Category Archives: Hungary

by Joel | 27 February 2026 · 6:56 pm

Pressure on Adm. Horthy, 1944

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 298-300:

The pope had not been able to utter the word ‘Jews’, or to make his plea public, but his meaning was clear enough. The American president, meanwhile, was not quite so squeamish. The very next day, 26 June, and just as the truth of Auschwitz was becoming ever more public thanks to the press coverage coming out of Switzerland, Roosevelt had his secretary of state deliver a message to Horthy:

The United States demands to know whether the Hungarian authorities intend . . . to deport Jews to Poland or to any other place, or to employ any measures that would in the end result in their mass execution. Moreover, the United States wishes to remind the Hungarian authorities that all those responsible for carrying out those kind of injustices will be dealt with . . .

The pressure, unleashed by the publication of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, was unremitting. On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’. But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind.

‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease!’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next.

Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There now ensued a power struggle inside the Hungarian government, as those bent on continuing to do the Nazis’ bidding, collaborating in the effort to rid the country of its Jews, sought to resist the regent’s edict. The security forces themselves were split: there was a tank division loyal to the regent, battalions of provincial gendarmes loyal to the Final Solution.

If Horthy was to prevail, he would have to move fast. Adolf Eichmann and his local fascist allies had drawn up a plan to ensnare the last major Jewish community still untouched by the hand of the SS: the 200,000 Jews of Budapest who were the last Jews of Hungary – and, in effect, the last Jews of Europe.

This is how it would work. On 2 July, thousands of Hungarian armed police would gather in Budapest’s Heroes Square on a pretext designed to arouse minimal suspicion: a flag ceremony to honour their comrades. Then, once the formalities were over, the gendarmes would quietly spend their three days of supposed leave making themselves familiar with the locations of the single-building mini-ghettos known as ‘yellow-star houses’, in particular working out how to block off potential escape routes for any Jews minded to flee. The trains carrying Budapest’s Jews to the gas chambers were scheduled for departure on 10 July.

Except events did not run to plan. On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect.

By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’. That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police, there to round up Jews, were pushed out.

In the clash of wills, the regent had won. To be clear, his prime motive was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews. The deportation of the Jews of Hungary had not especially troubled him until that moment. Indeed, it would continue for the next three days, at the same intense pace as it had throughout May and June: there were five transports from the provinces on 9 July alone. There was one more on 20 July.

But the rest were stopped. One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders. Eichmann was livid: ‘In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before,’ he raged. ‘It cannot be tolerated!’ Under Horthy, there would be no deportations from Budapest.

The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations – starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war – but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.

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Filed under Germany, Hungary, migration, military, Poland, religion, Scandinavia, U.S., war

by Joel | 26 February 2026 · 8:18 pm

Publicizing the Auschwitz Report

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-275:

NATURALLY, THE WORKING Group always hoped that the escapees’ testimony would reach the Allied nations fighting the Third Reich. They had no clear idea how exactly it would get there; instead they cast the document upon the waters, hoping it would land on the right shore. The Auschwitz Report would be a message in a bottle.

One early copy fell into exactly the wrong hands. Oskar Krasňanský sent it to Jewish officials based in Istanbul through a courier who he had been assured was ‘reliable’. But it never arrived. Krasňanský later concluded that the messenger had been a paid spy who took the report to Hungary, only to hand it to the Gestapo in Budapest.

Another copy, also originally destined for Istanbul, followed an especially circuitous path. A Jewish employee of the Turkish legation in Budapest passed it to the head of the city’s Palestine office – representing those who were determined to turn that country into a refuge for Jews – who, keen to get the information to neutral Switzerland, passed it to a contact in the Romanian legation in Bern who, in turn, handed it to a businessman from Transylvania who had once been known as György Mandel but who had now, however improbably, become the unpaid first secretary of the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, under the name of George Mantello.

The route was bizarre, but at last the report had found the right person. Mantello was a man ready to flout convention, and if necessary the law, if that’s what it took to rescue Jews from the Nazis. And for him, the Auschwitz Report had a bleakly personal significance. As he read it, he knew that his own extended family in Hungary had already been deported. The words of Vrba and Wetzler, reinforced by Mordowicz and Rosin, confirmed that all of those relatives, some 200 people, were almost certainly dead. He resolved immediately to do what he could to spread the word.

Mantello’s copy was a five-page summary in Hungarian, produced at an earlier stage of the report’s convoluted journey by an orthodox rabbi in Slovakia, so he now enlisted the help of assorted students and expats to make immediate translations of this abridged version into Spanish, French, German and English. On 22 June 1944 he handed the document to a British journalist, Walter Garrett, who was in Zurich for the Exchange Telegraph news agency. Garrett saw the news value immediately, but he also recognised that, even in its pared down form, the Auschwitz Report was still too lengthy for easy newspaper consumption. He had his British–Hungarian secretary, one Blanche Lucas, produce a fresh translation and he then distilled the core points into four arresting press releases.

