Interwar Subcarpathian Rus, Hungarian Annexation, and Hungarian Rule Before the German Occupation (c. 1900s to March 18, 1944)

Epilogue - Chapter 1

Related to testimony: Lanka Ilkow’s 1991 Voice/Vision interview, her 1996 Shoah Foundation interview, and her German restitution statement.

I have worked from my own knowledge of the scholarship and published memoirs, and from the sources listed at the end of this page.

The land she was born into

Lanka was born in 1920 in a village in what Czechoslovakia called Podkarpatská Rus, Subcarpathian Rus. The state itself was only about a year and a half old. The region had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary for roughly a thousand years until the Allies detached it in 1919 through the Treaty of Saint-Germain, and Hungary formally accepted the loss in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Czechoslovakia promised the region autonomy but did not deliver it for almost two decades. It was the poorest and least industrialized part of the republic, mountainous and agricultural, with Rusyn villagers, a Hungarian-speaking minority in the south, and a large Jewish population of just over 100,000, roughly one person in seven by the 1930 census.

This explains several details in her account that can seem contradictory. She says she was born in Czechoslovakia but attended a “Russian school” and spoke “Carpata Russian.” The language was Rusyn, an East Slavic vernacular of the Carpathians. The Czechoslovak state supported Rusyn-language village schooling alongside a contested debate over whether the people were Russians, Ukrainians, or a separate nation. Because she learned Czech and Rusyn at school and spoke Yiddish at home, she had no Hungarian as a child. She began to pick up words after the Hungarians arrived, enough by 1944, as she says in her 1996 interview, to speak for herself to a policeman, but she told Dr. Bolkosky in 1991 that she learned the language properly from Hungarian-speaking women in the camps. That suggests how little the state touched her village’s daily speech even after five years of Hungarian rule. The interviewer called her priest “Greek Orthodox,” but a priest who married before ordination belongs to the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, which was the dominant church of the region, follows the Eastern rite, accepts Rome’s authority, and ordains married men. Her description of the married priest, his twin children, and a daughter who became a nun fits that church. The Thursday religion lessons, when Jewish children were sent out, reflect Czechoslovak school practice of confessional instruction, which she experienced as separation but not hostility.

In her 1996 interview she adds that the church stood on the hill across from her family’s house, and that on Sundays the priest said the Jews had killed Jesus. Her father argued with him about it, citing the Bible, and she remembered fights with Gentiles over Jesus, even as she insisted that most people were not anti-Semitic. Teaching of that kind was the background of ordinary village life, and it matters for how neighbors behaved later.

A village with four Jewish families

The Jewish presence in Subcarpathia was dense in towns like Ungvár (Uzhhorod), Munkács (Mukachevo), and Beregszász, which were centers of Hasidic life and of rival Zionist and Agudah institutions, including the Hebrew gymnasium in Munkács. Her family lived a different, rarer pattern. A village of about five hundred with only a handful of Jewish families was common in the rural districts, but Jews who farmed, kept livestock, and employed Gentile laborers were unusual in the broader Jewish world. Her grandfather’s hundreds of sheep and the sheep’s-milk cheese, brynza, belong to the shepherding economy of the Carpathian highlands, in which Jewish families sometimes acted as owners and merchants of the product. This shaped how she was treated. As an employer’s daughter in a society with deep class hierarchy, she was “looked up to,” which is how she explains the absence of hostility. Historians of rural Jewish life in the Carpathians describe a similar mix of interdependence and social distance. It was generally peaceful when trade and work bound people together, and it could turn quickly when state policy changed.

Her religious life matches Orthodox village practice in the region: walking to a neighboring village’s house with a minyan, a boy’s melamed but only the aleph-bet for girls, and a Sabbath observance that meant she stayed home from the Saturday school sessions and studied her lessons privately, which the teacher accepted. The anecdotes about the Swiss-born teacher, who struck her over a flower, and about the Greek Catholic priest, show the pre-1938 environment as one of schoolhouse discipline and minor incidents, not organized persecution. Before the annexation she reports one hostile family, whose son hit her at school. The orchard vandalism came after the Hungarians arrived, which is consistent with the pattern in which a change of state policy emboldened local hostility. Historians generally agree that Czechoslovakia, whatever its failings, offered Subcarpathian Jews legal equality and room to organize politically.

