Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing in English

Abstract

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Review Article: Souls, Hearts and Heritage: Passing from the Danube to the Hudson. Szegedy-Maszák, Marianne. 2013. I Kiss Your Hands Many Times – Hearts, Souls and Wars in Hungary. New York: Spiegel & Grau, Random House. 345 pp; and Griesz, Katherine. 2012. From the Danube to the Hudson. Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing. 482 pp.

“…Most such works have been written by those of the assimilated middle classes, with memoirs by both the poor and the very religious, who perished in far higher numbers. (see Vasvári 2009, as well as earlier reviews of memoirs in this journal by Blaikie 2009). The memoirs under review here are not about the fate of the persecuted masses but about how the rich and the super-rich Hungarian Jews in Budapest fared during the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust, and beyond.…”

Hungarian Women’s Holocaust Life Writing in the Context of the Nation’s Divided Social Memory, 1944-2014

“…As the title of this paper indicates and as I have also discussed in earlier studies, my primary focus is on women's Holocaust testimonies within a gendered frame of analysis, specifically to examine the still relatively neglected role of gender differences generally in wartime, and specifically the important role of women's life writing in the history of the Holocaust, where, in fact, women have written considerably more than have men (Vasvári 2006(Vasvári , 2009a. While the best-known scholars of the Holocaust tend to focus more on the macro level, it has been women scholars, usually feminists, who analyze the Holocaust in terms of women, gender, children, and family life.…”

“…But while Anne Frank's diary, written in hiding, is less than twenty percent about the plight of the Jews, and much more about the unfolding of an adolescent girl's maturation, Éva Heyman's diary presents a much more painful and tragic perspective. Éva lived in Nagyvárad/Oradea/Grossvardein and was first confined there in the ghetto, which was second in 4 Since my focus here is on the events of 1944 in Hungary, I will not discuss the diary of Anikó Szenes (Hannah Senesh) (1921, whose Hungarian diary up to her departure from Hungary for Palestine in 1939 testifies to a surprisingly normal middle class Jewish world that continued to exist in Hungary, while the rest of Europe's Jewry was being decimated (Senesh 2004, Vasvári 2006). Nor will I discuss the Hungarian-language diary of Zimra Harsányi (later known as Ana Novac), born, like Éva Heyman, in Nagyvárad, Transylvania in 1929, who began to write her diary in Auschwitz about her camp experiences and briefly about her postwar return to Transylvania (Vasvári 2009b: 5).…”

“…It may seem surprising to readers that in her entry from August 22 Lilla can write that she feels better in the ghetto than locked up alone at home earlier, but in fact she is not the only teenage girl to prefer the companionship offered by ghetto life, along with its hardships, and not knowing then what we now know about the ultimate fate of the ghettos. For example, thirteen-year old Hungarian Elli Friedman (Bitton-Jackson 1999, Vasvári 2009a, the subtitle of whose memoir is Coming of Age in the Holocaust, writes about how she likes standing in line for the toilet in the ghetto because that is where everyone meets to gossip, and she also recounts her infatuations with boys she meets there. This is how Lilla explains why she enjoys life in the ghetto: I feel great.…”

“…The family functions as a space of transmission and remembrance of inherited catastrophic histories that might be generationally translated from orality to literacy, that is, whereby survivors tell and retell stories to their children, but it is only the latter who are able to write them down. In other cases it is rather the impact of untold stories silently passed on by survivors, who literally cannot bear the pain of telling that which falls outside the normal limit of what is "tellable," and which spills over into the next generation through objects, behaviors and affects passed down within the family and culture at large (Levine 2006, Vasvári 2009a. It has been suggested that daughters of trauma survivors may be more vulnerable to trans-generational transmission of trauma and unconsciously become carriers of trauma that parents reject or suppress due the more permeable ego-boundaries in women, especially in mother-daughter relationships, which may lead women to taking their mother's experience as their own by way of projective identification (Hirsch 1989(Hirsch , 2002Vogel 1994;Malin 2000;Giorgio 2002).…”