Representatives in a Changing World: Characteristics of Urban Advocacy at the Turn of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries*

István H. Németh
National Archives of Hungary
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 1  (2021): 3-34 DOI 10.38145/2021.1.3

The Kingdom of Hungary had a strong system of estates within the Habsburg Monarchy, and this exerted a significant influence on the positions of free royal cities. The free royal cities enjoyed a large degree of internal autonomy until roughly the end of the seventeenth century, with little oversight or interference by the larger state. Since 1526, the cities had been members of the estates which had taken part in the Diets (the parliaments which could be regarded as the early modern form of the Hungarian), though they had played a minor role in comparison to the counties. In the last third of the seventeenth century, the system of estates underwent significant changes. The royal state came to exert more control, and in the free royal cities, the central administration began to play a stronger role as a force for oversight. The interests of the state administration now played an important role in the selection of the city’s leaders. The delegates who represented the cities in the Diets were also chosen according to these considerations. The local bodies of state administration were given major say in the selection of the representatives. As a consequence of this, delegates began to be chosen who were from different social backgrounds, including people who had different places within the system of the estates. While earlier, the individuals who had been sent to take part in the Diets had been members of the Lutheran bourgeois elite, from roughly the late seventeenth century onwards, members of the nobility living in the cities began to play an increasingly influential role. Many of the delegates from the city of Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) who will be discussed in the analysis below came from families of non-noble origins which, however, had been granted nobility as a reward for the services they had performed in the chamber administration. The career paths for members of these families led either to administrative bodies in the city or back into state administration.

Keywords: Catholicization, confessionalism, urban elites, professionalism, state administration, Habsburg Monarchy

The Positions and Roles of the Free Royal Cities in the Hungarian Diets

Within the Habsburg Monarchy, the Kingdom of Hungary remained a province with a strong system of estates (or feudal order). The threat of the Ottoman Empire, which ultimately affected the other provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy, compelled the Habsburg rulers and the Hungarian estates to seek mutual compromise. The influence of the estates of the Kingdom of Hungary, which played a significant role in providing protection for the monarchy and also in its food supplies, became so strong in these areas (precisely because of the importance of these two considerations) that the central government and the estates were able to reconcile their apparently conflicting interests for a very long time. The central administration of the monarchy, which was undergoing dramatic development at the time, and the strong feudal order in Hungary were able to coexist, and the counties governing the internal life of Hungary remained in the hands of the Hungarian estates. Even after the proclamation of highly centralizing decrees at the end of the seventeenth century, the counties retained a strong domestic political role essentially until the formation of the modern nineteenth-century state. As a consequence of this, the estates in Hungary played a more prominent role in the domestic politics of the country than the estates in the other provinces of the monarchy. These differences became increasingly apparent, particularly from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Assemblies of representatives of the estates became the main forums for the internal sovereignty of the country, and the participating estates took control of domestic feudal policy (i.e. in addition to the counties, they took control of the judiciary, the local military, tax collection, etc.). Thus, the Diets in feudal Hungary were considerably more important than the assemblies of the estates in other provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy. For the historian, then, both the Diets themselves and the domestic participants who appeared at the Diets (which were the most important forum of the feudal order) are significant subjects of study.1 In this complex feudal monarchy, since the fifteenth century, the free royal cities had had municipal rights independent of the royal court.2 The state order of the cities grew even more rigid compared to the late Middle Ages, and they maintained their right to self-government even if members of the nobility who moved into the burgs and, in the case of some cities, the military strained the medieval administrative framework.3 However, the cities did not have significant political influence in the Diets. From the perspective of the authorities, the monarch had more direct say in their lives. They had to pay an annual land tax (census) to the ruler as the landlord, and the extraordinary war tax (taxa) was set by the central organs of finance, not the estates. From the first third of the seventeenth century on, these taxes could even be collected several times, independently of the decisions reached at the Diets.4

Changes in the Hungarian Feudal Order in the Seventeenth Century

The changes which exerted a direct influence on Hungarian policy towards the cities from the end of the seventeenth century also influenced both the selection process of the individuals who served as envoys of the cities to the Diets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the responsibilities and prerogatives of these individuals. The extension of the state administration to the free royal cities, the city leaders, and the denominational affiliations of the inhabitants of the cities determined, in the long run, the city administration and political representation. The era was not a period of calm construction. A decisive and irreversible turn came in the fates of the free royal cities in these decades of change, and this turn was further aggravated by numerous external factors. Between 1662 and 1681, a period spanning almost two decades, not a single Diet was held. The primary reasons for this were the responses which were caused by the differences concerning ideas of state administration, within the Habsburg Monarchy, between the Kingdom of Hungary and the elite which governed the monarchy. The county estates were resolved to maintain the domestic political relations which had developed in the sixteenth century and changed several times over the course of the seventeenth. Beginning with the period of the Wesselényi uprising (1670–1671), however, the political leadership at the head of the monarchy planned and implemented fundamental changes in these relations. The changes in public administration and domestic political life were hardly unique, however. On the contrary, they were part of a larger European trend. One of the fundamental shifts in the early modern era, a shift which came in parallel with the formation of the modern state, was the extension, simply, of the prerogatives of the state. This was accompanied by the introduction by the state, which was using centralizing and later absolutist measures, of central regulations concerning matters which earlier had been determined entirely by the estates and their representatives. In the areas which had become the responsibility of the state which had been built under the authority of the absolute ruler, the state administration, reinforced by the ruler’s legitimacy, became an unambiguously decisive factor.5 Economic history characterizes this transformation as the creation of the fiscal state (of the fiscal-military state), an expression which captures the purely economic, financial relationship between cause and solution.6

