ABSTRACT
The incredibility of the Holocaust has been a central theme of Holocaust literature and scholarship from their inception. Nowhere was the incredibility of Germany's campaign to destroy Jewry more extreme than in Hungary. As historians Raul Hilberg and Randolph Braham have observed, by 1944, Hungary, with its 750,000 Jews, was the only important area of Europe still untouched by deportations to the killing centers. The mass deportation of Hungary's Jews was also unique because it was carried out openly, in full view of the whole world. On May 15, 1944, when deportations of Hungarian Jewry had already begun in the Carpathians, the Church declared: The Apostolic Nunciature considers it to be its duty to protest against such measures. One wonders whether, in the vast body of Holocaust literature, there is a more striking example of the Hebraic-Hellenic synthesis in the life of cultivated European Jews.
