TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents 1 Synopsis 3 Inroduction 4 I. Hungarian Refugees from Transylvania, the Northern and the Southern Regions 16 . II. Polish refugees in Hungary during W.W. II The last hours of peace 23 September 1939 28 The Polish government and the organization of the resistance 33 The Hungarian government and the Polish refugee problem in September 1939 37 The viewpoint of the Hungarian government 39 The Hungrian and Polish organizations in care of refugees 58 The secret Polish political and military organizations 63 Polish military institutions in the fall of 1939 67 Polish military structures in the spring of 1940 74 Evacuation 78 The social welfare of the Polish refugees 85 The Red Cross and the refugees 91 Education 97 Elementary schools 101 Schools for Polish Jews 105 High schools 107 University Students 112 The independent Polish health-care service 115 1 After the German occupation of Hungary 121 Attempts to form new organizations 128 The Arrow Cross Party comes to power 134 Going home - Spring 1945 137 Hungarian aristocracy and the refugee care 143 The Polish Catholic Church in Hungary 147 The Jewish refugees and their persecution 152 French soldiers 170 British prisoners of war in Hungary 186 Dutch military refugees 198 The British, Dutch, Polish and French officers during the peace negotiations 204 Escaped Italian soldiers 208 Serb and Russian refugees 221 III. Documents, recollections, memoirs 229 2 SYNOPSIS Hungary is situated at the cross roads of Central Europe and its fate depends mostly on the immediate interests of the past and present great powers. For the past 11 centuries its shear existence was constantly in the balance. From its greatness under the Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus in the 15th century, the road was downhill. Today on only one third of its former territory, with millions of Hungarians under foreign rule, Hungary by and large, still menaged to cling to medieval ideas of chivalry and devotion to help the innocents victims of despots and dictators. Starting with the victimized and persecuted Hungarians under the new Czechoslovakian, Rumanian and Yugoslavian rulers right after WW I., continuing with thousands of our brethren chased out by Serbs from Vojvodina in l935, hundreds of thousands of refugees and P.O.W."s of many nationalities found safe heaven on Hungarian soil during WW II. Starting with thousands of Jews from Austria and Czechoslovakia, continuing with the great masses of Polish refugees, and with a lot of other nationalities, mostly French, Italian, Russian, Serb, Dutch, British etc. escapees from German P.O.W. camps and ended with American and British airmen shot down over the country. The epoch ended partially with the German military occupation of Hungary on the 19th day of March, 1944. Even after this date, most members of the Hungarian armed forces, authorities and civilians defied the German efforts of rounding up all foreigners on Hungarian soil. Thousands of refugees survived the hostilities and were repatriated after the war. It should be emphasized, that the Hungarian governments of the period were under extreme pressure by the Germans to hand over the escapees, refugees and the POW's to them. Even governments under the German occupation resisted this constant demand to surrender these people, with various degree of success. Especially irksome was to the Germans, when with the tacit approval of the Hungarian government, tens of thousands of mostly Polish soldiers left the country to join the Allied Forces. We are willing to compare our record of handling the refugees with the record of any European nation under German occupation or influence. 3 INTRODUCTION Not for the first time in the course of Hungary's history, during the past seven or eight years our nation and her society had to face a flood of refugees seeking asylum in our country. First came the tens of thousands of Transylvanian Hungarians and Romanians fleeing the dictatorship of Ceaucescu; then thousands from the former German Democratic Republic. Then, since the summer of 1991 as a result of the civil war that erupted in the Balkans as a consequence of the declaration of Croatian and Slovenian independence, followed by the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, thousands of refugees - in several waves - came seeking the help and protection of Hungary. This series of tragic events, the flood of refugees, and the efforts made by the Hungarian nation cannot help but evoke the past when, in the course of her history, our country or the Danube-basin, was placed in the same situation and opened her doors to those left homeless by strife. Although international law makes by now a precise distinction between political and economic refugees, the burden of caring for them still falls on the receiving country. The Geneva Agreements initiated by the Red Cross (1864, 1929, 1949) govern the treatment of the war-wounded, the prisoners-of-war