...The Holocaust in Hungary and the case
of Peter Balàzs
...In 1944, the Jews of Hungary, numbering some 700,000,
remained the most physically intact Jewish community in Europe.
Close to 64,000 Hungarian Jews had already lost their lives;
20,000 ‘alien’ Jews had been sent across the
border into Poland and shot at Kamenets-Poldolsk, and a majority
of the rest were Jewish men killed when serving in labour
battalions on the Ukrainian front. A series of severe anti-Jewish
laws had also been implemented, restricting basic civil and
socio-economic rights. But the conservative government of
Miklos Kallay (9 March 1942 to 22 March 1944) had stopped
short of complying with Germany’s demands for the deportation
of Hungarian Jewry. The occupation of Hungary by Germany
in March 1944 led to the implementation of the 'Final Solution'
with a speed and efficiency unrivalled in other Nazi-occupied
countries. Within a few short months, at a time when it was
clear that the war was already lost, and when the realities
of Auschwitz were public knowledge among the world’s
leaders, more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported from
the provinces to the death camps. This was only made possible
with the wholehearted support of the Hungarian constitutionally
appointed government of Döme Sztójay, the endorsement
of the Regent of Hungary, Miklos Horthy, and with the assistance
of local authorities. As Braham writes: ‘With Horthy
still at the helm, providing the symbol of national sovereignty,
the Hungarian police, gendarmerie, and civil service collaborated
with the SS in the anti-Jewish drive with a routine and efficiency
that impressed even the Germans.’ By 1 June, the average
daily number of Hungarian Jews being deported to Auschwitz
was 20,000.
By the end of July, virtually the only remaining Jews surviving
in Hungary were in Budapest. In the month of July, 25,000
were deported to Auschwitz, at which point the government
temporarily suspended deportations. In October, the fascist
Arrow Cross party, under the leadership of Ferenc Szàlasi,
was installed in government in a Nazi-orchestrated coup.
The Arrow Cross embarked on a reign of terror, enacting frenetic
killing sprees of the remaining Jews seeking refuge in the
city. Thousands were arrested and shot and dumped into the
Danube, and thousands more were shot or perished during a
death march of 70,000 to Austria. The Arrow Cross reign lasted
until Soviet forces liberated the city on 13 February 1945;
during this time, those Jews who managed to stay outside
of the ghetto, using false papers and not wearing a yellow
star, had a slim chance of survival. Péter Balázs,
an 18-year-old boy, was among those who chose the Jewish
underground.
It was during this time that Zentai, a conscripted Hungarian
Royal Army officer, was stationed at the Aréna Road
military barracks in Budapest in 1944. Zentai’s commanding
officer was Bela Máder, and his fellow officer Lajos
Nagy. After the war, they were tried for the murder of Péter
Balázs and found guilty, Máder in 1946, Nagy
in 1947. Máder was sentenced to forced labour for
life; Nagy was given the death sentence, later commuted to
life imprisonment. Evidence given at these trials prompted
the Hungarian authorities to charge Zentai with the same
crime; by that time, he was already in Germany living as
a DP. These trials were part of the wave of war crimes trials
held in Hungary in the immediate postwar period; approximately
27,000 people were sentenced by the Hungarian 'people's courts'
for war crimes, crimes against the state or crimes against
humanity, among them a number of senior government ministers.
These also included local and county government officials,
gendarmerie and military officers responsible for the expropriation,
ghettoisation and deportation of the Jews of Hungary.
At his trial, Nagy told of how, under the orders of their
commanding officer Bela Máder, Zentai went out on
patrols regularly to perform identity checks and round up
Jews for interrogation. According to Nagy, Zentai already
knew Péter Balázs: in his statement after his
arrest he told the police, ‘Zentai told me that the
boy and his family were old acquaintances of his’.
