BSZKRT workers, Holocaust, leftism, labor service

In 1932, the Budapest Capital Transport Corporation, commonly known as the BSZKRT, employed nearly 10,000 people. With 481 clerks and 8,935 other employees, a considerable number of families’ livelihoods depended on this company. In accordance with its size, the BSZKRT also provided a variety of social and recreational services, including a self-education group, a music department, and a brass band, in which all band members performed regular duties as conductors, mechanics, drivers, etc. The BSZKRT also had its own Levente group aimed at maintaining physical health, as it was compulsory for any company with more than a thousand employees, where regular exercising was carried out in a patriotic spirit.

With the approach of the Second World War, passenger traffic increased dramatically, as industrial companies were operating at full capacity, unemployment disappeared, and, paradoxically, not long after the Great Depression, Budapest started to experience a labor shortage. At the end of the 1930s, the increased traffic flowed entirely into the tram network, as automobile traffic was greatly reduced by fuel restrictions and a shortage of tires. As a result, trams became overcrowded, and the pressure on conductors and tram drivers increased significantly.

In the late spring and early summer of 1944, the pressure on conductors and tram drivers was quite different. After the Nazi German occupation, restrictions on Jews in almost all areas of daily life were imposed, including “on tram carriages with several cars, [in which] Jews were allowed to travel only in the last one”. Many Jews found this equally humiliating as the decree requiring them to wear a yellow star badge on their clothes. As a result of the increasingly radical anti-Jewish legislation, more and more Hungarian Jews had taken their own lives. One form of attempted suicide was jumping in front of speeding BSZKRT cars. The “accident reports” written by BSZKRT inspectors about serious injuries due to non-fatal suicide attempts or sudden death by suicide of Jews, in their forcibly objective language, unintentionally reflect how the trauma of the Holocaust affected a wide section of society. This was the case with the Christian driver “Gyula 6 Németh” (in this case, the number 6 meant that at least five other BSZKRT employees were named Gyula Németh). On June 18, 1944, in the period immediately preceding the Budapest Jews’ segregation into Yellow Star houses, Mr. Németh was driving tram no. 44 towards the zoo. This was when, according to the accident report, suddenly “he hit an unknown woman of Israelite faith, aged 70-74, who probably stepped in front of the carriage with suicidal intent.” The unknown woman, who was wearing a yellow star, survived the incident.

During the war, left-wing and right-wing workers’ organizations were in constant competition within the BSZKRT company. On November 3, 1941, for example, employees from opposing camps had an argument on the tram, which led to an investigation into the “carriage scandal” by the director of the BSZKRT’s traffic department. According to the internal auditor who conducted the investigation, tram no. 25 was used by the BSZKRT employees to travel to their places of work. When one of their colleagues, István Aranyos, boarded the carriage headed for the zoo, they greeted him in the Arrow Cross manner: “Hang in there, brother!” (Hungarian: Kitartás, testvér!), to which he replied with a left-wing greeting: “Friendship, comrade!” (Hungarian: Barátság, elvtárs!). This was the beginning of the conflict on the tram, which escalated into violence.

István Kossa wrote a memoir entitled From the Danube to the Don about the most difficult period of his wartime labor service, in 1942-1943. He was originally a BSZKRT conductor and also led a trade union organization within the company. After the war, beginning in 1948, he first became the Minister of Industry and later Minister of Finance, but before that, he had also been a member of the Budapest Executive Board of the Communist Party since January 1945 and General Secretary of the Trade Union Council since February 1945. During the war, on April 25, 1942, 126 members of the trade union, including Kossa, received an emergency SAS draft call (SAS was an abbreviation of the Hungarian words: hurry, immediately, urgent) from the Hungarian Royal Army. “It was obvious from the first moment that a political call-up had been issued,” Kossa writes. Most of those called up were non-Jews and thought that they had to report for real military service. Two days later, however, they discovered that someone had filled out their call-up forms for labor service at the military office of the BSZKRT, as proven by the fact that the company distinguished between workers with the same name by numbers, while no such administrative practice was known in the military. The call-ups thus bore the names “József 11 Nagy” and “István 9 Németh”, written in the same way as the entries in the internal records of the BSZKRT. Thus, was formed the 401st Special Labor Service Company, which consisted of a mixture of conscripts of Jewish origin and Social Democrats and Communists, i.e., the leaders of the labor movement in the large factories of the capital.

