The Historiography of the Holocaust

432 Thomas C. Fox
amount of publication about the Holocaust, generated primarily by Jewish
authors. History books and schoolbooks continued to reflect the orthodox
party line, but memoirs, fiction, documentaries and journalistic investigations
demonstrated a relative openness. It was at this time, for example, that the role
of the Christian Churches during the Holocaust became a topic of public
discussion.
Hungary’s literary, artistic and scholarly output on the Holocaust, unrivalled
in the Eastern Bloc in the 1970s, continued in the 1980s, for example with a series
of conferences dealing with the 40th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary.
These conferences took place in 1984 in New York, Tel Aviv and in Hungary,
and resulted in important publications. In 1987, the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences established a Centre for Jewish Studies in Budapest. Also in the late
1980s Hungarians began to make available translations of leading western
scholarship on the Holocaust.
The post-communist transition has led to a resurrection and open expression
of longtime anti-Jewish sentiments based on the ostensible connection of the
‘Jews’ with communism, an issue broached by Bibo in his essay in the late
1940s. And it is true that Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians tended to view
the Soviets differently, at least in the initial post-war period when many Jews
and Hungarian anti-fascists welcomed the Soviets as liberators, while the
majority of the population tended to view them as invaders and oppressors.
After 1948, and during the subsequent anti-Zionist campaigns, Hungarian Jews
suffered perhaps most under communism, but the old stereotypes continue to
inform post-1989 political discourse in that country.
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In Romania, in March 1945, the communist government created a special
court for the prosecution of war criminals. 27 Supervising the court was Lucretiu
Patrascanu, who was a leader of the Communist Party, the minister of justice
and one of the people responsible for the overthrow of the fascist wartime regime
of Ion Antonescu. The leaders of that regime were brought to justice and
Antonescu was executed along with three others. During the war, Romanian
troops had joined the invasion of the Soviet Union and had participated in the
murder of Jews. Although the Holocaust remained unsystematic in Old Romania
(that is, within Romania’s pre-First World War borders), it was systematic in
Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. Members of the civilian and military
administration who organized and implemented the deportation and murder
of those Jews were given long prison sentences, as were both low- and highranking
officers in the military and police. The trials were, however, viewed by
Romanian nationalists as an anti-national act imposed on the people by ‘foreign’
elements in order to disgrace the army that, following a long Romanian tradition,