One immensely important area of centralization is confessionalization, or to put it more simply, the extension of the authority of the ruler over religion and the church (and this is one of the hallmarks of an absolutist or centralized state administration). The religious policy pursued by the Habsburg government in the Czech-Moravian and Austrian hereditary provinces was clearly part of an effort in this direction, and this was indeed part of larger political practice in the other states of Europe. The notion of “one state, one religion” had become a fairly uniformly espoused political stance in the seventeenth century in each of the states which sought to create a more or less centralized or absolutist administration.7 The issue of confessional belonging was of key importance in Hungarian domestic politics, as the events which took place in part as a result of the advance of state confessionalization clearly indicate. As the end of the Bocskai uprising (1604–1606), which broke out in no small part because of issues and conflicts of a strongly sectarian and confessional nature, the Peace of Vienna (1606) resolved (among other things) the sectarian dispute between the two parties, i.e. the Hungarian estates and the ruler. At the beginning of the reign of Ferdinand II, there was a strong demand for the establishment of a state with only one denomination, but this did not take place in the case of the Kingdom of Hungary. The reasons for this are related in part to the domestic political compromise which addressed, over the course of the whole period, the domestic political conflicts between the estates and the ruler/state.8 This compromise seemed precarious at the time precisely because of the issue of confessionalization. The attacks launched by the two Transylvanian princes (Gábor Bethlen and György I. Rákóczi) confirmed the previous place of the Hungarian estates. The Diet which was held in Sopron in 1622 and then the Peace of Linz (1645) restored the relationship between the estates and the ruler.9 In contrast, in the Austrian provinces (mainly Lower and Upper Austria and Styria), a strong counter-reformation had been underway since the first quarter of the century, which had included forced relocations and conversions.10 In contrast with the practices used to implement religious policy in the other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, in the Kingdom of Hungary, attempts were made to effect change with peaceful means. Educational institutions run mainly by the Jesuits were established in the free royal cities and landlord market towns, and with them came the monasteries.11 The monasteries became the foundations for a slow process of conversion which enjoyed funding from the state. By the last third of the seventeenth century, the nobility had, for the most part, been converted,12 as had the middle-nobility stratum of trained professionals working in the state administrative bodies in Hungary.13 Debates and decisions reached in the Diets strengthened the results of the process of Catholic renewal, and the Hungarian Protestant political elite was increasingly pushed to the margins.14

While the parties managed to resolve the conflicts which had emerged earlier relatively quickly (1606–1608, 1622, 1645) and the domestic political balance between the estates and the ruler was, ultimately, restored, in the 1660s, the primary concern for the new political generation, which consisted of the people surrounding the new ruler, Leopold I, was simply the issue of the efficient operation of the state.15 The newly emerging political system of the Viennese government was now negotiating with a fundamentally changed Hungarian political elite, which was no longer the generation which had been born in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. For this new generation, the compromise and the rules of the political game which had emerged as a consequence or corollary of this compromise were self-evident and repeatable.16 The complete political turnaround and the reforms to public administration which were favored by the Vienna government were made possible by the period following the Wesselényi conspiracy (1664–1671). The series of armed uprisings and trials concerning accusations of treason in the wake of the conspiracy were unique in Hungarian politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they enabled the Vienna government to implement its plans for reform without constraints. Extremely high taxes were levied in the Kingdom of Hungary, and radical changes were implemented in the ways in which the taxes were levied. The tax based on providing for the military and the levy that was introduced as a sales tax were collected without the consent of the Diet.17 With the establishment of the Gubernium, an attempt was made to set up a new system with an office better connected to the central bodies that would govern instead of the estates. However, the Gubernium could not play a significant role due to the prevailing conditions in the country. One of the first tasks of the new administration was the recatholicization of the country. Protestant churches were confiscated and handed over to the Catholic Church.18 The measures adopted led to religious civil war,19 and the comparative stability of domestic life, which had been based until this point on compromises, was upset, as the old rules of the game no longer applied.

The measures introduced by the Habsburg government were very rapid and effective, especially when it came to restoring the institutions of the Catholic Church and taking control of the estates and buildings which had formed the basis of the institutional system. However, they had rapid repercussions for Hungarian politics due to the larger tax burdens and the radical changes to confessional life. The Thököly Uprising (1677–1685) and the Rákóczi War of Independence (1703–1711) were both consequences of the effects these measures had. At the time, during the period of the “religious civil war” of the late seventeenth century, people who belonged to different denominations were automatically regarded as enemies or, in situations of war, even as spies. The Rákóczi War of Independence was something of an exception to this, as the Lutherans again came to hold the advantage, but as a consequence of a balanced religious policy, the different denominations were still able to achieve of a certain degree of compromise and cooperation.20 The political circumstances of the Szatmár Peace Treaty (1711) helped ensure that the new administrative system that had emerged by the end of the seventeenth century could continue to develop relatively peacefully and essentially remain in place until 1848. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the entire Hungarian central administration underwent major reform, and the Hungarian Royal Lieutenancy Council (which replaced the Gubernium), the Hungarian Royal Chamber (which had been reorganized), and the Hungarian Court Chancellery formed the backbone of the Hungarian state administration. The Hungarian counties retained their prominence and influence in domestic politics, but in the free royal cities and the organs of the central government, the Catholic revival program was successful. Only Catholics could hold important positions in the administration, and the newly introduced administrative principles remained.

