Munkácsi is best known today for his 1947 memoir Hogyan történt?, published in English by McGill-Queen's University Press as How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry,[5] an influential account of the Holocaust in Hungary that has been widely cited by such leading scholars as Randolph L.
[6] A reviewer of the English translation states, "Munkácsi writes dispassionately at first, describing life as a proud 'Magyar of the Israelite faith' before the aftermath of World War I ushered in a cascade of repressive anti-Jewish laws.
"[7] In the new critical edition of Munkácsi's book, his descendant Nina Munk writes in the preface that "to read How It Happened is to understand that the Budapest-based Judenrat, an administrative body established by the SS immediately after the invasion of Hungary in March 1944, inadvertently facilitated the Nazis’ 'wholesale extermination of Hungarian Jews' (Ernő's words).
Already in the immediate aftermath of the war [Munkácsi] and other members of the Judenrat were confronted by intense hostility and outrage from fellow survivors, many of whom had lost their whole family and community to the gas chambers.
How did the Judenrat and their families manage to emerge largely unscathed from the war even while more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered?"