Marta Munzer – Every Person Has A Name (Lost Lands #180)

In 1944, one out of every three people in Oradea (Nagyvarad) was Jewish. The main Oradea Ghetto setup in the spring of that year to imprison the city’s Jewish population prior to deportation held 27,000 Jews. Another ghetto in the city held 8,000 Jews from outlying areas. Nine trains between May 23rd and June 27th liquidated the ghettos. All of these raw numbers have one thing in common, they are faceless. Individual identities of the victims are crushed beneath the sheer weight of numbers. Trying to distinguish the individual Jews from Nagyvarad who died gives the victims a semblance of an identity. The names include notables such as Eva Heyman, who left a diary covering three and a half months in 1944, from prior to the German occupation, all the way up until her deportation. Other names are less well known or in some cases were lost amid the unending catastrophe. A few of these falls into the pages of history and are recovered much later, including Eva Heyman’s favorite childhood friend.

Small Print – The Book of Names

In the autumn of 2018, I visited Auschwitz. The visit was not as shocking as I imagined because I had already visited another concentration camp, Sachsenhausen north of Berlin. Every concentration camp is different in many ways, but the end result was always the same. Tragedy, trauma, death, and sorrow. The most unsettling aspect of my experience at Auschwitz was visiting the remnants of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. That iteration was a factory of death on an industrial scale. Standing on the platform beside the train tracks where hundreds of thousands of Jews were offloaded and then herded to gas chambers was disturbing in the extreme. To the Nazis they were little more than human cargo to be dispensed with as they pleased. The individualization of the victims was lost among the mass numbers of dead. The Nazis stole the victims’ identities in life and death. The insidious nature of the Final Solution has never been clearer to me.

My experience at Auschwitz II-Birkenau was a counterpoint to what I found at Auschwitz I, the barracks which were the camp’s initial iteration and administrative headquarters. This part of Auschwitz is most memorable for the gate above the entrance that infamously greeted prisoners with the message “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Works Sets You Free). I had seen the gate so many times in photos that it looked eerily familiar. Instead, my most memorable experience came in Block 27 of the barracks. That was where I discovered “The Book of Names” exhibit. This was the largest book I had ever seen, and I hope to never see another one like it again. There are 4.8 million names out of the 5.8 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The book is daunting. The oversized pages listed name after name of victims in small print. In some cases, I would see the same twenty or more times. My eyes would glaze over while reading them. The lines ran together as my mind numbed.

Identity Crisis – Erasure & Recovery

Each of the names listed multiple times in the Book of Names were distinct individuals. This repetition communicated the breadth and death of the Holocaust. The Nazis and their fellow fascists wanted to eliminate every Jew and erase them from history. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, set out to right this historic wrong. The idea behind the Book of Names exhibit is what makes it so effective. The book was developed from the commemoration project, “Every Person Has A Name” by Yad Vashem. The project identified the victim’s names and basic biographical information. Those whose lives were stolen from them by the Nazi’s murderous machine were given their identities back. What is a person without a name? A person who never existed according to the Nazis. The “Every Person Has A Name” project proves otherwise. This project is as much for the dead as it is the living. It offers proof that the victims existed and makes them more than a statistic. If I ever return to Auschwitz, there is one name I plan on looking for. Marta Munzer of Nagyvarad who without Eva Heyman’s diary might well be lost to history. Which brings me back to my itinerary for the lost lands beyond Hungary’s borders.

Oradea is the place on my itinerary with the highest highs, and the lowest of lows. In my opinion, it is the most beautiful city in the world. The secessionist and Art Nouveau architecture integrates fantasy with reality. On the other hand, Oradea has some very dark history that all the radiant architecture can never erase. That history begins with the consternation caused in Hungary by losses due to the Treaty of Trianon. This meant Hungarian Nagyvarad became Romanian Oradea. What made the loss of Nagyvarad so galling for many Hungarians is that it was just over the border from Hungary. It had a majority ethnic Hungarian population. None of that mattered to the treaty makers in Paris. The losses from Trianon proved humbling for Hungarians and at the same time, incited them to work towards recovering what they felt had been stolen from them. This led to two decades of simmering tensions with Romania.

Middle Course – A Fine Line

Caught in the middle of this low intensity conflict was the Jewish population of Oradea. They overwhelmingly identified as Hungarians. Conversely, there was no love lost in Hungary towards Jews who were persecuted during the interwar period, especially during the counter-revolution against the communists which brought the right-wing regency of Miklos Horthy to power in Hungary. Unfortunately, the Jews now in Oradea had to deal with Romanian anti-Semitism as well. No matter what happened, Jews in the city were forced to straddle the divide in a no-win situation. They were citizens of Romania unless Hungary recovered the city. That is precisely what happened in 1940, when Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany paid a large dividend with Northern Transylvania rejoining the country. Oradea’s Jews were back in Hungary and once again citizens. That was not quite true for some Jews like Marta Munzer.