The Historiography of the Holocaust

430 Thomas C. Fox
with East Germany and Poland, Czechoslovakia also specialized in excoriating
capitalist West Germany as a haven for past, present and future Nazis.
The Terezin Memorial illustrates many of these tendencies in nuce. Established
during the reform movement in 1968 as a belated tribute to Jewish victims, the
research institute in its early years presented important publications on longneglected
or taboo themes. By 1974 it had become a centre for the indoctrination
of class-consciousness, and the ghetto history was depicted as a class struggle
between Jewish Zionists and assimilationists. The official guidelines for the
centre emphasized the following themes: a) communist resistance to the Nazis;
b) the suffering of Czechoslovakia; c) the suffering of the inmates of all nationalities
in Terezin; d) documentation of various phases of the Little Fortress,
where Czech political prisoners were held; and e) the parallels between the
oppression of the Jews during the Nazi period and the conduct of the Zionists.
This was the general tone of official ideology. It is important to note, however,
that alongside such constructions, other, less ideological pieces of Marxist
scholarship made contributions to Holocaust memory, as did numerous literary
works and films by Jewish and non-Jewish Czechs and Slovaks. Livia Rothkirchen
asserts programmatically:
Czech reactions to the Holocaust fall into two different types: (1) the official
reaction, influenced by Moscow and supported by the state, and (2) the
more sympathetic reaction of a large part of the population, which viewed
with compassion the plight of the Jews. How could one otherwise explain
the great success of Jewish writers whose novels and reminiscences attained
such popularity? 23
***
In post-war Hungary, initial efforts to reconstitute Jewish life were stymied by
the lack of restitution, which was refused on various grounds: the generally
desperate economic situation, the reluctance of non-Jews to part with property
confiscated from Jews and, most importantly, the increasing influence of the
communists who desired all property, Jewish and non-Jewish, to be nationalized. 24
A government campaign against the black market became a coded campaign
against Jews. In a time of severe economic dislocation, Jews proved convenient
scapegoats, and between February and July 1946 serious antisemitic incidents
and even virtual pogroms took place in several Hungarian cities.
Hungarian attitudes toward the Holocaust were shaped by a series of trials
between 1945 and 1948, which investigated local and national crimes committed
by Hungarians collaborating with the Nazis. One hundred and forty-six people
were executed for war crimes or crimes against humanity, perhaps most notably