Walking with the Enemy

The forgotten B-movie of WW2 Hungary which saw Ben Kingsley starring as Miklós Horthy

About six years ago I saw a trailer of a movie titled Walking with the Enemy and I instantly knew this was a movie that I had to see. Now, I finally did. The plot is based upon the true story of Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum, a Hungarian Jew who, by impersonating SS and Arrow Cross officers is credited with saving thousands of people from deportation and certain death. There’s also a subplot about Miklós Horthy’s attempts to negotiate an armistice with the Soviets. The film never saw a wide release and was never marketed in Hungary as far as I’m aware of, which is a huge shame. It’s not any good, but I’m glad it exists nonetheless, and recommend it to everyone.

Movies about the Holocaust, or World War 2 in general, are very hard to talk about. The whole affair was so grand and so horrifying, that when someone makes a movie about it, good or bad, one is expected to take that seriously. And while making fun of B-movies can be satisfying, it’s hard to do that with a Holocaust-movie, especially one based on a true story and not seem like a complete jerk. I’m about to make fun of this movie anyway and hope for the best. But you should know I don’t intend to demean the gravity of the film’s subject matter.

Despite this preamble, I don’t think the movie is terrible. It’s just not good. It’s a faithful, poignant representation of WW2 Hungary with some very failed dramatic moments. It is “average” which is probably not what you want when making a movie about the Holocaust.

So why talk about this movie at all? It’s because, in addition to it being a Holocaust-drama, it’s also a very ambitious film. It’s about the broader scope of the Hungarian participation in WW2, touching on every aspect there is: the situation at the front, the political maneuvers, the many faces of civilian attitude to the war, and, obviously, the war crimes. Few countries had such an interesting and tragic fate in the war as Hungary, but amidst the many stories of the bigger nations, Hungary’s stories (but also those of e.g. Romania and Yugoslavia) don’t get enough attention.

So, this film is unique in attempting to capture this understudied subject in such an ambitious scope. By doing so, it offers invaluable insight in some of the most tragic, illuminating, and obscure events of WW2. In this piece I invite you to watch this film and give the subject matter some attention. Pretend it’s a better film, try to feel the emotions it wants you to feel, or, if you’re anything like me, enjoy its unintentionally hilarious moments and nitpick on the history the movie is getting wrong. In this piece I talk about the history behind the movie, its flaws and merits, and talk a bit about why everyone should see it.

Historical backdrop

Between 1939 and 1941, Hungary was a neutral nation, aligned with, but not allied to Germany, sort of like the US’s relationship to Britain. As the countries of Europe fell one by one to the Nazis, Hungary, the only nation with a significant Jewish population to not outright molest them developed a reputation as a haven of sorts, taking in tens of thousands of refugees from Poland. That’s despite Hungary adopting its own version of Germany’s anti-Jewish legislation, limiting their participation in intellectual life in 1938, hammering into law the racial definition of Jewishness in 1939, then prohibiting marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews in 1941.

This relatively peaceful but unstable situation started to turn for the worse upon Hungary joining the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941. With that, the war crimes quietly began. 20.000 Polish Jewish refugees were deported and handed over to the Germans who massacred them immediately. By 1942 in occupied Yugoslavia, Hungarian gendarmes massacred 4.000 Serbians and Jews. All in all, in this period Hungary had a bit of a bipolar attitude towards its Jewish and Slavic civilians and towards the war in general. Atrocities were grave but still amounted to little more than a rounding error to what the Germans were doing at the time.

After the Germans were pushed back from Moscow, more allied Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian armies were sent to the Soviet front to replenish German losses. With them went tens of thousands of Jewish forced laborers called Munkaszolgálat (Work Service) who were treated brutally by their commanders and guards.