Garrett made a break from the reporters’ unwritten code, which would forbid a journalist from receiving financial help from a source: doubtless for the sake of speed, he allowed Mantello to pay for those four texts to be sent to London by telegram, costly as that was. Still, despite that departure from traditional Fleet Street practice, and in welcome contrast with Krasňanský, Garrett understood the grammar of news. His telegram despatch, wired on the night of 23 June 1944, led with what was his most stunning revelation:

FOLLOWING DRAMATIC ACCOUNT ONE DARKEST CHAPTERS MODERN HISTORY REVEALING HOW ONE MILLION 715 THOUSAND JEWS PUT DEATH ANNIHILATION CAMP AUSCHWITZ BIRKENAU . . . REPORT COME EX TWO JEWS WHO ESCAPED BIRKENAU CORRECTNESS WHEREOF CONFIRMED . . . FROM THE BEGINNING JUNE 1943 NINETY PERCENT INCOMING JEWS GASSED DEATH STOP . . . THREE GAS-CHAMBERS FOUR CREMATORIUMS BIRKENAU-AUSCHWITZ STOP EACH CREMATORIUM . . . TWO THOUSAND CORPSE DAILY STOP GARRETT ADDS ABSOLUTE EXACTNESS ABOVE REPORT UNQUESTIONABLE . . . END

As soon as those words were humming along the telegraph cables to London, Garrett acted to ensure that his story – surely one of the scoops of the century – would get the widest possible distribution. The technology of 1944 allowed for few short cuts. And so, in the early hours of 24 June, Walter Garrett rode his bike through the streets of Zurich, pushing copies of his despatch by hand into the mailboxes of the city’s newspapers. Attached was a covering letter of endorsement, supplied by Mantello, from a quartet of senior Swiss theologians and clerics, all apparently vouching for the gravity of the revelations. (In fact, none of the four had seen the report: in a typical Mantello flourish, he had put their names to the letter but had dispensed with the formality of asking their permission first.) And so the first newspaper story based on what would become known as the Vrba–Wetzler Report appeared in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung later that same day.

Mantello’s efforts had worked. Thanks to those ‘two Jews who escaped Birkenau, correctness whereof confirmed’, the word was out. Breaking the dam of censorship, the following eighteen days saw the publication in the Swiss press of no fewer than 383 articles laying bare the truth of the Auschwitz death camp, even if, by accidentally omitting the estimated 50,000 Lithuanian dead, Garrett had revised down Vrba–Wetzler’s death toll. Put another way, between 24 June and 11 July more articles appeared about Auschwitz in the Swiss press than had been published about the wider Final Solution throughout the entire course of the war in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian and the whole of the British popular press put together.

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by Joel | 23 February 2026 · 8:07 am

Planning Escape from Auschwitz

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-187:

And so by the early spring of 1944 there was a double urgency to Walter’s determination to escape. Those 5,000 or so Czechs who had entered the family camp in the second wave, arriving on 20 December 1943, would be put to death exactly six months later on 20 June. That was beyond doubt; it was the hardest of deadlines. But now there was the prospect of an even more imminent, and much larger, slaughter: hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would board trains for Auschwitz in a matter of weeks, trains that would take them to the very gates of the gas chambers.

Walter had his motive and now he acquired a mentor. After the Poles, the most successful escapees from Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war. Many thousands had been brought to the camp at the start, dying in the cold and dirt as they worked as slaves to build Birkenau. But there was another group, Walter estimated there were about a hundred of them, known to the Auschwitz veterans as the ‘second-hand prisoners of war’. Captured in battle, they had been sent initially to regular PoW camps but then despatched to Auschwitz as punishment for bad behaviour, including attempted escape. Among them was one Dmitri Volkov.

Not for the first time, Walter had reason to be grateful for the Russian he had taught himself back in Trnava. It meant he could talk with the second-hand PoWs as he registered them, even those whose appearance was forbidding. To Walter, Volkov was a bear of a man from the land of the Cossacks, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. Enormous and with dark, deep-set eyes, and still in his Red Army uniform, he looked like someone to be approached with care.

But with time they got to know each other, eventually striking an unspoken bargain not dissimilar to the high-school deal that had seen Walter trade lessons in Slovak for tuition in High German. Volkov allowed Walter to practise his Russian. In return, the young pen-pusher handed over his allocation of bread and quasi-margarine, honouring a vow he had made to himself much earlier: that he would not take his official ration so long as he had access to food from elsewhere. He noticed that Volkov did not eat even that meagre portion, instead cutting it into quarters, to be shared with his comrades.

They began talking. Not, at first, about the camp, but about the great Russian literary masters Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, moving on to the Soviet writers Gorky, Ehrenburg and Blok. Eventually, Volkov began to lower his guard.

He revealed that he was no mere conscript but a captain in the Red Army. In making this admission, Volkov was taking a huge risk: it was Nazi practice to shoot all Soviet officers. But he had decided to trust Walter, and not only with that information. He also told him of his own experience of escape, for the captain had once broken out of the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. As his teenage pupil listened, and over several days, Volkov proceeded to give Walter a crash course in escapology.

