'Non-Remembering' the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland

Hungary, as an ally of Nazi Germany, introduced anti-Jewish legislation from 1938 but managed to avoid the deportation of Jews from its post-Trianon territory until the German occupation of the whole country on 19 March 1944. The deportation of 430,000 Jews from Hungary was the quickest in the history of the Holocaust, taking less than two months with the active participation of Hungarian civil servants. Miklós Horthy, who governed the country with an iron fist from 1919, initiated discussions with the Allied forces over a separate armistice, but that did not remain unnoticed by the Germans who installed the fascist Arrow Cross party as a collaborationist government on 15 October 1944. The final days of Hungary, following the pattern of the Italian Social Republic, had started.¹ Some parts of Hungary had been liberated by the Soviet Army by December 1944, and the provisional government held its first meeting in Debrecen and started to build up the new Hungary.

Liberty Square in the centre of Budapest was renovated in 2014, the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary, and, as a part of the reconstruction, the architect installed a fountain which stops when somebody approaches it and has a fairly large dry space in the middle. It is the joy of young children stuck in the city during the very hot summer days. On 4 October 2014 the performance artist Victoria Mohos placed a chair in the fountain, sat in it, and screamed for fifteen minutes (according to some reports, eighteen), protesting against what is behind the playful and innovative fountain: the monument to the victims of the German occupation.²

The Christian-conservative government hoped to use the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust as a PR blitz to repair its tainted international reputation caused by its 'unorthodox policy' on freedom of speech and the role and funding of civil organizations. As part of 'Hungarian Holocaust 70', it allocated a large amount of state funding for the purpose and invited proposals from civil organizations.³ So what went wrong? Why did a young performance artist spend fifteen minutes screaming in front of the newly erected monument?

To explain this unarticulated emotional response, I would like to analyse the processes of 'non-remembering'. Non-remembering is a conscious process of forgetting and replacing painful memories with less painful ones. In the 'Hungarian Holocaust 70' commemorations, the non-remembering happened in such a way that it blocked the construction of what Aleida Assmann has called 'dialogic remembering' and promoted further pillarization of the different memory cultures present in Hungary.⁴

The monument to the victims of the German occupation was erected and unveiled during the night in total secrecy and without an official ceremony. It depicts Nazi Germany as an eagle descending upon Hungary represented by the archangel Gabriel and thus expands the category of victim to include Hungary itself. However, Hungary collaborated with Nazi Germany until the last moments of the Second World War, and applying the category of 'victim' in such an undifferentiated way is deeply problematic. Protests against the monument started when the plans for it were first revealed, taking the form of a continuous demonstration on the square, including the exhibition of alternative forms of memory, such as family photographs, photocopied excerpts from books, personal objects, and a Facebook group called 'The Holocaust and My Family'. Demonstrators argued that the monument is revisionist and attempts to undermine the previously anti-fascist consensus that the Hungarian state had a role in the murder of its own citizens.

In this chapter, I argue that the two strategies of non-remembering—substituting one historical narrative with another and resisting remembering the murdered Hungarian citizens in 1944—are intertwined. They are both connected to a language problem in Holocaust remembrance. I use three examples to prove my point: a Polish film, a Hungarian teaching exercise, and a local research project.

Pokłosie

The Polish film Pokłosie (Aftermath, 2012), directed by Władysław Pasikowski, discusses—with many allusions to the Old Testament—the guilt of Polish peasants for the murder of the...