Hungary, just as the other Axis powers suffered terribly at the front in the winter of 1942-1943. We all know what happened to the Germans at Stalingrad, but the fate of the minor Axis powers who were guarding the northern flank of Stalingrad, with no support from the Germans and a bare minimum of supplies, often goes unmentioned. The Soviets first wrecked the Romanians in November 1942 (Operation Uranus), then did the same with the Hungarians and Italians in January 1943 (Operation Little Saturn, known in Hungary as the Battle of the Don Bend) just as they were finishing with the Germans trapped in Stalingrad. Of the 40.000 Hungarian Jewish casualties in the Munkaszolgálat on the Russian front during the 3 years of war (mind you, these people were non-combatants), circa 16.000 died in that single month at the Don Bend, among them, the favorite Hungarian author of my teenage years, Jenő Rejtő, whose last words were rumored to be

“Na, ez az év is jól kezdődik” [Well, another great start of a new year],

as he froze to death on January 1, 1943 in the Russian wilderness.

Hungary withdrew what was left of its forces from the front. The rest of 1943 was spent by both sides trying to muscle for the initiative. The Germans, after their summer offensive at Kursk failed, built up a defensive line called Panther-Wotan line, intending to hold back the Soviets along the Dnieper river (i.e. the huge river bisecting the Ukraine at Kiev), but the Soviets creep through and establish tenuous bridgeheads in right-bank Ukraine by the end of the year. This brings us to the start of the movie at the start of 1944.

The history covered by the movie

The movie’s timeline spans from March 1944 to December 1944. The main question of early 1944 of the eastern front was whether the Germans can hold, stall and exhaust the Soviets along the Panther-Wotan line. The Soviets answered this by breaking out of their bridgeheads and wrecking the German Army Group South in their greatest offensive yet, retaking West Ukraine, and arriving near the Romanian border in March. The consequences of this battle cannot be overstated (but I bet this is the first time you hear of it). First, Germany would transfer half a million men and 800 tanks away from Western Europe, opening the way for the western allies into France. Second, and more importantly for our story, it made Hungary and Romania nervous about their future in the war at a time when they became ever more crucial for Germany.

Germany decided to ensure Hungary’s cooperation by occupying the country. On March 15 Hitler lured Horthy into his temporary residence under the pretext of negotiations, and as the two were talking, German forces entered and took control over the country without resistance. Today’s Hungarian politics being what they are, the official position is that at this point the country lost its independence and everything that followed is on the Nazis. This is a self-serving and harmful half-truth, much like the résistancialisme in France (embellishing the impact and spread of the French resistance), or Poland’s downplaying of its people’s assistance in the Holocaust.

In any case, Hungary’s armies were sent east to the front again, while in their place arrived Adolf Eichmann himself, the main organizer of the Holocaust in Europe. The first measure, in April, was to increase the number of Jewish forced laborers to 300.000 (essentially all working-age Jewish males in Hungary) under the guise of the Munkaszolgálat. Then, in May, with German planning and enthusiastic help from the Hungarian authorities, the Final Solution came to Hungary. In under two months, 440.000 people, mostly women, children, and old people were deported, the overwhelming majority to Auschwitz to be gassed on arrival. This marks one of the deadliest periods of the Holocaust as the Germans – by this time having years of experience and fully built facilities – were able to murder people with ridiculous efficiency.

This coincided with the wider spread of the news of the Holocaust throughout the public in the free world. On June 30, FDR, following the Pope and the Swedish leadership, pleaded with Horthy to stop the deportations, but unlike them, he also threatened Horthy that he would bomb Budapest to the ground if he didn’t agree. On July 7, Horthy gave the halt order. The plan had been to first deport the Jews of the countryside, supposed to last until July 15, then those in Budapest. As a result, by the time the trains stopped, most of the Jews left in Hungary were holed up in the ghettos of Budapest.

For a time, the larger-scale killings paused, but the military situation continued to deteriorate for the Axis. In late June, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration which wiped Germany’s Army Group Center out of existence and pushed the frontline all the way to Warsaw and Krakow, just a stone’s throw away from Auschwitz. In mid-July, the Soviets turned south to obliterate what was left of Army Group South, swatting aside the Hungarian 1st and the Romanian 3rd army as well. On August 23, with Soviet troops on their doorstep, Romania has had enough.

By this point, both Hungary and Romania were actively negotiating with the western allies. Horthy, however, was still hoping to avoid Soviet occupation of the country and was reluctant to open talks with Stalin. Michael, the King of Romania, on the other hand, took matters into his own hands and launched a coup d'État, ousting Antonescu. He was able to take control of the army and turn it against the Germans fighting on the side of their former enemy. In a matter of a few weeks, the frontline advanced all the way through Romania, sparing the country much of the destruction and plunder of war.