The Zentai and Balázs families were both from Budafok,
a small town on the outskirts of Budapest. The Balázs
family were well known in their region as Jews and for their
leftist sympathies; Dezsö Balázs, Péter’s
father, had his legal practice there until 1942 when the
family moved into Budapest. Zentai, only a few years older
than Péter Balázs, was apparently his ‘Levente’ instructor
for a time in Budafok. Balázs was surviving on false
identity papers, and defied a call-up order for a Jewish
forced labour unit in April 1944. On 8 November, Zentai recognised
the boy on a Buda-pest tram and arrested him for not wearing
the yellow star.
What happened afterwards, according to the evidence presented
at Nagy's trial, is that between the hours of 3 pm and 8
pm, Zentai and Nagy beat Balázs so badly that by 8
pm he was dying. According to Nagy's evidence, they (Zentai,
Máder and himself) saw that the boy was dying, and
then went to an adjoining room and began drinking. In a macabre
twist, Captain Máder decided to show off their handiwork
to a number of other prisoners detained that night at Aréna
Road. As a number of them testified at Nagy's trial, eight
of them (some say six) were taken to Captain Máder's
rooms, where one by one, they were shown a man lying on the
floor covered by his own overcoat. His breath rattled, and
it was clear that he was dying. ‘Can you hear that
music?’ Sándor Révner stated that Máder
asked him, when it came his turn to view the dying man. ‘That's
the way you will go too.’ Each of the witnesses said
they were told the same thing. The prisoners were then brought
back into the room and forced to say the Hebrew prayer for
the dead, ‘and we said that prayer according to his
instructions’. The next day, all but one of them escaped.
Each confirmed, as did other officers present that day, that
the man lying on the floor, according to his photograph,
was Péter Balázs.
I have before me the original court transcripts in which
witnesses describe the brutalities they endured while they
were detained at the barracks. There are various references
to Zentai’s regular participation in these beatings.
Imre Zoltan testified that in 1944, while in Budapest as
a forced labourer, he was arrested and taken to the barracks ‘where
at Béla Máder's orders, Cadet Károly
Zentai and Cadet Ferenc Érsek beat me up for hours
with boxing gloves until I lost consciousness’. Ervin
Barinkai, another soldier at the barracks, remembered seeing
Zoltan ‘gravely assaulted several times, especially
by Cadet Sergeant Károly Zentai’. Another cadet,
György Varsányi, stated that ‘it was Cadet
Sergeant Zentai who did the beatings, I saw that myself several
times’.
On the night in question, József Monori, another officer
assigned to the barracks under Máder’s command,
reported that he heard, but did not see, the beating going
on behind closed doors. He ‘definitely’ remembered
Zentai, Nagy and Máder present. He went to bed, but
was woken up at around 11 pm and told to harness a horse
and carriage: ‘Nagy and Zentai brought down a corpse
from the office, put it on the cart, and covered it with
straw…Nagy sat on the driver’s seat, Zentai beside
him, and I sat on the side of the cart. Nagy was driving
the cart. We drove along Aréna Road…down to
the Danube…There Nagy and Zentai took the corpse and
dumped it in the Danube. They waited a while to see if the
corpse would come up but it sank.’ Monori also stated
that during the journey ‘Nagy and Zentai were talking
about how they should not have beaten the boy so hard’.
These testimonies were taken before the warrant for Zentai’s
arrest, which was issued on 29 April 1948. After the warrant
was issued, Máder, already a condemned man, stated
that Zentai ‘took part in patrols as well as in beating
and maltreating Jews…He and 1st Lieutenant (Nagy) were
always ready to volunteer to do the atrocities.’ Imre
Parázsló, another cadet, stated that the identity
checks on Jews were ‘mostly carried out by 1st Lieutenant
Lajos Nagy and Ensign Károly Zentai accompanied by
the worst imaginable beatings…Zentai hit hardest but
Nagy was not far behind. They hit the Jews with fists, boxing
gloves or sticks, kicked them, and I often saw these Jews
beaten to a bloody pulp coming out of the office moaning
and crying. Bela Máder knew about these tortures,
indeed, he gave orders to them.’
