Budapest is presented as both a possible refuge and a destination of persecution: Jews escaping the ghetto are imagined walking its boulevards, but in 1944 German pressure helps bring deportations there, and close to half a million Hungarian Jews are deported and murdered in Aktion Doll. The city’s changing place in the narrative links one family’s attempted escape to the expanding reach of the Nazi extermination campaign.

A Destination Beyond the Ghetto

When Paul Doll discovers that Shulamith has escaped the ghetto with her brother, he learns they are heading south toward Hungary. His account describes Jews there as second-class citizens, but notes that they were not even required to wear badges and faced only occasional raids and massacres. The contrast makes Hungary seem, within the dangers surrounding them, like a possible place of relative safety.

Doll is particularly angered that Shulamith’s escape occurred despite what he describes as a personal guarantee from Chaim Rumkowski. He imagines her walking freely along Budapest’s boulevards and finds the image aesthetically irritating. That reaction reveals how thoroughly he treats her freedom as an affront to his authority: the city matters to him not as a refuge for her, but as the place where his threat may lose its force.

German Pressure on Hungary

The novel later places Budapest within a diplomatic campaign to compel Hungary to adopt measures against its Jews. Martin Bormann addresses Hungarian officials in the name of Berlin, presenting closer relations with Hungary as conditional on cooperation. He demands confiscation of Jewish wealth, exclusion from cultural and economic life, and the imposition of the Star, followed by concentration and eventual dispatch. His message also carries a threat: Germany will take Hungary’s Jews even if it has to use the Wehrmacht.

The encounter exposes the distance between diplomatic language and its intended consequences. The measures are presented as administrative steps, but the sequence moves from dispossession and exclusion toward concentration and deportation. Hungary’s earlier relative permissiveness is thus shown not as lasting protection but as a condition the German regime seeks to overturn through pressure and threatened force.

From Exile Schemes to Deportation

A retrospective discussion sets these demands against the development of the extermination policy. It describes an authorization letter dated July 31, 1941, drafted by Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich and signed by Göring, as granting authority for a total solution. At first, the account suggests, Nazi leaders may still have contemplated removing Jews to a cold, barren region beyond the Urals or in the Arctic after victory over Russia. As that territorial scheme receded and officials in occupied Poland faced pressure over the growing number of Jews under their control, the policy escalated toward killing women and children as well as men.

The same discussion insists that gas chambers and crematoria accelerated killing and reduced strain on the killers but were not essential to the murderous intent. It invokes the Einsatzgruppen’s killing of well over a million people by bullets to emphasize that the means could change while the will to murder remained. This context gives Budapest’s later deportations a place within a widening campaign, rather than presenting them as an isolated episode of wartime repression.

Aktion Doll and the City's Reversal

By April 1944, the war is described as already lost, cities have been razed, and millions of people are hungry, homeless, and dressed in singed rags. Even so, the Reich diverts troops to Budapest, and deportations begin. The narrator compares the continued escalation to a succession of acts that each attempt to justify the one before: the next thrust validates the previous one, until the process continues to the limit of the perpetrators’ strength.

The account states that close to half a million Jews from Hungary were deported and murdered in Aktion Doll at Kat Zet II, while two hundred thousand survived. Against that outcome, Budapest’s earlier appearance as a destination where Shulamith might be free becomes bitterly provisional. The city’s narrative significance lies in this reversal: a hoped-for escape route is drawn into the system of coercion and mass murder, even as the numbers of those who survive prevent the account from turning the catastrophe into an assertion that no one escaped.