Some lessons were intensely practical. He told him what to carry and what not to carry. In the second category was money. Kanada might be overflowing with the stuff, but it was dangerous. If you had money, you would be tempted to buy food from a shop or a market, and that meant contact with people which was always to be avoided. Better to live off the land, stealing from fields and remote farms. Also not to be carried, at least when making the initial escape, was meat: the SS Alsatians would sniff it out immediately.

So: no money, no meat. As for what he would need, that category was larger, starting with a knife for hunting or self-defence, and a razor blade in case of imminent capture. That was a cardinal rule for Volkov: ‘Don’t let them take you alive.’ Also: matches, to cook the food you had stolen. And salt: a man could live on salt and potatoes for months. A watch was essential, not least because it could double as a compass.

The tips kept coming. All movement was to be done at night; no walking in daylight. It was vital to be invisible. If they could see you, they could shoot you. Don’t imagine you could run away; a bullet would always be faster.

Keep an eye on the time, hence the watch. Don’t be looking for a place to sleep when dawn breaks; make sure you’ve found a hiding place while it’s still dark.

But some of the advice belonged in the realm of psychology. Trust no one; share your plans with no one, including me. If your friends know nothing, they’ll have nothing to reveal when they’re tortured once you’re gone. That advice fitted with what Walter already knew for himself: that there were others eager to give up your secrets. The Politische Abteilung, the Political Department of the SS, had built up quite a network of informers among the prisoners, always listening out for talk of escape and revolt. (They were recruited by a threat from the SS that, if they refused to betray their fellow prisoners, their relatives back home would be murdered.) You never knew who you were really talking to. Best to say little.

Volkov had more wisdom to impart. Have no fear, even of the Germans. In Auschwitz, in their uniforms and with their guns, they look invincible. But each one of them, on his own, is just as small and fragile as any other human being. ‘I know they can die as quickly as anybody because I’ve killed enough of them.’ Above all: remember that the fight only starts when you’ve broken out of the camp. No euphoria, no elation. You cannot relax while you are on Nazi-ruled soil, not even for a second.

Walter did his best to take it all in, to remember it along with the mountain of numbers and dates that was piling ever higher in his mind. But there was one last bit of advice, for the escape itself.

The Nazis’ tracker dogs were trained to detect even the faintest odour of human life. If there was a single bead of sweat on your brow, they would find you. There was only one thing that defeated them.

Tobacco, soaked in petrol and then dried. And not just any tobacco. It had to be Soviet tobacco. Volkov must have seen the gleam of scepticism in Walter’s eye. ‘I’m not being patriotic,’ he said. ‘I just know machorka. It’s the only stuff that works.’

Volkov let Walter know that he had his own plans for escape and that he would not be sharing them with Walter or anyone else. He was happy to serve as the younger man’s teacher. But he would not be his partner.

For that role, there could only ever be one person. Someone whom Walter trusted wholly and who trusted him, someone whom he had known before he was in this other, darker universe, someone who, for that very reason, had an existence in Walter’s mind independent of Auschwitz: Fred Wetzler.

More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been sent to Auschwitz in 1942. By the spring of 1944, only two were still alive: Walter Rosenberg and Alfréd Wetzler. All the rest had either been swiftly murdered, like Fred’s brothers, or suffered the slow death in which Auschwitz-Birkenau specialised, worn down by disease, starvation and arbitrary violence, a group that almost certainly included Fred’s father. Fred and Walter had grown up with those 600 boys and men – as teachers and schoolmates, family friends and acquaintances, playground enemies and romantic rivals – and now every last one of them was gone. From the world they had both known, only Fred and Walter were left.

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by Joel | 22 February 2026 · 12:10 am

Old Polish Slang

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Patryk Zakrewski (with translations by MW) titled Kapewu? A Guide to Old Polish Slang. Here are some excerpts.

Antek

In Kraków, he was called an ‘ancymon’, while in Lembryczek (pre-war slang for the city of Lviv), a street urchin was a ‘baciar’ (from the Hungarian ‘betyár’ – a hoodlum or goon). A baciar spoke bałak, a Lvovian slang. Elsewhere in Galicia, such rascals and scoundrels were called, in the plural, ‘sztrabancle’ (from the German ‘strabanzen’ – to loiter), and in Poznań, they went under the names of ‘szczuny’, ‘zyndry’ or ‘ejbry’. There were, of course, many other similar terms, because Poland was also full of andrusy and wisusy.

In Warsaw, and especially in its riverside neighbourhoods of Powiśle and Czerniaków, a street urchin was simply an ‘antek’ – which is also a common diminutive of the name Antoni. The satirical newspaper Trubadur Warszawy (Warsaw’s Troubadour) explained the term this way in the year 1927:

I’m Antek. I can’t swear that it was the name I was given during baptism, but here, near the Wisła, the custom is that even if you’re called Hipolit, Konstanty or – imagine it – Maurycy, people’ll still call you Antek anyway. Trans. MW

Unfortunately, sometimes a kind-hearted antek would grow up to become a majcher- and szpadryna-carrying hooligan (the terms for a knife and brass knuckles, respectively). If he lived in Lviv, he would have been called a ‘chachar’. And if a chachar wants to give you bałabuchy, or zamalować kłapacz (both terms for beating you up), you should know that there is nothing pleasant coming. It could lead to a fest magulanka (a mighty fight). But let’s set aside violence and focus on etymology instead.

