Those For Whom No Accounting Was Required

"For the Jewish men of Hungary, the labor service was not a footnote to the catastrophe. For many of them, it was the catastrophe itself." The munkaszolgálat - Hungary's wartime forced-labor service - remains one of the least documented chapters of the Holocaust. Jewish men of military age were stripped of the right to bear arms and conscripted into unarmed labor battalions: sent to the Eastern Front in civilian armbands to dig fortifications, clear mines, and haul supplies for an army that regarded them as expendable. Of the 45,000 deployed to the front, 80% never returned home - killed by battle, starvation, disease, and the hands of their own guards (Rozett, Yad Vashem, 2014). Some units were entirely wiped out. Dr. József Bihari, a Hungarian Jewish linguist and professor, was one of them. He survived. Six years later, with a scholar's precision and a refusal to let a single detail fade, he wrote it all down. Handwritten in Hungarian and translated here for the first time, Those for Whom No Accounting Was Required is the only full-length first-person account of the munkaszolgálat ever published - in any language. It is a document of extraordinary scope: from the assembly camps of provincial Hungary to the frozen steppes of Ukraine, from the typhus barns of the Eastern Front - where Bihari awoke naked on a stretcher beside a mass grave, having been presumed dead - to the long, ravaged road home. His company of 213 men set out together. Fewer than 50 came back. At its center stands a night history has never heard from the inside. On April 29-30, 1943, at a field hospital in Dorosics, Ukraine, 518 forced laborers died in a single fire. Bihari was there. He saw how it started. He saw who locked the doors. In the hours that followed he was forced to help clean the site.…