This comic is only 1,500 words. The 6 chapters in my forthcoming book tell the full history which has rarely been told, of the rise of fascism in Hungary and the stories of the courageous resisters.
An eBook will be published in the coming months. Links at the bottom to purchase the print on demand book and to sign up to learn about the eBoook.
Kile B. Jones Review
Mila and I learning about Hungarian Jews. We’re reading “The Hungarian Resistance” by Sander Feinberg and Summer McClinton.
I didn’t know this history. I know Auschwitz and the canonical six million. Of Hungary, where one of the swiftest mass murders on record was conducted in the summer of 1944, I could have told you nothing. It took thirteen-pages to do what no classroom of mine attempted, and I intend to hold a grudge.
Feinberg’s opening point, made with panels rather than italics, is that the catastrophe began with legalities. Under the regency of Admiral Horthy, whose name became a curse among Hungarian immigrants in America, the laws of 1938, 1939, and 1941 defined Jews as a race, confiscated their properties, and sent their men into labor battalions.
This killed 27,000 through starvation and neglect, all while the Wehrmacht was still on the far side of the border. Nobody needed to conquer Hungary to make a people poor, then rightless—dead in their thousands. Parliaments managed, with a show of hands and neighbors to enforce. When the Germans arrived, the paving was done, and 437,000 human beings went to Auschwitz by July 1944. Eight weeks. It took only 8 weeks.
Some people declined. In December 1944 the story tightens to a forgery shop, where David Gur, Miki Langer, and Andrei Fábry manufactured the papers keeping thousands of the hunted alive. The Arrow Cross, Hungary’s homegrown Nazi movement, in power by coup since October, seized and tortured the three, with Miki not living to see morning. The underground bought a Hungarian officer, who strode into Margit prison announcing “I have orders to remove these traitors,” marched the survivors with fifteen others out of the gate, as to their executions. He returned a day later carrying a list of 103 names
Seventeen out, then a hundred more, on sheer nerve and forged authority, while militia were shooting Jews into the Danube where the bronze shoes now stand. By the end, 565,000 Hungarian men, women, and children were dead. The rescuers subtracted what they could, at prices I cannot imagine, and Feinberg presents this subtraction without varnish.
History wrote its own joke here, and he wisely leaves it deadpan. Béla Lugosi, the screen’s immortal Dracula, appears beside the author’s grandfather, Kálmán Márki, founding the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy in 1943. The vampire of Hollywood raising funds against the genuine article.
Summer McClinton’s black and white art refuses both vain prettiness and the glorification of violence, faces you’d recognize at a bus stop, small hands closing on a Star of David pendant. Her figures look like people—in events where the crime consisted of deciding Jews were something else.
My ignorance was curated, and I finished these pages in a year when hatred of Jews has once again acquired a vocabulary that respectable people pronounce in public.
The last page belongs to Jacques Sémelin’s observation that even amid massacre a few always step aside, people who “prefer to help rather than denounce, protect rather than destroy.”
Thank you Sander! Mila and I loved it.
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