Very accurate historically

I just happened to read a review of this movie by István Deák, a Hungarian historian, in the July 20, 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books.

If you're interested, you can probably find a copy in your local university library. It's also available from the magazine archive at www.nybooks.com, but unfortunately you have to pay. The name of the article is Strangers at Home.

According to the article (and I have no other knowledge of Hungarian history, so please don't beat up on me), the history of the Jews in Hungary is complicated and unique to that country. (All quotes are from the article; everything else is my own summary of it.)

Under the long reign of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef (1848-1916), Jews gradually attained an eminence that was remarkable for that time. "They sat on the Supreme Court, in the ministries, and in the parliament; they held university chairs; they obtained aristocratic titles, bought large estates, and served in the career officer corps. Nearly one in five reserve officers was a Jew or a Jewish convert to Christianity." The population of Budapest was about 25% Jewish.

All that began to change with WWI and the death of Franz Josef. Subsequently "...a small group of young, mostly Jewish intellectuals seized power in 1919, [and] established, with considerable brutality, a socialist state." The Jews were blamed for Béla Kun's Soviet Republic, although ironically few of them had anything to do with it: "...most of them were appalled by it."

Anti-semitism grew between the wars, but the situation was not yet desperate. There was in fact a prominent Jewish fencer, Attila Petschauer, on whom the character of Adam Sors is based. He "won several gold and silver Olympic medals, although not at the games in Berlin. Petschauer... whom the army had drafted into labor service in 1942, was horribly beaten at a camp and soon after died." Jews who had converted to Christianity, like Petschauer and Adam Sors in the film, were treated especially harshly.

These labor camps were specifically devised to cause maximum suffering to the Jews, but Jews were not sent to death camps until the German invasion, and the coup by the Arrow Cross, in 1944. Even then, many Jews, especially those in Budapest, were spared. At the end of the war, approximately 40% of Hungary's Jews had survived.

After the war it gets even more complicated. In the early years of the Communist regime, many of the political police were of Jewish origin. At first they prosecuted ex-fascists, but then they turned their attention to other Communists. The party secretary general was "...Mátyás Rákosi, a Communist tyrant of Jewish origin. In 1952, Rakosi was in a hurry to get rid of Jews in the Communist hierarchy, so that he himself would not become a target of Stalin's anti-Zionist campaign."

"In today's Hungary, most Jews are assimilated...", although few of them are religiously observant. "...practically all Jewish Hungarians reject the idea that they are a separate ethnic group, as did, incidentally, even the most anti-Semitic Hungarian authorities. The latter often treated the Jews as pariahs but nevertheless counted them as Hungarians in their statistics so as to boost the proportion of ethnic Hungarians in the country."

And there's a lot more in the article, drawing connections between the movie and actual events, like the tonic the family invented, and their changes of surname, etc. Comments?