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  • Jewish Ghettos in Sighet and Dąbrowa Górnicza
  • Hannah Berliner Fischthal

In his autobiographies, Elie Wiesel describes the ghettoization in his Transylvanian hometown of Sighet (Máramarosziget) before he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. The Jews are driven first into a large ghetto, from there into a small ghetto, then to the synagogue, and finally to the freight trains that will take them away forever. The Nazi movement toward the destruction of the Hungarian Jews is organized and planned. The ghettos into which they are forced are temporary holding grounds enabling the Germans and their willing co-perpetrators, the Hungarian gendarmes, to easily round up the residents for the final solution.

In Wiesel's Sighet, as the town is known in Jewish sources, the Jews were required to move into two ghettos on 20 April 1944. There were four transports to Auschwitz during 16-22 May 1944 (Miron 454). The ghettos were liquidated, and the town became judenrein. This quick and effective dispatching of the Jews to their deaths, under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, was not characteristic of the way the Final Solution was actualized in the rest of the German-occupied world.

David Silberklang categorizes diverse Holocaust events from 1939-45 by stating that "officials followed two general approaches—some wished to fully exploit potential Jewish labor, and some sought to diminish the Jewish presence altogether" (593). Although simplistic, the division serves as a useful prototype with which to compare ghetto life in Elie Wiesel's town of Sighet with ghetto [End Page 149] life in my father's hometown of Dąbrowa's Górnicza, Poland. The Sighet ghetto system was designed to expedite elimination of the Jews; the Dąbrowa's ghetto served for four years as an economic unit providing slave labor to German industry, to the Wehrmacht, and to SS General Albrecht Schmelt.

Sighet

Hungary joined Germany in dismembering and annexing parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In the Second Vienna Award of 1940, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy reassigned Northern Transylvania, including the town of Sighet, from Romania to Hungary. Thus Sighet, which had been part of Romania in the interwar period, became part of Hungary again (30 August 1940). Transylvania itself contained 150,000 Jews (Dawidowicz 381).

Sighet was a very Jewish town. According to the Hungarian Census of January 1941, it had 10,144 Jewish inhabitants, representing 40 percent of the total population. The city had followers of a variety of Hasidic Rebbes, such as the Teitelbaums, the Vizhnitser Rebbe, and the Spinka and Kretchnev dynasties. There were also various Zionist youth movements, Orthodox, and Conservative Jews. It had been a center of Hebrew printing since the 1870s (Silber 1746).

Even before the German occupation, Hungarian authorities dictated anti-Jewish legislation, which was enforced more harshly in North Transylvania than in inner Hungary. The Jews were accordingly impoverished (Miron 452-54).

In 1941, Elie Wiesel, almost thirteen, met Moishe the Beadle, "the poorest of the poor of Sighet." All the Jews in town were fond of him, but he had a special relationship with Elie. For hours at a time, Moishe initiated Elie into the secrets of Jewish mysticism. They read the same page of the Zohar together over and over, hoping to discover the essence of divinity. Elie "became convinced that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become ONE" (Night 5).

While Wiesel was exploring arcane religious matters with Moishe, the Hungarian armed forces joined the Germans in invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, although the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklos Horthy, resisted German demands for general mobilization. By 26-29 August of that year, SS General [Obergruppenführer] Friedrich Jeckeln, Senior SS and Police Leader of the southern zone, decided to deport 17,000 Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship to German-occupied Ukraine (Miron 280; Dawidowicz 381). "All foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet," Wiesel reports. Moishe the Beadle was one of these outsiders. "Crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently. Standing on the station platform, we too were crying. The train disappeared over the horizon; all that was...

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