ILONA HORTHY

(2908 szóból áll a szöveg)
(633 olvasás)  

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. It is an honor to be called a friend of Hungary, as it is an honor to be asked to introduce Countess Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai, the widow of Vice Regent István Horthy. [Editor's remark: István Horthy was the son of Regent Admiral Horthy. He served as a fighter pilot on the Russian front and was killed in a crash.]

Last year in Budapest I attended in Parliament a ceremony honoring Count János Esterházy, a deeply decent man deliberately allowed to die in a Communist jail in what was then Czechoslovakia.

It was there, in Parliament, that I had the pleasure of meeting and spending the day with the lady from whom you will soon hear.

I must tell you that at every interval during the ceremony, during the reception that followed, and in the chambers through which we passed, it was around Ilona Horthy that the crowd formed. Later in the day at a wreath laying the same thing happened. Simple men and women, many of them Hungarians from Slovakia in Budapest for the commemoration honoring Esterházy János, stepped up to introduce themselves, the women smiling, often through tear-filled eyes, and the bolder among the men lining up to kiss Ilona Horthy?s hand.

Although more than half a century has passed since she and her family were forcibly taken from their homeland, everyone seemed to want to greet her and to find the right words to communicate their affection to her.

Why is this lady so fondly remembered?

I think because her courage and dignity never wavered as her country stood on the brink of a national cataclysm.

Because she tirelessly nursed the wounded throughout the war.

Because her grave beauty shone brightly in the midst of so much destruction and ugliness.

Because people remember that on her slender shoulders the honor of her country rested during those terrible October days and that she bore that burden unflinchingly. .

Her image seems engraved on the nation?s memory: I believe that in the distant days of WWII the Hungarian people opened their hearts to Ilona Horthy, and that there, in those hearts, she can still be found today.

Let me add some sentences to what Ambassador Jeszenszky has said about me. My father and I were, indeed, transiting Hungary homeward bound, when on December 11,1941, the day Germany declared war on the United States, we were stopped on the German side of the Hungarian-German border and subsequently spent the war years in Hungary. During our four and a half Hungarian years we were treated as guests, not as enemy aliens: We were favored by the generous hospitality of a chivalrous people.

Because some of you have no connection to Hungary, Ambassador Jeszenszky thought it a good idea that you should have from me, a non-Hungarian, a few thoughts about the period 1920-45, with particular focus on the background to the politics of the interwar period and the Holocaust, which are the subjects of this conference.

Perhaps I should say that in addition to the years I spent there during the war, my connection to Hungary has been sustained by my professional responsibilities as an American diplomat and by my links to a Hungarian family to which I have been devoted since boyhood, and frequent and prolonged visits since 1989. Still, you will be hearing the views of an outsider looking in.

It is not possible to speak of Hungary in the interwar period without focusing on the Treaty of Trianon that after WWI in 1920 stripped Hungary of two thirds of its territory and left three million Hungarians in the successor states.

Trianon is central to Hungarian history: From 1920 to 1945 and to a significant degree to our own day. Trianon dominated and defined Hungarian foreign and domestic policy, Hungarian economic life, and Hungarian thought and culture. It is the humiliation of Trianon that must be before your eyes as you consider the interwar period and the war years.

The shock of Trianon was so strong, and the wound so deep, that no government, of whatever ideological coloration, could have survived had it not had revision of the Treaty at the center of its political program.

I cannot resist a further historical note:

Although the ignorance and cupidity of the WWI allies played their part, there was design behind this treaty, and the design was French. Believing that the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the weakening of Germany would enable France to become the preponderant power in Central and Southeastern Europe, the French plotted the reduction of Hungary to the status of a minor player, and successfully promoted the creation of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and the dramatic enlargement of Romania. Hungary even lost territory to Austria: This, the wise men of Versailles and Trianon thought, would help draw Austria eastward and thereby reduce any urge it might have felt to unite with Germany!

Of course, the French were never strong enough to dominate the affairs of the region and the Germans were back soon enough, stronger than ever, and more aggressive than ever, now that the stabilizing presence of the Dual Monarchy had vanished.