The Turning Point in Urban Policy

The new domestic policy affected the free royal cities of Hungary the most, where, beginning in the early 1670s, a significant political turn took place. The change served in part to further recatholicization and in part to secure the financial resources for increased spending by the state administration and, in particular, the army. Instead of having to rely on cities which had gone into debt and had to struggle to pay their tax burdens, the central government wanted to create a situation in which the cities would constitute a larger and more secure foundation for tax incomes. In order to address economic problems, the government wanted to introduce administrative tools similar to mechanisms and measures in other provinces of the monarchy. It sought to exert an influence on the internal composition of the city councils and to introduce state overview and reform of urban management. The central government’s primary goal was to reform urban management, and it approached this issue from several angles. First, it sought to make the city administration even more layered and more complex and also easier to keep under strict oversight and control. It also sought to determine the composition of the staff that led and operated the administration to ensure that it consisted of people who had the adequate training and expertise, who were loyal to the state administration, and who could be trusted to deal reliably with the incomes and properties of the cities and not to use them for their own purposes. The primary task of the initial period of intervention was to remove the (Lutheran) burghers in key positions and replace them with Catholics. The process of recatholicization served not only to implement increasingly the principle of one state, one religion. The selection of Catholics for positions of prominence and influence was, in the political context of the last third of the seventeenth century, a primary criterion of loyalty.21

In addition to ensuring the loyalty of its subjects, the state also needed to restore the cities economically. The factors which were taken into consideration when new members were chosen by the commissioners and delegated to the councils would have furthered the economic growth of the cities and the transparency of administration, as, alongside the criterion of belonging to the Catholic Church, knowledge of law and economics was also given considerable emphasis in the instructions.22 According to the chamber commissioners, the ability to elect the most important officers had to be taken away from the people and made subject to a decision by the ruler, since these figures allegedly “were the first leaders from the perspective of the ruin and retention of the city.” The cities would have been left only with the right to make nominations, and the commissioners would have selected the appropriate individuals from among the candidates, as was customary in Austria (sicuti moris est in Austria). Were a commissioner unable to choose a suitable candidate from the nominees, the Hungarian Chamber would have made the decision.23

In the end, the extreme means of nomination were never used. Rather, a policy was adopted according to which Catholics enjoyed strong support, but the city’s economy was also taken into consideration. The positions of key leaders in the city can be clearly discerned on the basis of the instructions given in the first few years. The city magistrate, the mayor (where there was one), and the notary had to be selected from among the candidates nominated by the central authorities.24 The commissioners not only determined the selection of the magistrate and, in some cases, the mayor, but also exerted an increasingly strong influence on the composition of the members of the internal council, then the elected council, and, where it existed, the external council. However, the election commissioners did not have an easy task, as very few of the individuals available met the ruler’s expectations, especially in the first period. The city official to be selected had to belong to the Catholic Church, but in addition to this, he also had to have an estate (benepossesionatus) and proper qualifications (qualificatus).25 In the last third of the seventeenth century, due to the haste with which changes were being introduced, individuals with inadequate qualifications and social status were often appointed to very significant city offices.26 However, it cannot be claimed that, contrary to the intent of the ruler, the changes made on the basis of denominational belonging led to a striking or irreversible drop in the qualifications of city leaders. Indeed, by the time people belonging to the second generation since the change began to take office, quite the contrary was true.

From the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic city leaders almost without exception had training in law, and it was gradually inconceivable that someone without strong social ties would be elected. Alongside the converted city leaders, the urban nobility, which had important family and social-economic ties and therefore enjoyed considerable prestige and were among the former economic intellectuals, also played a major role in the leadership of the cities. Usually, the descendants of the people belonging to this circle remained in the city leadership or entered the service of the state (or married people who had entered the service of the state). In the first decades of the eighteenth century, there were some city leaders from burgher families who, as Catholics, were seen as having the necessary qualifications. They came to occupy important positions in the city leadership as burghers with suitable social recognition and prestige who, from the perspective of their family circles, had a kind of double identity. They were tied to the local burgher communities because of their occupations and family ties, but they were also tied to the public administration because of their roles as public officers and other familial ties with public officials.27