Her grandfather’s warning

Her grandfather’s deathbed instruction to leave Europe, which she dates to when she was twelve, around 1932, and his song about the Cossacks, belong to a layer of memory that predates Nazism. A man born around 1847 would have lived through the 1881 pogroms in the Russian Empire, the Russian army’s incursions into the Carpathians in 1914 and 1915 during the First World War, the revolutionary chaos of 1918 and 1919, including Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic with its red banners, and the waves of pogroms in Ukraine from 1918 to 1921. The red flags in her memory of the song suggest that the Cossacks in his stories came from the revolutionary period. Her grandfather’s cycle of “every twenty-five, thirty years they kill Jews” is not mystical. It reflects what a long-lived Carpathian Jew actually saw.

His advice to write to America collides with American law. The Immigration Act of 1924 had cut the quota for Czechoslovakia to a few thousand per year, and an affidavit from a relative did not guarantee a visa. In her 1996 interview she adds that she had papers for America and that her parents, who wanted to see their eldest daughter under the wedding canopy and feared for a young girl traveling alone, would not let her go. The interview does not say whether those papers were an actual visa, and even a sponsored emigrant needed a place under the quota. In the 1930s, and again after the Evian Conference of 1938, the quota system was the main barrier for Central European Jews, not their lack of foresight. When Lanka later says the American relatives were slow to rescue her, the postwar quota and affidavit system, with its bureaucratic requirements, is the real context.

What she knew about Hitler and when

She says her community knew of Hitler “in ‘32.” Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, but the Nazi Party’s electoral rise in 1930 to 1932 was widely discussed. Her formulation, “they’re killing there, they’re not killing here, so nobody cared,” is a retrospective summary, and it matches what many survivors say about the gap between knowledge and belief. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the November 1938 pogrom, Kristallnacht, were public events, and the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 turned the question into a local one, because it sacrificed Czechoslovakia’s defenses.

Munich, the Vienna Award, and the annexations

Her dates for when Hungary arrived need unpacking because two separate events are collapsed into “‘39.” After Munich, Czechoslovakia became a weakened federal state. Slovakia and Ruthenia gained autonomy in October 1938. On November 2, 1938, the First Vienna Award, arbitrated by Nazi Germany’s Ribbentrop and Fascist Italy’s Ciano, gave Hungary the ethnically Hungarian southern strips of Slovakia and Ruthenia, including Ungvár, Munkács, and Beregszász, and Ruthenia’s capital moved from Uzhhorod to Khust. Hungarian troops entered in the following days. Ungvár itself therefore came to Hungary in November 1938. Lanka dates the arrival of the Hungarians in her village to 1939, and I treat it as part of the second wave.

The remainder of Subcarpathia fell in March 1939. Slovakia declared independence under German protection on March 14, and when Germany occupied Prague on March 15, Carpatho-Ukraine, led by Avgustyn Voloshyn, declared its own independence for a single day. Hungarian forces invaded and overran the region in days against a small Ukrainian paramilitary resistance, and fought a brief border conflict with Slovakia later in March. Her first husband’s town, Velykyi Bereznyi, lay in this remainder, and so, I believe, did her village. The Friday scene of soldiers seizing challahs fits the March advance, since March 17, 1939 was a Friday, and it was a local memory of troops requisitioning food during an occupation.

Her opinion that the Hungarians “were worse than the Germans” is hindsight. The Hungarian state she encountered between 1939 and March 1944 was neither the German regime nor the later deportation machine, but it was legally and socially hostile to Jews, which is the paradox her story captures.

The Hungarian legal order and its effects on her family

The annexed Jews entered a state that had already passed antisemitic legislation. The First Jewish Law of 1938 capped Jewish participation in professions at 20 percent. The Second Jewish Law of 1939 defined Jews by race and cut quotas to 6 percent. The Third Jewish Law of 1941 forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Hungary also reduced the number of Jewish-owned trade licenses, transferred businesses to non-Jews, and in 1942 passed a law forcing Jews to give up agricultural land. Her interviews do not describe her family losing land under the 1942 law, but it is a significant risk to flag, because a Jewish farm family would have been directly exposed. In 1991 she also mentions a Gentile who set up a shop in his own name after Jewish shops were taken away, so that the family would have something, which fits the pattern of Jewish businesses being preserved in non-Jewish names to survive. Her uncle’s timber business, which shipped wood to Hungary and “made a good living,” shows that some Jewish enterprises survived through personal connections.

