Introduction
Requesting István Bibó’s release from life-sentence prison service, Oxford British scholars and scientists sent the following telegrams to PM Ferenc Münnich and PM János Kádár on 14 March 1961 and 22 February 1962 respectively.
On the eve of the anniversary of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 may we urge that it would be wise and generous for the Hungarian government to release the distinguished scholar Professor István Bibó by or on the approaching anniversary of Hungary’s liberation from Fascism.1
The signatories to this telegram sent (care of Professor Ayer, New College, Oxford) on 14 March 1961 to Dr Ferenc Münnich, president of the Council of Ministers, Budapest, were: A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Cranston, Dennis Gabor, Max Gluckmann, Michael Polanyi, Hugh Seton-Watson, Edward Shils, T.S. Simey, Richard Titmuss, C.V. Wedgwood, and Elisabeth Wiskemann.
Scholars and scientists in Britain are grieved by news of failing health of eminent legal historian István Bibó imprisoned since early 1957. May we point out to Your Excellency that his early release would contribute to establishing friendly links between Western and Hungarian intellectuals and would be greatly appreciated by peaceloving people all over the world.
The 22 February 1962 cable was signed by A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Cranston, Max Gluckmann, Julian Huxley, A.L.P. Norrington, Bertrand Russell, Hugh Seton-Watson, Leonard Schapiro, T. S. Simey, Richard Titmuss, C. V. Wedgwood, and Elizabeth Wiskemann.2
In what follows, I am going to explore and interpret the lesser known story of the resistance and life-saving activities during the Shoah of the greatest democratic Hungarian political thinker of the 20th century, and indeed one of the most original political theoreticians of his time. The political role he assumed in 1956 made him highly appreciated by many. He became an ideal role model for the democratic and regime-changing opposition in Hungary and Central-East Europe, from György KonrádReference Konrád3 to Adam Michnik.Reference Michnik4
Short Biography
István Bibó (born 7 August 1911, Budapest, Hungary; died 10 May 1979, Budapest), professor of political science and the philosophy of law, and eminent political thinker, became a role model for dissident intellectuals in the late communist era. He came from a Calvinist intellectual background. He earned his PhD in international law (The Role of Sanctions in International Law, 1933) and philosophy of law (Coercion and Freedom, 1934) at the Faculty of Political and Legal Studies at the University of Szeged. In Vienna and Geneva he studied under the legal theorist Hans Kelsen and the philosopher and historian Guglielmo Ferrero. In 1938 he became a notary at the Budapest Court of Justice. It was in this period that he came in contact with the Márciusi Front (‘March Front’), a left-wing association of so-called ‘populist’ (népi) writers and university students. He became a member of the Philosophical Society, giving his inaugural lecture on Ethics and Criminal Law. In 1940 he became a lecturer in the philosophy of law at the University of Szeged, which was transferred back to Kolozsvár (today: Cluj, Romania) between 1941 and 1944. Between 1942 and 1944 he wrote a massive manuscript ‘On the European Balance of Power and Peace’ which included ‘The German Hysteria’, the first analysis of Nazism as political hysteria. In 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, he drew up ‘Plans for a Peace Proposal’, which was to be a framework for post-war domestic settlement and social concord in Hungary. In 1944, he forged papers for hundreds of Jews and other persecutees, for which he was arrested by the Arrow Cross and handed over to the SS. In 1945, as the head of the ministry of interior’s administration department, Bibó helped draft the new electoral law and wrote a memoir criticizing the expulsion of the Germans from Hungary. In 1946 he was appointed as Professor of Political Science at the University of Szeged. A year later he became vice-president, practically director, of the Institute for Eastern European Studies. Meanwhile, he published a series of seminal essays on problems of Hungarian and East-Central European society. His essays ‘Hungarian Democracy in Crisis’, 1945; ‘Distorted Hungarian Character, Cul-de-Sac Hungarian History’, 1948; and ‘The Jewish Predicament in post-1944 Hungary’, 1948; and his treatise ‘The Misery of East European Small States’, 1946, were recognized as the cornerstones of modern democratic Hungarian political thinking by the dissident intellectual movements of the 1980s. The communist regime, however, disapproved of Bibó’s thought and activities, and forced him to retire from his professorship in 1950. In 1951 he took up a position as librarian at the Eötvös Loránd University Library in Budapest. On 3 November 1956, he became minister of state in the revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy. Remaining in the Parliament Building while Soviet troops were invading Budapest, on 4 November he issued a proclamation to the nation, and on 9 November he prepared a proposal in order to save the main achievements of the revolution: independence, democracy, a multi-party system. He was arrested on 23 May 1957, and on 2 August 1958 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting to overthrow the state order of the People’s Democracy. In 1963 he was released in an amnesty. In 1978 the charge against him was rescinded.Reference Kovács5 His collected works were published in the early 1980s in SwitzerlandReference Bibó6 and later on in Hungary.Reference Bibó7 The most recent and authoritative edition of his oeuvre is the centennial series of his works.Reference Bibó8
Ethno-protectionism
At the time of the first anti-Jewish Act, Bibó subscribed to the claim of equal distance between Jews and Anti-Semitism. The requirement of the Hungarian nation’s liberation was, at this time, linked up in his eyes with the requirement that the excessive presence of the German and Jewish minorities in public and cultural life be curbed.Reference Balog9 In the supplement proposals to the manifesto of the March Front in January and February 1938, which would not be included in the final version, he wrote, together with his Jewish friend, Béla Reitzer:
The leading role of Hungarians in all areas of Hungarian life and society: all minority rights for the minorities with a German or a Jewish consciousness, the full appreciation of genuine assimilation, but the elimination of the leading role /and vociferousness /(and power position) of assimilated /Germans and Jews/(layers with German and Jewish backgrounds) promoting interests besides assimilation. […] The development of Hungarian culture rooted in the people, universal and European at the same time: the liberation of Hungarian culture from under the /outdated/ (German and Jewish) cultural influences (hindering development), the shaping of a new Hungarian cultural community through the full intellectual inclusion of the peasantry and labor (which allows the peasantry to live a high-level life connected to the city, yet not cut away from the land, and prepares for the cultural community of the peasant peoples of Central-East Europe). (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, p. 11.)
