The position of Hungarian Jewry has always been exceptional (see Chapter 3), with Jews playing a very important role in every aspect of national life. Their importance to the nation was a double-edged sword: In the twentieth century, it created bitter antisemitism, but yet Jews could not be removed easily from the Hungarian economy – as they could in the countries of Western Europe – without doing grave damage to the country.

In the spring of 1944 it was evident that the Nazis were determined to murder all the Jews of Europe, and indeed, they had already done much to achieve that aim: The two bloodiest years of the year were 1942 and 1943. One of the reasons they “succeeded” in killing so many Jews was that they had developed a uniform modus operandi that they followed in country after country. However, each country had its own Holocaust, and because of varying circumstances the end results were not the same. In the Eastern European countries, which had large Jewish populations, such as Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia, had different political and social systems and different Jewries and therefore the character of antisemitism in these countries also varied. Hungary differed from both Eastern European and Western European countries in that, before World War I, Hungarians defined the nation in such a way as to include Jews, and its Jews were valued as allies of the nationalists. Ironically and sadly, although one of the reasons why Jews in Slovakia and Romania were hated was that they were considered to be Hungarians (and indeed they considered themselves as such), just on the other side of the border, their Hungarian compatriots, after the conclusion of the Great War, refused to accept them as fellow countrymen any longer.