By September, the writing was on the wall for Hungary, but Horthy had much less room to maneuver, had an indecisive nature, and was presiding over a country much more strongly aligned with Germany than Michael. If he ever had any chance to remove his country from the war, he had missed it.

He acted a month later. On October 15, with the Red Army breaking into the Great Hungarian plain, Horthy announced in a radio broadcast that the war was over, as he had finally signed an armistice with the Soviets. But Hitler outwitted him once more. He had sent Otto Skorzeny, his favorite commando to Budapest who, in an operation dubbed Operation Panzerfaust, kidnapped Horthy’s son, blackmailed then detained Horthy himself, and placed Arrow Cross party leader Ferenc Szálasi in charge of the country.

With the fascist in charge, armed Hungarian militias started roaming the streets of Budapest, snatching Jews indiscriminately and establishing the Budapest ghetto. From December, they began mass killings on the shores of the Danube which lasted until the Soviet liberation. Thousands more were force marched from the city towards Austria for labor and to be murdered later, with many of them shot or beaten to death already on the way, including my second favorite Hungarian poet, Miklós Radnóti, my mom's favorite Hungarian author Antal Szerb, as well as a distant family member of mine.

As this was happening, the Soviets crossed the Danube and surrounded Budapest by Christmas Eve. The Germans were resolved to hold to the last man. The siege left the city in a similar state as the later one would leave Berlin months later, except, while the Battle of Berlin lasted for 16 days in the spring, the Siege of Budapest would go on for 50 days in the winter. 80% of buildings were left in ruins, about 40.000 civilians were killed including my great-grandfather (on January 1 of yet "another great start of a new year”, 1945) and many more injured including my great-grandmother who was blinded.

Women were subject to mass rape by the Soviet soldiers and Hungarian deserters, while civilian men were snatched from the streets indiscriminately and passed off as prisoners of war, including my grandfather (a civilian pharmacist and by this point the head of the family at age 21) who was taken 12 times only to escape 12 times. Up to 600.000 Hungarians would be deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor, a third of them civilians. 200.000 would perish from beatings and neglect, those who didn’t, were returned after 1-10 years.

Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum

The hero of the story, Pinchas T. Rosenbaum (PTR) was a Hungarian Jew from Kisvarda, the son of the local rabbi. He was active after the Arrow Cross takeover. He had already been a member of the Zionist organization, smuggling people to safety and providing them with false papers. Sometime and somehow (the story is based on personal accounts, anecdotes, and legends so we don’t get much specificity) him and his organization gained access to Arrow Cross and SS officers’ uniforms. With his aryan appearance and good German, he could be passed off as either.

During the raids of October-November and the killings of December-January, he would walk up to militia groups leading away kidnapped Jews, show a commanding authority, and take charge of the would-be victims, escorting the still-terrified people to a safe place. Other times he would march straight into prisons and walk out with members of the resistance who had been held there. He would infiltrate dinner parties to obtain information. Sometimes, when the Zionists would catch wind of an upcoming raid on a starred building, he would join it or conduct a pre-emptive raid of his own, bursting in, terrifying and kidnapping the fugitives, only to shepherd them to safety. All through this he took advantage of his sangfroid, natural authority, and improvisation skills, standing up to armed, murderous Arrow Cross militiamen and cowing them into surrendering their captives like extorting lunch money in an elementary school.

Nobody knows exactly how many lives he saved, estimates range from hundreds to several thousand. And he did all of this at 21 years of age.

What makes it to the movie of all this

The most successful war stories are the ones focused on a single aspect, be it on the frontline, the home front, or the death camps. This movie could have done that as well, focusing entirely on PTR’s actions during the autumn. Instead, it wants to capture all aspects of war, including all of Horthy’s political maneuvering that PTR (renamed as Elek in the movie) had nothing to do with. The result is… complicated. Here’s what the movie’s rough timeline looks like. Bold indicates events shown in the movie, the rest are not shown.