‘Chachar’, just like ‘baciar’, is Hungarian in origin. It spread all over the southern voivodeships of Poland, taking on a different meaning in each region. In Kraków, and in the east of the Lesser Poland region in general, chachars were simply street urchins. The article Śląskie Wyzwiska (Silesian Invectives), published in Kłosy in 1934, states that:

A ‘chachar’, or an unemployed person in general, received their name only recently; back in the day, a chachar was mostly a lazybones avoiding work. Trans. MW

Becja

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was common for an antek to become a bek. Stefan Okrzeja was one, and so were Józef Piłsudski and later Prime Minister Walery Sławek… In underground slang, ‘bek’ was a Polish Socialist Party (PPS) fighter.

A woman fighter, such as Faustyna Morzycka or Wanda Krahelska, was called a ‘beczka’ (like the Polish word for barrel), and a group of beki (the plural of bek) were ‘becja’. Members of the PPS, whether they were beki or agitaje (agitators), were called ‘pepesiacy’ or ‘papuasi’. The latter variant, stemming from the Polish name for the inhabitants of the island of Papua, was particularly in vogue among PPS’s political enemies.

Beki were armed with bronki (Browning pistols; the term is similar to Bronek, a diminutive for the name Bronisław) and participated in eksy, or expropriations of Russian property in the name of the revolutionary cause. They also performed prowoki and szpiki, or committed assassinations of prowokatorzy (instigators) and szpiedzy (spies).

The conspirators were particularly fond of abbreviations: ‘dru’ was an underground printing shop (from Polish ‘drukarnia’) and ‘gra’ was a good trafficking spot (from Polish ‘granica’ – the border). Szwarc (contraband), which included flugblaty (leaflets) and bibuła (books; literally, blotting paper), was usually smuggled by dromaderki (female smugglers of illegal publications, called this after the dromedary camel).

Many beki and beczki suffered setbacks during their operations. After getting caught by a fijoł (a gendarme), a rewirus or a stójkus (both meant ‘cop’), they ended up in ul (jail or prison; literally, a beehive) and were then transported to cytla (Warsaw’s Citadel) or białe niedźwiedzie (Siberia; literally, white bears). As you can see, prison terminology was quite elaborate in this period.

Some of the most original terms include ‘duma’ (stemming from the name for the Russian Parliament, which was created in 1906 – but meaning also ‘pride’ in Polish) and ‘skałon’ (created on the basis of the General-Governor responsible for the bloody repressions which followed the 1905 revolution). Both of these words designated prison toilets.

Bradziażić

A birbant, a bon vivant, or a bibosz – somebody leading a riotous life, never one to avoid fun – was known to bradziażyć. In Old Polish, you could similarly say that such a person bisurmani się or lampartuje (all terms for partying). He would flanerować (roam) from pub to pub, often tempted to gamble. This usually made it easy for him to wyprztykać się z floty (run out of money)… but there’s no glik (luck) without risk!

As a result of bradziażenie, it’s easy to become a bradziaga. This word comes from Russian and designates a vagrant or globetrotter. Such a free-floating person was known in Lviv as a ‘makabunda’ (a distorted form of ‘vagabond’). In Silesia, a ragamuffin was a ‘haderlok’ or a ‘szlapikorc’, while in Poznań, he would be called a ‘łatynda’, ‘opypłus’ or ‘szuszwol’.

‘Menel’, a word for a ‘bum’, still used in all parts of Poland, has an interesting etymology. In one of his pre-war columns, Stefan Wiechecki described this dialogue, reportedly overheard in a courtroom:

‘He called me a “menelik”…’

‘But there’s nothing offensive about that. Menelik is the name of one of the kings of Abyssinia’, replied the judge.

‘Your Honour, it’s possible that it designates a king in Abyssinia, but here, in Szmulowizna, it’s something altogether different.’

The exotic dress of the Emperor of Ethiopia fascinated the Warsaw populace to such an extent that peculiarly dressed people began to be called by his name. Menelik II’s honourific was negus negesti (king of kings), and as a result, the slang term ‘nygus’ (loafer, good-for-nothing) became part of the Polish language.

The people of Warsaw also insulted each other (for no discernible reason) with the use of names such as kopernik and gambeta. While the former referred, of course, to the famed Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus, Leon Gambetta was a French statesman during the Second French Empire and the Third French Empire periods.

…

Jak bonie dydy

‘Jak bonie dydy’, ‘jak bum cyk-cyk’, ‘jak pragnę zdrowia’, ‘jak pragnę podskoczyć’, ‘jak babcię drypcie’ and ‘jak Bozię kocham’ don’t always make sense, but they all mean something like ‘scout’s honour’, ‘on my mother’s life’, or ‘I swear to God’. Each of these phrases is a synonym for the phrase ‘na słowo honoru’ (you have my word).