He was no supporter of the first Act of Jews, but he was not among the protesters against it either. He did not want to take a stand because he believed at the time that it distracted the attention of the public from the essence, the master–servant relationship. He embraced the ethno-protectionism of Dezső Szabó and László Németh concerning German and Jewish dominance in Hungarian business and cultural life. He had enough to break away from, to process and deconstruct.Reference Dénes10
He gradually, but radically made up his mind about and rejected ethno-protectionism, which he had embraced in 1937–38. In a draft, ‘Ten Commandments for He who Loves Freedom’, he penned around 1938 and 1940, he wrote ‘He who loves freedom... shall forever bear in mind that human freedom and dignity are one and indivisible, and the harm done to any one man is a threat to the freedom and dignity of all; he shall therefore strive for joint action against any limitation of human freedom, arbitrary arrest and detention, individual or administrative insolence or any disgrace to human dignity, and if this is not possible, he shall try alone’ (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp 15–16.)
That he radically turned against all forms of Anti-Semitism was probably also influenced by the fact that his best friend, Béla Reitzer – who had also embraced ethno-protectionism together with Bibó at the end of the 1937–38 – in response to exclusion, later proudly stood up for his Jewish identity in 1940 (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, pp. 21–31). Reitzer was lost without trace in the Ukraine, where he had been taken for forced labour service in 1942. Bibó heard from his parents that Reitzer had died in the course of either the full or partial retreat campaigns of the German army from the Don bend, when the Germans burned down the hospital barracks – obviously to prevent the Russians from being able to make use of it. The withdrawing troops left the diseased and helpless behind, including Béla Reitzer, who may have been sick with typhoid fever.Reference Bibó and Balog11
It was Bibó’s originality that led him to do away with ethno-protectionism. He demolished his father-tongue, the ethno-protectionist discourse, its themes and the genre of national characterology as such, its presuppositions and arguments for a national ontology, its national historicism and political language, with which all this was formulated: the political language of national egoism. In their stead, he founded the genre of analysing political hysteria (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 7, pp. 120–176).
After almost four decades, he believed the essence of the ethno-protectionist view was:
that the Hungarian nation ‘upset its stomach’ with the assimilation that the Hungarian German middle class and intelligentsia and the entirety of Jews were so successful at, as the result of which a Jewish dominance developed in the economy and a German one in administrative and political life, especially after the Christian regime established itself after 1919, and both in intellectual life... It was only later, gradually, that I moved away from this view... Finally, in ‘The Warped Hungarian Self’ of 1948, I expounded the mistakenness of the entire approach, that all the ‘disproportions’ of Hungarian political, economic and intellectual life were finally caused by the fact that ascent was open for wide ranges of assimilated German and Jewish middle classes, while true-born Hungarian society, due to its feudal makeup, remained hierarchical, wherein the wide masses had little opportunity of providing new blood for the upper classes, and this vacuum was filled by those assimilated; I am therefore forced to hold the genteel class responsible for this that was so vehement in speaking up against the gaining ground of those assimilated […] I am inclined to limiting the word Anti-Semitism to the view which has a demonic image of the Jewry, as acting according to a single and pre-meditated plan and pulling the strings nationally and internationally. […] The position of Dezső Szabó with all its ramifications […] arises from the cul-de-sac of Hungarian social development and its mistaken interpretation. […] Its gravest danger is also specifically Hungarian insofar as it, first, glosses over the blocking of Hungarian social development, and, second, it is a national self-mutilation insofar as it blocks assimilation which was complete or nearly complete. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 12, pp. 121–125)
In 1979 he reflected on the programme of the ‘Hungarian Community’, which followed the position of Dezső Szabó, and which was liquidated by a show trial and judicial murder in 1947:
Its procedure, whereby it sought to exclude from its society people with alien origins, was an offence not only to the equality of citizens and men, but was also aimless, ineffectual and useless in renewing the Hungarian nation. It bears little significance to point out that the Hungarian Community wanted no offence or branding exclusion, because such exclusionary maneuvers end up in institutionalization, especially if they attain political power. And if we hear that they meant nothing evil with this, only to bring together good Hungarians, history has repeatedly, indeed a thousand times, proved that this gives rise to the same contra-selection as an ideology which seeks to base the leadership of the nation on descent, whether Hungarian, Christian or labor. The end result is bound to be the dominance of those unworthy and inept, whose only quality is their descent. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 5, pp. 186–187)
During the German Occupation
German forces occupied Hungary, its official ally, on 19 March 1944. Three days later, Regent Miklós Horthy, the head of state, appointed collaborator Dome Sztójay as prime minister. Sztójay’s government forced Jews to wear yellow stars and move into ghettos. Through the mobilization of the Hungarian civil administration and the gendarmerie, the entire Jewry of the countryside, at least 400,000 people, men and women, including children and the elderly, were deported in no more than a month and a half, starting on 15 May, after having been robbed, with their movable and immovable property requisitioned and then distributed. On 6 July, the head of state terminated further deportations, which concerned the some 200,000 Jews of Budapest. On 29 August 1944, he appointed General Géza Lakatos as prime minister. On 11 October, his emissaries signed a preliminary truce in Moscow. On 15 October, he made a radio announcement stating that he had requested a truce. His attempt to back out from the war failed the same day. German troops took control of the strategic points of Budapest, a special squad took Horthy’s son hostage, and so blackmailed him. As a result, he appointed Ferenc Szálasi as prime minister, and abdicated. Between 6 and 21 November, the Budapest Jewry was forced to march to the western border for labour service on the orders of Szálasi. In November, the international and the large ghettos were set up; Arrow-Cross commandos massacred Jews on the Danube banks, the hospital in Maros utca (street) and the Great Synagogue. Pest was liberated on 18 January, and Buda on 13 February 1945. The number of Jewish dead stood between 550,000 and 569,000 – at least two-thirds of the third largest Jewish community in Europe, after those in Poland and the Soviet Union (particularly the Ukraine and Belarus).Reference Braham12
