István Deák and World War II in Europe

Abstract

In the Stanford History Department, we have a small claim to the rich intellectual and pedagogical heritage of István Deák, who taught in my stead three different times in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after he had retired from Columbia. In that period, he was an unforgettable colleague in our Europeanist contingent and a magnificent mentor to a number of our talented East Europeanist PhDs, among them Jelena Batinić, Holly Case, Emily Greble, and James Ward, who continued to profit from his care and wisdom long after receiving their degrees. During that period, too, he and I became friends and, like so many others, I was swept up both by his incredibly delightful personality—he was so very smart, witty, warm, and engaging—and his historical worldview, deeply entwined with his own life experiences growing up in Hungary. His dedication to his Columbia students and pride in their accomplishments were also traits I deeply admired. He and Gloria seemed to love coming to Stanford; he could run in fine weather with beautiful natural surroundings, visit with his many Hungarian friends who lived in the area, and continue to teach in retirement gifted and interested graduate students. He also liked the easy friendliness of the place. I recall that at one point, when we were having lunch at the Faculty Club, Stanford’s then president, Gerhard Casper, came by our table to say hello, sat down with us, and, for the next hour, engaged in a lively conversation with István and me about European politics.

Deák’s interests in World War II, the Holocaust, and the immediate postwar period frequently overlapped and intersected with my own. But his lived experiences of that period and those events lent his insights the kind of weight and subtlety that “book learning” simply cannot duplicate. In his writing, he would repeatedly emphasize the complexity of the events, of the motivations of its participants, and the contingencies that lay behind both. In one of his several interviews with Holly Case, he spoke eloquently about the advantages and disadvantages of having experienced the events of the war at a very impressionable age, just as he was graduating from the Catholic Cistercian gymnasium he had attended.¹ Most prominently, these included the Nazi occupation of Hungary (March 1944), the deportations of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz (May–July 1944), and the depredations of the Arrow Cross men after they seized power in October 1944. He seems to have interrogated and processed that shocking period in the Hungarian past over the rest of his life, without, however, letting it dominate his personal or social relations. He understood that he had to find an appropriate distance to those events in order to analyze them “objectively,” a word he frequently employed in a wonderfully old-fashioned way to describe good history. He was still working on his autobiography in Hungarian before he died and surely those cataclysmic events remained foremost in his mind, as they were in his writing about the war and in the interviews about his life with Case.

His major books on the topic of the war and its aftermath, The Politics of Retribution in Europe, which he edited with Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt; Essays on Hitler’s Europe, which is a collection of his articles and reviews; and Europe on Trial, for which I had the honor of writing the foreword, explore the many dimensions of collaboration, resistance, and retribution in Europe.² He sees all three aspects of the wartime drama in pan-European terms. Each European nation had its own distinct experience with collaboration depending on its domestic political circumstances and more or less supine relations with Berlin. Though Deák had his own unpleasant encounters with Hungarian collaborators, they are no more condemned in his work than the Dutch or the Norwegians. He takes no pleasure in the foibles of mankind, but he lets us know just how easy it was for middle-class liberals to turn into fascists during the war and fascists into communists or good democrats afterwards. “Think only of the masses of Parisians who, in 1944, gave a roaring welcome, first to Marshal Pétain and then not too long afterward to General de Gaulle. Newsreels show the same type of faces, the same radiant young women throwing kisses, the same Republican Guard in shining armor, and the same crowds intoning the ‘Marseillaise’.”³

He admires the Poles and the Yugoslavs for having fought the Nazis as determinedly as they did. In his preface to Europe on Trial, Deák dedicates the book to the valiant Hungarian resister, Béla Stollár, his sister’s fiancé, who was killed by Arrow Cross militiamen on Christmas Eve 1944. But his generally skeptical view of the claims in various European countries about staunch resistance to the Nazis is transparent when he writes: “Stollár was one of the few Europeans who actually gave their lives so that others may have lived.” Deák notes that he was eighteen at the time and Stollár was twenty-seven, and he mourns the disappearance of a “wise old friend.” He is also disturbed, if not shocked, that after the war “no one was investigated and none sentenced” for Stollár’s killing.⁴ This fits his understanding of the way that retribution became an only modestly successful effort to deal with the crimes of the war. He is acutely aware that women who harmed no one by their actions had their hair shorn and were humiliated and brutalized by local bullies—whose own innocence was questionable—because they had relationships with German soldiers, sometimes because they sought food and shelter for themselves and their families. Thousands of Norwegian babies fathered by German soldiers were denied citizenship by the postwar Norwegian government. Yet major Nazi criminals escaped criminal justice by fleeing to South America and through recruitment to Soviet, American, and British military-security institutions. The coming of the Cold War meant that fascists and Nazis, collaborators of various stripes, became members of postwar police and civil administrations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Yet, balanced and measured in his judgments as always, Deák writes that “the number and political importance of those sentenced was extraordinarily large” and that “those who were punished for good reason far outnumbered those who were punished unjustly.”⁵

