Building Managers, Bystanders and Perpetrators

Abstract

This book attempts to show a historically broader view of the Holocaust than is usually shown by scholars, a view that includes the everyday actors and bystanders of the Holocaust. This view is particularly fitting for the Holocaust in Budapest because of this event’s several special features. Firstly, the worst part of the Holocaust in Budapest appeared at the very end of the war, and secondly, here the ghettoization, plunder and later the murder of thousands were carried out in the heart of a metropolis. Shops kept their normal opening hours, ordinary people lived their everyday lives while round-ups happened in their proximity. Mrs Dévényi, eight months into her pregnancy, found herself trapped in a ghetto building. She wrote: “we live isolated from the rest of the world. If I look through the window, I can’t see the beauty of the Danube as I could see it from home. Here I can only see the dirt on the courtyard, and I can only listen to noises. But life goes on outside of the building. I read the adverts of the holiday resorts. The café houses advertise themselves too … People live their lives and maybe they don’t even know what is happening around them. Only we are not allowed to live and only we are not allowed to leave this building.”¹ This diary entry shows from the perspective of a ghettoized person that while the segregation and plunder of Jewish Hungarians proceeded smoothly, the bystanders of Budapest lived their lives as if nothing had happened. This chapter will contextualize the book in terms of other works on the everyday actors of the Holocaust, with a special emphasis on the bystander. One important argument is that the Budapest concierges were not an exception: there were similar groups in other countries as well, whose members from time to time cooperated with the Nazi authorities, yet their actions do not amount to the level of primary perpetrators. Moreover, some of them even saved certain people from persecution. The second part of the chapter will then give a rough idea about the Hungarian society in which building managers had to function. It is crucial to understand their possible options, and to see what a Budapest concierge risked if they considered leaving the position of the bystander.