Hungarian journalist György Vámos, referring
to the ‘unusual circumstances’ of judicial practices
in postwar Hungary, recently cautioned that witness testimonies
relating to this case should be treated with care. He offers
no detail beyond remarking that social justice, as opposed
to merely criminal justice, was an important objective of
the government at the time. This is largely true. The people’s
courts were driven less by legal concerns than by the desire
for retribution and, in many cases, revenge. Confusion, insufficient
preparation and political bias were rife during the major
political trials, of which there were 14 between 1945 and
1946. ‘The historical responsibility of the Hungarian
principal war criminals is beyond question’, wrote
historian Laszlo Karsai. ‘What is questionable, however,
is whether the people's courts were sufficiently equipped
to establish their criminal responsibility.’...
...Istvan Hargittai is a professor of chemistry at Budapest
Technical University and one of a few to have published in
Hungarian his Holocaust experiences and the wall of silence
that surrounds this history. He recalls that he and his generation
grew up thinking ‘it was the Germans’ who were
responsible for the Hungarian Holocaust. Members of the Arrow
Cross were outsiders, so the theory went, unrepresentative
of the Hungarian people. This myth prevails. Most Hungarians,
he says, have lived since World War II as if Auschwitz never
happened. The crimes of the Communist regime command the
sphere of public debate over retribution and justice. The
question of Hungarian complicity in the crimes against a
significant number of its own people in World War II has
yet to be asked....
Károly Zentai and the route to Australia
...The story of how Zentai came to be in Australia is part
of the history of Australia’s first immigration program,
in which tens of thousands of DPs were brought out on ships
from the DP camps in Germany and Italy to Australia on
its mass resettlement scheme. For many genuine refugees,
Australia was ‘the farthest place’, far removed
from the Europe of old race hatreds that had led to the
concentration camps of World War II; for others, Australia
was a country of last resort. Zentai’s own application
for refugee status, for example, lists Canada and Argentina
as countries of preference for immigration. There is no
mention of Australia. Contemporary observers were often
struck by how comparatively easy it could be, if you were
non-Jewish and ‘fit’, to get in to Australia
when applications elsewhere had failed. Ron Maslyn Williams—on
location in Germany in 1949 to make Mike and Stefani (1952)—wrote
to his boss at the Commonwealth Film Unit, Stanley Hawes: ‘As
one intelligent DP put it to me “It is Australia
or Siberia or starvation…Australia is the gambler’s
shot”. Moreover, “quite literally, very many
IRO officials regard Australia as a kind of modern Van
Dieman’s (sic) land where they can dump the people
who constitute IRO’s problem”.’
The Australian authorities, for their part, counted physical
attributes above all else as criteria for migration: one
needed to be fit, preferably young and, more preferably still,
fair-skinned. Until 1960, humanitarian principles did not
inform motives for assisted refugee migration—pragmatism
did. Australia needed to expand its labour force and its
population, and the only way that the government could sell
its scheme of mass migration was by assuring its public that
it remained committed to the principles of a ‘White
Australia’ on which the Commonwealth was founded. Jews
were especially unwelcome. Immediately after the war the
government announced a humanitarian scheme to permit the
arrival of concentration camp victims with Australian relatives;
the scheme was met by antisemitic protest, and in response,
the immigration minister Arthur Calwell introduced a quota
system, in which only 25 percent of each ship carrying migrants
could comprise Jews. These would be admitted only on the
grounds of their potential contribution to Australia's economy,
not on humanitarian grounds.
As Klaus Neumann has written: ‘Suitable non-British
settlers were young, educated and healthy and, ideally, possessed
certain racial features. Australian selection teams preferred
vigorous, flaxen-haired, fair-skinned and blue-eyed young
men and women from the Baltic countries who did not or could
not return to the Soviet Union.’ These were to resemble
Australia's ‘own kind’ as closely as possible.