Wartime economic controls explain the food details. Hungary introduced rationing and grain regulation, including requirements that flour be milled at a coarse extraction rate, which makes her claim that white flour was banned and that her father produced it for challahs on the black market plausible. The same controls explain the black market in sugar and cloth in which she traded, carrying goods on her body to sell in Ungvár. Farming families were insulated from hunger by their own produce. That is why she says the Hungarians “didn’t take away the foods,” while the army requisitioned horses for the military from Jews first and then from non-Jews, as she observed. The requisition of draft animals was a real and heavily documented burden on peasant farms.

Her statement that Jews were forbidden to perform shehitah, ritual slaughter, belongs to the same picture. Wartime meat regulations, licensing problems, and local enforcement made ritual slaughter difficult and became harsher over time, so her experience of surveillance by gendarmes and her use of a sympathetic Gentile butcher are consistent with wartime reality.

The gendarmes deserve a note. The Hungarian gendarmerie, the rural police, was a feared institution. They appear in her account in three roles that seem inconsistent but are not: as officials who took goods from a store, as men who ate at Jewish tables, and as the force that beat her brother in September 1943. The same men who in 1944 carried out the ghettoization and loading of Jews onto trains were already embedded in village life.

Martin’s flight to the Soviet Union

Martin Ilkow’s flight to the Soviet Union appears in her account as a family detail, but it fits a political pattern. The Communist Party was strong in Subcarpathia in the 1930s and attracted many Jewish youths in a region of poverty and discrimination. After Hungary’s annexation, communists were targeted. The gendarmes decided Martin was a communist because of the way he talked, and he was not one, but the threat “we know what you are” was the kind that precipitated flight. Crossing into the Soviet Union offered no safety in itself. Many who fled were arrested at the border by the NKVD and sent to labor camps, while others joined Czechoslovak military units that formed on Soviet soil. He did not know what had happened to the Jews of his home country until he was allowed to return in 1947. His hometown, Humenné, lay in the Slovak state, whose Jews were deported in 1942.

The 1941 expulsion of “alien” Jews and what it meant for Morris

Her account of Slovak-born men being “taken to Poland” and killed, and of the young woman who came back with a story of Jews forced into a river and shot, points to one of the first large-scale massacres of the Holocaust. It holds up against the record in outline while diverging on geography. Shortly after Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union on June 27, 1941, the agency responsible for foreign nationals decided to deport foreign Jews. Jews who could not readily establish Hungarian citizenship were equally vulnerable, and many Jewish communities, especially in Transcarpathian Ukraine, were deported in their entirety. The first decree was issued on July 12 by the foreigners’ police, and about 18,000 people were deported in July and August, including Jews from Budapest, who were brought to Kőrösmező from the West Railway Station in sealed wagons. At Kőrösmező, near the old Hungarian-Polish border, the Hungarians transferred them across the frontier and handed them over to the Germans. By August 10 about 14,000 had been deported, with another 4,000 handed over later in the month, and they were forced to march from Kolomyja to Kamenets-Podolsk. On August 26 the deportees were ordered to assemble at the city’s train station on the pretext that they would be returned home or resettled in Palestine. Between August 26 and 28, detachments of the Einsatzgruppen and troops under SS General Friedrich Jeckeln killed the deportees along with the local Jewish population, the killers including Jeckeln’s staff company, Order Police Battalion 320, and Ukrainian auxiliaries. Jeckeln’s report counted 23,600 dead, among them about 16,000 who had been expelled from Hungary, and other counts put the number from Hungary between 14,000 and 18,000. Kamenets-Podolsk | Holocaust Encyclopedia +7

Her details differ from the record in ways that are easy to explain. The killing was done at pits, not from trucks into a river, and Kamenets-Podolsk lies in the Dniester basin, so the “Dnieper” is probably a conflation. The “Poland” she says the men were taken to is Galicia, the part of prewar Poland through which the deportees were sent. The returned young woman’s story of chaos on the road and flight is consistent with the fact that some deportees escaped or were sent back to Hungary. hnn

I believe this is what happened to her first husband, Morris Lebovic. He was born in Slovakia, which after 1939 made him a foreigner in Hungary. According to her 1996 interview his brother’s family was deported in the same operation, and one of the daughters came back. He was taken, then sent to Budapest, and from there to “Poland,” which is the route the deportees took. She says in 1991 that the Slovaks taken in 1941 were shipped to Poland and killed there, and nothing was ever heard from him. Two things do not fit neatly. She describes his removal as forced labor and says she bought him a reprieve of several weeks for 500 pengő, which is not how the alien police’s roundups are usually described, and in 1996 she says the longest he was ever home was six months. A foreign-born man could be called up for labor and then handed over, or paid off temporarily, and corruption touched both systems, but I have no document that settles which of them happened to him. No record of his name among the victims has been found, which is expected, since Jeckeln’s report gave totals and not names. On balance, the timing, the route, and her own understanding at the time make Kamenets-Podolsk the most probable place of his death, in the last days of August 1941.

