|
Judit Molnár, “Two
Cities, Two Policies, One Outcome: The De-Judaization of Pécs and
Szeged in 1944”
This
article engages in a comparative analysis of the behavior and
attitudes of the local civilian officials, policemen, and gendarmes
of Szeged and Pécs during the Holocaust. These cities were
provincial capitals as well as gendarmerie district seats. Both had
substantial, largely neologue Jewish populations. In May 1944,
closed ghettos were created in both, as well as collection camps and
deportation centers. The article looks at how these local leaders
dealt with the new situation; whether and how they carried out the
decrees and the orders of the government. It finds that the
authorities usually carried out the central decrees more strictly on
the local level. The civilian leaders of Szeged took independent
action and initiative, whereas Pécs had more benevolent officials
and police officers. Still, the histories of these two cities in
1944 are similar. The discernible differences among the Hungarian
officials in enthusiasm for the anti-Jewish measures did not change
the Jews’ fate. The lack of enthusiasm of the prefect, mayor, and
local police of Pécs did not prevent the same stigmatization,
plunder, ghettoization, and deportation of the Jewish population as
in Szeged, where the local administrative and police authorities
displayed enthusiasm. The two gendarmerie district commanders also
had different interpretations on how to implement the decrees, with
the commander of the Pécs District displaying more antisemitic
enthusiasm than his counterpart in Szeged. But in the end, all those
classified as Jews, whether orthodox, neologue, assimilated, or
converted, met the same fate. The law-abiding agencies of public
administration and public security decided to carry out the decrees
and instructions and to meet the deadlines. The differences in the
actual execution were determined by individual attitudes. |