New Considerations on the Basis of which the City Delegates Were Chosen

The frameworks described above exerted a decisive influence on the ways in which the representatives who were sent to the Diets were selected and the question of who, ultimately, represented and was eligible to represent the interests of some of the free royal cities. The urban state policy which had begun to emerge in the second half of the fifteenth century was consolidated in the sixteenth century, as is indicated by the fact that (in contrast with earlier years) from the middle of the century on, the possibility that a city might not send a delegate to the Diet was not raised by a single urban council. The number of delegates that the city would send was not fixed in this period, but the cities usually sent two and sometimes three or four representatives to the Diet. The instructions for the representatives of the cities and their credentials were issued by the city’s internal councils, and the points contained in them focused essentially on the protection of the interests of the given city. The delegates were always members of the city council, but in many cases the city notary was included among them or the notary accompanied the two-person delegation.28 State oversight of seventeenth-century urban policy may have influenced the cities to support the aspirations of the ruler at the Diets as well (as they were in a more vulnerable position). By the end of the seventeenth century, the cities had managed to acquire considerable influence through the ruler and the government, and this influence was quite clear in the Diets from the eighteenth century onwards. One very clear consequence of this change was that, in the Diet held in 1687, a legal limitation was placed on the number of free royal cities, as there was legitimate fear that the number of cities would exceed the number of counties.29 As in the case of other city officials, the individuals who were selected to serve as delegates were chosen by the chamber bodies. This direct use of political control was clearly apparent in the fact that, in the 1681 Diet, at least one of the delegates sent from each of the free royal cities (which earlier had spoken out against the Counter Reformation) was Catholic, and sometimes both of the delegates were Catholic, even in cases of cities which still had clear Lutheran majorities. This shift in the denominational longing of the delegates was clearly a consequence of the instructions given by the chamber. In the first such Diet, 30 of the 49 envoys of the fourth order were Catholic, while only 16 were Lutherans and 3 were Calvinist. The cities of Kassa, Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia), and Eperjes (today Prešov, Slovakia), for example, which had strong Lutheran elites, sent only Catholic ambassadors to the Diet. In the case of Lőcse (today Levoča, Slovakia), the sources clearly indicate that Johann Fabritius and Daniel Weber were nominated under pressure from the chamber administration of the Szepes (Spiš) region, while the selection of the famous Lutheran printer Johann Brewer reflected the views of the majority of the city. Credentials were issued and instructions given for three delegates, but only the two Catholics could officially appear at the meetings of the Sopron Diet.30

The frameworks presented above and the shift in the composition of the urban elite thus exerted a strong influence on the individuals who were chosen to serve as city leaders. Drawing on the example of the city of Kassa, I offer a sketch of their social backgrounds. The sources suggest that there were no significant differences among the delegates sent by the cities from the perspective of their social backgrounds. Where there were differences, these differences were due to distinctive circumstances (for instance, varying proportions of members of the nobility or the intelligentsia) within a particular city, such as Pozsony and the mining cities of what is today central Slovakia (and at the time was referred to as “Alsó-Magyarország,” or “Lower Hungary,”) to Nagybánya (today Baia Mare, Romania). In the discussion which follows, I will offer an overview of the careers of some of the delegates from Kassa whose professional trajectories can be considered typical as a means of offering insights into the socio-historical effects of these changes. While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the city notaries had played prominent roles, from the end of the seventeenth century on their relevance diminished drastically. It suffices perhaps to consider the example of the most famous notary from Kassa, Johannes (Bock) Bocatius, who for a short time also held the office of magistrate. Bocatius took part in the 1601 Diet as a notary. Then, during István Bocskai’s military campaign in Upper Hungary (a term used to refer to a region which today, essentially, is Slovakia), he became one of the prince’s close intellectual advisers. As Bocskai’s foreign ambassador, he was taken prisoner by Rudolf I. Like many of his associates, as a dominant urban intellectual and one of the decisive figures who shaped the ideology of the uprising, Bocatius also played a prominent role in domestic political life.31 Daniel Türck, a notary from Lőcse, took part in seven parliaments. His diary, which fortunately survived the upheavals of history, has become one of the essential sources on the early sixteenth-century Diets.32 At the end of the seventeenth century, there was only one notary, András Kercho, among the delegates to the Diet, though we know of a total of 14 delegates sent from Kassa by 1741. It is worth noting that Kercho was a Catholic burgher when he acquired his position as notary, as this post was given high priority by the royal commissioners in the post-1670 period, and only Catholics could be appointed to hold it.33 Kercho was the child of a family from Turóc County, as the last will and testament which he drew up with his wife on December 30, 1709 indicates. When he arrived in Kassa, he did not have any inherited property. (One could suggest a parallel between his career and that of János Keviczky, a key figure in the seventeenth-century Kassa elite.34) Kercho married the widow of György Szentsimonyi. Between 1691 and 1697, he was active on the external committee that represented the burghers, and from 1699 until his death on August 14, 1710, he served as a member of the internal council. He had the typical career of a Kassa notary, broken only by the period during which the soldiers of Ferenc II Rákóczi occupied the city. Kercho did not hold any city office between 1705 and 1707. However, the land he acquired lay in the part of the outskirts of Kassa where the majority of the city leaders also acquired estates. His neighbors were the Demeczky family, Johann Grasz, and János Jászay. His connections thus tied him to the new elite of the city.35

