The pages that follow are a first-person account of the munkaszolgálat — Hungarian for "labor service." The labor service remains unfamiliar to most readers outside Hungary, even among those well-versed in the history of the Holocaust. Yet for the Jewish men of Hungary, the labor service was no footnote to the catastrophe; for many of them it was the catastrophe itself.
It began as a legal fiction. Hungary's National Defense Act of 1939 introduced a public labor obligation that, in principle, applied to anyone deemed unfit for armed military service. By the time the law was amended in 1941, "unsuitable" had come to mean Jewish. Jewish men of military age were stripped of the right to bear arms and conscripted instead into unarmed labor battalions attached to the Royal Hungarian Army. They reported to assembly points like any other reservist, but what awaited them was not soldiering. They were not issued uniforms; they served in their own civilian clothes. They wore armbands that marked them: yellow for Jews, white for Christian converts of Jewish origin, black for those of mixed background. The age range steadily widened until, by 1944, men from their late teens to their late forties had been called up.
The men were organized into numbered companies. A designation such as Bihari's own — the 106/8 — followed a fixed logic: the first number identified the labor battalion to which the company was attached, the second the company's place within it. A single company numbered a few hundred men, drawn most often from the same region, so that a company was frequently a cross-section of the Jewish life of one town or county — its teachers, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and laborers thrown together under arms they were not permitted to carry. Each company was placed under a Hungarian officer and a keret, the cadre of guards and overseers drawn from the regular army, on whose individual character the survival of the men beneath them very largely depended.
It is against this background that the diary should be read. Dr. Bihari was a teacher by profession, and what follows has the patience of a man trained to observe and to explain. The reader is about to enter a world that has nearly vanished from memory; Bihari József is among the surest guides to it that we have.