There are events in the movie that don’t line up perfectly, such as the timing of Horty’s negotiations, Elek’s actions, and most obviously Skorzeny’s arrival, which happens in March in the movie but took place only in October in real life. What’s more problematic is that the movie doesn’t make it easy to follow events. Cause-and-effect between the three theaters of war is completely missing. We don’t get a feeling of how the military situation influenced the political one, how both influenced the fate of civilians. The audience gets the bare minimum of information to understand who is who and what they’re doing in their own scenes.

This is a huge missed opportunity, because the framework of the story is good, and the project is ambitious. It’s simply that the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. This is made even more problematic since, as far as the audience can tell, the events of the movie span a couple of days or weeks at most. The opening text says: Spring 1944 and there’s no indication of how much time has passed since Elek’s crew was just out on the town partying. This is always a problem with historical movies, but it becomes outright ridiculous here. The long, hard, freezing, hungry, winter siege of Budapest, during which my grandfather and many others resorted to crossing the frozen Danube on its perilous, thin ice daily under fire is shown to take place in a single, warm, sunny day with soldiers shooting at each other to no effect in summer uniforms.

And that’s just wrong. There are so many little stories that could be told in the siege of Budapest. Hungarian worker guard on the side of the Red Army fighting against Hungarian regular soldiers. Romanians, press-ganged to fight against their former allies alongside their former enemies. Disciplined and principled Soviet soldiers fighting their own to protect Hungarian civilians. Civilians, pressed on all sides, running low on food, and medications. They had all that to work with and did nothing with it, reducing it to a side show.

How to shoot people shooting people

My historical gripes aside, the movie isn’t super gripping either. I didn’t find it boring, but the tone fails to live up to the premise of actually “Walking with the Enemy” in constant danger of recognition and with innocent lives at stake.

This flows from two weird choices, first, the decision to not show any blood. I don’t know how the movie got the PG-13 rating (with attempted rape and the exterior of a gas chamber with muffled noises from within) but they got it and thus every time someone gets shot, they fall down on the ground and the camera cuts away or goes out of focus. The whole thing reminded me of a Marvel movie. That’s a, shall we say, new take for a movie about the Holocaust.

The second choice is to build up their scenes in a way that deflates any possible tension, both within the scene, and the whole movie. Scenes with two or more opposing characters tend to have the following structure: (1) characters meet, (2) they get into a disagreement about the daily particulars of the Jewish Question, (3) debate heats up and becomes an argument about loyalty to the Axis cause, (4) someone produces a gun and shoots the opposition in the face. This is not something you want to do in a movie if you want tension. Tension needs highs and lows, not than a single escalation and an outburst of violence. Even worse, the movie decides to repeat this exact scene structure ad nauseum. We see it in the labor camp, the apartments and streets of Budapest, the banks of the Danube, even the royal palace.

The combination of these two choices produces a hilarity that cannot be intentional. Some character who doesn’t bear much relevance to the story is shouted at, gets shot, thuds to the ground in typical comic-book fashion, and the plot just moves on like nothing happened. Maybe a character is feeling sad in the next scene but even that is completely forgotten by the time we cut to next day’s (week’s? month’s?) events.

There are a few rewarding counterexamples to this. The first scene with Elek in uniform is excellent. But generally, even Elek’s whole depiction bothered me. By the stories, PTR gave me the impression that he was a cool-headed, iron-willed, mentally impervious badass with a quick mind and a silver tongue. Elek, on the other hand, comes off as a romantic cry-baby who would last about 10 seconds undercover.

If you want this approach, if you want your main character to start as this “no one left behind” melodramatic superhero-type (again the Disney influence) who breaks down crying after every mission (PTR was legendary for sleeping like a baby after coming home) and whips out his gun rather than compromise in lives, you can do that, but you need to confront that with the cold reality of the World War to make it interesting. Maybe let him learn from failure. Slowly, he could start losing his innocence, making compromises with evil for saving more people. Maybe “Walking with the Enemy” even rubs off of him in an uncomfortable way.

Instead, it almost feels like Elek keeps failing upwards and somehow powers through the literal impostor syndrome without a scratch on his humanity or his knightly values. His obvious mistakes don’t cost him anything as the Nazis are about as threatening as in an action shooter game set to “very easy” difficulty. It becomes funny, but even worse, it becomes uninteresting.