But such obiecanki cacanki (empty promises) can be misleading. What if the other person bierze nas pod pic (tries to hustle us) or wstawia farmazon (tries to pull one over on us; the Polish phrase stems from Russian ‘farmazirowat’’, which means to pretend or simulate)?

We all know someone who will swear pod chajrem (literally, risking a curse) that they will do something na zicher (for sure), but in the end, they’re sure to only ever fulfil that promise ‘na świętego Dygdy, co go nie ma nigdy’ – which would mean something along the same lines as ‘when the Cubs win the World Series’ did a couple of years ago.

Kapewu?

Questions like ‘Kapewu?’ can sometimes still be heard in Poland, but today, the phrase is mostly associated with the slang of the heroes of cult children’s TV series from the 1970s like Podróż za Jeden Uśmiech (A Trip for One Smile) and Stawiam na Tolka Banana (My Bet’s on Tolek Banan). Today, you’re more likely to be asked questions like ‘kumasz?’, ‘czaisz?’ ‘jarzysz?’, ‘kminisz?’ or ‘kapujesz?’. They all mean ‘do you get it?’ – and the last of them can teach us something about the etymology of kapewu.

The Polish ‘kapować’ probably came from the German capiren or Italian capire, meaning ‘to understand’. Forms of the latter, like ‘capito’ and ‘capisce’, are sometimes still present in Polish slang. For example, the rapper Włodi rhymed on the Molesta group’s debut album: ‘Źli i łysi to klima, kapiszi?’ (The bad and the bald are my squad, understood?).

Kapewu is a humorous, quasi-French form of the Polish ‘kapować’, created as analogous to phrases like ‘parlez-vous’ and ‘comprenez-vous’. Other examples of such French stylisation are two phrases present in an old Warsaw local dialect: ‘iść de pache’ (walk hand in hand) and ‘przepraszam za pardą’ (I’m sorry for interrupting or bothering you).

In the above-quoted book about schoolchildren’s slang from the late 1930s, Ignacy Schreiber lists several words for joy and approval. These include words like ‘byczo’, ‘morowo’, klawo’, but also a mysterious exclamation: ‘sikalafą!’. This stemmed from the French ‘si qu’a la font’, which is itself a slang term which means ‘that’s the way it goes’ or ‘that’s life’ (I’m tempted to write here: ‘that’s c’est la vie’ to preserve the spirit of other French loans in Polish slang).

But Poles willing to admit that something was cool had a broader repertoire: szafa gra (literally, the jukebox’s on), gra gitara (literally, the guitar plays), gites bomba and cymes pikes.

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by Joel | 22 December 2025 · 9:45 pm

Prominenten, VIP Nazi Hostages

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 67-68:

Kaltenbrunner, meanwhile, had also decided that hostages might offer a little bit of leverage in these days of the crumbling Third Reich. Throughout Germany were a number of high-profile prisoners, Prominenten, as they were termed. At the beginning of April Kaltenbrunner drew up a list of 139 men, women and children and ordered them all to be brought together. They were of seventeen different nationalities: there were Germans, French, British, Soviets, Czechs, Danish, Italians, Hungarians and even Greeks among them. They included the former French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, Admiral Miklós Horthy of Hungary, Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, a British Commando officer, and even General Franz Halder, the former Chief of Staff of the German Army and the architect of the Blitzkrieg in the west back in 1940. General Georg Thomas, the former head of the Economic Department of the OKW, was also on the list, as were a number of those now categorized as Sippenhaft – family members of disgraced Germans, such as the wife and children of Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who had attempted to assassinate Hitler the previous July.

It was an astonishingly eclectic bunch of VIP prisoners, now brought together by Kaltenbrunner. They were to be sent first to Innsbruck and from there to South Tyrol, where they would be hidden away in a remote mountain resort and guarded by the SS. And from there they could be used as a bargaining chip under the threat of execution, which, if necessary, Kaltenbrunner fully intended to carry out.

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by Joel | 26 November 2025 · 7:01 pm

Slovakia in 1939

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 27-29:

Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none. On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’. At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. (He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.) In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.

But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parceling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.

In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.

All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, side-curled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’.

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by Joel | 13 October 2025 · 8:17 am

Poland’s Eastern Border, c. 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 1390ff.

To understand better the genesis of the war and Piłsudski’s aims, it is essential to present a general background of this conflict. Between ethnic Poland and ethnic Russia stretches a belt of land several hundred kilometers wide, inhabited by a population that is neither Russian nor Polish. After a few centuries of political union with Poland, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Baltic nations, and even to some extent Belorussians succeeded in creating their own national movements at the turn of the twentieth century. Poland was the dominant political power until the end of the eighteenth century, but by the time of the second and third partitions of Poland (1793, 1795) Russia had taken over control of those areas. In spite of this, the Poles were a dominant element of both the economy and culture of those territories. For many of local leaders the tradition of a multinational Polish Kingdom, or Rzeczpospolita, with its privileges and freedom, was still an attractive example. All these matters were incomprehensible in the West, where all Polish claims to territories east of the Bug River were treated as imperialistic, even after two important declarations of the Bolshevik regime. In the Peace Decree of November 8, 1917, they announced:

The Government regards as an honest or democratic peace … an immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign land, without the forcible taking over of foreign nationalities) and without contribution.