There were many German burghers among the Kassa urban elite even in the seventeenth century, despite the fact that during this period, the German population was becoming less and less significant and a large number of Hungarians had moved into the city. Hungarians had begun to settle in Kassa in significant numbers in the middle of the sixteenth century, but it was really in the seventeenth century that they began to acquire a role and place in the city elite that was significant enough for them to replace the German elite. With the increase in the number and significance of the Hungarians in Kassa, not only was the ethnic and power map of the city redrawn, but the place of Lutheranism as the confession which had held sway since the Reformation was undermined, as the vast majority of the Hungarians were Calvinists. Initially, the Lutheran city leadership had not allowed the Calvinists into the city. The Calvinists were only allowed to have their own religious community in the city beginning in the first third of the seventeenth century, and only as a consequence of pressure put on the city by the Transylvanian prince. The tensions between the Lutherans and the Calvinists only further facilitated the flow of Catholics into the city, a process which already enjoyed the support of the Vienna government.36 At the end of the seventeenth century, Andreas Breiner and Michael Goldberger were the only two Kassa councilors to appear at the Pozsony Diets with credentials. This was tied both to the shifts which had taken place in the ethnic makeup of the city of Kassa and to the fact that the highest authorities considered the selection of the Catholic delegates a priority. The non-Catholic Hungarian population of Kassa was represented by Dávid Féja and András Vida. They were both representatives of the old Kassa bourgeoisie, as socially tied to the city as the seventeenth-century local urban elite.37 This trend continued in the Diets which met during the Rákóczi War of Independence, in which, thanks to Rákóczi’s confessional policy, Protestants and Catholics enjoyed relatively balanced representation.38

Urban Nobles as Representatives of Urban Interests

The most dramatic change to take place in the delegates who were sent by the city of Kassa to the Diets was the sudden leap in the number of Catholic Hungarians who belonged to the nobility. Kassa was predestined by its status as a regional center, its role as the administrative center for the military and the chamber of Upper Hungary, and its distinctive sociohistorical characteristics to become a local center for the urban nobility, which was clearly emerging as a new social stratum in Western Europe as well. This transformation of the social order of the city was also furthered by the fact that Kassa, as the seat of the region between the Transylvanian principality and the Hungarian Kingdom, often served as a kind of place or refuge for members of the Transylvanian nobility, who sought refuge at times of unrest or turmoil (which were relatively frequent) in the Principality of Transylvania.39 Almost all the individuals who appeared in the name of the city at the national Diets and smaller Diets held at the end of the seventeenth century fell into this category. Imre Szentmártony, a member of the legal intelligentsia of the time, was active in Kassa as a recognized lawyer.40 From 1703 until 1720, he served as a member of the internal council, and he served as magistrate for three years when the city was under occupation by Rákóczi, and he regularly took part in the Kuruc Diets. His wife, Katalin Marussy, widow of István Orbán, was related to the Lászay and Regéczi families, and his father was a so-called iudex nobilium (noble judge) in Abaúj County.41

Mihály Demeczky was the child of a noble family from Gyergyószék. He may have studied law at the Jesuit University of Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia) before settling in Abaúj County. At first, working in the service of Imre Thököly, he represented the prince as his ambassador. He became a city notary in Kassa and very quickly became a member of the internal council, director of the city’s estates, and a magistrate in 1686 and 1687,42 but he also held minor positions in the county as a juror and accountant.43 Demeczky was not chosen by the royal commissioners by chance. As a young nobleman who had spent time among the Jesuits of Nagyszombat, he was selected as the solution to a challenging problem, for he had to replace Mihály Udvarhelyi, who himself had been selected in 1674 with some difficulty and who, as the chapter notary, worked both for the city and for the chapter.44 The position of city clerk not only secured him a salary, it also gave him considerable influence. In order to maintain his position, he allegedly did not hesitate to lobby against a resolution passed by the Diet in 1687 on the election of officials in the free royal cities. However, after this came to light, he fell out with the city leadership and renounced his rights as a burgher. Indeed, before doing this, he was not even willing to go to the meetings of the city council. Rather, the internal opposition of the city leadership met in his home. Although this unhappy state of affairs was resolved in accordance with the strict instructions of Leopold I, Demeczky’s relationship with the council clearly remained troubled, for he never held office again.45

Like Demeczky and Szentmártony, László Jászay may have been an intellectual nobleman who had studied law, though the sources contain no clear indication that he had any degree at all. He served as a delegate to the Diet, and this and the services he performed in city affairs and the various occasions on which he served as a delegate suggest that, like Demeczky and Szentmártony, Jászay had also been a member of this stratum. This is also supported by the fact that in 1676, citing the services he had performed for the city and his poverty, he asked the council to refrain from compelling him to present a letter of confirmation (the document which attested to his noble birth) or from paying the tax levied on burghers. Six years later, he had become a member of the internal council, and there is no indication in the sources that he was among the community of the elected.46 He also served as the delegate sent by Kassa to the assembly of the representatives of the cities of Upper Hungary, and one year later, he was a delegate to the Diet. Alongside the magistrate and city prosecutor Balázs Váncsay, he was a member of the committee charged with the task of designating the site of a church for the Lutherans, in accordance with the decisions reached at the 1687 Diet.47 Balázs Váncsay was the father of István Váncsay, who would emerge as a prominent Kassa politician. His career illustrates the changes which were underway and the ways in which individuals were compelled to adapt to these changes. Balázs Váncsay is mentioned in the sources as a Hungarian cantor and, later, as the city prosecutor. He was one of the figures who helped the family acquire a noble title. Together with his brothers Mihály and Mátyás, he was given a title on May 4, 1665 by Leopold I.48 Váncsay may have served as a suitable link between Catholics and Lutherans, as he converted to the Catholic faith very early on. His son István was baptized on July 25, 1673 by a Lutheran pastor. His godparents, Márton Madarász, István Kassai, organist Sándor Pischel, Mrs. Zsófia Puttemberger Ádám Kiss, Mrs. Judit Liptai András Tornay, and Mrs. Judit Faigel Dávid Féja, were prominent members of the city’s Lutheran elite.49 His second child, Gábor, was baptized by the Catholic parish priest in 1681,50 so he clearly converted sometime between these two dates, but presumably sometime around the moment when he went from being the Hungarian cantor to serving as the city prosecutor, as it was customary to reward intellectuals who had converted with positions in the city or state administration and thus to ensure them a livelihood. This may have taken place sometime around 1676, or at least this is suggested by the fact that in 1676, András Újvári-Bodnár, a resident of Kassa, rebuked Váncsay precisely for this reason, and indeed he rebuked him so churlishly that he was sentenced to pay a fine of 100 thalers.51 The council, which was already mostly Catholic by that time, may have chosen Váncsay to negotiate with Thököly, who was marching against the city, precisely because he was a convert.52