Beyond this, a philosophy of assimilation governed immigration
policy and popular attitudes towards new arrivals. Immigrants,
labelled ‘New Australians’, were expected to
merge, quickly and quietly, into the Australian cultural
and social landscape. This kind of thinking also implied,
of course, that people's political pasts were as irrelevant
as their cultural pasts—a slate wiped clean by the
promise of Australian acculturation.
The Zentais ticked the right boxes: ‘fit worker’ is
handwritten across both Károly and Rozsa’s migration
selection forms. In March 1949, Zentai, his wife Rozsa, their
two sons born after the war, and Zentai’s older sister,
Julia, were at Tuttlingen in southern Germany’s French
zone, where they were interviewed and accepted by the Australian
Migration Team for resettlement in Australia. Zentai’s
screening card twice states that he arrived in Germany on
9 March 1949, and that he had ‘fled from the Communist
Party’. His wife’s card indicates the same information.
The accompanying resettlement card from the IRO, which establishes
their status as DPs, also states that Zentai and his wife
were in Budafok between 1945 and 1949, and that their son
Gabor was born in Budafok, Hungary, in 1946.
Except that he wasn’t, and they weren’t. Documents
held by the International Tracing Service (ITS) tell a different
story. The ITS, located in Bad Arolsen in Germany, is a massive
storage house of SS records of the death camps, yet it also
holds the records created by the Allies in the DP camps.
Zentai’s file includes his application for refugee
assistance to the IRO, and lists his places of residence
from 1938 onwards: in March 1945 he was already on his way
to Dietersburg, Bavaria, where he arrived, according to the
information he provided, on 19 April 1945 and remained until
March 1948. A document dated 14 August 1946 confirms that
he, his wife, his sister and his son, Gabor, born 26 February
of that year, were in Dietersburg. His son Gabor is twice
recorded as having been born in Arnstorf, Bavaria. Another,
dated 15 July 1947, indicates that Zentai was temporarily
in Kösslarn, in the district of Griesbach, also in Bavaria.
In his application for IRO assistance, a routine statutory
declaration states that Karl Zentai was ‘never a member
of the Arrow Cross or any political party and never committed
any atrocities’. It is signed by Zentai and three witnesses,
dated 12 March 1948 at the Hungarian office (Ungarisches
Büro) in Pfarrkirchen. A handwritten statement by an
IRO officer concludes: ‘On account of credibility of
the statement of the Hungarian office and the witnesses he
should be found eligible for refugee status with IRO assistance.
Refuses to return home for the present regime there—no
political freedoms.’
None of these official records hint at the warrant for his
arrest issued by the Budapest People’s Court in April
1948, despite the fact that his whereabouts were well known
to the Hungarian authorities. The warrant even lists an address, ‘the
American occupation zone in Germany, where his address at
present is…Furth in Pfarrkirchen district with farmer
Jakob Schneiderbauer’. It appears that Zentai was able
to make his way safely to Tuttlingen almost one year after
the warrant was issued. Was the warrant ever communicated
to the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany, and if so, why
was it ignored? Did Zentai know about his warrant? The answers
to these questions, of course, can only be speculative. Yet
the inconsistencies in the records as to his whereabouts
for the four years between 1945 and 1949 seem to indicate
some kind of attempt to cover his tracks. In his recent interviews
with the media, Zentai has never tried to deny that he was
already living under the protection of the Allied Occupation
Forces in Germany from 1945. Why then did he lie about his
whereabouts in 1949? I contend that his decision was strategic:
rewriting those four years in this way so as to convey that
he was coming from Hungary in 1949 rather than 1945 distanced
his decision to leave Hungary from the imme-diate aftermath
of World War II, thus making it simpler to argue that he
was ‘fleeing the Communists’, as so many other
East Europeans were doing in the years of 1948 and 1949.