The decree was issued at the Second All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Piotrogrod (St. Petersburg). Subsequent documents included the Declaration of the Rights of the Nations of Russia from November 15, 1917, guaranteeing the rights of self-determination to break away and to create independent states. Even more important was the decree of the Council of the Peoples Commissars from the August 29, 1918, about the annulment of the partition treaties in relation to Poland. According to many lawyers, these proclamations restored the status quo ante and legitimated Poland’s claims to lands within her 1772 borders. Of course, politicians in Warsaw realized the impossibility of openly claiming the return of those territories, mainly because of the awakening national consciences of the nations inhabiting these lands. Anyway, this option remained more or less in the propaganda arsenal.

Fundamentally, there were two approaches to the territorial shape of the state. The National Democrats headed by Roman Dmowski pursued the incorporation of the borderland areas into the Polish state and the gradual polonization of those people. Piłsudski countered Dmowski with his federation program, or the construction of national states friendly to Poland, which would fulfill the national aspirations of the Ukrainians and the Lithuanians and would separate Poland from Russian threat. In February 1919, following the German armies’ retreat from the “Ober-Ost,” the Bolshevik armies moved west. When they met Polish military outposts in the vicinity of Bereza Kartuska, armed conflict ensued. At the same time there were battles and skirmishes between Poles and Ukrainians in East Galicia. The conflict on this part of the frontline was complicated because there were at least three political entities that claimed principal state authority in Ukraine. It is common knowledge that until 1914 the Ukrainians, who did not have their own state, were divided by the Austro-Hungarian and Russian border. The eastern part of their national territory belonged to Russia and created a group of politicians opposing Russian domination. From this base came the later ally of Piłsudski and Ataman of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Semen Petlura. Part of western Galicia under Austro-Hungarian control, and the capital Lwów, was turned into the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic with Evhen Petrushewich at its head. Its policy was decidedly anti–Polish. In addition there was the Ukrainian communist movement controlled from Moscow and led by the Bulgarian born Christian Rakovski. This triangle remained unchanged, with the exception of attempts at cooperation by both of the national wings of the Ukrainian movement against Poland. There was also a small but relatively influential group around the “Hetmanate” government of Pavlo Skoropadski appointed at the end of World War I, when the Germans occupied Ukrainian territory.

The situation underwent some changes from the conclusion of the May–June offensive of 1919, in which the Polish Army forced the Ukrainians back beyond the Zbruch River. Shortly after, namely in August 1919, under the pressure of anti–Bolshevik armies, the so-called White Russians, Kiev fell. The Tsarist generals did not even want to hear of independence for Ukraine. They fought all factions of Ukrainian political life opting for the breakaway of Ukraine from Russia. The occupation of Kiev signified the extinguishing of all hope of an independent state. Quite simply the Ukrainians did not have the resources to fight both Poland and Russia. Petlura was first to grasp the political situation. Since it was impossible to fight all the real and alleged enemies of Ukraine, it was necessary to ally, even at the cost of territorial concessions, with a partner who guaranteed political independence. It was Piłsudski’s idea of a federation that seemed to offer the most promise of an independent Ukrainian state. After a few weeks of hesitation, Petlura, in November 1919, sent Andrij Livickij to Warsaw with the aim of preparing for talks about a military-political alliance. This was the origin of the Polish-Ukrainian alliance, which was finalized in April 1920 by a political pact on April 21 and a military convention on April 24. With this ally Pilsudski moved on Kiev. However, as time showed, the mirage of an independent Ukraine disintegrated. This happened as a result of the relative apathy of the population, which had suffered six years of war. It was also due to the impossibility of ensuring a longer period for the organization of a state apparatus and administration after the Polish armed forces had taken Kiev on May 7, 1920.

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Filed under Austria, Germany, Hungary, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, war

by Joel | 12 October 2025 · 8:57 am

From The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer, by Philipp Cross and Alexander Pfeifer (True Perspective Press, 2024), Kindle pp. 266-267: (The following passage is by the junior author, who supplies many backgrounders to help readers better understand his great-great-grandfather’s war diary.)

The recent and upcoming series of events are today known as ‘The Battle of Caporetto’ (The 12th Battle of The Isonzo), one of the most significant chapters of the Great War. When Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, they did so while influenced by the dreams of territorial conquest; and the desire to conquer the Italian-speaking areas around Trento and Trieste along their northeastern border. However, the Italian army had become fatigued towards the end of 1917. Insignificant progress had been made on its frontlines at the cost of severe casualties and a breaking economy. After 11 battles for the Isonzo in just over two years, the Italians anticipated a period of rest during the winter of 1917, but this did not happen. There were growing rumours of an attack by the Austro-Hungarians, and the Italians worked towards strengthening the mountainous combat areas around the town of Caporetto, today known as ‘Kobarid’ in Slovenia. Caporetto is positioned on the western side of the Isonzo River, with the frontlines lying six to seven miles east of the river as of October 1917. Due to the supposedly weakened Italian defence there, Caporetto had been chosen by the Central Powers as the main target for this significant offensive. The offensive, initiated on the 24th of October, would be seen as a complete disaster for the Italian army, also causing devastation nationwide.

