majority of victims lived in the territories Hungary reannexed after 1938 in southern Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia, and northern Transylvania, but even some individuals living in Budapest, including two of Eisen's uncles, ended up being deported. They were initially sent to an internment camp in Kőrösmező, then loaded on trucks bound for Galicia. There was no clear destination, other than to deposit the expellees on the eastern side of the Dniester River so that they could not easily return to Hungary. The vast majority of the over 20,000 people expelled to Galicia were murdered as part of Germany's Final Solution.Eisen argues that the presence of Hungarian refugees in Galicia was a crucial factor in “the escalation of genocide in Ukraine” (p. 100). The expulsions took place without the consent of German authorities and created food supply and sanitation problems, which further destabilized local communities. Refugees were vulnerable to robbery and arbitrary violence by Ukrainian militias and were a source of resentment among local Jews who were often made responsible for their care but not provided necessary resources by the German occupiers. In Kamenets-Podolsk, where around 16,000 Hungarian refugees were assembled, German authorities decided to liquidate the entire Jewish population of the town and perpetrated the largest single massacre of the Holocaust, up to that point. Apart from a small number of survivors who managed to hide or escape, the remainder of the refugees from Hungary were killed along with the local Galician Jewish population in the following months. By the end of 1941, the District of Galicia had become the first in the General Government to liquidate its Jewish population (p. 132).The final chapters of the book take up the topics of rescue, survival, and responsibility. Eisen highlights the role of three women, Margit Slachta, Edith Weiss, and Erzébet Szapáry, who “were willing to challenge the political, social, and moral status quo in a conservative society to stop the deportation, extend humanitarian assistance to the expellees, and help their family members who remained destitute inside Hungary” (p. 211). He also discusses the men he considers the main architects of the deportation, Henrik Werth, Ámon Pásztoy, and Miklós Kozma, opining that there's “no way of knowing” if their “motivations and actions were governed by the fact that they were not ‘ethnic Hungarians’” (p. 233). That particular observation strikes as irrelevant, given that all three men acted in the name of the Hungarian nation and held beliefs consistent with the popular opinions Eisen describes in the first part of the book.As it recounts the fate of the refugees from Hungary, A Summer of Mass Murder engages with some of the more recent lines of Holocaust research: the so-called Holocaust by bullets, intercommunal relations, economic rationales of genocide, and sexual violence. Eisen's writing is accessible, although many of the graphic descriptions of violence and murder make for difficult reading, even for specialists in the field of Holocaust studies. He makes expert use of survivor testimonies, perpetrator depositions, and archival records. The book is a demonstration of the overwhelming amount of evidence historians contend with but at the same time, the truth that some basic questions can't be answered and people disappear from the historical record without a trace. Eisen was never able to locate information about his two uncles who died in Kamenets-Podolsk, which was what initially drove him to write the book. However, he was successful in telling the broader story of the 1941 Hungarian refugees and giving it the historical treatment it needed.