Moreover, as Zentai’s case makes clear, the DP camps,
and their route to Australia, could provide avenues of escape
for those wishing to avoid retribution or exposure. It was
well known to contemporaries that a number of collaborators
and war criminals were hiding in the DP camps. G Daniel Cohen
has examined the extensive technologies of screening and
identification developed by the IRO, which took over from
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA) in 1947, to determine the authenticity of refugees
and displaced persons. It was a daunting task, but according
to IRO officials, ‘of first importance in its work’.70
Refugees were now required to fill in numerous forms and
questionnaires, yet as Cohen explains, if there was no apparent
reason for exclusion, that is, if they seemed to fit the
story they presented, they were not required to prove their
right to be included as eligible. IRO officers received manuals
that included sample cases and historical information to
guide their decisions, and were taught how to detect untrue
statements, yet in practice their mission to cleanse the
system of ineligibles was often frustrated. Visitors reported
that the ‘right answers’ to IRO questionnaires
were circulating in the camps; further, it was clear to IRO
officials that many simply destroyed their identity papers
and made up new ones. Dates of displacement were frequently
altered during interrogations to make their applications
more plausible. Within the IRO, Cohen quotes, it was commonly
believed that ‘after many months of observation and
listening, the DPs are told what to say and know how to craft
an acceptable story leading to eligibility’.
Over one million people arrived in Australia under various
immigration schemes by the end of the 1950s, and there are
estimates that even in its earliest years, 4,000 to 5,000
Nazis may have found sanctuary there, most of them from East-Central
Europe. As Konrad Kwiet notes, during the screening process
they lied about their wartime activities, usually claiming
to have been subjected to ‘forced labour’ or ‘deportation
to Germany’. ‘In reality’, he writes, ‘many
of them had actively enthusiastically assisted the Nazis.
Their claims concealed “police work”, military
and Waffen SS service and participation in killing operations’.
This should also be viewed in the context of a broader Allied
retreat from the issue of denazification and punishment of
wartime activities. Zentai was in Germany at the very moment
that Europe’s postwar memory was being moulded, by
all sides, around the notion of German guilt, in which all
responsibility for the war was made to lie squarely at the
feet of the Germans. This focus on Germany meant the postwar
status of other countries could be resolved. Thus Austria
was retrospectively declared the ‘first victim’ of
Nazi aggression and with Austria’s innocence assured,
the responsibilities of other non-German nationals in Europe
were similarly eradicated. As the Cold War deepened, the
Allies were determined to avoid alienating Austria and Germany,
and this meant removing attention from the past. ‘In
a process that would have been unthinkable in 1945’,
Judt wrote, ‘the identification and punishment of active
Nazis in German-speaking Europe had effectively ended by
1948 and was a forgotten issue by the early fifties’.
IRO policy also reflected a softening towards those who previously
may have been denied eligibility as collaborators. Ideological
motives for assisting enemy forces, for example, became as
important as their actions during the war; in other words,
if someone had voluntarily enlisted in the German army because
they wanted to oppose the Soviet regime, this was reason
enough for inclusion. DP claims of anti-Communist sympathies
and fear of Communist persecution began to carry as much,
if not more, weight than claims of Nazi persecution. ‘By
1950, refugees deemed "imposters" or "security
threats" in the days of UNRRA were now offered the chance
to emigrate to Australia or the North American continent.’
This strategic refocusing of attention away from the crimes
of the past identified by Judt was enormously significant
for the thousands, if not millions, whose wartime pasts were
being reframed by a deliberate process of forgetting and
denial, and whose identities were recast as refugees of an
oppressive Communist regime. Australia’s own role in
this history was one of passivity and equally, one of denial.
In the 1950s, protests by the Australian Jewish community
over the migration of Nazis and their collaborators were
even-tually silenced by the continuing apathy and even hostility
to their campaign. The politics and ideology of anti-Communism
coloured government rhetoric and attitudes to the evidence
of Nazi war criminals and collaborators living in Australia,
and governed the state’s failure to act. This was made
explicit in the official response in 1961 to a request by
the USSR for the extradition of an Estonian immigrant Ervin
Viks, who was accused of murdering 12,000 Jews and Roma in
the Tartu concentration camp. The Liberal government of Robert
Menzies refused. In a speech defending the decision, Australian
Attorney General Sir Garfield Barwick declared that against
the ‘utter abhorrence’ felt by Australians against
war crimes, ‘there is the right of this nation, by
receiving people into this country to enable men to turn
their backs on past bitternesses and to make a new life for
themselves in a happier community’. He concluded, in
what has become an infamous phrase: ‘the time has come
to close the chapter’.
