Butchers and Slaughtermen

For centuries, being a butcher came with a certain social appreciation in Hungary. Only those who invested time and energy in learning the trade could become professional butchers, and through butchers one could gain access to meat, a vital part of the human diet. Let us look at the career path of an ordinary Hungarian butcher: András Krizsán was born in 1865 in the territory of modern-day Budapest. In 1879, at the age of fourteen, he was contracted as an apprentice to a butcher named György Suberka. He remained in this position for three years and was “released” from his apprenticeship in 1882. He was next promoted to assistant butcher, a position he kept for no less than eight years, and only in 1890 did he succeed to pass the so-called “master exam” for butchers and subsequently open his own shop. Thus, it took Mr. Krizsán some eleven hard-working years to become an independent butcher, and from May 9, 1890 until his death in 1943, he remained a member of the Budapest Butchers’ and Slaughtermen’s Chamber. Understandably, the young men of interwar Budapest were able to find much easier career options. In this growing metropolis, even unqualified factory workers could sometimes count on an immediate sizeable income and could even take breaks for paid holidays. Butchers, however, were not always able to compete with the salaries and benefits that the manufacturers, transport companies or the growing Budapest nightlife could offer a young workforce.

Furthermore, there were way too many qualified independent butchers operating in the Hungarian capital, and the market simply could not sustain so many. Already in 1936, there were no less than 920 individual entrepreneurs in this trade in the city, and they had to compete not only with each other as well as with companies, but also with Budapest city’s own commercial chain. The Municipal Food Company, or in Hungarian the Községi Élelmiszerüzem, inevitably enjoyed advantages in accessing goods and setting its prices as it did not have to bring much profit. The annual turnover of this municipal commercial network reached 13 million pengős around 1937, and its stores employed more than 600 people. The situation of Budapest butchers further worsened following a poor fodder harvest in 1940. Since it was already easy to sell animals in the countryside at that time, the meat was not transported to Budapest, where there now appeared a shortage of the precious commodity.

With an insufficient supply of meat in the city, it became obvious that the shrinking market could not keep all of Budapest’s individual butcher shops profitable. This is why the leadership of the Budapest Butchers’ and Slaughtermen’s Chamber complained to the relevant minister, concluding their letter of March 8, 1941 with a threat: “If the present situation is not changed shortly, the meat industry in Budapest will not be able to fulfil its role due to a shortage of raw meat…”.^[1]  The government took action: it restricted access to raw meat, although this restriction did not apply to the network of the Municipal Food Company, whose 52 shops received almost a third of all the meat slaughtered in Budapest, while the remaining two thirds were shared by the nearly 1,000 private butcher shops. In practice, each member of the trade association was given a small purchase book, which had to be presented at the slaughterhouse. The butcher could only buy the amount the book showed, which depended not on the number of customers the butcher supplied with meat, but rather on the number of assistants the butcher employed. While clearly against the idea of a free market, the reasoning was that the governing body of the Budapest Butchers’ and Slaughtermen’s Chamber wanted to avoid any situation where the butcher shop owners would be forced to lay off their employees. This distribution system clearly signals that the wartime objective of the meat industry was survival rather than profit, especially after Hungary’s unfortunate entry into the war in mid-1941. From then on, raw meat stocks were used primarily to satisfy the needs of the Hungarian Royal Army.

These unfavorable circumstances and the fierce competition provided a fertile ground for anti-Semitism within the butchers’ trade. The lack of raw material to provide income for all members of this industry puts the butchers’ anti-Jewish sentiment into perspective: they were part of a broader debate that could be formulated vaguely as “whom should be eliminated from the Budapest butchers’ trade in order to ensure the survival of the rest of the businesses?” The increasingly popular answer for this question was, of course, the “Jews”.

In 1939, Zoltán Damásdi was a vice-president of the Budapest butchers’ trade association, when he and all the Jewish members of the board of the Budapest Butchers’ and Slaughtermen’s Chamber were asked to resign from their positions “for the good of the whole”. Damádi, who was an independent butcher selling at the slaughterhouse, added in his memoirs: “I came home from forced labor work on June 3, 1940. Upon arrival I didn’t get my sales stall back, but a much worse one was assigned to me at the edge, and they (the antisemite colleagues) kept visiting the office to keep me and my Jewish comrades out of the slaughterhouse area”.

Damásdy’s leadership was replaced by Ferenc Bukovszky, who spoke on May 10, 1942 at a meeting of Budapest butchers’ trade association. His speech is quoted in the official journal of the Hungarian meat industry workers of May 15, 1942 (Husiparsok Lapja, Volume IV, No. 21). According to Bukovszky, “Unfortunately, the exclusion of Jewish butchers from the pork and veal market has resulted – and I have already pointed this out several times in the relevant places – in the Jews having now switched their entire business activity to the sale of beef…” In the following year, Jews were driven out of the beef business as well: they were refused raw meat and were denounced for illegally undercutting prices. Some were even conscripted for labor service at the request of the trade association’s Christian leaders.

Among the guards of the Jewish forced laborers some of the cruelest appeared to be butchers. One such was Károly Jánosi, who before the war worked in Népszínház Street, in the heart of Budapest, as a butcher and slaughterer. Nevertheless, well-meaning butchers regularly supplied food to Jewish Hungarian citizens, even illegally, even after 1944 when the authorities had made it almost impossible for them to eat meat.

[1] Yearbook of the Budapest Butchers and Slaughtermen, 1941, pp. 4-6.

Meat and fat tickets for Jews
© Holokauszt Emlékközpont

The butcher shop of János Brauch on Mester Street, in 1935
© Ferencvárosi Helytörténeti Gyűjtemény

The butcher Mátyás Schlotter and his shop in 1942 and 1944, during World War II with a sign marking the shelter. Budapest, Retek Street 
© Fortepan / Lissák Tivadar