Balázs Váncsay was also a link to the next generation of Kassa city leaders, to the members of the elite who represented the interests of the city of Kassa in the Diets which were being held at a time in which the political circumstances and issues had changed dramatically. Balázs Váncsay’s son István, who was born a Lutheran (or Calvinist), became both the most significant figure of the city government who wielded the greatest influence but also the person who caused the biggest scandal in the politics of the city at the time. From the perspective of his social connections, the young Váncsay was clearly among the city leaders who were proud of their noble rank and sought ties to the noble families of the county.53 Already as a young man, he may have been a divisive figure, for in 1692, he came into conflict with Mihály Tarnóczy. Váncsay had sought to cheat Tarnóczy, and Tarnóczy had become so enraged that he had chased Váncsay through the vineyards, but first he struck him in the head with a small hatchet. He threw a stone at Váncsay (who fled) which quite possibly would have killed him had Váncsay, who had only recently turned 20, not been quick on his feet.54 He began his career as an advocate in the city council, in the council that was newly elected by Ferenc II Rákóczi, but he was soon mentioned in the sources from subsequent years among the most prominent members of the internal council. During the War of Independence, he was one of the members of the Kassa council who was sent the most frequently to meet with Rákóczi or Rákóczi’s most important officers or to represent the city at the Kuruc Diets.55 István Váncsay was at the Diet held in 1712 (which brought the War of Independence to an end from the perspective of domestic politics) as the only city notary of the time, with András Hlavathy, the envoy sent by Kassa, at his side. During the Diet, the two delegates participated in the debate with the cities which again had been given the status of free royal cities over their rank, but they were dealing, in addition, with the issues concerning the tax agreement, which was deemed hopeless, and they also worked to facilitate the selection of the new parish priest of Kassa.56 Váncsay was a respected councilor at the time. He had served as deputy magistrate in 1709 and then had been elected to serve as magistrate in 1710 and 1711.57 Váncsay seems to have been someone who did not hesitate to come into conflict with others if he felt he had to protect his own interests or if he felt that a member of his family had been insulted.58 As noted above, he was baptized a Protestant, but by 1712, he had converted to Catholicism, for in this year he became the godfather of one of István Radikovicz’s twins.59 The fact that he was ranked second on the council which was elected in front of chamber councilor Franz Meixner on January 28, 1712 and which consisted exclusively of Catholics is again clear indication that he had converted. He was also elected to serve as a tax collector.60

Váncsay served on the council until 1714, and it is reasonable to suggest that he failed to hold his position because of events which had transpired during the Rákóczi War of Independence and suspicions concerning biased management of city funds. In 1717, Baron Johann Ignatz Viechter, a chamber councilor and delegated election commissioner, was given the task of putting the management of Kassa on stable footing. In order to do this, he had Bertalan Máray appointed mayor of the city, and he requested all the records of the city accounts and strove to determine who had been responsible for the earlier mismanagement of city finances. Váncsay was among the accused. According to the report, he was chosen to serve as a member of the council again on condition that he submit for examination the records of accounts from the period during which he had served as magistrate. It had then become clear that, during the upheavals caused by the War of Independence, Váncsay may have dealt in an underhanded manner with the wealth which had flown into the city, as it came to light, in the course of the investigation, that he had taken 13 last wills and testaments from the city archives which had never been found again. Each of these last wills and testaments had named the city as the heir.61 In spite of the suspicions which were cast on him, Váncsay was still nominated to serve as deputy magistrate62 that year and as advocate and magistrate the following year. Of the latter two positions, he secured the second with a majority of the votes, and he remained in office as magistrate until 1727, or in other words for nine years.63 Váncsay ruled with an iron fist during his time in office, as evidenced by the fact that he did not leave office voluntarily or simply as a result of a vote held by the council, but rather as the consequence of an extraordinary procedure, something that was used only as a rare exception at the time. In January 1726, the Szepesi chamber, which passed on the contents of the annual royal decrees, informed the city that they would not send an election commissioner. Rather, the election would be held without a commissioner. Their only stipulation was that Váncsay submit the records of accounts from the period between 1709 and 1712 to the chamber for examination.64 It referred, as an antecedent to this, to the fact that during the election of city officials held in 1724, the royal commissioner had objected to Váncsay’s management,65 but as Váncsay had failed to submit the records (which now were well over a decade old) even after having been called on to do so several times, royal commissioner Pál Lipót Mednyánszky was having him removed from office, and he would not be allowed anywhere near the highest circles of the city leadership until he had done as instructed and had submitted the records.66

