Patterns of Prejudice the Ties That Bind: Australia, Hungary and the Case of Károly Zentai

This article was downloaded by: [UNSW Library] On: 27 May 2014, At: 23:17 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Patterns of Prejudice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpop20 The ties that bind: Australia, Hungary and the case of Károly Zentai Ruth Balint Published online: 29 Jun 2010. To cite this article: Ruth Balint (2010) The ties that bind: Australia, Hungary and the case of Károly Zentai, Patterns of Prejudice, 44:3, 281-303, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2010.489737 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2010.489737 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2010 The ties that bind: Australia, Hungary and the case of Ka´roly Zentai RUTH BALINT ABSTRACT Balint examines the current case of Ka´roly Zentai, an Australian wanted for war crimes in Hungary, his country of origin. She explores the evidence for his extradition, the broader historical context of the Zentai case, from 1944 until the present day, and its implications for historical understanding in Hungary and Australia. In the former, the complicity of the state in the Holocaust remains subject to historical denial, drowned out by the dominant narrative of Hungarian victimhood in the war. In the latter, the migration of war criminals to the country via the mass immigration programme conducted in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps of post-war occupied Europe has been hidden by the more widely known story of rescue. Balint also explores the wider history of connection between these two countries, forged during the post-war voyages of immigrants from the DP camps in occupied Europe. She questions to what extent Zentai’s extradition and possible trial would help to promote collective understanding of the ‘lessons of history’ in contemporary Australian or Hungarian society, and argues that, even in this ‘twilight time’ of Holocaust memory, such efforts are necessary, though risky, for the future as well as to do justice to the past. KEYWORDS Australia, Holocaust, Hungary, Ka´roly Zentai, memory, post- Communism, post-war immigration, war crimes, war criminals oday, the fundamental problem of justice concerning the Holocaust has Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 23:17 27 May 2014 Tbecome one of memory, and memory’s ubiquitous twin, forgetting. Primo Levi understood the intrinsic relationship between memory and justice. In The Drowned and the Saved, he described ‘the memory of the offence’, by which he meant the memory of extreme trauma inflicted or suffered during the Holocaust, as one of choice for the perpetrators, who can ‘fabricate for themselves a convenient reality’.1 On the other hand, for the victims, the memories never cease, no matter how much they wish them to. I wish to thank Professor La´szlo´ Karsai, Professor Istvan Hargittai and Professor Konrad Kwiet for their suggestions and invaluable advice on earlier drafts of this article. I also wish to thank the staff of the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Centre, the Open Society Archives and the Centre for Pasts at the Central European University in Budapest for their generous assistance with my research. 1 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus 1989), 14. ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/10/030281-23 # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2010.489737 282 Patterns of Prejudice Levi quotes Jean Ame´ry: ‘Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured.’2 We might also say the same of nations. The acknowledgement of guilt for past crimes is rare, despite the fact that the victims of those crimes are unable to forget. Yet, as Levi cautioned, the burial of memory leads to the withering of justice. Without a clear view of the past, there is no possibility of a just future. Memory, however, does not necessarily mean a clear view of the past. In fact, as a number of scholars have pointed out in recent years, memory can work against real historical understanding. But collective memory plays an important role in the perception and practice of justice. Sixty years after the Holocaust, attempts to bring the few remaining perpetrators of war crimes to trial are complicated by questions of collective memory and its relationship to the contemporary societies in which the cases are pursued. This is particularly evident in the case of Ka´roly Zentai, a man wanted for extradition by Hungary since 2005 in order to be questioned about the murder of a Jewish man in 1944. Zentai has lived in Australia since 1950. This article examines the history of this case, and the contemporary context in which it has been pursued in the two countries in which, at the time of writing, it is still playing out. For the historian, this case provides important insights into the politics of memory, and illustrates wider debates about the uses and abuses of history in the face of the ‘perpetually remade past’.3 ‘Collective memory’ is a notion first developed in the 1920s by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose theoretical analysis high- lighted the social dimensions of remembering, the way the present works to influence what is remembered in societies, and the institutions that embody public acts of remembering.4 The collective consciousness is a powerful force when it comes to determining which narratives take precedence vis-a`-vis the past and the way they are used to direct, legitimize or justify actions in the present. Raphael Samuel has noted the historical conditioning of memory, that memory, far from being the opposite of Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 23:17 27 May 2014 historical thought as is often imagined, is dialectically related to it. Memory is historically conditioned, its colour and shape constantly changing ‘according to the emergencies of the moment’.5 The question of choice 2 Ibid., 12. 3 Istva´nRe´v describes the way the events and ideas of the past, as well as the dead, are constantly being re-envisioned and remade in Hungary; he posits 1989 as a particular moment when millions lost their past and thus their future, leaving only what was unknown: ‘At that point between the lost and the not-yet-comprehended, historians, politicians, and professional and amateur self-proclaimed experts offered ... to remake the world’; Istva´nRe´v, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2005), 9. 4 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. from the German by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992). 5 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London and New York: Verso 1994), x. RUTH BALINT 283 permeates discussions of memory. And choice, as Pe´ter Novick explains, does not necessarily mean ‘free’ choice, but rather choice constrained and shaped by the wider circumstances in which it is made.6 Forgetting also involves the act of choice. Since the fall of Communism, the question of which past to remember, which to use in the forging of a post-Communist identity, has galvanized the national societies of East Central Europe. Randolph Braham believes that, in Hungary, the Holocaust has been subject to a ‘history cleansing process’ since 1989, largely absolving Hungarian society and its political elites of responsibility for the destruction of two-thirds of its Jewish population. A reluctance to address the Holocaust has been aided by a resurgence of antisemitism and a revival of the ‘Jewish question’, diverse forms of which have rehabilitated old stereotypes of the Jews as alien and unassimilable, and as responsible for the evils of Communism. Preoccupa- tion with the crimes of Communism comes at the expense of any proper reckoning with the Hungarian Holocaust.7 This has represented a major setback to the project of historical understanding. Braham writes that, although the number of populist champions of antisemitism and outright Holocaust-deniers is quite small in post-Communist Hungary, ‘the camp of those distorting and denigrating the catastrophe of the Jews is quite large’, and includes many respectable public figures, ‘intellectuals, members of parliament, influential governmental and party figures, and high-ranking army officers’.8 Even in its more moderate forms, the voice of historical revisionism has tended to assert that it was the Germans who committed the atrocities with the assistance of Hungarian fascists as accomplices, the ‘Nyilas’ (members of the Nyilaskeresztes Pa´rt, the Arrow Cross Party), while the rest*/politicians, soldiers, gendarmes and citi- zens*/were largely bystanders or victims themselves.

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