Munkacsi's seminal book, published in Hungary in 1947, just two years after the end of the war, detailed the Nazis' unimpeded assault on the last sizeable community of Jews in Europe, their wholesale extermination of Hungarian Jews, and shows in horrifying detail the "choiceless choices" faced by Jewish Council members as they executed the Germans' orders. Among scholars, How It Happened? has long been recognized for its critical contribution to understanding the Holocaust in Hungary, and is frequently cited by those able to read Hungarian. The book offers an exceptionally rare perspective: few members of Jewish councils survived the war; even fewer wrote memoirs. Whereas war memoirs are frequently affected by hindsight bias-written years, even decades, after the fact-How It Happened? was written shortly after the war, by a man familiar with the intimate details of Jewish organizations. Some of their archives were saved by some were destroyed-Munkacsi gives scholars and readers a sense of the contents of those that were lost. How It Happened? is both precisely documented and eminently readable. Munkacsi presents detailed tallies of deportations, village by village. He reproduces relevant documents, memoranda, and minutes of meetings with German commanders. He reports on the Jewish Council's frantic pleas to release the ever-growing number of prominent citizens incarcerated without cause. He describes Eichmann's increasingly outrageous demands, and the ensuing discussions, arguments, and occasional hysteria that unfolded behind closed doors. Until now, the book has never been translated so was accessible only to those who read Hungarian. This translation will be a valuable source for all historians of the Holocaust, World War II, Jewish history, etc.
Industry Reviews
"Beyond its value as a primary source, Munkacsi's account is compelling as a human story, and will no doubt prove to be provocative reading for students, scholars, and the general public alike." Hungarian Studies Review
"This is an increasingly anguished memoir by someone whose faith in law and humanity was broken as the details from the Auschwitz Protocols (testimony from camp escapees) became known ... profoundly sad but important reading. We all know how the war ends and how many lives were lost, but this eyewitness account is a good primary source document for understanding how ethnic hatred overtook one of Europe's most seemingly cultured societies." Foreword Reviews
"Erno Munkacsi's How It Happened is a riveting account, told by one who was there, of the anguished decisions that Hungarian Jewish leaders made and of the actions that they took (or did not take) as the Holocaust unfolded around them. One of the very first histories of the Holocaust in Hungary, Munkacsi's account defies genre, combining careful analysis of documentary sources with powerful and detailed personal recollections. The publication of this expertly annotated English translation is a major contribution to international Holocaust studies." Paul Hanebrink, Rutgers University and author of In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944
"One of the first of several immediate postwar engagements with the Hungarian Holocaust, this volume-originally published in 1947 and now translated into English-breaks the myth of silence that the Holocaust historiography claimed has marked this period.
"Could the members of the German-appointed Jewish Council in Hungary have done more to help their fellow Jews, miraculously still numbering more than eight hundred thousand in 1944? The fact that more than half a million perished but the rest survived, in
"How It Happened succeeds both as a riveting, personal account of the days leading up to the Holocaust in Hungary and as a scholarly work that sheds new light on the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry. A valuable addition to Holocaust literature, this is a very r
