Deportation from the Szeged Brick Factory in the Summer of 1944 Facts About and Survivors’ Interpretations of the Functioning of the Special Jewish Council
Deportation from the Szeged Brick Factory in the Summer of 1944 Facts About and Survivors’ Interpretations of the Functioning of the Special Jewish Council

Summary/Abstract: To this day, the role of Jewish functionaries during the Holocaust remains highly controversial among scholars and a broader public. Immediately after the war, Jewish survivors already attached particular importance to the so-called Jewish collaborators. In the displaced persons’ (DP) camps, Jewish courts tried Jewish functionaries, and in Israel the “Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law” (1950) was designed to filter out collaborators, primarily from among immigrants. This article presents a case in Hungary. Immediately after the war, in May 1945, the Szeged Jewish Community launched an investigation against some members of the community. These members had, before the deportation of the local Jews in the summer of 1944, and on German orders, selected the persons to be deported on various deportation trains. The study shows that the survivors did not find the forced collaboration itself unacceptable. What they could not accept was that the members of the committee had carried out their task arbitrarily, with some redefinition of the sorting criteria. In this way, according to the survivors, they were actively involved in determining the fate of the deportees.

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