Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War

From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Soviet Union. Some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. They fell prey to battle, starvation, disease, and grinding labor, aggravated immensely by brutality and even outright murder at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers responsible for them. This study constitutes a unique and invaluable chapter in the mosaic of Holocaust history. The laborers’ personal accounts speak powerfully to every Jewish family that lived under Hungarian rule during the Holocaust years, because it is their own personal story, but it is not one to be kept in the family alone, since it is profoundly relevant to all people.

Dr. Robert Rozett is Senior Historian in the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. Prior to this, for 25 years beginning late in 1992, he was director of the Yad Vashem Libraries, and has been at Yad Vashem since 1981 in various capacities.

He obtained his BA from Rutgers College, Rutgers University (1978) and received his MA (1981) and PhD (1987) from the Hebrew University, where he studied with Yehuda Bauer. His dissertation was about Jewish Rescue and Revolt in Slovakia and Hungary.

Among his scholarly publications are Conscripted Slaves, Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front During the Second World War (Yad Vashem, 2013), which was a runner up for the US National Jewish Book Award for 2014 in the category of Holocaust Research. His more recent books are After So Much Pain and Anguish, First Letters after Liberation, which he edited with Dr. Iael Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem 2016) and Jewish Solidarity (Yad Vashem 2022) which he edited with Dan Michman. His most recent scholarly articles are: “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 2022; and “Information About the Holocaust in Hungary Before the German Occupation, Revisited,” The Journal of Holocaust Research, 36:1, 2022 and “Growth of Antisemitism in Hungary Since 1918,” Cambridge History of Antisemitism, Steven Katz (ed.), Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).

Dr. Rozett is an adjunct at Yeshiva University and lectures around the world. He serves as the historical adviser to the Echoes and Reflections educational program, is a member of Israel's delegation to IHRA and served as chairman of the IHRA Academic Working Group in 2023.