Elie Wiesel’s Night contains the closest parallel in a better-known text. Moishe the Beadle, deported from Sighet in 1941 as a foreign Jew, escaped and returned to warn his neighbors, and was ignored. Lanka’s remark that people did not believe the story, and that only later did they believe it was happening, follows this documented pattern of rumors from the eastern killing zone being dismissed as exaggeration.

Refugees, rumors, and her father’s family in Slovakia

The Polish refugee in her account, the photographer with the broken arm, belongs to the earlier context of the well over 100,000 Polish refugees who fled into Hungary after the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. Hungary admitted them, which gave rural Jewish communities early firsthand news of German brutality. The 1942 Slovak deportations, in which about 58,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz and other killing sites, added to the information. Her father’s family came from Konus, in Slovakia, and her second husband’s hometown of Humenné lay in the same state. Her testimony does not say which of her father’s relatives were deported in 1942.

Labor service, buyouts, and her brother’s death

Hungarian Jewish men were not drafted into the army as soldiers but were conscripted into the Labor Service System, which grew from the 1939 defense law. Jewish men of military age served in unarmed battalions under army officers, and in the spring of 1942 about 50,000 were sent to the Ukrainian front, where more than 40,000 Jewish labor servicemen died in all, especially during the Soviet Don offensive of early 1943. Her father’s service in 1942, from spring until fall near Budapest, fits agricultural or military labor behind the lines and his release before winter. By September 1943 he was again at a labor post when his son died. At around forty-four years old he was at the upper end of the age range, which in Hungary rose in wartime. The call-up by telegram or written notice, and the practice of paying to be exempted, are well documented. Her purchase of Morris’s reprieve for 500 pengő belongs to a real, corrupt system in which officials accepted bribes, though the relief was temporary and the second call-up is typical.

Her brother Herschel’s death in September 1943 needs careful treatment. The levente was the compulsory Hungarian paramilitary youth program for boys aged twelve to twenty-one, and Jewish boys were excluded from or segregated within it, sometimes assigned to labor duties. Her description of him standing guard and being beaten by gendarmes, with a medical conclusion of “heart attack,” matches the pattern of local officials concealing violence behind a medical explanation. The visit of non-Jewish neighbors to mourn, and the mayor’s remark at the roundup in 1944 that Herschel was lucky to be buried at home, also reflect rural reality: personal sympathy coexisted with passivity toward state violence. It also anticipates 1944, when the same neighbors “ran to see” the Jews being taken.

The Kállay years and why she never saw a German

Her statement that Germans “didn’t come into the villages” and that she “never saw a German” until Auschwitz is accurate and historically important. Between March 1942 and March 1944, Prime Minister Miklós Kállay’s government kept Hungary in the war on Germany’s side but resisted German demands to deport Hungarian Jews. As a result Hungary’s Jewish population, roughly 800,000 with the annexed territories and converts, was by 1944 the largest surviving Jewish community in Axis Europe, even though it was subject to discrimination, labor service, and violence. This produced a false security that Lanka reflects when her family believed they would be taken only “to work.” The German occupation came on March 19, 1944. A small German unit under Adolf Eichmann arrived, but the work of identifying, concentrating, and deporting Jews was done by Hungarian officials and gendarmes, which accounts for her repeated insistence that “the Hungarians took us, not the Germans.”

Sources for the 1941 section: USHMM, “Kamenets-Podolsk,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kamenets-podolsk. Wikipedia, “Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamianets-Podilskyi_massacre. History News Network, Karl Pfeifer, “‘Without Pressure from Germany’: Hungary’s Revisionist History of the Deportation of 18,000 Jews,” https://www.hnn.us/article/without-pressure-from-germany-hungarys-revisionist. Zachor Foundation, “Massacre at Kamenets-Podolsk,” https://www.zachorfoundation.org/timeline/massacre-at-kamenets-podolsk/. Yad Vashem, “Munitions Depot in Kamenets-Podolsk,” https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/untold-stories/killing-site/14626226. JNS, Bernice Lerner, “Eighty years ago, Hitler’s first large-scale mass murder,” https://www.jns.org/opinion/eighty-years-ago-hitlers-first-large-scale-mass-murder/