István Bibó formulated the requirement of personal responsibility, community assessment and conduct in respect of the Shoah four years after it in the following way:
The only thing to do in this situation is to establish and admit one’s own personal share of the responsibility. To state that, for instance, what the author did out of conscience or to help – try to – help when asked, was deplorably and pathetically little; what a far cry it was from what should or could have been done; how much it was held back by futile caution and lack of charity; how much it lacked, beyond the effort to make goodwill felt, pledging the full care of those that turned to him for help, taking fully in hand their rescue; and that he merely slipped into, rather than consciously go up against running risks. Everyone should make this reckoning for himself, and focus not on his merits or excuses, and on how these set off his wrongs or neglects, but on what he is responsible for, on what he shares the responsibility for. In due course, this might lead to a clearer, more courageous and common national reckoning more ready to face responsibility. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, pp. 80-81; emphasis in original)
A closer investigation of Bibó’s activities and roles during the German occupation and the deportations does not bear out the way he himself described his own deeds in his seminal essay on the Jewish question and Anti-Semitism (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, p. 80).
Following the German occupation, Bibó made a lonely attempt at initiating and organizing resistance. In the name of the Hungarian labour class he drafted a peace offer to the Hungarian middle class, which did not become a pamphlet as representatives of the sender labour and addressee middle class were lacking (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, 57–69).
As a member of the editorial board of Magyar Jogi Szemle (Hungarian Law Review), he initiated the journal’s protest against the occupation and deportations. Seeing that his suggestion would not be heeded, he resigned from his position as editor (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 73–87). As secretary at the Ministry of Justice, he produced hundreds of false papers, with which he saved the lives of many. He was therefore reported to the police, arrested, and handed over to the SS (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 91–101). When he was released to attend the disciplinary procedure against him, he went underground. While hiding, he hid others: he saved the life of, for instance, his former professor, classical-philologist Károly Marót (b. Arad, 1885 – d. Budapest, 1963).Reference Dénes13 Simultaneously, he started collecting material for his study of the Jewish question and Anti-Semitism. In order to do so, he conducted several interviews with theology students at the Ráday Reformed College, Budapest.Reference Tüski14
Between 1942 and 1944, Bibó worked on a manuscript for translation into English entitled ‘Az európai egyensúlyról és békéről’ (‘On the Balance of Power and Peace in Europe’) and addressed to the peacemakers at the would-be conference closing the war. The voluminous manuscript would not find its way to its addressees or into print in his lifetime (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 2, pp. 29–317).
Peace-offer Draft
It was probably in 1944, although the exact date is unknown, that he drafted the peace offer in the name of Hungarian labour to the Hungarian middle class. He was not commissioned, nor did he have any contacts with labour parties to agree the matter.
‘A few months ago,’ begins the text,
the most disgraceful event in Hungarian history took place: on 19 March 1944, Hitler coaxed the head and the military leaders of the Hungarian state out to Germany, and, in the meanwhile, thief-like, he occupied the country. To no avail did the leaders of the country think for one day of resistance; to no avail did Horthy bang the table, to no avail did he want to refuse to appoint any government; finally, he gave his name to and signed the appointment of the current puppet government, into which, apart from the nine Swabians, one member of another national minority and one renegade Hungarian could be won. Since then, Hitler’s henchmen do whatever they want: they detain anyone they want to, they murder anyone they want to, and pilfer whatever they want to. In sealed wagons, they deport thousands of Jews: women, children, the elderly, taking them without exception to the mass graves and death factories in Poland, and carry off Jewish property out of the country. Whatever they have taken away, they will never return, but the responsibility for the terrible mass murders they and their hirelings here have committed remains ours. […] The only way for a Hungarian future is a Hungarian Resistance Movement! (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 57–69; emphasis in original)
Forty years later, Bibó would recall the draft in the following way:
At the end of 1943 and even more so after the occupation, I started drafting a big peace offer putting it into the mouths of labor and addressed to the Hungarian intellectual middle class, which I knew out and out. Its aim would have been to allay all the horrors the middle class had developed concerning labor, the communists and revolution, and the peace offer would have been a humane and reassuring, yet resolute answer to those fears. I managed to word this quite clearly, and my poor wife, trembling, carried it around in her handbag for weeks. I spoke about it to Ferenc Erdei, but he had no idea of how it could be printed. I had none either. So it came to naught. […] Demonstrations, not that we had anything against it, were not quite our cup of tea. Ferenc Erdei remained aloof to the Historical Memory Committee, in which our friend Mihály Borbély, was deeply involved. So, by 1943–44, when action would have been timely, the situation was that we had no knowledge of these matters. […] So, it did not materialize. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 12, pp. 61, 72, 74)
Like a Hungarian Duverger-Case
In 1944, Bibó took a stance in an earlier exchange on the efficiency and legal compliance of public administration between Zoltán Magyary (Professor of Public Administration, Budapest) and Vilmos Szontagh (Professor of Public Administration and Finance Law, Debrecen) in the journal Társadalomtudomány (Social Science). As opposed to Magyary’s stress on efficiency, he supported Szontagh’s compliance-centred view, and maintained that only a legally compliant public administration would be efficient in the long run (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 1, pp. 285–306). Soon, the efficiency view would have grave practical consequences.