This directive to forget in order to create ‘new lives’ and
a ‘happier community’ became a prevailing ethos
in the next few decades, assisted by the fact that there
was no legal framework established for extradition or prosecution
of suspected war criminals. This changed briefly in the late
1980s when, under the Hawke Labor government, a special inquiry
was set up to investigate allegations of Nazi war criminals
living here, inspired largely by the forensic investigations
of journalist Mark Aarons in a series of reports for ABC
radio and television, which resulted in the Menzies Report.
Controversial legislation was passed in parliament enabling
Australian courts to prosecute suspects for war crimes (War
Crimes Amendment Act, 1988). Most importantly, a Special
Investigation Unit (SIU) was created within the federal Attorney
General’s department to investigate suspected war criminals.
In its five short years of operation, there were 843 investigations,
three individuals charged and tried in Adelaide, with no
successful conviction.82 In 1992, the SIU was closed down,
and responsibility for following up war crimes’ accusations
delegated to the federal police, who were either unwilling
or unable to investigate them. It was, in Kwiet’s words, ‘a
clear signal that the second chapter of the war crimes debate
in Australia was closed’. During his brief tenure as
chief historian for the SIU, Kwiet observed both the negative, ‘even
damning’ attitude that prevailed within the legal fraternity
towards war crimes’ legislation and the proceedings
themselves; and the frequent indifference of the Australian
public. He recalls:
In the public domain the war crimes debate had, in my view,
little, if any impact on public awareness and memory… The
public proceedings in Adelaide took place in front of empty
galleries. Quite popular in the scant media coverage were
references to the accused as ‘nice neighbours’ or ‘old’ and ‘sick’ pensioners.
For the overwhelming majority of Australians, the news of
the closure of the SIU went almost unnoticed.
David Fraser has also noted that the presence of unpunished
perpetrators never became part of the cultural or political
dynamic of Australian national identity or Australian values.
Yet others have recognised that in spite of a lethargic community
response to war crimes trials, these are important forums
for producing cosmopolitan ideals of justice and human rights.
They also affirm the role of history, in the form of evidence
that 'things happened', in justice work and in the work of
remembrance.
Although the legal framework was successfully developed by
the SIU in the late 1980s, the resources for the investigation
of people who have committed war crimes overseas have not
been forthcoming and there have been no charges laid since.
The Wiesenthal Centre recently listed Australia as the ‘only
major country of refuge’ and former diplomat Fergus
Hansen, in a recent report compiled for the Lowy Institute,
writes that Australia ‘has inadvertently become a safe
haven for war criminals’. This is certainly the impression
Australia has been giving the world, and presumably its war
criminals, for some time. Hansen notes that there are indications
war criminals have come here from Afghanistan, Palestine,
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Sierra Leone, India, Cambodia, Iran, Iraq,
Chile, Lebanon, Nigeria, Bangladesh, the former Yugoslavia,
possibly Rwanda and East Timor as well, among other countries.
The twilight of memory and the struggle for historical justice
Zentai’s appeal against his extradition to Australia’s
Federal Court in April 2008 failed, with Federal Court judge
John Gilmour finding that there was no reason why Zentai
should not be extradited to face trial. The court agreed
to bail for Zentai on the grounds of ill health, and his
lawyers took the case to the Minister for Home Affairs, O’Connor.
