Remembering Cold Days: The 1942 Massacre of Novi Sad, Hungarian Politics, and Society, 1942–1989

Abstract

In January 1942, Hungarian occupying forces conducted a series of raids against Serbian partisans in the occupied territory of Vojvodina, which Hungary had reannexed during the invasion of Yugoslavia several months before. The most eventful of these raids occurred in the city of Novi Sad, where over the course of three days Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes executed more than a thousand civilians, most of whom had no connection to the partisans. Witnesses both in the city and in neighboring Croatia (where the executions could be seen from the southern bank of the Danube) brought immediate attention to the atrocities, and it became one of the most high-profile crimes of the Second World War. The Novi Sad massacre and its long afterlife as a site of memory is the subject of Árpád von Klimó’s latest monograph.The first section of the book chronicles the raids and their immediate aftermath. Klimó describes how military leaders in Novi Sad summoned tens of thousands of people to appear before ad-hoc verification committees, over the protests of civilian authorities, who argued that the actions would destabilize the city. The action quickly devolved into “the random killing of innocent civilians,” with Jews making up a disproportionate number of the victims (27). This has led scholars to suggest that Novi Sad be considered a precursor to the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944. Klimó argues that Serbian–Hungarian territorial rivalry over the city, as well as the growing belief among members of Hungarian society that persecuting Jews furthered social justice and aimed to rectify “the unequal distribution of wealth” in the country, were important contributing factors to the atrocities in Novi Sad (38). However, he contends that the desire on the part of Hungarian officers to contribute to Hitler’s vision of a “New Europe” by copying German occupational strategies was the main reason for the massacre (41). Klimó’s detailed description of the historical event brings in new scholarship on borderlands, wartime atrocities, and perpetrator motivations that contextualize the Novi Sad massacre within the broader European historiography of the Second World War. From a meta perspective, it also serves as his own contribution to the memory of the massacre.The first section concludes with two chapters describing various responses to the Novi Sad massacres. These included a somewhat half-hearted attempt to hold officers responsible for the raid during the war, mass reprisals against ethnic Hungarians by Tito’s partisans, and a series of postwar trials in both Hungary and Yugoslavia. Klimó argues that the postwar trials had revenge as their main motivator, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of the “politics of retribution” explored by István Deák, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt, among others. The postwar period also saw a distortion of the memory of the crime, as many commentators, especially those aligned with the Hungarian Communist Party, attempted to exonerate the “Hungarian people” from any responsibility for war crimes, attributing them solely to class enemies or the country’s German minority (92).In the second part of the book, Klimó explores Novi Sad as a “site of memory” by tracing the development of popular memory of the massacre through the post-World War II decades. He begins with the Stalinist period in Hungary, where he argues that the “future-oriented Stalinist discourse” had little place for remembrance of the massacre, or the war in general (109). It was not until the 1960s that the Novi Sad massacre became widely discussed, due largely to the success of the novel Cold Days and its subsequent film version, which was one of the first explorations of personal responsibility for crimes committed in the name of the “institutional structures” of the state (142). By dramatizing the event, author Tibor Cseres and director András Kovács transformed Novi Sad into a “symbol of Hungarian guilt” and gave a lasting descriptor—the Cold Days—to the 1942 massacre (156).Remembering Cold Days concludes with a look at how memory of the Novi Sad massacre intersected with larger trends in historical memory in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. Klimó suggests that “radical shifts in Hungarians’ understanding of their past and in remembering the victims of mass violence” might be considered one of the domestic catalysts for regime change (153). While Novi Sad was one of the first instances of mass violence that was widely discussed, this process broadened in the 1980s to include remembrance of the Second World War in Hungary more generally. Klimó also touches upon contested interpretations of the Novi Sad massacre and the postwar reprisals in Yugoslavia, and the 2011 trial of Sándor Képiró for his role as an officer during the raids, which brought a renewed focus to the Cold Days in the twenty-first century.Remembering Cold Days moves forward the historiography of a number of fields, including the history of World War II violence, postwar trials, the cultural history of postwar Hungary, domestic and international politics of memory, and 1989 regime change. It also effectively demonstrates the many ways in which collective memory manifests—politically, juridically, artistically, historically—and weaves these strands together into a compelling narrative. Klimó’s work offers plenty of avenues for future research: the specifically Jewish aspects of the memory of Novi Sad, the postwar massacres of Hungarians and Germans in Vojvodina, and the distinct role of the Cold Days in the much broader memory wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia all deserve deeper investigation than this one monograph can provide. In particular, Klimó’s contention that changes in historical memory in Hungary helped motivate regime change has implications for Central and Eastern European historiography more broadly, and will hopefully lead other scholars to take up similar case studies in order to determine whether this was a regional or even continent-wide phenomenon in the leadup to 1989.