Stuff I absolutely loved

I don’t want to be too harsh on this movie, it’s an ambitious, sometimes even brave film that is held back by its constraints, budgetary, and otherwise. Still, there are a lot of things that I genuinely loved.

The uniforms, props, and the locations all look great. We really do get the feel that we’re in 1940s war-torn Hungary. We get authentic-looking newspapers, postcards, cars, flags, it’s all really nice and immersive. I liked that one can’t really distinguish German and Hungarian soldiers from each other by their uniforms, in fact I would have liked if they played this up even more, it would have been a poignant addition.

Even better, I thoroughly enjoyed the way that the actors playing Hungarians spoke English with Hungarian accents. It’s kind of silly when you think about it (just imagine the cast of Chernobyl put on fake Russian accents), but the accents sound almost authentic and the fact they made Sir Ben Kingsley do this is just so ridiculous I loved it. It doesn’t make much sense for most characters to communicate in Hungarian (e.g. an SS officer barking orders at Arrow Cross militiamen, or Horthy and Eichmann, or even German officers between each other) but it fits well with all the other PG-13 elements.

Although I complain about the story a lot, I think they did a lot of that quite well. Through Elek’s point of view we see the forced labor at the front, the Hungarian countryside, the events at Budapest, we get a near-complete view of what Hungary was like during the war. I really liked how the uneasy peace that Hungary was still enjoying in March 1944 was shown to go to shit so gradually and thoroughly, this is not something a more time-focused story could have shown. The moments of terrifying ambiguity as the Jews of Budapest piece together what happened to their deported friends and relatives in the countryside is top-tier filmmaking. I even enjoyed the inclusion and portrayal of Horthy, even if he ends up having nothing to do with the story of Elek. Which brings me to my next point.

Horthy, the Red Army, the Arrow Cross

Regent Miklós Horthy is the single most controversial figure in Hungarian history. The most generous of interpretations portray him as a patriot who found himself in an impossible situation, sandwiched between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and through his maneuvering, did his best to save his people in a world at war. To the most critical of voices, he is Hungary’s Hitler who brought Hungary into the war out of anti-Bolshevik fanaticism and was a knowing, willing participant of the Holocaust.

For historians, and most of his contemporaries, he is somewhere in between. Someone who was never a true Nazi, but who was more than happy to deal with Nazis and looked at them for the advancement of his own goals. Someone who, from 1939 onwards, was willing to trade the soul of his nation for pieces of land by allying Hitler whom he personally despised. After 1941, he resolved to trade blood of his soldiers fighting in the most criminal of wars to ever exist. And finally, after 1944, with German troops in his country, he agreed to give up his civilians as well.

So, to portray him in any film is a bold move. To portray him in a film specifically about the events of 1944 is downright daring. Casting Ben Kingsley to this role actually made my head explode. I love it. I loved it even more because in the 2018 movie Operation Finale, he plays Adolf Eichmann. So, as I was watching his scenes with Eichmann (played by Charles Hubbell in this movie) I kept imagining Kingsley in both roles talking to himself.

The only problem with this, just like the rest of the movie, is that you can’t take this seriously, and not just because of the two Kingsleys. Horthy is portrayed in a very sympathetic light by a very sympathetic Kingsley. His very first scene, shared with his son and set in the Royal Palace goes like this:

Horthy: “Stalin murders his own people, Hitler wants to purify the world, how does one choose?”

Son: “Father, you were faced with an impossible choice.”

Horthy: “I aligned Hungary with what I thought was the lesser evil.”

Son: “Our country would have been crushed between them if you didn’t choose!”

This is already bordering on parody, but it gets even better. Skorzeny and Eichmann arrive, they talk a bit about how Horthy is reluctant to let Eichmann exterminate Hungary’s Jews and Skorzeny hints at installing Szalasi to lead Hungary. Once they leave, Horthy faces the audience, flanked by his son, and with the gold ornate background of the Royal Palace, Ben Kingsley, his face severe, his voice with just a perfect amount of Hungarian accent, and with great foreboding:

Horthy: “The Jews have Eichmann. We have Skorzeny. All will be tested.”