The city of Kassa treated the case of its former magistrate as a matter of considerable importance and even urgency. One explanation for this may simply have been the prestige and authority which Váncsay enjoyed, but the city may also have resented the manner in which the royal commissioner and the ruler were infringing on the rights of the city council. The council turned to the Hungarian Court Chancellery and then the Court Chamber with its complaints, and it charged Adam Aloysius Talheim, who was a Vienna agent and who served on the chancellery, with the specific task of handling this matter. The council was perfectly willing to spend money and barter with the wines stored in the city cellars in order to ensure that Váncsay be restored to his position as magistrate as soon as possible. (They even turned to Mátyás Bél, a Pozsony pastor, for assistance, as indicated by the fact that two of the barrels of wine that were sent to the chancellor were stored in his cellar.67) Talheim earned his money, and the wine given to further Váncsay’s case also proved an effective bartering tool, for in February 1728, the chancellery recommended that the Royal Chamber support Váncsay’s reappointment as magistrate, as, in the end, he had submitted the records requested of him and had settled the issues concerning the city finances. The chancellery felt that Váncsay had already proven his capacity for the office and that he had done a great deal for Kassa as a royal estate (peculium regium).68 Kassa therefore quickly received permission from the ruler, and Váncsay regained power over the city, as he began serving as deputy magistrate that year and then regained his seat as magistrate the following year in the election that was held before the royal commissioner.69 True, the Szepes Chamber Administration was by no means satisfied with Váncsay’s work. Indeed, it had several specific complaints. It objected, for instance, to the various luxury expenditures he ordered, and records of accounts again were missing. The basic principles according to which the orphanage would be run had not been clearly specified, and the urbarium for the city estates still had not been prepared. The apothecary, which was worth more than 30,000 forints, had been leased for 3,000 forints, and worst of all, no records had been kept of the estates which had ended up in the hands of the city.70 Váncsay nonetheless triumphed over the other candidates in the 1729 and 1730 elections and again in 1733, and he sat in the most prominent places on the council until his death. Considering that, as the most prominent member of the council, he also held the position of mayor (as was established practice) and thus essentially had complete control over the management of the city, we can justifiably say that István Váncsay was the most significant magistrate of Kassa in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Social Ties and the Early Stages of Career Paths

Members of the Váncsay family were working in the service of the chambers by the middle of the eighteenth century, but like the children of many other individuals who held offices in Kassai, they saw greater assurance of good career prospects in the service of the state. János Nossiczi Thurzó, who worked as part of the office responsible for collecting the thirtieth (a tax),71 was a permanent member of the Catholic council created in 1712 until his death on August 12, 1732, and in the last two years of his life, he served as the city magistrate.72 In addition to serving on the city council, he was also given constant employment by the Szepes Chamber Administration.73 One sees evidence of the close relationship between the chamber and the city management in the fact that, among the children of the city councilors, members of the Almássy, Csomortányi, Demeczky, Ganóczy, and Berezik families became the chamber officials. Usually, the officers who had positions as clerks were sons of the mayors of Kassa, but some of them managed to make it to positions in the middle of the hierarchy of offices. György Thurzó, the son of the aforementioned János Thurzó, served as assistant accountant to the chamber administration.74

There were tendencies in the family and social ties of the Kassa delegates and, more generally, the new elite of the city which indicate the existence of various subgroups. The delegates tended to come from a social group which could perhaps most accurately be characterized as the intellectual, officeholding stratum of the nobility the families of which had gotten their noble titles one generation earlier (usually, in the middle of the second half of the seventeenth century). If one looks at the network of relationships involving the godparents of the Kassa delegates and their children, one notes one of the largest nodes of this network was formed by the relationships among the families which sought closer bonds (such as the bond between family and godparent) among people who belonged to the city elite. The few delegates who were Lutherans formed a distinct group, the most interesting of which was perhaps the subgroup formed by András Hlavathy and Gergely Lukácsik, who asked women who were married to leaders of the Szepes Chamber Administration to be godmothers to their children. This all clearly illustrates that the smaller groups which had already been identified in Sopron also existed in Kassa, and the model introduced there was also valid in the case of a city which was an administrative center in Upper Hungary.75 Indeed, as the seat of the Szepes Chamber Administration, Kassa perhaps bore a stronger affinity with Pozsony from the perspective of its ties to the local network of officeholders. The roles of the city, which served as a prominent site for domestic political affairs in the Kingdom of Hungary, as both a residence and an administrative center further strengthened these urban-political and social factors, which were also factors in the other free royal cities and which exerted a stronger or weaker influence on the lives of the city communities. Members of the new, well-educated, Catholic urban elite appeared very quickly among the city leaders in the first years of the turnaround in urban policy. Elected officials almost without exception had legal degrees, and they built strong social ties. It was also not at all uncommon for a Catholic intellectual to enter into a familial relationship not with someone who belonged to one of the families which was part of the city elite, but rather with one of the employees of the local chamber. In these cases, we can speak of people who had ties to the city and the burghers because of their occupations and lifestyles but who were also tied to the state administration because of their family connections to state offices and people who held positions in the state offices. Naturally, this put them in a very advantageous position. As burghers who were also intellectuals (for the most part, with training as physicians or apothecaries), they were recognized members of the given communities, and because of their good ties to local representatives of state power, they clearly enjoyed an array of other advantages.76 The close study of the Kassa delegates definitely indicates that the leaders of the burgher community of the city tended to develop close ties to the local nobility and the state administration, even more so than in the case of Sopron or Pozsony. This was true not simply in cases involving the official affairs of the city but also from the perspective of the personal relationships of the city leaders.

