History of The Jews in Carpathian Ruthenia - Final Solution

Final Solution

During World War II, once the legal government of Hungary was overthrown by the Germans, the "Final Solution" of the Holocaust was also extended to Carpathian Ruthenia. To be sure, the legal government of Hungary and its fascist elements had already played a prominent role in killing Jews even before this.

Beginning in 1939, draconian laws had been passed banning Jews from going to school or from operating their previous businesses. Then in summer of 1941, Hungarian authorities deported about 20,000 Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia to the Galicia region of Poland-Ukraine. This was done under the guise of expelling alien refugees, but in practice most of those expelled were from families which had lived in the region for the previous 50–100 years. Many who might have been able to prove their long term residency were taken without being given the chance. Most of the deportees were immediately handed over to Nazi German Einsatzgruppen units at Kaminets Podolsk and machine-gunned over a three day period in late 1941. A few thousand others were simply left to their own devices after being pushed across the border into Galicia, in the area near Kaminets Podolsk. The vast majority of this group subsequently perished over the next two years in ghettos and death camps with other Jewish residents of the region.

Those Jews fortunate enough to avoid the 1941 deportations faced further privations under Hungarian rule. Men of working age were conscripted into slave labor gangs in which a high proportion perished. The remnant were ultimately returned to their homes in time to suffer deportation to concentration camps under Nazi rule after 1944.

In April 1944, 17 main ghettos were set up in cities in Ruthenia. 144,000 Jews were rounded up and held there. Starting on May 15, 1944: 14,000 Jews were taken out of these sites to Auschwitz every day until the last deportation on June 7, 1944.

The following table shows the death trains originating from these four counties that went through Kassa(Košice). (Some Jewish males were on forced labor (munkaszolgálat), some trains did not pass through Kassa, some Jews from the area were forced to board trains departing from neighboring counties):

By June 1944 nearly all the Jews from ghettos of Carpathian Ruthenia had been exterminated, together with other Hungarian Jews. Of more than 100,000 Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, around 90,000 were murdered. Except for those who managed to flee, only small number of Jews were saved by Rusyns who hid them.

Since the fall of Communism, archives have recently been opened to allow study of the facts about the implementation of the Final Solution in the province. The most discussed issue is whether, and to what extent, local collaborators helped the Nazis in performing the tasks and to what extent such collaboration was forced upon those collaborators by the threat or actuality of brutal violence against themselves.