and the civilian refugees; determine the forms of the care they are given; protect the rights of the interested; and define the ways of communication between the opposing parties. yet the person, the refugee himself, does not always fit into this precise framework of rules and regulations. Often the refugee "appears" even though two nations are not in open conflict; what is more they may be allies. This is what happened in the 1980s in the case of Hungary and Romania, as well as Hungary and the GDR, causing considerable tension not only between these states but also in their societies. The political war-time refugee seeks asylum but harbors in his soul the hope of a speedy return to his naive land. On the other hand, the economic refugee seeks work, a livelihood, and is often fuelled by the hope of settling down permanently. The receiving country's responsibilities are singular: the political and war-time refugee needs care and support aside from the protection of his rights; the economic refugee wishes to integrate 4 into the economic life and workforce of the host country. In the first instance, society is, most of the time, tolerant and ready to help; in the second, tensions are more frequent. The intricacies of this question are nothing new; their development can be followed from the Middle Ages on. The Hungarians were pushed into the Carpathian basin as a consequence of their ongoing battles with the Petchenegs (Bessenyos). Their remnants, as well as the Jasigs and Cumanians, were, in the course of the later centuries, absorbed by the Magyars and settled down, even before the Tatar invasion (13th century). The geographic names and those of their settlements, as well as their office-holders that were maintained for a long time, prove that these ethnic groups were considered separate and independent within the Hungarian kingdom. Considering the circumstances at the time, their absorption went relatively smoothly; after all, there were vast uninhabited regions available. The exception were the cattle- breeding, nomadic Cumanians who clashed with the settled Magyars, tillers of the soil. Their final settlement came about slowly, after the Tatar (Mongolian) invasion, when they were finally fully integrated into the Magyar realm. The next great flood of refugees was started in the middle of the 14th century by the advance of the Ottoman Empire which threatened our nation too. Gradually occupying the Balkans and aiming at the heartland of Europe, the Turks systematically destroyed nation after nation pushing hundreds of thousand homeless fleeing their advance. Depending on the scale of the Ottoman expansion, more and more people sought refuge in Hungary, transforming the ethnic make-up of vast regions. The expression "Southern Slav" is truly a collective term as it encompasses the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Macedonians, Bulgarians; that is to say peoples as different in their culture, religion, and traditions from one another as they are from the Hungarians. But we must not forget that the Hungarian kingdom maintained close ties with its southern neighbors even before the 14th century. The independent Croatian Kingdom became, in 1102, an integral part of the Hungarian crown with an autonomous government; only the king's person tied the two together. On the southern fringes of the Hungarian realm, there were scattered Sloven and Vend settlements which were increased by 5 systematic introduction of these people, on among others - the lands of the Cistertian Abbey. The Turkish menace tightened the links between the Hungarian kingdom and its southern Slav neighbours. From the 14th century on, the Serbian Principality bore the brunt of the Turkish attacks; so they sought an alliance with their northern neighbor, the Hungarian Kingdom. In 1404, Sigismond, King of Hungary, entered into an alliance with Istvan Lazarovich, the reigning Serbian prince who became the king's vassal in exchange for military assistance. In the meantime, as they needed more and more help, the Principality left the defense of several of their most important forts to the Hungarian soldiers. In 1427 they ceded Nandorfehervar (present-day Belgrade) and several forts in the province of Macso to the Hungarian Kingdom. The aristocrats and noblemen who lost their estates to the Turkish expansion received land in Hungary. Istvan Lazarovich himself and later Gyorgy Brankovich, both reigning princes, received substantial estates in Hungary where they also settled Serbians. But these were not only their men; they were also true refugees. The oldest such settlements are Kiskeve and Rackeve on the Island of Csepel where the Eastern- rite Catholics enjoyed full freedom of religion and a tax-exempt status. Independently of the above process, in the course of the 15th century, an important number of Serbian refugees settled in Hungary's southern border counties. Their numbers increased significantly after Serbia's fall to the Turks in 1459.