Had there been no Trianon, had the Allied powers after WWI worked toward the creation of a Danubian Federation to replace the Dual Monarchy -- as it was clearly in their longer term interest to do -- might there have been no Hitler? No WWII ? No Cold War? No Bosnia, no Kosovo?

But the reality is that there was a Trianon, and that it eventually delivered Hungary into the arms of Germany, the only country that lent support, however cynical and opportunistic, to Hungarian hopes for revision. Fear of the reversal of the German sponsored revisions of the first and second Vienna Awards, helped to thrust Hungary into WWII. Hungary was a reluctant ally of Germany, yet however hard the country?s leaders tried to minimize her active participation in the war, the passage of time exhausted both Hungarian stratagems and German patience.

On March 19, 1944, the Germans marched into Hungary: It was a dark day for a country which had already suffered too many dark days in its long history.

This brings me to the difficult subject of anti-Semitism.

The fate of Hungary and of its Jewish community were indissolubly linked. There had been a Jewish presence in Hungary since at least the thirteenth century, but it grew exponentially late in the nineteenth as the Dual Monarchy opened its frontiers to Jews seeking refuge from pogroms in Russia and Russian Poland.

Anti-Semitism was present in Hungarian society before WWI, but not significantly more so than in Western Europe or in my own country.

It is necessary to recall that Hungarians were accustomed to other peoples in their midst: Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Ruthenians. These ethnic groups lived peacefully side by side with their Magyar neighbors, the chief difference being that assimilation among these groups was slow, whereas the assimilation of Jews, at least among the more prosperous and less orthodox elements, in other words among those who sought assimilation, was rapid.

The dismemberment of the country after Trianon, the brief and awful triumph of a Bolshevik putsch, a Romanian invasion, and the search for scapegoats, always the search for scapegoats, changed this tolerant landscape. Anti-Semitism of a stronger sort began to take hold, although the better educated, the better traveled, the more worldly the individual, the less affected he was by anti-Semitism. The best men and women of the aristocracy, senior leaders of the churches, the upper ranks of the bureaucracy, and the diplomatic service, were mostly anti-German and repelled by Anti-Semitism. It was stronger among the less well-educated classes, and virulent on the lumpen far right made up of a small number of fanatics and a large number of thugs, many of whom would later make the easy switch from Arrow Cross thug to Communist thug. The transition was easy. Fascism and Communism have much in common and their methods differ hardly at all.

The governments of the Twenties, and with exceptions, of the Thirties, were mostly in the hands of civilized men, heirs to the traditions of nineteenth century Hungarian Liberalism, which in Anglo-American terms translates into Whig conservatism. Some appalling anti-Jewish laws were passed in the late thirties, but these were mostly observed in the breach. Indeed, until March 19, 1944, Hungarian Jews lived relatively, I emphasize the word relatively, normal lives. You must remember that by this time most Polish Jews had been murdered, together with virtually all Jews trapped in German-occupied Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic countries, and beyond. The same was true of the large Jewish populations of Slovakia and Croatia where the Fascist Tiso and Pavelic regimes outdid even the Germans in the cruelties they inflicted on their Jewish neighbors. The bulk of the Jewish communities of the conquered countries of Europe had suffered the same sad fate.

The fact is that until the takeover by the Germans in 1944, the huge Jewish population of Hungary was by far the largest remaining in Europe, and the only significant one left virtually, and once again I must emphasize a word, untouched by the Holocaust.

That it survived to this point was a product of the resistance of Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, and of Prime Minister Kállay, to repeated German demands for the deportation of Hungarian Jews for ?resettlement,? ?agricultural and industrial labor,? and other euphemisms for mass murder.

I would like to be able to say that the psychopath Adolf Eichman and the Gestapo, charged with the implementation of the ?final solution? in Hungary, found no collaborators. But I cannot, for they did. Some were senior civil servants, a handful of the worst in the Ministry of the Interior, including the minister and two of his state secretaries, all three violent anti-Semites. Many were gendarmes or railroad men. Some were thugs of the sort I have mentioned before, sad to say the sort of thugs that surfaced everywhere where the Germans sought henchmen for the execution of the Holocaust.

