Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Rezső Kasztner" in English language version.
the BBC broadcast every day, giving updates on the war, general news and opinion pieces on Hungarian politics. But among all these broadcasts, there were crucial things that were not being said, things that might have warned thousands of Hungarian Jews of the horrors to come in the event of a German occupation. A memo setting forth policy for the BBC Hungarian Service in 1942 states: "We shouldn't mention the Jews at all." By 1943, the BBC Polish Service was broadcasting about the exterminations, and yet its policy of silence on the Jews was adhered to right up until the German invasion in March 1944. After the tanks rolled in, the Hungarian Service did then broadcast warnings, but by then it was too late: "Many Hungarian Jews who survived the deportations claimed that they had not been informed by their leaders, that no one had told them. But there's plenty of evidence that they could have known," said David Cesarani, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
the Hungarian Jews in 1944 knew all about it. They had a lot of information because there were Jewish refugees coming to Hungary, in 1942 and 1943, giving reports about what was happening in Poland, and what was the reaction from the Jews? "This is Hungary. This might be happening in Galicia to Polish Jews, but this can't happen in our very cultivated Hungarian state." It is impossible that even early in 1944, the Jewish leadership there didn't have some inkling about what was happening. There were people escaping from the extermination camps just 80 km from the Hungarian border, and there were letters and reports and of course the BBC. I think part of the problem of the Holocaust was that potential victims couldn't believe the information. The idea that something so atrocious would come from Germany and from European civilized environment was so unimaginable that they didn't take it for real, even when they received overwhelming reports from the death camps.
