ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the early postwar years as a transitional era that unmade and, at the same time, transformed fascist memory. Using published and unpublished sources from European, Israeli, and US archives, this chapter ponders on how collapse, displacement, loss of social status, and the shift in the moral, political, and legal order impacted the fascist experience. It details Lajos Marschalkó's route from embattled Budapest through the refugee camps in Allied-occupied Germany to postwar New York City. Doing so, this chapter examines how his notorious writing haunted his escape and took on new meanings in the context of his migration. Back in Budapest, where József Erdélyi's trial at the People's Tribunal spotlighted his infamous poem, The Blood of Eszter Sólymosi, the poem's publication fell under a new legal category: crimes against the people. For the postwar public and, especially, for the remaining Jewry, the memory of the Tiszaeszlár case stood symbolically for the most recent past of persecution, fascism, and genocide.