Many Hungarians of all walks of life risked their own lives to save the life of a Jewish friend or neighbor. But for the most part the population of Hungary, like the populations of other countries that experienced similar atrocities, stood aside; out of fear, out of inertia, or out of opportunism. Some took advantage of the spreading lawlessness and stole Jewish property. In a little more than six weeks after the German takeover the Jewish population of the countryside had been collected and loaded onto trains. At the frontier the Germans took charge of the trains, which then proceeded to Auschwitz. And we know what happened there.

The Jewish population of Budapest, roughly 250,000 strong, was to be the next to go, but the Regent, perhaps understanding the terrible truth for the first time, was able to stop all further deportations. They were resumed only after he had been deposed and with his family deported to Germany in October, 1944. In the end about 300,000 Hungarian Jews survived the war. Had the Hungarians not resisted German pressure for so long, there would have been no survivors.

But close to 500,000 Hungarian Jews perished.

The number defies human comprehension

Had there been no German occupation, would the Holocaust have come to Hungary? I think not. No, emphatically not, with or without Trianon. Hungary was a country with a tradition of racial and ethnic tolerance, a tradition under severe strain since 1919-1920, but essentially in tact.

The Regent himself, the conservatives and the men of the center, were products of the liberal-conservative traditions of the nineteenth century into which they were all born. They stood for legality, order, authority and hierarchy. They were everything the Fascists deeply hated. To these men the idea of the mass murder of members of a valued minority was unthinkable. Tragically, however, mass murder did appeal to a small number of half-demented fanatics; it was these bloodstained men who for a short while ruled parts of the country.

And a final observation: The interwar governments of Hungary, and the Regent personally, have all too often been misunderstood by, or willfully misrepresented to, the Anglo-American world.

To judge Admiral Horthy, a man born into the Hungarian squirearchy in 1868, a man who became an Austro-Hungarian naval cadet at the age of fourteen, a naval officer who served the Emperor Franz Joseph as aide de camp, by the standards of late twentieth century ?political correctness,? as he frequently is, is absurd. The Regent was a conservative of the old cut. The civilized values of the nineteenth century: Humaneness, legality, tradition, order, respect for authority, were important to him. So were decency, fairness, and courtesy.

During the interwar years Admiral Horthy, and the men who worked with him, evolved a governing formula that was semi-parliamentary, and tolerant of political parties, including the Social Democratic Party. (It is worth noting that the Regent understood that full revision, i.e. a return to Hungary?s ?historic? borders, was impossible. He and other conservatives would have been perfectly content had Hungarian-inhabited areas reverted to the mother country). The tone was nationalist and patriotic and, of course, revisionist. The press was free and lively. Proponents of the extreme right or left were discouraged and sometimes tried and jailed. Szálasi was twice tried, twice jailed.

There are things the Regent perhaps should have done, but didn?t. But about what leader or politician can that not be said? At the age of seventy-six in 1944 when he labored to save what still could be saved, he may no longer have had the strength he once had. But to characterize him, or his governments, as totalitarian or Fascist as they sometimes are, is bad history, on occasion malevolent, and in either case nonsense.

Fascism came to Hungary in October 1944. It wrought murder, cruelty, and unimaginable beastliness. It lasted from then to the end of the war, a few months later, yet to those who lived through it seemed an age. It left the country in ruins, its fields unplowed, its factories silent, and tens of thousands of its best citizens in their graves.

A country that had already suffered so much was to undergo decades more tyranny, this time of the Soviet variety. Hungarians would rise in 1956. Many young men and women would die, but it is they who cracked the core of Communism.

Every year when I go to Budapest my first stop is at the eternal flame for the victims of 1956, and my second is to the bullet scarred fa?ade of the Ministry of Agriculture where so many died. It is also my last stop before I return home. Last April as I made my pilgrimage before my departure, the thought crossed my mind that there exists a link between the Ilona Horthy of that terrible October of 1944, and the boys and girls, the men and women, of that other heartbreaking October of 1956.

In extraordinarily difficult times, against impossible odds she, like they twelve years later almost to the day, did what was decent, what was dutiful, and what was honorable.

<it>?Becsület és Kötelesség.? - ? Honor and Duty.? It is an apt title for a very fine book. </it>

Thank you for hearing me out. It is with pleasure that I yield the floor to Horthy Ilona.