Jewish Holocaust
Travelling first through Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna - near the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War 2 - visiting Anne Frank’s house and two concentration (not extermination) camps - seeing a modest wave of books and movies asking what relatives had gotten up to in WW2 - and so many monuments to the victims of the Nazis - it was note-worthy that there was little mention of WW2 in Budapest and Italy - and nothing about the Holocaust. There is a lot more to Hungarian and Italian history than WW2, but - when the former talk about how poorly they were treated and the latter require passport checks at all accommodation like they didn’t give the world the word “fascist” - it’s easy to be cynical.
Lesser Known Facts of WWII, Protection of Italian Jews:
In Italy, no Jews were deported while Mussolini ruled the country but after the armistice, when Germany occupied the country in 1943, the round-up and deportation of Jews commenced. […] In the whole of Italy some 32,000 Italian Jews and about 12,500 foreign Jews lived in fear of their lives. Before the Italian surrender a total of 8,369 of these had been arrested and deported. Only 979 survived the death camps. The majority of Jews who survived in Italy were saved by the Italian people themselves who risked their own lives in helping them hide or flee across the border into Switzerland.
[The massacre] of Hungarian [Jews…] came late in the war. The deaths of approximately 550,000 Hungarian Jews occurred between May and July 1944; most of them were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944 in response to the threat of the approaching Soviet Army. Prior to that time the authoritarian government of Hungary, although allied with Nazi Germany, resisted German demands to implement the Final Solution program.
So today there is a little less cynicism in the world - and more light.
PS
There is more to the Holocaust than the attempted genocide of the Jews - there are the Poles, Russian war prisoners and other Slavs, the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and Roma… but on this point everyone is quiet.