ABSTRACT
Since the collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989, Hungarian pundits have remarked ironically that, unlike in Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland and even France, Hungarians do not have to worry about tending graves of martyred resistance fighters from World War II, since no such combatants existed. This was in spite of Communist attempts until 1989 to create a myth of a Communistled resistance movement.1 In the post-1945 discourse, which was marked by clear differences between East and West in the forging of collective memory, any discussion of forms of “resistance” was part of a wider theme that included its antithesis – “collaboration.” The Hungarian case of collaboration and resistance raises several questions
within the context of the history of World War II and the struggle for historical memory in the post-Communist period. These concern collaboration with whom and when, and resistance to whom, when and by whom.2 However, since 1989 – and to some extent in the Communist period – Hungarian historians have wrestled with the problem of periodizing Hungarian history during World War II. This matter assumed new forms after 1989, when open discussions began on the nature of the Soviet “liberation” in 1945, namely, the Red Army’s behavior toward Hungarians, which included pillage, violence, rape, and the virtual kidnapping of thousands of Hungarians as postwar POWs, in addition to the tens of thousands captured prior to April 1945. Thus, the issue of periodization of the war was combined with debates over the dual aspect of “liberation” and “occupation” by the Soviet Union. Overshadowing all this was the question of the postwar trials. Postwar “justice making” was challenged from a legal and a moral point of view, and the notions of vengeance and political objectives were raised in order to rehabilitate those found guilty after the war. On the other hand, those few whose memory had been cherished by the Communist regime as resistance fighters were doomed to oblivion as part of the nationalist campaign to erase Communism and glorification of the Communist era. The postwar years, and the Communist manipulation of the past, including
the drafting of so-called petty fascists – former low-ranking Arrow Cross
members or sympathizers – into the Communist Party, and the large number of Jews who served in the party and security apparatus, complicated the legacy of the past, which became, after 1989, an arena for the struggle over historical memory. In the words of István Deák, who summed up the dilemmas of this period
and its representation in historical memory:
… historical memory of this era resembles a confusing and terrifying nightmare. Did the forced laborer-turned-Communist political police officer have the right to torture Arrow Cross criminals? Whose fate was to be more bemoaned, that of the Jew gassed at Auschwitz or that of the peasant draftee who died of starvation in a Soviet POW camp? Who were the nation’s worst enemies, the fascists or the Stalinists?3