How far can one tolerate the intolerable? From what point does it count as collaboration and complicity? How long could a professional journal act as though everything was all right when Jews were being herded into wagons and taken to death camps? István Bibó had been on the editorial board of the journal Magyar Jogi Szemle from 1942. Until the spring of 1944, the German occupation and the Jewish deportations, ‘No issue of an ideological nature occurred until the spring of 1944, when discussing a concrete case and giving appearance to a person deemed Jewish’, István Bibó and another editor, Dénes Goltner, supported the publication of the writing (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 86–87). The themes, arguments and presuppositions, the formulations of the moral dilemma and the conclusions drawn in the letters of Bibó to Endre Nizsalovzsky, the editor-in-chief of the Magyar Jogi Szemle, dated 12 July and 25 September 1944, recall the disputes over the Duverger case:Reference Lochak15 ‘[…] the MJSZ is a journal serving the needs of the administration of justice, because the main question is whether there is any of that any longer, and if there isn’t or there is less of it then a journal like this ought not to gloss it over […] We, however, apart from the natural-law and constitutional concerns, i.e. concerns of principle, receive information that renders it impossible to not address the matter’ (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 78–79). ‘I am compelled to inform you with honest sadness: I must resign from my editorial position at Magyar Jogi Szemle,’ began Bibó’s letter of 25 September 1944. And he went on to explain: ‘In the beginning of June, I wrote to you a letter the main problem of which was that, after certain events, what are the moral possibilities of editing a law journal, and if there are any, what they are.’
What were the events and the consequences involved?
We know that things have happened in Hungarian state legislation and public administration whose effects of human anguish and suffering can never be redressed, and cleaning the moral filth which has thus stained the nation will take generations. Where is the boundary beyond where a professional journal can no longer continue as a professional journal? In June, I believed that if there was no possibility of a criticism and calling to account, editing must be done in a consciously and purposely ‘museum-like’ style. […] The way I put the issue for myself was that I could participate in the editorial work as long as we do not go into the dogmatic analysis and legal elaboration of the details of state-power regulations when the most grave natural-law, constitutional and moral doubts arise in respect of their entirety. (Emphasis in original)
Editor-in-chief Endre Nizsalovszky differed in opinion from Bibó, but he seemed to come closer to espousing Bibó’s stance:
It seems, your understanding was different, because ‘In the Balance of Iustitia’ appeared in the August issue with your – otherwise harshly critical – train of thought, in which you referred to a new regulation. […] This was exactly what I had believed was to be avoided, because by the criticism of detail we imply that the entire regulation complex and legislative period is acceptable, the state-power regulations are generally without concern and can be qualified as law. I felt rather embarrassed because I would never have expected to fall into the vexing and immodest situation where it is exactly your writing that forces me to draw the consequences of my position; moreover, I had felt that you want to take up that very critical outlook Dénes Goltner was urging. I was thus very happy to hear that there was a possibility of publishing Goltner’s pointedly challenging article written in the meantime; as his strong moral criticism followed by your lawyer’s-approach criticism would have meant a unified and coherent critical position. I had been expecting that censorship would enforce some changes, but I had also hoped due to the change in government that the essence of the article would appear, and that the minor row it would elicit would exert a beneficial influence.
