ABSTRACT
Yisrael Gutman, in his classic study The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943, echoes Kazimierz Brandys’ assertion that ‘Warsaw was the capital of the war’. Warsaw was the first city to be bombed, turned into a battlefront, and effectively razed to the ground following the ghetto uprising in 1943 and Warsaw uprising in 1944.1 Perhaps more than any other European city, the Second World War proved to be a ‘metropolitan catastrophe’ for the Polish capital, which lost an estimated 60 per cent of its pre-war population and 85 per cent of its housing stock.2 In contrast to Warsaw, the Hungarian capital got off relatively lightly. War damage came late to Budapest. The city was first bombed in April 1944, and although there was severe devastation in the winter of 1944-5 during the siege of Budapest,3 it was not on the same scale as that in Warsaw. The same could be said of the city’s ‘Jewish’ population.4 Like ‘Jews’ in Warsaw, Budapest’s ‘Jews’ were placed into urban ghettos, although much later on in the war in the early summer of 1944. However, the Pest ghetto was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, not liquidated as the Warsaw ghetto had been over a year and a half earlier.
