Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry
Moshe Herczl
Trans Joel Lerner
299 pp
NYU Press: New York 1993
Moshe Herczl (1924-1990) was a survivor of the Shoah in Hungary and completed this text before his death. It consists of a historical background, covering the years before 1938, an extensive discussion of prejudicial legislation from 1938 until the beginning of the disasters of 1944, and then a section on 1944 itself
Substantial research went into the text, which paints a clear picture of anti-semitism in Hungary, especially after 1920, with particular attention to the attitudes of certain churches. It is an entirely tragic story, in which various churchmen helped lobby for discriminatory laws and then were sometimes later surprised that the political establishment did not respond well to demands for protection of life and property of converts to Christianity. Many Catholic officials, for example, rejected racism in principle but voiced no objection, or even voiced support, for official legal discrimination based on religious practices. Nor was the Catholic church the only church that failed to object to religious discrimination and failed to rebuke those of its representatives who openly advocated such discrimination
And, in the aftermath, there was too often an astounding lack of penitance. In the late 1940s, when the war was over, the head of the Hungarian Reformed Church declared, at open convention and to applause
... The Reformed Church has no reason to ask forgiveness of the Jews for what befell them ...
although, prior to the war, he had addressed the legislature to support anti-Jewish legislation, saying
... There exists a Jewish problem which must be solved ...
Various examples illustrate the views of the more active perpetrators, notably a post-war interview with an Arrow Cross member who explains that he did not find any contradiction whatsoever between his racism and his Christian duty to love his neighbor