Master Sergeant Péter Rotyis served as the head of the guards at the 401st Special Labor Service Company. He regularly executed forced laborers in the winter of 1942, not far from the Don River’s bend, in the occupied Soviet territories. According to István Kossa’s recollections, it was here that Rotyis led Kossa’s colleague Miklós Gruber, a Budapest tram conductor, to be executed. Rotyis carried out the crime using a Russian submachine gun, in order to deflect responsibility. “Gruber was a good friend of mine back home. He was a comrade from the BSZKRT Baross carriage depot…”, remarks Kossa about the murdered Gruber in his book.

The murderer, Master Sergeant Péter Rotyits, received the first capital punishment sentence of the postwar Budapest People’s Court on February 3, 1945. The location of his hanging was in downtown Budapest on the Oktogon Square, which a couple of weeks earlier had still been called Mussolini Square. Angry Hungarians who had gathered began to beat the hanging corpse. On the other side of the Danube River, the Nazi German occupiers were still in control of the Buda castle. From there they saw the gathering on the Pest side and started to shoot in the direction of Oktogon Square. Two years later, the People’s Court sentenced retired Gendarme Colonel Lóránd Preszly, former factory secretary of the BSZKRT, who had led the BSZKRT as a “military factory representative” during the war, to ten years in prison. Preszly was appointed as factory secretary in 1939 by the Minister of Defense. In this capacity, he also made decisions on questions of military and labor service recruitment for the company. According to the People’s Court, during the war Preszly had organized an internal spy network and compiled a list of left-wing employees with the help of those who reported on their colleagues. These were then sent to labor service in 1942 with a punitive battalion and were taken to Ukraine, where many of them perished. The same spy network had reported on Jewish workers. For example, a BSZKRT personnel manager from the main workshop on Aréna Road personally reported to his superiors when two Jewish BSZKRT workers, Gál and Blau, had hugged each other at work in June 1941, on hearing the news of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war. Blau was called up for labor service shortly after the incident.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of BSZKRT workers who were more directly involved in the anti-Jewish atrocities in Budapest. József Bárány, a tram driver, made the news in 1936 by colliding with a baron’s car when the baron was travelling with his mistress. Eight years later, in the autumn and winter of 1944, József Bárány was already shooting Jews into the Danube, he was “one of the executioners of the Danube bank”. István Veszteg was a BSZKRT ticket conductor, who became infamous for his brutality as an assistant officer of a “Levente group”. As an Arrow Cross militiaman, he escorted Jews from the Yellow Star houses to the KISOK sports field (National Centre for Secondary School Sports Circles). According to witnesses, conductor Veszteg “walked among the persecuted people gathered on the KISOK field in October 1944 with a black death’s head armband and performed armed guard duty there”.

Portrait of István Kossa
© MTI Fotó/Magyar Fotó: Várkonyi László

BSZKRT inspector Simon Krausz
© USHMM / Centropa

The inauguration ceremony of the memorial erected by the Free Trade Union of Transport Workers on April 25, 1946, on Vilma királynő Road, dedicated to the BSZKRT (Budapest public transport company) employees who were deported and murdered during the Second World War.
© Magyar Műszaki és Közlekedési Múzeum, Témagyűjtemény

BSZKRT employees march in Kelenföld, on József Attila Street on Labour Day. May 1, 1945.
© Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Közgyűjteményi Központ