Then hard cut to Elek waking up in cargo car to a generic train sound effect.

This was the first time I was overpowered with laughter watching this film. Then I got a little angry. I don’t mind the outright lie that “we have Skorzeny” since they would, eventually, have to deal with Skorzeny in October (by which time a majority of Hungary’s Jews would be dead though). But this “The Jews have Eichmann” is the worst kind of historical revisionism. Horthy casually washes his hands of the blood of hundreds of thousands of his civilians and then blames it all on the Germans when it is the Hungarian authorities that would round up and deport the Jews, Hungarian authorities that Horthy is still very much in charge of.

The first bit about choosing between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia bothers me as well, not just because we hear Horthy’s main excuse echoed without any sort of criticism, but mostly because no alternative viewpoint is shown to evaluate Horthy’s tenure as Regent. At the end of the movie, as in real life, Hungary does get crushed between the two powers, it gets crushed more thoroughly than any country other than Poland. And for much of the road that Hungary took to getting crushed, it was Horthy who led the way. I really wish someone in the film would have reminded him of this or if Elek’s people would remark on how utterly Horthy had failed them.

My other gripe is how the Red Army is depicted. The fearsome Soviet Red Army that defeated the Nazis and fought and plundered their way through Central Europe gets two generic battle scenes (actually the same scene played twice). Volumes could be filled with the heroic and despicable conduct of the Red Army in Hungary. I understand the omission a little bit, since the movie is mostly about the Holocaust.

What makes it bad is that it coexists with all the Horthy-stuff. If Stalin and the Soviets are the greater of the two evils as Horthy’s choice would imply, why aren’t we getting at least a glimpse into the horrors that the Red Army unleashes on the civilians of Budapest?

Finally, we have the portrayal of the Arrow Cross, who serve as the primary antagonistic force in Elek’s story. It’s conventional wisdom that your movie is as good as its bad guys. It is therefore a huge shame that the only named bad guys in this film are Eichmann and Skorzeny who never cross paths with Elek. All the Arrow Cross people that Elek deals with are just bloodthirsty killers with no name, no fear, and no motivation.

In reality the Arrow Cross militias were the 1940s equivalent of gang-bangers. Marginalized, impoverished members of society without representation or prospects. After a decade of conditioning they became receptive to the idea that Jews, who by and large were members of the intelligentsia, were beneath them and were responsible for their problems. Give them a uniform, a gun, point them to an enemy and they will become murderers. I don’t mean to absolve them of what they did, but their story is a tragedy as well. If a story is literally about “Walking with the Enemy”, then I expect that enemy to show its human side. That way you can actually send a poignant message about how rotten that human side can be. Failing to do so is just another missed opportunity among many.

Take me back to Budapest, no it’s Bucharest, not Budapest

My final point isn’t really about the film but about how it was made. And I’m only speculating here. The only solid fact that we have is that, although Budapest has become a very attractive place for film studios small and large, this movie was produced in Bucharest, Romania. It has a Romanian supporting crew, Romanian extras, Romanian locations (but, sadly, no Romanian characters).

And I’m left thinking how different the movie could have been, what impact it might have had if it had been shot (and popularized!) in Hungary. I cannot imagine that Bucharest was the filmmakers’ first choice. Maybe it was. Maybe it didn’t matter that much, maybe the movie would have turned out the same or worse. But still, what a failure from the government of Hungary.

Hungary’s Ministry of National Resources (which oversees culture, education, and health) has become notorious for its outrageous measures in subservience to Orbán’s regime. They were the ones who ousted the Central European University, stole the funds of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, replaced the heads of Hungary’s cultural institutions with idiots and cronies, wage a continued war on the autonomy of schools and universities, allow the healthcare system to decay, and last but not least, manage – catastrophically – the ongoing health crisis. Compared to that, the failure to home-produce a movie about the nation’s own history doesn’t seem much.

But I think this is a part of a darker picture. Orbán’s Hungary had been very keen on rewriting the nation’s history of WW2. His culture warriors push Horthy’s narrative of a peaceful Hungary beset on both sides by evil and the narcissistic myth that the nation lost control of its internal affairs in March 1944. The far-right of Hungary openly worships Horthy (as they secretly worship Szálasi), an attitude that’s becoming less and less marginal by the day.