Alas, in spite of his promise, the editor-in-chief crossed the boundary acceptable to Bibó, who therefore resigned from his editorial post in terms very polite, but resolute:
This hope of mine has come to naught when I saw the train of thought changed in the wake of the discussions with censors. I am aware that the insertions sometimes include strong and harsh positions, which can be noticed in spite of the tactful wording. Two most essential points in Goltner’s article were left out: facing up to the huge breach occurring in the fundamental principles of the Hungarian legal order and the moral bankruptcy of the Hungarian public administration corps. However, beyond not even mentioning these two points, what was left was given a quite different frame. The original text wanted to focus on lawyers’ primary dispositions in the mental reckoning or heart-searching that the entire nation will have to do. In contrast, however, the new text puts the entire argument in the frame that there was a dejection due to an excessive anxiety among Hungarian lawyers until this August, which the new government, including four eminent lawyers connected to our journal, has immediately allayed. I believe that had the new situation allayed all the legitimate concerns of the former period, which it has not, the facts involving irremediable and immeasurable human suffering cannot be measured against the dejection of certain onlookers, and cannot be deemed to have not happened, deemed, as it were, to have lost their legal effect, by carrying out certain welcome personal changes. The changes to the text may have been forced, but this does not change the situation: if this is the only way the journal can exercise its critical function, its relentless silence would have been the only viable position to have been taken in my humble opinion. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 82–85; emphasis in original)
In his statement clearing Dénes Goltner after the war, István Bibó recalled all this very humbly, understating his own role:
In the spring of 1944, when sporadic and uncertain news began to arrive of the deportations in the countryside and the methods of the gendarmerie, it was Dénes Goltner in the editorial board who confirmed the truth of the news, and suggested that a journal could not be edited in a tone of disinterested objectivity, and that we should take a stance in the matter of the total subversion of Hungarian legal order manifest in the events. I took sides with his position. As the editor-in-chief of the journal was ill and staying in the country at the time, a long correspondence ensued, as a result of which Dénes Goltner wrote a very harsh and brave article openly naming the deportations, the wagons, the gendarmerie atrocities and the total moral collapse of the Hungarian public administration, and this was a worthy expression of the stance which was obligatory for us as lawyers and men. Having over-circumspectly discussed the matter with officials, the editor-in-chief of the journal provided an introduction and conclusion to the article which largely blunted the argument. This was the shape in which the article appeared in September. Upon this Dénes Goltner resigned from his editorial position, and I followed suit. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 86–87)
Life-saving Activities
As an official at the Ministry of Justice, Bibó issued exemption certificates throughout the period between the beginning of the German occupation and his arrest on 16 October 1944.
[…] then began the manufacture of exemption papers in the Ministry of Justice, on which I got cracking; and then came the Szálasi government and my arrest. […] In the summer of 1944, I began to issue Aryan-companion exemption papers in the Ministry of Justice, first according to regulations, but increasingly in breach of them. So I was arrested on 19 October and taken to the prison in Fő utca, and handed over to the Germans. I was incarcerated for three days, when, upon the intervention of the Ministry, I was released. The next day, Jolán Majlát [Ferenc Erdei’s wife] came along to our house, and asked whether I wanted to go south with the Erdei siblings. I did not want that because my wife was expecting our child. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 12, pp. 61, 74)
Some 30 years ago, József Éliás, the head of the Good Shepherd Mission Committee, the life-saving organization of the Reformed Church in Hungary, recalled the life-saving cooperation that developed with István Bibó in 1944:
The anti-Jewish laws brought up numerous legal problems, and we had to arrange for legal counsel and protection. Excellent lawyers supported the Good Shepherd, but it was common knowledge that it was not legal arguments that decided. We had to find appropriate help at the Ministry of Justice. This was provided by a Ministerial Secretary, Dr István Bibó, who did all he could.Reference Szenes16
The aesthetician György Péter describes how his maternal grandmother and mother escaped, with Bibó playing a decisive role:
In her meek, fleeting and objective manner, my mother told her story with István Bibó, who, as a civil servant in the internal ministry, gave her papers without hesitation when she as a sixteen-year-old introduced herself as a refugee from Transylvania. It was thus that, without actually knowing him, I considered him a personal acquaintance, just as my mother kept track of his career mindfully, fearfully and with love. She read pieces of news related to him as though it all happened to a distant relative, whom we numbered among the family, but could not trouble. For all Bibó’s stamps and papers, the Pest ghetto was a genuine ghetto, as demonstrated by the thousands interred in the mass graves in the gardens of the Dohány utca synagogue and the Maros utca hospital.Reference György17
In his usual self-effacing manner, Bibó summed up his life-saving activities in his Clearance Declaration written on 11 March 1945:
I served at the Ministry of Justice between 1 September 1939 and 16 October 1944, as an assigned judicial secretary, later a court judge and finally as a minister’s secretary. In this period, I was involved in no political activity, and had no membership in any political party. In the Ministry, I worked at the Department of Private Law and Administrative Law (IX), which issued legal opinions to the other ministries.
I did not exercise any official duty in implementing and applying the laws against the people and democracy, apart from the fact that this Department provided information and official notices to private persons on the application of the so-called Act on Jews, whether this and other measures applied to them or not, and I myself arranged for such cases, as well. This activity of the Department having been to the benefit to those concerned, mixed marriages, the minister at time forbade issuing such certificates in July 1944. From this moment on, I myself signed and issued these semi-official exemption documents until 16 October 1944, when, upon an earlier Arrow-Cross report, the Arrow-Cross arrested me and I was suspended as non-active at the Ministry. The Arrow-Cross handed me over to the Pest SS jail, from where I was sent to the Ministry of Justice for disciplinary action, where I was released until further action; from then on I did not exercise any official duty. During the siege of Budapest, I remained in the city in breach of the conscript regulations of Szálasi. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11. pp. 100–101)
Official letters reveal further details. On 20 November 1944, disciplinary action was initiated against Bibó at the Ministry of Justice, and he was suspended from his job:
Due to your conduct of issuing notifications to certain Jewish persons, I have ordered an investigation preceding disciplinary action against you, and I have nominated Judge Endre Kőházi of the Court of Appeals to carry it out. Simultaneously, I have suspended you from your position under § 250 of the Internal Rules of the Ministry of Finance. I shall arrange for your payments separately. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, p. 93)
Three days later, the examiner of the disciplinary committee summoned Bibó: ‘With reference to letter ref. no. 40039, 1944, I invite you to my office (Ministry of Justice, Room 66, Floor 2) in the matter of the investigation preceding disciplinary action at 10:00 a.m. on 30 November 1944’ (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, p. 94).