In the early morning of the first day of the battle, the Italian trenches were smothered with poisonous gas, which left many occupants dead and caused others to flee. An intense artillery barrage would later follow, as well as mines being detonated beneath Italian strongpoints — Then, the infantry assault. The attacks were led by specialised stormtroopers who made full use of their light mortars, flamethrowers, machine guns and hand grenades. The Italians were in a state of complete disarray and fell into retreat due to this rapid and astonishing breakthrough. The attackers advanced up to 25 kilometres towards Italy on the first day without much resistance. By mid-afternoon, the command centre of the Italian army was still oblivious of the magnitude of this offensive, and Luigi Cadorna, Chief of General Staff, would not realise to what degree his troops were suffering until later in the evening — Munition shortages, wavering commanders, communication breakdown and lack of information — all working against the few trying their hardest to suppress the German and Austro-Hungarian assault. We know how these events unfolded from Alexander’s perspective, but just what exactly was it like through the eyes of someone on the other side?

Colonel Francesco Pisani was the acting general of the Foggia Brigade, who was present at Caporetto on the first day of the offensive. With orders for parts of the brigade to reinforce other units under pressure from the assault, the left-over troops headed towards Caporetto while passing the retreating men telling horror stories of the battles ahead. Pisani was to defend the Eiffel Bridge over the Isonzo with his troops, with a retreat soon after being ordered. The control of the town was then handed over to the Foggia Brigade. This is how he afterwards describes this series of events in his post-battle debriefing:

“There was total confusion. The road was almost entirely blocked by a mass of troops, carts, horses, trucks, artillery pieces, mules, and supplies. Officers’ cars were unable to make any headway, and it was very hard to execute or even transmit any orders. At this point, the various components of the Brigade became separated in the chaos, the freezing fog, and the rain. We also tried to organise transport for the wounded, many of whom had been abandoned in the road. We could hear them groaning through the fog, and it was imperative to move them since their presence was demoralising the defenders of the bridge.”

This battle will continue until late November 1917, and will eventually lead to enormous Italian losses and setbacks. They will lose over 5000 square miles of territory, over 40,000 dead and wounded, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers left scattered who will either be captured or will have deserted. The Italians will not just be subject to losses of soldiers and land. More than 10 million ration sets and over 6 million tins of fish or meat will be seized by the attacking forces, as well as hundreds of tonnes of dried pasta, cheese, and coffee; and 5 million litres of wine. Many thousand pieces of clothing, bedding, boots, artillery pieces, machine guns, horses and mules, and vehicles will be abandoned and lost — a huge loss for Italy considering the shortage of these vital supplies before this setback had even occurred.

The potential reasons for this disaster, and later defeat, already caused political quarrels within 48 hours of the first assault. Blame was placed on all sides of the political spectrum, as well as other factors. General Cadorna, who was already unpopular before the battle, blamed the Austro-German breakthrough on: “The inadequate resistance of units of the Second Army, cowardly retreating without fighting or ignominiously surrendering to the enemy”. However, this has been viewed as an unfair assumption by many, as the Foggia Brigade’s experience of poor defensive positioning, inconsistent orders, and scarce supplies represented the entire situation. Several descriptions indicate that the Italians fought courageously, for as long as they had ammunition and officers. However, as soon as these crucial needs were no more, and their enemy gained more momentum, it was hard to maintain an overall positive attitude.

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by Joel | 8 October 2025 · 6:33 pm

Entering Bukovina, August 1916

From The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer, by Alexander Pfeifer and Philipp Cross (True Perspective Press, 2024), Kindle pp. 155-156:

1.8.1916 We continue on a rapid climb in the eastern valley at 6 o’clock in the morning. The ascent begins after approximately three kilometres. The road, which was only built during the war, winds its way up the steep slope in countless wide windings. Around noon, we arrive close beneath the peak of the 1599-metre-high Copilasul [Rom. ‘The Small Child’] whose grassy summit is lined with field fortifications.

We pitch our tents on the grassy ridge that forms the border between Hungary and Bukovina, and which leads to the 1655-metre-high Stog [Rom. ‘hayrick’]. It swarmed with jägers from various battalions on the way there. There is a lovely view here of the Pip Ivan [‘Father Ivan’?] (2026 metres) and the Corbul [Rom. ‘The Raven’] (1700 metres). On the higher mountains, the woodland suddenly stops at the top, and the summit is a green peak of grass. Our field kitchens can’t drive to us at the top anymore. The food needs to be carried up in cooking crates using pack animals.