So how come they didn’t end up producing a movie in which Horthy is portrayed outright sympathetically?

I offer three reasons. The obvious one, is that, with Hungarian Arrow Cross militias murdering Jews left and right by their own initiative in much of the second half of the movie, it’s hard to push the “it was all the Nazis”-narrative.

The second reason, the fun one, is that it’s hard to watch this film and see Horthy as anything other than incompetent (which he most likely was). The far-right’s greatest asset is its illusion of strength in leadership. The primary and primal reason why their followers are numb to the suffering of others is because causing suffering is a demonstration of power, and power is sexy. Horthy, an emblematic and central figure to the Hungarian (far-)right is not powerful in this movie. He’s lost, he’s helpless, and he’s completely inept. The government of Hungary is very much right to fear the depiction of a humbled and bumbling Horthy, even if sympathetic, as his incompetence, his lack of vision for his country, and his empty façade of strong leadership, reflect on them far too closely.

The third reason, the tragic one, is nuance. The government of Hungary doesn’t appreciate the nuances of our history. They want you to sit and listen to their version of events and not ask too many questions. Their message is threatened by any retelling of the story with shades of grey in it. Hungarian civilians who weren’t complicit in the Holocaust but were eager to take over the properties of deported Jews? Christians who were willing to help Jews but only as long as it was safe? Hungarian soldiers laying down their lives fighting against the Bolshevik threat but mistreating, neglecting, torturing, and killing the ones building their roads, camps, and bunkers, their own people? The domineering “conservative” values Orbán’s Hungary are so fragile they couldn’t survive nuance like this.

PTR and many others were heroes, Hungarian heroes who maintained their humanity and were ready to lay down their lives in the service of others in the most tragic chapter of our history, surrounded by the bottomless darkness and the muddy, confusing shades of grey of humanity. They deserve much better than to be ignored. And this is why...

You should watch this film

This brings me to my recommendation of why you should watch this film: it’s because Viktor Orbán and the far-right wouldn’t want you to. If you’re Hungarian, you should watch it for its nuance. If you’re not you should watch it to learn and perhaps emotionally engage with an obscure but crucial part of history. And if you’re anything like me who can take guilty pleasure from watching B-movies regardless of subject matter, watch it for fun. It’s really not that soul-wrenching for a Holocaust-movie, which is a failure from the film’s part but makes it accessible for an audience that doesn’t want to test itself emotionally.

And here’s to more movies like this, nuanced and ambitious. Flawed or perfect, just bring them. The world needs it.

December 18, 2020.

Footnotes:

• The Hungarian version of the Nazis that ended up becoming the Arrow Cross Party was more than just the clone of its more famous, German counterpart. Rather, they are its surprisingly highly influential contemporary. Gyula Gömbös, their most prominent early figure, coined the term “national socialism”, (which then of course gave the Nazis their name) as well as the term “Berlin-Rome Axis” (which gave the name of Germany’s “alliance”).

• Operation Panzerfaust basically amounted to Skorzeny hopping on a Tiger tank and driving it straight through some very frightened and confused Hungarian palace guards in Buda Castle. In the film we get the impression of a much larger shootout taking place.

• Skorzeny is portrayed (by Burn Gorman no less) in the movie as he was keen on portraying himself, as the badass, dangerous Nazi with a facial scar. Skorzeny was more of a prima donna vying for Hitler’s attention, famously pushing others aside to pose for a photo op with the recently liberated Mussolini. He was more known for his failed wacky schemes such as parachuting into the mountains of Persia to stir unrest or disguising Panther tanks with American markings rather than anything badass.

• In pandering to American audiences the film ends with Elek emigrating to New York and being cheered by his family and friends for his heroism. In reality PTR emigrated to Switzerland and would refuse to talk about his exploits.

Amazon link for the movie (costs 4 bucks):

https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Enemy-Jonas-Armstrong/dp/B06Y1F637K

Comments and questions should be addressed to peter.bayer7@gmail.com.