Right-wing Hungarians try to board ‘Gold Train’ claims

BUDAPEST, Dec. 21 (JTA) — It was perhaps inevitable that the Holocaust restitution process would attract some curious hangers-on.

It may partly explain why some right-wing Hungarians are now trying to latch on to what has come to be known as the “Hungarian Gold Train.”

In October, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States said it had uncovered documents detailing how U.S. infantry forces on May 16, 1945, seized a train in Werfen, Austria, that was filled with paintings, rugs, china, gold, watches and other valuables looted from Hungarian Jews by the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators.

The looted assets were later taken by generals and soldiers in the U.S. Army, the commission said.

The panel’s findings were praised for sending a signal to other countries to probe their own wartime records.

Now, Hungarian Jewish leaders are negotiating for the return of the property, compensation or both.

But why is it that a group like the World Federation of Hungarians — a nationalist voice in domestic politics that typically draws attention to the ill-treatment of indigenous Hungarians in neighboring Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia — is suddenly interested in a “Jewish” issue?

Money and pride, say Jewish leaders.

In 1945 the valuables aboard the Gold Train were valued at a staggering $206 million. Today, it may be worth “ten times as much,” say analysts.

Groups like the World Federation now stake a claim to a portion of the booty, pointing to Gold Train documents that refer to “property belonging to Hungarian gentiles” who voluntarily put their valuables aboard “to escape the advancing Russians.”

But observers say the claims being stacked by the World Federation and others smacks of an ongoing right-wing campaign in Hungary to downplay the country’s deeds during the Holocaust, while playing up its victimization at the hands of the occupying Nazis and “liberating” Soviet Red Army.

“Since they are nationalists, in their view the issue of the war was not Jews — that was a side issue,” says Peter Tordai, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary.

“The issue for them is the bleeding of the Hungarian nation” and the problem of “Hungarian aristocrats trying to save their land and property from the Russians.”

Indeed, some here are inclined toward creative spin on the events of 1944 — the year of the Hungarian Holocaust.

They ignore the pre-war decades of anti-Semitic laws and the Jewish forced-labor battalions of 1941-42, in which thousands died.

Rather, such Hungarians blame the Germans, who occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Soon after, the mass roundup and deportation of Jews began.

Hungary had a prewar population of 800,000 Jews. About 600,000 died during the Holocaust.

“Hungarians tried to avoid persecution of the Jews, but it was very hard to do,” said Julius Geonczeol, Budapest representative of the Cleveland-based World Council of Hungarians.

“The primary objective was to avoid Russian occupation. But once the Russians came in, nothing was safe. We have no idea what was lost — my family also lost property — but that’s the story of many Hungarian gentiles.”

However, Geonczeol and others overstate the non-Jewish share of valuables aboard the Gold Train — according even to an American expert the World Federation recently flew in to bolster their argument.

Last Friday, the World Federation hosted a news conference with Kenneth Alford, author of the 1994 book, “The Spoils of World War II.”

Alford spent 15 years poring through wartime records, including those related to the Gold Train, at the National Archives in College Park, Md.

The World Federation, which did not invite Tordai or other Jewish leaders, had predicted beforehand that Alford would reveal “the true history” of the Gold Train — presumably that a big chunk of its valuables belonged to Hungarian nobility.

But Alford disappointed them. According to him, almost the entire contents of the Gold Train’s 20 cars came from Jews; only parts of two cars held property taken from small banks in the Hungarian countryside. And even that could have belonged to Jews, since the majority lived in the provinces.

At most, then, only a fraction of any future settlement would go toward non-Jews.

Alford, who is not Jewish, said he knew he would be treading in politicized terrain in Budapest.

“I’ll write an interesting story,” he said, “but I stay away from politics.”

After the news conference, World Federation officials still maintained a stiff upper lip, portraying their media event as a noble public service.

“Everything that concerns the Hungarian people and state is of interest to the World Federation,” said the group’s vice president, Miklos Patrubany.

“As for Hungarian Jews, to the extent that they consider themselves Hungarian, we are interested in any issues affecting them.”

Jewish leaders, meanwhile, don’t expect Patrubany and others to give up their wartime grievances.

“Their pride doesn’t allow them to acknowledge that a great deal of business life here had to do with Jews, and that Jews had a lot to be robbed from them,” Tordai said.

“If there was a Gold Train, they figure it couldn’t be from Jews, it had to be from Hungarian aristocrats.”