As an official of the Ministry of Justice, István Bibó issued fake papers to people being helped by the Good Shepherd and those unknown persons that turned to him for assistance between spring and summer of 1944 and his arrest on October 16 that year. Before he was arrested, he was writing a legislative proposal on exemptions to the Act on Jews (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 91–92).
At the end of October, he went underground, hiding along with his family in the basement of the Theological Academy of the Reformed Church in Ráday utca. During that time, he re-thought the interpretation of legitimacy, Napoleon and the Vienna Congress that Guglielmo Ferrero had expounded, and attempted to outline its application for the period after liberation so as to ensure the unfolding of truly legitimate conditions (Ref. Reference Kovács5, pp. 281–287). While hiding, he also helped hide his former professor of classical philology, Károly Marót. Again, we know of this not from Bibó, but from Marót’s letters (Ref. Reference Dénes13, pp. 539–541).
The oeuvre of classical-philologist Károly Marót is timely even today.18 Together with his best friend, Béla Reitzer, Bibó often attended the lectures of Marót on literary theory and Homer. From then on, they maintained friendly relations. Bibó wrote to Marót four days before his arrest in 1956: ‘Now, as I set out with a small package towards a destiny unsure (as I had on 4 November), I have put in it the Iliad and the Odyssey’ (Ref. Reference Dénes13, p. 543). The letters of Marót himself however testify to much more: ‘During the Shoah my life was endangered’, and he believed he owed his life to Bibó, who had hidden him in 1944 (Ref. Reference Dénes13, p. 539).
Marót found his way to the Tündérhegy Sanatorium, his first hiding place, through the good offices of Bibó. Writing conspiratorially under the pseudonym Károly Teffert, a fictional pharmacist, he asked Bibó to help him move from this first, unsafe hiding place to another one, the Hospital in Vas utca:
It is said here in the sanatorium that only the most severely ill can remain, and a revision is due forthwith. It is for this that I ask you to be gracious enough to pick up the string of Vas utca (the week is just about over), and if there is any hope there, please call me by telephone (Tündérhegyi Szanatórium, XII, Szilassy út 6, II, 18), or if that does not work, send a brief note. In the situation here, I cannot be the one to call you. I know I am very immodest and selfish, but I have little choice; please, don’t be angry with me, and help your poor old pharmacist friend, who has remained faithfully yours. [...] My problem has become tractable insofar as I now have registered Budapest residence, but I have no food ration tickets. (Ref. Reference Dénes13, p. 539)
From Marót’s letter a week later, it turns out that the manoeuvre succeeded, and Marót realized that Bibó was likewise hiding:
Your kind card arrived only today. Thank you very much for it. I will never forget that not only you but your dear good wife have taken and take so much care of the illness of your unfortunate old, but faithful friend. Please give her my sincerest respects. You yourself – please – bother with nothing but your earliest recuperation, and that you change your unworthily Papist, faithfully Reformed heart, which I have been observing shaking my head, to one which is redder. This is the most determined wish of an old dyspeptic; who must take a bed rest most seriously. I am more or less all right; God helping, I’ll manage somehow. I am through with the most important examinations, and I am to receive injections, from which the doctors expect improvement; perhaps they begin tomorrow. I often warmly think of you, and pray that the Grace of God be with you […] and all your loved ones in these days of crisis. Thank you again for all the trouble you have taken. (Ref. Reference Dénes13, 539)
This was how Marót wrote to Bibó after the liberation back in Szeged:
I chanced on the fragment of the letter I started in the morning before Christmas Eve in the sanatorium. I could not finish it, but I wouldn’t have been able to post it anyway. It is most certain that the gratefulness and thankfulness I had wanted to express in it and I tried to make you feel during my last visit is unchanged in me. […] (Ref. Reference Dénes13, p. 540)
Four months later the professor would return to the matter again:
I must use this opportunity to express to you again in writing, as well, my warmest thanks for your unselfish and untiring friendship whereby you not only saved my modest belongings in those difficult times – I will never forget your goodness of heart and refinement. I must also use this occasion to tell you what I suppressed noticing the pressures and concerns of work on you, though this had been the main aim of my visit. I must tell you I would not feel my gratefulness and indebtedness so oppressive for all your magnanimous help during the time of my troubles if I could perform any services for you and your loved ones now or any time. […] Again, let me thank you, my dearest Pista, for the infinite chain of kindness you have afforded me, for, after all, I am indebted to you for my very survival, because you helped me, by the dispensation of Fate, to Esterházy utca, the way to safety. (Ref. Reference Dénes13, 540–541)
Processing Out: The Jewish Predicament in Post-1944 Hungary
In 1948, after four years of work, István Bibó published the study of Anti-Semitism he had started working on while he was hiding from the Arrow-Cross henchmen and the Germans. This study included an elaborate examination of the situation, provided a differentiated and clear diagnosis, and took a stance accepting the raison d’être of assimilation, minority consciousness or Zionism. In it, he set an example to assuming personal responsibility. In his interpretation of Anti-Semitism, he took into account the joint role of anti-Jewish Christian religious prejudice, the experiences resulting from a dehumanized co-organization of Jews and their environment and the confusions in the social development of an assimilating society. He expounded all this in 1948 by separating what a non-Jew could say to a non-Jew, non-Jew to a Jew, a Jew to a non-Jew, and a Jew to a Jew (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 315–316).
