Genocide in the Carpathians ─ War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multi-religious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure, first from interwar Czechoslovakia, and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of "foreignness" and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and anxieties about national security. Genocide unfolded as a Hungarian policy, and Hungarian authorities committed state-sponsored robbery, deportations, and mass killings against all non-Magyar groups.

In considering the events that preceded the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, this book reorients our view of the Holocaust not simply as a German drive for continent-wide genocide, but as a truly international campaign of mass murder, related to violence against non-Jews unleashed by projects of state and nation building. Focusing on both state and society, Raz Segal shows how Hungary's genocidal attack on the people of Subcarpathian Rus' obliterated livesand social ties that encapsulated a way of life for both Jews and non-Jews that today, from our vantage point of our world of nation-states, we find difficult to imagine.