Hungary’s Unlikely Chronicler of Jewish History

The tragic story of the Jews who lived in Bekes County, a mostly poor and rural region in southeastern Hungary, 120 miles from Budapest, was grimly echoed to greater or lesser degrees throughout a large section of Central and Eastern Europe.

A once active and thriving community had been decimated during the Second World War. Most of the Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust immigrated to places far away from the region: Israel, the United States and Australia.

Only a smattering remained in Bekes County following the war and into the country’s Communist era. As the decades past, the number of Holocaust survivors living here dwindled.

Nevertheless, their story, as well as the history of the formerly thriving community, is still being penned, and by the most unlikely of chroniclers.

Istvan Balogh, a 22-year-old university student, hails from a non-Jewish though multi-ethnic Hungarian family. Despite his deceptively young age, he is the author of two books (in Hungarian) about Jewish life in Bekes country.

“Before I was even 10 years old, my grandmother would tell me stories about Jewish life here from the time when she was young girl. She recounted how her best friend, a Jewish girl named Rozsi Leichter, was taken away on a train, only to perish later at a concentration camp,” Balogh said.

“From that point forward, I was drawn to the story of this community that once live here amid my own community, yet was no longer here,” he added.

He started work on his first book, about Jewish life in his hometown of Totkomlos, a small community of 6,600 people, when he was a mere 13 years of age. His passion for the subject remained throughout his adolescence and his volume was subsequently published by the time he was 18.

Balogh’s fascination with the story of the Jews of Bekes County and Judaism as a whole remained so deep in fact that, at the time he had graduated from high school, he enrolled and was accepted at the Hungary’s University of Jewish Studies in Budapest, where he is in his third year.

He has just completed his second book, a painstakingly researched tome, about the Jews from the entire region of Bekes County. In it, Balogh goes into great detail about hundreds of Jewish buildings and landmarks within dozens of communities stretched across Bekes Country. He describes the location and the current status of the landmarks, whether the local councils have made efforts to maintain them or whether they have fallen into disrepair.

“Every weekend I would come home and plot out which city, town or village I would go to. I would ask officials in the settlements where the Jewish landmarks were. If they were in a bad state, I would ask them why the situation was this way,” Balogh said, retelling his experiences meeting with town officials who were often two or three times his age

“I also searched through local registry offices, traced the names on tombstones, spent hours poring over documents in local libraries, anything that he could use to find connections between those people who lived in Bekes county and who could help me make the picture more complete,” he went on to say.

Through these sources, Balogh was able to gather the addresses of Holocaust survivors and relatives of victims and former residents of the region. He wrote numerous letters and tried to establish a correspondence with scores of people who had a connection to Jewish life in Bekes County.

The reaction from those who wrote back to the young, non-Jewish compiler of their history was positive, if not enthusiastic, according to Balogh. From the many responses he received, he was able to piece together a framework of what had once transpired in this area, now mostly devoid of any form of Jewish life.

“The letters which came back to me were not only invaluable in the research I was performing, but they also helped bring in a human element which was mostly missing in my desire to learn more about what had taken place here,” he said.

Some of what Balogh has delved into in his book can also be found on his Web site where he documents the location of dozens of Jewish cemeteries, the number of tombstones situated in each and their present condition.

As for professional ambitions, besides the near certainty that he will produce more books, Balogh hopes to become a professor of Jewish studies.