Bibó in first instance addressed his non-Jewish compatriots, but he received positive responses mostly from Zionist Jews, chemist-professor Ferenc Kőrösy (who taught at the Haifa Technion in 1957–1958 and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, from 1958) and Béla Dénes, a physician, journalist and Zionist politician, the cultural attaché at the Budapest embassy of the newly founded Israel, and the primary accused in the first Zionist trialReference Kőrősy19 (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 11, pp. 317–318).
Half a year after the publication of Bibó’s study, the communist dictatorship, which had firmly established itself by this time, fully put an end to the freedom of the press and speech, as indeed it did all other freedoms, and thus excluded any possibility of an open public debate on Bibó’s essay and of its becoming the opportunity of a Hungarian Historikerstreit.
In the first sentence of his study, Bibó considered the losses suffered:
Between 1941 and 1945, over half a million Hungarian Jews perished in labour service, police atrocities, deportations, extermination camps, and during the Arrow-cross reign of terror. No sooner than the first shock passed, anti-Semitism, as witnessed to by many a sign, has again cropped up in the face of the survivors and home-comers. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, p. 39)
He stressed the uniqueness of the Shoah, its incomparability with other suffering: ‘No war captivity, internment or police atrocity – all quite different in themselves – can be compared, even if they have had a death toll, to what happened to the Jews. […] It would be frivolous or spiteful to match any of them with the mass extermination of Jews’ (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, pp. 72–74). He then went on to define the nature of the Shoah in the following terms:
Throughout not only the Christian era and civilization but in the many centuries of human viciousness, there has always been a limit on cruelty; a certain degree of clemency was to be shown towards the elderly, women and children, which was never breached in principle, and only seldom in practice. By the intent of racist theory and leaders, however, the mass destruction and killing of Jews were equally directed against the elderly, women and children as against men. The methods of selection and torturing unto death were such that tens of thousands of survivors have lost their sanity in the clinical sense of the word. We have people walking and living in our midst who have had to watch or were capable of watching their naked and skinned mothers and wives being eyed, assaulted and driven to death; we have parents in our midst who have had to watch or were capable of watching their children being staked, their infants being banged against the wall of the wagon; we have people in our midst who, on the brink of going mad, level the absolutely unfounded accusation against themselves that they let or sent their beloved on to the road of death.
In contrast, those whose loved ones have died in shellings, prematurely in disease or even due to human evil and cruelty, but in nevertheless more customary circumstances of dying look serene and relieved, because they wrestle with on old and familiar friend, abstract and impersonal Death, and not with the images of fury and sadism, artificial, man-made, dense Horror, which one cannot rid oneself of. If anyone has any good or less good reason to brush aside the idea that he might have a share in the responsibility for this, yet imagines his own mother, wife or child in the same situation, he might no longer be in the mood to weigh against these monstrosities so many years of war captivity, whatever hunger-ridden internment and police atrocity. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 8, pp. 72–74)
Against and During Another Occupation
As Soviet tanks were occupying the city, Bibó, the minister of state of the last legitimate cabinet of the 1956 revolution, went to fulfil his duties in his office in the Parliament, wrote declarations, expositions and draft proposals, and dispatched them to foreign embassies in order that the invading troops leave the country, and then he elaborated his position in a memorandum. As a result, he missed the gallows by the skin of his teeth: the Ambassador of India to Moscow intervened on his behalf and secured a mere life sentence. We know quite a lot about his prison years from the memoirs of his fellow inmates. But his life-saving activity is exemplified by a story his son recorded:
I am quite sure I heard the prison story from my father, no other context would be fitting, yet I no longer remember the circumstances of our talk. The essence is that he got into conversation about the Jewish question with his cell fellows, perhaps there even was an argument between them, and one of them said: ‘Listen, Uncle Pista, surely you’re defending the Jews because you yourself are Jewish.’ My father did not respond by any protestation, explaining that he has no Jewish background. A few weeks later, they started talking about their families and ancients, and my father told them that, on his father’s line, he was a descendant of lowland Hungarian gentry and, on his mother’s line, German farmers. This turned into a dialogue of the following kind:
‘But, Uncle Pista, you have a Jewish background...’
‘No, it was only you who said that the last time.’
‘But you did not object!?’
‘Why should I have? It’s no disgrace to be Jewish...’Reference Bibó20
Another memory of Bibó’s son provides a much wider context to his father’s life-saving activity than what we reconstructed above:
In my father’s literary remains, there is a postcard he received during the Christmas of 1947 or 1948. It has the season’s greetings and expresses gratefulness ‘in the name of the several hundred persons you saved’. And the signature, which I remember distinctly, ‘Gyula Pepita, fiddler’. He was obviously a Gypsy violinist, and those he saved could be none other than Gypsies, too. The postcard provided no clue as to the circumstances of the saving, nor did my father ever say anything particular about it.Reference Kőrősy19
Between his release from prison (1963) and his death (1979), Bibó wrote several essays and a book. He penned his examination of the crisis of the international community and its remedies between 1965 and 1974.Reference Bibó21 The longest case-study he conducted for this was on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Knowing the 1967 and the Yom Kippur wars, he formulated his views on Israeli and Arab nation-building processes and his proposals. The text of the case-study came out in print in Hungarian well after his death, and has not been published in translation (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 6, pp. 250–401). Among Bibó’s manuscripts, there are interesting psychological analyses of the relationship between King David and his general Joab, based on Samuel 1 and 2, Kings 1 and Chronicles 1.Reference Bibó22 He also had plans to rearrange his great 1948 study of the Jewish question as a volume entitled Four Studies of the Jewish Question, but this never materialized (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 9, pp. 362–363).
