Warsaw and Budapest, 1939–1945: Two Ghettos, Two Policies, Two Outcomes

This chapter will compare the histories of the Warsaw and Budapest ghettos. Prior to the Second World War a significant number of Jews lived in both cities; however, their fates were very different: of the 380,000 Jews living in Warsaw before the war only an estimated 11,500 survived, whereas out of the 200,000 Jews of Budapest more than 130,000 lived to see the liberation of Hungary.¹ This chapter will attempt to explain this great difference. The history of the Warsaw ghetto is one of the best documented and researched topics of the Holocaust.² A treatment of the Pest ghetto—a book still usable today—was written immediately after the war.³

There are fairly precise figures available for the number of Jews living in Budapest for the century before the Second World War (see Table 1). To the data of the 1941 census must be added 22,122 individuals who were considered Jewish according to Article IV of the antisemitic law of 1939, of whom 13,966 were Roman Catholic, 4,232 Calvinist, and 3,222 Lutheran.⁴

Table 1.

Jews in Budapest, 1840–1941

The number of Jews in the Hungarian capital significantly decreased from 1920 to 1941. One of the main reasons for this, apart from conversion, was 'a dramatic drop in the rate of natural increase'.⁵ After 1941, when Hungary entered the war as an ally of Germany, this trend only intensified, since approximately 30,000 Jewish men perished during forced labour for the military.⁶

The majority of religious Jews in the Hungarian capital belonged to the assimilationist Neolog movement, and the number of conversions and mixed marriages was high—between 1931 and 1942 there were 10,842 mixed marriages.

In Warsaw during the nineteenth century the percentage of Jews grew continually. In 1830 they constituted 25.0 per cent of the total population; in 1863, 32.6 per cent; in 1901, 35.8 per cent; and in 1917, 44.9 per cent. In 1938 the population of the capital of the Polish Republic was 1,265,372, of which 368,394 (23.1 per cent) were Jews.⁷ Most of them spoke Yiddish, a language unintelligible to the overwhelming majority of Hungarian Jews. In the Warsaw ghetto, whose population peaked at 400,000 in 1941, there were barely 2,000 converted Jews (0.5 per cent).⁸

National employment data confirm that in Hungary, where Jews played a greater role in the process of capitalist modernization, their numbers among agricultural producers and miners were insignificant (in 1930 it was 2.7 per cent and 0.1 per cent respectively), whereas their proportion among those working in commerce was high (in 1930 it was 42.2 per cent). Among the relatively poorly paid and rather antisemitic state employees there were barely any Jews (in Budapest in 1930 there were 116 Jewish state employees, 1.5 per cent); there were not many Jews among the judges, either (in Budapest there were 13, 1.7 per cent). Conversely, out of the 2,693 Jewish lawyers 1,523 (55.7 per cent) lived in the capital and often made a rather comfortable living. Antisemitic doctors often noted that out of 2,852 Jewish doctors 1,494 (52.4 per cent) had practices in the capital.⁹

On 5 April 1944 most Jews, half-Jews, and quarter-Jews over the age of 6 in Hungary were forced to wear a yellow Star of David, ten centimetres by ten centimetres, on the top left side of their clothing. Jews in Poland over the age of 12 were required to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David from 1 December 1939.

Unlike in Poland, the Zionist movement was very weak in Hungary and especially in the capital, where most of the Jews were assimilated. In Hungary—also in sharp contrast to the situation in Poland—there were no expressly Jewish political parties. Jewish workers and especially skilled workers (printers, turners, and so on) [End Page 382...