This appeal failed, and Zentai was ruled fit to travel. This
time Zentai’s lawyers based the justification for their
appeal on the argument that the offence for which Zentai
is convicted did not constitute a war crime at the time it
was committed. The implications of an argument such as this,
although not new, are momentous, legitimising what was, in
effect, a fascist regime at the time and putting forward
the quite extraordinary idea that for Jews like Balázs,
being beaten to death was somehow lawful. A similar argument
was made during the Nuremberg Trials, in which the question
of whether the 24 German leaders should have to answer for
actions rendered illegal after the fact—ex-post-facto—was
put forward by the defence. The prosecuting lawyers never
conceded this point, arguing that the charges were grounded
in international law and what they called a common law of
nations. Such an argument suggested that the accused had
no idea they were acting illegally, an argument without merit
in the minds of contemporary observers: murder is murder.
The legality of the charge of war crimes was upheld at Nuremberg,
and it is commendable that Federal Court judge John Gilmour
resisted such logic today.
His lawyers successfully appealed the decision, taking it
back to the Federal Court. In July 2010, Justice Neil McKerracher
ruled that the Government had made an ‘error of law’ in
agreeing to extradite him, and that the crime for which Zentai
was charged was not an extraditable offence under the Extradition
Act. Zentai returned home, but in 2011 the Federal Government
returned to the High Court for another appeal, seeking a
ruling on what constitutes a war crime. It is thought that
such a ruling will have a significant impact on Australia’s
extradition regime.
Zentai has clearly led an exemplary life in Australia. He
is the embodiment of the multicultural ideal, a man who worked,
brought up a family here and settled quietly into the suburban
landscape. It is not easy to watch a frail elderly man being
hauled in front of the courts to face trial. He might, despite
all the evidence, be innocent. There are powerful incentives
to simply turn our collective back on this story and let
the old man be. But are we also prepared to accept a statute
of limitations on war crimes or crimes against humanity?
Is there a time when it is too late for justice? ‘That
the past slips into the oblivion of forgetting does not change
its moral nature’, writes Booth. ‘The passage
of time may dull our recollection of events, but it does
not erase the (morally weighty) fact of their having happened
nor the wrong involved in them.’
...Andreas Huyssen has described our time as the twilight
of memory. ‘Twilight’, he writes, ‘is that
moment of the day that foreshadows the night of forgetting,
but that seems to slow time itself, an in-between state in
which the last light of the day may still play out its ultimate
marvels. It is memory’s privileged time.’ As
did Levi, Huyssen believes the struggle for memory is also
a struggle for history. When we think of the Holocaust today,
we often imagine our present time in terms of it being ‘too
late’ for justice.
... in this brief twilight of Holocaust time when victims
and perpetrators are gradually leaving our world behind,
we should be ensuring that these cases are told and not forgotten.
Justice, not memory, is the antonym of forgetting, writes
Booth. ‘In other words, the imperative to remember
is not the leaden voice of what has gone before, but rather
it is the call of justice insisting on the irreversibility
and persistence of what has been done, its claims on us which
are neither diminished nor augmented by the extra-moral passing
of time, and which call on us to bear these injustices in
mind.’ History’s purpose is to give meaning to
the present even as it seeks knowledge of the past; justice,
or the attempt at it, however flawed and incomplete, belongs
squarely within the historical project of understanding.
A 1987 cartoon by Ben Sargent about the Klaus Barbie trial
in France remains pertinent: ‘It's been more than forty
years’, a younger man remarks. ‘Why are we hunting
down a bunch of pathetic old men just to prosecute them for…er…uh…well,
you know…uh…whatever that stuff was they did…?’ The
older man replies: ‘That's precisely why.’
As Huyssen writes, ‘the inner temporality and the politics
of Holocaust memory, however, even where it speaks of the
past, must be directed towards the future. The future will
not judge us for forgetting but for remembering all too well
and still not acting in accordance with those memories’.
Zentai’s case is not just about Zentai. The important
question of a regime and a country that enabled, indeed encouraged,
the murder of thousands of Jews like Péter Balázs,
and a country that then gave murderers refuge and even prosperity
is still to be addressed. It is about the legacy of both
countries in the denial and silencing of a ‘memory
of offence’, and a responsibility towards our present
and their future. jiw.blogspot.co.il
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