Modern Jews have the luxury of thinking however we want about the Holocaust — if we think about it all. For some, it is nothing, for others a distant familial memory. For a bold few, it can even be the object of humor. (Hungarian Spectrum)
Not so for Jews of earlier generations, for whom the smoke of the camps is far more pungent. And as survivors of the camps dwindle in number, their voices, their invocations to never forget, become ever more urgent.
And no voice is more urgent than that of Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, whose “Night” remains probably the most widely-read nonfiction chronicle of the six million who perished, not to mention those who live with the scars.
Wiesel is in the news today because he has returned a Hungarian prize he won in 2004. He no longer wants it, convinced that Hungary is “whitewashing” its collaboration with the Nazis, according to an AFP report.
The central European country awarded Wiesel its highest honor, the Order of Merit, Grand Cross, in 2004 for being a “messenger to mankind.” With the Iron Curtain long lifted, and preparing to enter the Western European fold, Hungary seemed to be trying to account for its past, which included helping the Nazis exterminate some 70% of its 650,000 Jews.
Recent events, however, have stymied such efforts, leading Wiesel to return the award. He is especially outraged that the speaker of Hungary’s parliament, Laszlo Kover, last month attended a ceremony in honor of Jozsef Nyiro, the Hungarian wartime writer and politician who harbored openly Nazi sympathies, claiming that Jews “destroy the Hungarian soul…infect our spirit” in a 1942 speech, as James Kirchick points out in The Jewish Daily Forward. He was also a supporter of the fascist Arrow Cross regime, which took over Hungary after longtime dictator Miklos Horthy was ousted in 1944 for making overtures to the Allies (Horthy had previously been an ally of Hitler).
The ceremony for Nyiro was held on May 27 in the Hungarian village of Gyomro, where various memorials for the anti-Semitic ideologue were also unveiled, according to AFP. There had been an attempt to rebury his ashes in a part of Romania that had once belonged to Hungary, but the Romanians prevented a train carrying his remains from cross the border. Kover said the Romanians’ refusal to allow the Nazi sympathiser to be buried in their country was “unfriendly, uncivilised, barbaric.”
Nyiro died in Spain in 1953. His poetry is still read in Hungarians schools today.
And as the Associated Press reports, Horthy’s own besmirched reputation is enjoying a new luster:
Most Hungarians view Horthy as an authoritarian who dragged Hungary into a disastrous alliance with Adolf Hitler and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust. But as Hungary struggles to fend off recession and nationalist sentiment rises, there is a growing movement to recast Horthy as a patriotic hero who stood up to the Soviet Union and only reluctantly threw in his lot with Hitler. And critics say the populist government of Viktor Orban is doing little to stop the cult that has sprung up around the wartime leader.
Wiesel, who is of Romanian and Hungarian descent, has good reason not to want an award from the Hungarians, and in a blistering letter to Kover published on Tuesday, he wrote, “it has become increasingly clear that Hungarian authorities are encouraging the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary’s past, namely the wartime Hungarian government’s involvement in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish citizens.”
Hungary’s rehabilitation of its wartime leaders comes during a time of general nationalist resurgence in Eastern Europe, particularly in countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and Russia. As is often the case, feelings of nationalism spill over into xenophobia, and especially anti-Semitism.