Recollections
In Bibó’s recollections, we find rather telling discussions relating to the Jewish question. Let me quote two of these. The first relates to his childhood, the second to the experience of the post-Holocaust period.
I remember I learned from my mother at a very early age that everyone is equal, no one is to be disdained, so much so that, when I must have been some six or eight and I was playing along with the children of the tenement yard, I harshly scolded a little Géza for saying that he would not marry his former fiancé, the two-years-younger Zsuzsa, because she was Jewish. […] I also want to mention a few of my childhood memories relating to the Jewish question, which indirectly concern my mother’s image. At the end of 1919, during the White Terror, I tore down anti-Semitic posters in the street until I was chased away. In the beginning of the 1920s, there were anti-Jewish demonstrations at the Pozsony [Bratislava] University, which had fled to our neighbourhood, and I put up a note on the gate saying ‘Long live the Jews!’, whereupon I was slapped in the face. Looking back today, I cannot find any normal explanation. At home, persecution, oppression and mistreatment were generally condemned, but neither at home nor in my broader civil service environment was it the mood that decent people were being persecuted. I also do not understand what it was that drove me to seek danger on moral grounds, as I was not strong physically, and I knew myself to be a coward in physical trials. The moral impulse obviously came from my mother, but looking for danger was something she had rejected with dismay, and she believed it was her child-like duty to avoid such dangers, such as vehicles that might run over you. To return to the Jewish question, I had always been interested in what it meant to be a Jew. I had always regarded it as something exciting and interesting, and as a condition to be protected and pitied, as well, and, as I remember, that before 1919–1920. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 12, pp. 18, 68, 69)
So, I once had a chat with someone I did not know was Jewish. He questioned me about my various opinions, and asked me about my view of the Jewish question. I told him, listen, let me offer an emotional answer in advance, an answer made up of a simple sentence: I like Jews. I love their humour, their mind and their exacting morals, not to mention my personal contacts. In response, the fellow explained in detail and all seriousness that this was essentially Anti-Semitism. Because I distinguished a Jew from a non-Jew, because one can only love his fellow men by distinguishing them from others, etc., etc. Later I learned from other members of the same community that this man was Jewish, but went out of his way to conceal it; he had siblings who had died in 1944. Two people knew of this at the time, a Jew and a non-Jew, and they were both exasperated by such foolishness. But I convinced them that we should keep this ‘secret’, though I thought of it as foolish; yet I felt, we had no right to undermine his mode of defence. (Ref. Reference Bibó8, vol. 12, pp. 137–138)
Conclusion
Bibó’s characteristic self-effacement, his profound lack of self-aggrandizement, is responsible for our sporadic information on the lives he saved: he would have regarded documenting his deeds as out of keeping with his heightened moral sensibility. What he regarded as far more important was to argue against Anti-Semitism; his seminal study on the Jewish question not only honestly addressed the issue of Hungarian responsibility in the Shoah, and stood not only as a major testament to humanity at a time when a new dark age was imminent, but it helped many by clearing up confusions. Few Hungarian writings have been so efficient; it actually contributed to healing the world. Bibó’s heritage is a challenge to everyone intending to follow suit. In thought and deed, he belonged to the Righteous of the World. It would be timely to give expression to this, by the Yad Vashem Institute, on the one hand, bestowing posthumously upon Bibó the honorific Righteous among the Nations, and, on the other, initiating the publication in Israel of Bibó’s ‘The Jewish Predicament in Post-1944 Hungary’ and his case-study of the Arab-Israeli conflict in both English and Hebrew.
Iván Zoltán Dénes is a historian of ideas, conducting research on historical traumas and trauma management in Europe. He is the author of 12 books (including seven monographs) and editor of 46 volumes. He served as researcher (1973–1997), professor (1997–2011), and founding president of the István Bibó Center for Advanced Studies of the Humanities and Social Sciences (1996–2012). He has been awarded several visiting professorships and scholarships, including from the British Academy (universities of London, Oxford, Cambridge), Fulbright Commission (Stanford University, Department of History), International Research Exchange (Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science), G. Soros Foundation (Harvard University, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (Wassenaar). His most recent books and essays in English and French include: The Art of Peacemaking. Political Essays by István Bibó (editor, intro, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT & London, 2015); Conservative Ideology in the Making (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2009); Liberty and the Search for Identity. Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires (editor and contributor, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006); ‘Personal liberty and political freedom: four interpretations’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7(1), pp. 81–98 (2008); ‘Liberty versus common good’, European Review, 18(S1), pp. 89–98 (2010); ‘Reinterpreting a “Founding Father”: Kossuth images and their contexts, 1848–2009’, East Central Europe, 37(1), 90–117 (2010); ‘Le mouvement estudiantin à Budapest en 1969’, Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, 42(4), pp. 37–54 (2011); ‘Overcoming European civil war: patterns of consolidation in divided societies, 2010–1800’, European Review, 20(4), pp. 455–74 (2012); ‘Adopting European model versus national egoism: the task of surpassing political hysteria’, European Review, 20(4), pp. 514–25 (2012); ‘Interpreting regimes of memory’, European Review, 21(4) pp. 465–469 (2013); ‘Making democratic political culture’, European Review, 21(4), pp. 553–563 (2013). He is a member of the Academia Europaea (1995–).
