Shortly before the end of World War II, on 6 January 1945, two Roma families were murdered by SS [Schutzstaffel] troops in the village of Héreg in Komárom-Esztergom county, northern Hungary.
Roma in Héreg
According to the 1930 census, Héreg had 1 358 inhabitants. The 1932 survey of the county’s ‘Gypsy’ population does not mention local Roma families. ‘Gypsies’ were regarded by the statisticians of the time primarily as a social category, and in the case of the village population mostly as a social group below the peasantry. Roma musicians, on the other hand, were typically seen as part of local societies. Presumably for this reason, Héreg’s musician families were mostly not included as ‘Gypsies’ in contemporary statistics.
According to surviving records, these families were already living in the village in the second half of the 19th century, in the part of the village known as ’Cigányhegy’ [Gypsy Hill]. In the statistics and the civil registers, the entry Újmagyar [new Hungarian] was usually next to their names. The men worked mostly as musicians, the women sometimes as day labourers.
Shifting Fronts
In late 1944 and early 1945, the front moved back and forth around the village of Héreg. First German soldiers were billeted in the village after the German invasion of Hungary, and then Hungarian Arrow Cross fighters appeared there. On 26 December 1944, Soviet troops invaded Héreg. On 2 January 1945, German aeroplanes bombed the village, claiming civilian victims. On 3 January, the Germans again occupied Héreg. Afterwards, the Arrow Cross soldiers conscripted all boys over 14 years and took them to Germany.
When the Red Army occupied Héreg at the end of 1944, a few of the fleeing German soldiers hid in the nearby forest. One of them went to the village for food. He asked two local Roma families for help. The Soviet soldiers then captured the soldier in the village. He was tied by the legs to a truck and dragged through the village. After recapturing the village on 6 January, the Germans took all the members of these two Roma families, adults and children, to the local Roman Catholic school. Mihály Sárközi (unknown–1945), who had been known as ‘Törü’ in the village, and Jenő Sárközi (unknown–1945) tried to escape towards the forest, but were shot while trying to escape. The others were executed in the school garden. In total, ten Roma were murdered, accused of having handed the soldier over to the Russians, as was János Tvarosek (unknown–1945), who had interpreted for the Soviet soldiers in those days.
The Victims
The mass murder was not committed by Hungarian soldiers or gendarmes, but by SS troops, and thus there was no subsequent prosecution as in other cases in Hungary. Accordingly, it is not possible to reconstruct the events on the basis of trial records, and apart from the death certificates, no other documents on the killings have survived. According to the death certificates, the murders took place at around 5.30 p.m. on 6 January 1945. The members of two families were murdered by SS soldiers; the oldest victim was 40 years old, the youngest two. The German soldiers executed 40-year-old Mihály ‘Törü’ Sárközi (mentioned above), his 38-year-old wife Franciska Sárközi, and their daughter, the 19-year-old Julianna Sárközi. Also executed were 38-year-old Mihály Sárközi, his 36-year-old wife Julianna Sárközi, née Rováts, and their children: 18-year-old Jenő, 17-year-old Erzsébet, 14-year-old Ibolya, 5-year old Dezső and 2-year-old Mihály Jr. Among the historical works, only one local history monograph on the village briefly mentions the murder of the Roma.
All the inhabitants of Héreg suffered greatly during the war. Many of them died at the front or were killed in the bombing of the village. Several soldiers who were taken to Germany returned home later from Dachau concentration camp. Several citizens of Héreg, mostly captured as conscripts, were deported to camps in the Soviet Union. They include member of the local Roma community Mihály Sárközi, born in 1914, who was a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union from November 1944. He was imprisoned in Camp 159 near Odessa, and was finally released from Camp 176 near Nizhyn. After the Red Army occupied Héreg, soldiers raped several women in the village.
Aftermath
There are no memorials in the village to local Roma victims of World War II. Perhaps it was the depth of personal traumas, perhaps it was also the ordeal of the communist dictatorship that made it difficult to remember, but sufferings during World War II did not become part of the collective memory of the local community. The tragedy of the Roma victims of mass murder has also been preserved only in family memories.
