By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO-Walking with the Enemy belongs to a cycle of recent movies like Black Book, Army of Crime, Defiance, Inglourious Basterds, and Süskind which portray Jews actively resisting the Holocaust. With the exception of Tarantino’s counterfactual picture, these films are docudramas inspired by real events. Walking with the Enemy chronicles the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 to prevent its leader Admiral Horthy from concluding an armistice with the Allies and the ensuing mass deportations of Hungarian Jews and Jewish refugees there who heretofore had faced discrimination but not eradication.
Those familiar with the history of the decimation of Jewish communities in the Hungarian provinces, the roundups and killing of Jews in Budapest, and the rescue of over a hundred thousand of the city’s Jews usually associate this episode in the “Final Solution” with Adolf Eichmann, the SS, and the Arrow Cross and with the exploits of Raoul Wallenberg in establishing Jewish safe houses, issuing Swedish protective papers, and whisking Jews away from death marches and transports bound for Auschwitz.
Walking with the Enemy introduces audiences to lesser known stories: Horthy’s refusal to authorize the deportation of Jews, the kidnapping of his son by SS Major Otto Skorzeny to coerce the Admiral to abdicate in favor of the rabidly anti-Semitic Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szalasi, the equally if not greater contribution than Wallenberg’s of Swiss Vice Consul Carl Lutz in saving the Jews of Budapest, and the heroic activities of Elek Cohen played by Jonas Armstrong who starred as Robin Hood in the BBC series. Based on the figure of Pinchas Rosenbaum, Cohen masquerades as an SS officer who distributes protective Swiss documents to Jews awaiting deportation, frees a Jewish comrade from Gestapo custody, and shields Jews from Arrow Cross and SS massacres.
Director Mark Schmidt devotes most of the film to the Cohen/Rosenbaum story tracing it from his return from Budapest to his hometown, his ordeal in a German labor camp, and his subsequent clandestine missions in Budapest. What Cohen/Rosenbaum accomplished merits the screen time he receives, but Schmidt cinematically enhances his impressive feats. Rosenbaum usually disguised himself in an Arrow Cross uniform. The movie implies that he discovered that the labor camps where Jews were being sent were really death camps by eavesdropping on SS colleagues at a banquet he attended. This knowledge actually came from two Jewish inmates who escaped Auschwitz in April of 1944 and soon thereafter transmitted it the Allies and Hungarian Jewish leaders shortly thereafter. The urgency of the threat posed to Hungarian Jewry in the late spring of 1944 prompted the United States to recruit Wallenberg and spurred the neutral embassies and non-governmental agencies in Budapest to mount rescue operations.
While I understand why motion pictures idealize their heroes, I am puzzled by why Walking with the Enemy whitewashes Horthy. Casting Ben Kingsley in the role imparts a benign aura to the actor best known for his role as Gandhi and Stern in Schindler’s List. Kingsley’s Horthy admits that he allied himself with Hitler because he initially considered him a lesser evil than Stalin. The primary reason he gravitated into the orbit of the Third Reich was because Hitler endorsed the restoration of territories Hungary lost in World War One and shared his anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and ultra-nationalism. After linking his fortunes to Germany in 1938, Horthy enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws and conscripted able-bodied Jewish men into labor brigades. 42,000 Jews perished performing hazardous assignments for the Germans on the Soviet front and toiling in the copper mines of Serbia. An additional 18,000 “alien” Jews who fell under Hungarian rule were butchered by Hungarian troops.
As was true in other countries allied with Germany like Vichy France and Italy, Horthy’s discriminatory measures facilitated the rapid concentration and registration of Jews when the combination of German occupation troops and local collaborators escalated the persecution of Jews into genocide. Given the electoral strength of neo-Nazi parties in Hungary and its current government’s minimization of Hungarian responsibility for the fate of Hungarian Jewry, the positive image of Horthy conveyed by the film is disconcerting.
Although the acting, cinematography, dialogue, and sets are good, the presentation of the story is rather conventional and replicates iconic scenes and narrative strategies employed in far better Holocaust films like Schindler’s List and The Pianist. When you watch Walking with the Enemy, just keep reminding yourself that Cohen and Lutz are its heroes and not Horthy,
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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com