To the Editor:

I was happy to discover, that you published an article about my hometown, a “sullen, economically depressed place.” (“A Town’s Hidden Memory” July 21, 2002) Miskolc, I assume, rarely gets publicity in an American national newspaper, and I understand why. It is a small town (population: 182,220) according to American standards, at the far end of a faraway country, where great things of global interest do not happen. But an historian should still be careful to base her opinion about a place like Miskolc on well-investigated facts. Kati Marton fails to do so.

The Holocaust was a horrible tragedy, which claimed the lives of millions of Jews, including 600,000 from Hungary. The Jewish population of Miskolc was also decimated. It is a catastrophe. But it is not that well known, that Hungary was a refuge for the Jews from all over Europe up until the German occupation on March 15, 1944. When the deportation began, Hungary was an occupied country not acting on its own. Deportation, during which catholic priests, gypsies, homosexuals were also transported to concentration camps, was not with the consent of the rest of the citizens.

Ms. Marton seems to be unaware of the fact that prior to that dismal date Jews enjoyed hospitality in my town. Jews settled in Miskolc between 1710 and 1725, and founded their first school in 1738. The synagogue was built between 1856-63, so Ms. Marton’s date is not correct. It is probably worth mentioning that Miskolc was home to the only Jewish teacher’s college in Hungary from 1928. According to the census of 2001 there are 12 871 Jews in Hungary,1% of the total population) 445 of which live in Northern Hungary

Unfortunately, Ms. Marton did not realize that there is a plaque remembering the deportation. It is placed on the wall of one of the houses that stand on the place of the Jewish ghetto in the town center.

I am sorry to read that the author believed that the youth are not shown the synagogue. I myself was taken there by my schoolteacher, and I still remember the rabbi talking about the building and his religion.

The sentence: ”[the concrete tablets] were, in fact, designed to obscure the towering synagogue partly behind them” is equally not correct. The synagogue is such a massive building that it would take David Copperfield to hide it away. The three-meter tall slabs are not that tall, as you can get a good view of that building from the neighboring “’Heroes’ Square’, a sorry, ugly paved square.” These slabs are merely examples of the bad taste of socialist architecture. The very entrance to the yard of synagogue is on a busy street.

When I was reading this article I checked my map whether the synagogue was marked. It was. Ms Marton should have bought a street map of Miskolc for less than a dollar to avoid the “trouble finding the synagogue.”

Answering the author’s question, where my grandparents were in June 1944, I can tell that they were living in Munkács (now a town in the Ukraine) before fleeing to Hungary after that region was connected to the Soviet Union. The inhabitants of Miskolc, or rather that of Hungary, seem to be “soulless” because the generation that you expect to see the plaques commemorating the victims of Holocaust was raised by a generation whose parents also suffered in World War II. The horrors of the war plagued the whole nation, not only the Jews.

Why did the author make so many errors in her article? If she was to look for all the information she needed in museums or the archives or simply on the Internet (even the service hours are posted there) and not at a low-priced restaurant, she could have been better off. It is difficult to learn about a foreign town and culture from a McDonald’s.

Ms Miskolc are “ignorant of their own history.” Why? Because 45 years of socialism also meant teaching lies about history. The author is correct that we have to reckon with our past. But I don’t think that articles like Ms. Marton’s help in this. An objective, unbiased opinion would be well appreciated that strives for reconciliation and not stirring up ill-grounded emotions. What leads to Holocaust and genocide, after all? Ignorant people not willing to understand other peoples but ready to jump to conclusions and prejudge them without thinking twice.

László Jancsó