The last piece of bread has been consumed — nothing more to eat. I am sleeping in the grass during the afternoon. The field kitchens are to be dragged up via horse and carriage tonight. When it gets dark, an Austrian guard drives a large flock of sheep past and sells them for 1 Mark a piece. Many have even vanished unpaid. My company has pinched at least eight that will immediately be butchered and brought to the field kitchen. They were very beautiful animals with wonderful raven-black, shiny and long curly fur.

Dozens of watchfires are blazing up everywhere upon the heights, and you can hear singing from all around. It is a marvellous evening. Such a thing would be completely ruled out in the West, as the thick shells would be present within five minutes.

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Filed under Austria, food, Germany, Hungary, migration, military, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, war

by Joel | 2 August 2025 · 8:57 am

Rebuilding a Polish Nation in Galicia

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 504-507:

Unlike the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany or the Romanovs of Russia, the Habsburgs were Roman Catholic monarchs—and this is an important distinction. Furthermore, Habsburg piety was proverbial. All this meant that there should have been more common ground between the Poles and Austrians. At the same time, the Habsburgs had historically been the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (defunct as of 1806) and thus had a special relationship to the Germans of the rest of Europe.

As in all the partitions, the treatment of the new subjects was uneven. In the beginning, the Austrian authorities sought to civilize what they considered to be a backward land. Later, under the oppressive influence of Metternich, they sought to constrain what they thought was a revolutionary people—as witnessed in the debacle of the peasant jacquerie of 1846. (The incorporation of the Free City of Kraków into Galicia set the relatively thriving medieval capital of Poland back decades.) Metternich had seen fit to equate Polonism with revolution. Doubtless the new ruler of the Austrian Empire, Franz Joseph, felt similarly.

Only after a period of absolutism and Germanization did the tone change. This was brought about by several Austrian military defeats. The loss to the French in 1859 led to reforms at home that ultimately resulted in constitutional rule in Austria as of the early 1860s. Notably for the Poles, they were allotted their own provincial Seym as early as 1861.

The defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866 was even more significant. The defeat forced the Habsburgs to reach a new modus vivendi with the Hungarians, who had been chafing under Habsburg rule particularly since the end of their failed revolution of 1848–1849. In 1867, the two parties reached the famous compromise that led to the establishment of the Dual Monarchy. Henceforth, the country would be known as Austria-Hungary.

That the Habsburgs had been compelled to make concessions to one of their subject peoples was a fact not lost on the Poles. Already the failure of the January Insurrection under Russian rule led some important Galicians to reconsider their approach to the Habsburg monarchy. A new and influential group known as the Kraków Conservatives resolved to be loyal to the Habsburgs. Although initially skeptical, after several years the Polish elites of Galicia were won over to this idea. Even the defeat of Austria at the hands of Prussia did not shake their belief in the monarchy.

…

These developments led to a third, and most fruitful, phase for the Galician Poles. Unlike the disgruntled Czechs of Bohemia, Poles decided to participate in the Reichsrat or imperial council, a two-chambered parliament in Vienna. Polish elites sought to recast Galicia as a conciliatory, conservative, loyal province. All this boded well for the position of Poles within the Habsburg Empire. Indeed, during the Dual Monarchy, a number of Poles actually came to hold important posts in the imperial government, including that of prime minister.

Given a degree of autonomy, Galicia became a haven for the Poles—a place where Poles could be Poles while still being loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. This dual identity was facilitated by Article 19 of the Fundamental Laws, which specified that each people within the monarchy had the right to cultivate its own nationality and language. Poles, and especially the democrats who vied with the conservatives for influence within the province, availed themselves of this opportunity in various ways, including the celebrating of a series of national figures and historic anniversaries. Among the most noteworthy were the solemn reburial of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in the Wawel crypts in 1890 and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910, also celebrated in Kraków. The Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski had commissioned a massive monument commemorating that great medieval battle. These large public celebrations helped to bring Poles from all three partitioned lands closer together.

Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the best place to be a Pole—certainly if one wanted to be politically active—and unlike in the Prussian or German lands, politically active in Polish—was Galicia. One could breathe Polish air there—or, as was also remarked, the very stones spoke Polish. To be sure, in Vienna (in the Reichsrat) Poles used German for their interpellations. However, back in the province, in the Galician Seym, the Polish language ruled (although it should be noted that Ruthenian interpellations during the proceedings were written down, phonetically, in Latin—not Cyrillic—script). Polish nonetheless became the language of government, the language of schooling.

Galician Poles had a high degree of autonomy—all of which allowed them to school themselves in the art of governance, to work in the bureaucracy, to develop scholarly institutes and universities where Polish would be the language of instruction, and the like. They lived in a country in which they had parliamentary representation and the rule of law. This, combined with the rights of nationalities, suggests that, as of the last third of the nineteenth century, one might think of Galicia as the closest thing to a Piedmont that the Poles had (Piedmont, meaning the Italian province that initiated Italian unification in the 1860s). Could these advantages within Galicia, thus, help propel the Poles to their own unification?