Deák’s understanding of the Holocaust is similarly nuanced. His parents were converted Jews; he speaks of being raised in a strict Catholic family; and he graduated from the same Cistercian gymnasium that his father had attended. He tried to forget his “Semitic” ancestry and his Catholic upbringing, he writes, but he could not because “what knowledge I have comes from my Cistercian monk-teachers in Budapest, and what I have been living with for many years now . . . is the memory of the Holocaust.”⁶ His understanding that “there but for the Grace of God go I” comes through particularly strongly in his review of Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize-winning autobiographical novel Fateless. Kertész was a fully assimilated Hungarian Jew, born in 1929 (Deák in 1926); Kertész wrote in his diary “I am one who is persecuted as a Jew, but I am not a Jew,” and he finds it impossible to “divorce his thoughts and his writings from his native Hungary and, even more from his Holocaust experience.” Deák writes:

Deák’s deeply felt empathy for assimilated Hungarian Jews also is revealed by his observation that of all the Holocaust photographs he had seen, the most devastating, “at least to me, is that of two brothers from Hungary standing miserably on the railroad platform in Auschwitz-Birkenau, wearing patriotic Hungarian school caps and overcoats. One knows that within a few hours the two little boys will be gassed.”⁸

Deák explores similar themes regarding assimilated Jews in his review of Madeline Albright’s memoir, A Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War. Albright found out very late in life that her father, the famous East Europeanist Josef Korbel, converted to Catholicism, while Deák learned of his Jewish background at the age of 12. Even after 1945, he writes: “The Holocaust savagely destroyed the illusion that baptism would do away with Jewish origins . . . a person of Jewish descent remained a Jew.”⁹ He follows through on some of these same ruminations in his review of the diaries of the scholar Victor Klemperer, a converted Jew who documented in vivid detail the increasingly constricted lives of German Jews under Nazi rule.¹⁰

Deák’s understanding of the “twisted road” to the Holocaust does not depart in any major way from the mainstream of historiography, though he does make it clear that the Holocaust is, above all, an all-European story. In his review of Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution, he notes that the Nazi intention to destroy the entirety of European Jewry lent the Holocaust a unique character, yet the German actions were comparable to similar attacks on the Jews in other parts of the continent from other political leaderships, bureaucracies, and populations. Hungarian and Dutch officials, in this sense, were little different from the Germans. He agrees with Browning that Nazi racial laws were not the result of a “long-held blueprint” and though Hitler harbored particular animus toward the Jews, he was “quite flexible about which course was to be followed in dealing with them.” There was no clear order from Hitler to murder the Jews. Deák also agrees with Browning “that nothing was clear and simple in the Nazi Empire.” The fact that Jewish emigration became impossible sealed the fate of the Jews, along with the complete capitulation of the Wehrmacht to Hitler’s authority.¹¹

Where Deák does depart in some measure from the recent historiography is in his analysis of so-called bystanders, using the terminology of “passive accommodators” versus resisters and non-German perpetrators, whom he calls “active collaborators.” For many historians of the Holocaust, the term bystander is considered inappropriate since it implies the lack of an active role in going along with the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. Omer Bartov, for example, writes that “much of the gentile population in this region [East Galicia] both collaborated in and profited from the genocide of the Jews”: “The category of bystanders in these areas was largely meaningless since everyone took part in these events.”¹² Raz Segal agrees with this approach, though emphasizes, as does Deák himself, that choices between collaboration, accommodation, and perpetration depended on time and place, linked closely to the fortunes of the war.¹³ Still, I think Deák is not wrong to note that passive accommodators were all too common to wartime Europe, “people who tried to get by under foreign occupation, who hoped to survive the war unscathed, and who wished to remain nonpolitical.” This “vast majority” of people in Europe during the war were uninterested in either collaboration or resistance. But the fate of the bystanders, Deák adds, was often hopeless; there was no way to stay “neutral” in wartime Europe. As such, many were taken hostage by the Germans and killed; some died at the hands of partisans; and countless others died in bombing attacks, waves of famine at the end of the war, and at the hands of political fanatics of one stripe or another.¹⁴

World War II changed Central and Eastern Europe forever, Deák frequently stated, in good measure because the Jews and Germans were gone, the former murdered, the latter driven out by postwar governments. Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Vilnius, and Lviv would never be the same. He calls this “ethnic cleansing,” and finds it—in Bosnia, too—murderous and reprehensible.¹⁵ Deák’s work on the Habsburg officer corps, a tribute in some ways to his father who served in it, can be seen as a paean to the multinational character of the Habsburg Empire and especially to the army that served it. That great tradition came to a final, crashing conclusion in World War II. The communist societies that followed, dedicated to shallow nationalist rhetoric and homogenous ethnic populations, were impoverished by the results. For Deák, postcommunist Hungary, in particular, was the most disgraceful product of these trends: chauvinist, narrow-minded, and illiberal, just the opposite of everything he represented to his friends, his students, and his adopted country.

Notes