Esztergom is a town on the Danube in northern Hungary, with a population of between 17 000 and 22 000 in the 1930s and 1940s. According to a 1932 survey, there were approximately 250 ‘Gypsies’ living in and around the town. In the 1920s and 1930s, the local Roma population was resettled several times by the local council. In all cases, the resettlement involved violent measures against these families. In 1939, the Roma were finally relocated near the flood protection embankment. In the resettlement process, the aim was not only to keep the members of the Roma community as far away from the inhabitants of the town as possible and to isolate them as much as possible from them, but also to keep the ‘Gypsies’ away from the places frequented by tourists.
Ghettoisation
On 22 July 1942, the local town council adopted a regulation on the inhabitants of the ‘Gypsy colony’ of Esztergom. Preparation of the decree began in 1939, and its final version was modelled on a similar decree issued in Salonta (today Romania, from 1940 to 1944 Hungary under the name Nagyszalonta) in 1941. The decree designated the settlement as the exclusive place of residence for all ’Gypsies’ living in Esztergom.1Members of the community are often referred to in archival sources of the era as ‘tent-dwelling Gypsies’ (sátoros cigányok), which refers primarily to their migratory rather than residential conditions. They were allowed to leave the settlement ‘only for the purpose of labour service’. Among other things, the decree even prohibited them from sitting down on benches in the town. The document defined who was to be considered a ’Gypsy’ in the following way: ‘All persons of Gypsy origin and all persons living with Gypsies, irrespective of their origin, shall be considered Gypsies.’2HNA KECA V. 1. a. 203/1942. This definition shows that the authorities of the time regarded Roma communities on the basis of ‘race’ and as a closed social group into which one could sink and from which one could not emerge.3Although the regulation stated that ‘a gypsy who has a livelihood and is able to rent a decent apartment or buy a house can move out of the gypsy settlement at any time with the permission of the mayor’, this was not possible due to the almost total segregation of the local Roma community. Cf. HNA KECA V. 1. a. 203/1942.
The researcher János Bársony (born 1951) drew attention to the Esztergom decree by interpreting the closed settlement as a ghetto.4Bársony et al., Pharrajimos, 24–25. The implementation of the ghettoisation has since been questioned by several historians in the wake of László Karsai’s (born 1950) book, as the Ministry of the Interior did not confirm the proposed decree.5Purcsi, A cigánykérdés „gyökeres és végleges megoldása”, 75; Karsai, A cigánykérdés Magyarországon, 61, 97–98. In fact, the town council only asked the Ministry of the Interior to confirm the decree because one of its last points contained criminal sanctions. In general, town and county councils in Hungary were free to make decrees in their own jurisdictions. Only a decree establishing criminal sanctions required the confirmation of the Minister of the Interior. In exceptional, urgent cases, even these could be enacted by the town or the county council before ratification.
However, independently from this, the regulation appears to have been considered locally valid. It was reported even in the contemporary press that the Legislative Committee of Esztergom County had confirmed the decree in September 1942, and that the county had decided to appeal to the government for a national regulation of the issue. The Esztergom Council of Representatives then dealt with the decree again at its ordinary general meeting on 29 October 1942, and as a result on 30 November, the town council supplemented the decree by stating, for example, that the colony was a danger not only from a public but also from a ‘veterinary’ [!] health point of view. On 28 July 1944, the council decided to put into effect from 16 August those sections of the provision which did not contain criminal penalties. Thus, the town council confirmed the validity of the decree legally after the Ministry of the Interior had failed to do so (which was not an exceptional case in the practice of Ministry).
The archival sources on the Roma minority of Esztergom show that racial exclusion and persecution was not only a phenomenon of the war years, but also a phenomenon that transcended eras in the lives of the local community, and according to recent historical studies it was a general social experience of excluded Roma groups in the country. The events after 1939 and the decree of 1942 made the exclusion of the local Roma community even more extreme. Although the document did not use the term ghetto, the isolated ‘Gypsy settlement’ of Esztergom functioned as a ghetto, and was seen as such by its contemporaries. The text of the decree is more similar to municipal regulations against Roma communities than to decrees establishing ghettos for Jews, but its origins were of course not unrelated to the political conditions and racist ideologies of the time.
Segregation of Jews and Roma Compared
It is worth comparing the establishing of the closed ‘Gypsy settlement’ with the creation of the ghetto for the Jewish population in Esztergom. After the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, the deputy governor of Esztergom County, following decrees of the Minister of the Interior, ordered the resettlement of the Jews of the town and the district, i.e. the creation of a ghetto, to begin on 2 May 1944 and end by 11 a.m. on 12 May. Dr Jenő Etter (1897–1973), mayor of Esztergom since 1941, relaxed the order, referring to the fact that Jewish families had not been living in a single segregated part of the town. Eventually, certain houses were designated for the Jews to live in, and they were resettled here from other houses and from the district (in Hungarian: járás), i.e. from the surrounding settlements. However, this was not an enclosed area in the town; rather, the Jewish residents of the town and the Esztergom district were moved into apartments in houses where Jewish families had previously lived. The mayor, who according to historical sources seems to have been insensitive to the situation of the local Roma, had a role in helping Polish refugees, and did not want to implement the order on the Jewish ghetto automatically – an attitude which was surely not independent of the fact that the social perception of the two communities on the part of the town’s majority population was different, as was their social situation. The history of the urban segregation of Roma and Jews also shows that the creation of a ‘ghetto’ was not simply a matter of central will or legal act, but that the local context determined whether and when it would happen. Tragically, the Jewish families were first deported from the town to Komárom on 5 June, and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp on 13 and 16 June 1944.6Miklós, Mindennapi élet a háborús hátországban, 137–138.
Forced Labour and Deportations
Little is known about the history of the settlement’s inhabitants from contemporary official archives. Later oral history sources also tell only a fragmentary story of their persecution. Several members of the families living there at the time were deported to forced labour or concentration camps. Local historian Tamás Miklós (born 1987), referring to a contemporary diary, writes that the deportation of the local Roma must have taken place on the evening of 1 March 1945.7Miklós, „A cigánykérdés a cigányok elhelyezésével megoldva nincsen.”, 82. According to recollections, most of the inhabitants of the settlement were taken to the camp ‘Csillagerőd’ in Komárom. A Roma survivor from Esztergom recalled years later the trauma of the mass executions on the banks of the Danube at Komárom (whose victims, according to sources, were mainly their Jewish fellow inmates]: ‘I was there with the whole family, ten children and the wife […] Many of the gypsies who managed to get there were picked up early, shot on the edge of the water and thrown in there.’8OSA 369-1-1:7/3. Several Roma from Esztergom were deported to concentration camps, while others were forcibly marched to Galanta (today southern Slovakia) as the front approached.
Aftermath
After the war, the socialist system offered its citizens equality in principle. However, sources from the 1950s show that not only did the segregated settlement not disappear in Esztergom after the war, but a second one was established in another suburban area, Esztergom-Kertváros (Esztergom-Tábor). After 20 June 1961, when a Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party resolution announced the forced assimilation of Roma, settlement liquidation programmes were launched. This time, too, the first aim was to eradicate settlements on major roads and near tourist destinations. The Esztergom settlement later known as Töltés Street remained after the change of regime in 1989. It was repeatedly destroyed by floods and rebuilt by its inhabitants. Not because of its historical background, but primarily because of its social isolation, it was also referred to as a ghetto by locals and the press even in the 2000s.
In 2019, a small memorial to the Roma victims of the Second World War was erected in the courtyard of St Stephen’s Church in Esztergom, which has become the site for the commemorative events on the occasion of the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day on 2 August for the local Roma community.