In Summary

This discussion of the careers of delegates from the city of Kassa to the Diets sheds light on fact that, from the perspective of its professional (administrative) training and qualifications, the new Catholic urban elite managed to catch up relatively quickly to the Lutheran burgher community. In contrast with the Lutherans, however, Catholics enjoyed significant advantages according to the new principles of urban policy. Thus, the two groups were never on an equal footing from the perspective of politics. This was especially true when, due to the administrative significance of the city (like Pozsony and Kassa), the government no longer sought to maintain the former confessional balance and instead wanted to create a city leadership consisting exclusively of Catholics. This new, professional, trained urban elite was no longer tied exclusively to the burgher class. Rather, it was closely linked to the local nobility and the noble-officeholding urban stratum, which it came to resemble more and more. For the sons of this new elite, the prospect of serving in state office seemed an increasingly normal, natural way to launch a career. It also became increasingly common for the leading urban elite to include many individuals who were members of the nobility who lived primarily off their incomes as officeholders or, in other words, who belonged to the abovementioned stratum of noblemen intellectuals. Thus, from the perspective of social history, a new class of officeholding intellectuals emerged from the very mixed stratum that consisted of both burghers and members of the nobility. This new class had strong ties to the burgher lifestyle, and it not only took the baton from the honorary urban leaders in city administration but also began to serve in ever larger numbers in state offices.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [National Archives of Hungary] (MNL OL)

A 20 (Litt. Cam. Hung.) Magyar Kancelláriai Levéltár, Magyar Királyi Kancellária regisztratúrája, Litterae Camerae Hungaricae

C 30 (Acta nob.) Helytartótanácsi Levéltár, Magyar Királyi Helytartótanács, Acta nobilium

E 156 (UetC) Kincstári Levéltárak, Magyar Kamara Archivuma, Urbaria et Conscriptiones

E 210 (Misc.) Kincstári Levéltárak, Magyar Kamara Archivuma, Miscellanea

E 23 (Litt. Cam. Scep.) Kincstári Levéltárak, Magyar Kamara regisztratúrája, Litterae camerae Scepusiensis

E 254 (Repr., inf. et inst.) Kincstári Levéltárak, Szepesi Kamara regisztratúrája, Repraesentationes. informationes et instantiae

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA)

Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (FHKA)

AHK HFU Akten Alte Hofkammer, Hoffinanz Ungarn, Akten

AHK HFU ung.MBW Alte Hofkammer, Hoffinanz Ungarn, Ungarisches

Münz- und Bergwesen

Archív Mesta Košice [Košice City Archives] (AMK)

H I-II. Supplementum H, Listy a listiny

H III/2. mac. Supplementum H. Mestské knihy a registre, Knihy mestskej administratívy, Malá mestská kniha (Liber civitatis minor)

H III/2. pur. Supplementum H. Mestské knihy a registre, Knihy mestskej

administratívy, Veľká mestská kniha (Liber civitatis maior)

H III/2. re. Supplementum H. Mestské knihy a registre, Knihy mestskej

administratívy, Knihy voljeb (Liber restaurationum)

Schr. Supplementum Schramianum

Schw. Colectio Schwartzenbachiana

Štátny archív v Banskej Bystrici, pracovisko Banská Bystrica [State Archive in Banská Bystrica, Banská Bystrica workplace] (StABB)

MMBB: Magistrat Mesta Banská Bystrica

Štátny Archiv v Košiciach [State Archive in Košice] (StAKE)

Zb. cirk. matr. Zbierka cirkevných matrík

Štátny archív v Prešove, špecializované pracovisko Spišský archív v Levoči [State Archive in Prešov, specialized workplace Spišský archiv in Levoča] (StALE)

MML Magistrat Mesta Levoče

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* The essay was made possible with the support of an NKFI K 116166 grant and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Momentum “Family History Research Group.”

 

Negotiating Widowhood and Female Agency in Seventeenth-Century Hungary

Gabriella Erdélyi
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 4  (2020): 595-623 DOI 10.38145/2020.4.595

The case study focuses on the tactics of aristocratic women to negotiate their familial roles and identities primarily as wives and widows. By reading closely the rich family correspondence of the Várdai-Telegdi family in the first half of the seventeenth century and concentrating on the intensive negotiating period between getting widowed and remarrying the study argues that the role of the go-between and the marginal status of women in the patrilineal and patriarchal family created some space for them to maneuver. Moreover, the cultural context of female familial roles and ties (mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, half-sisters) was the female court, which created horizontal and intimate ties between women, which also empowered them.

Keywords: female agency, negotiating female roles, female courts, family network, half-sisters, mother-daughter relationship, emotional practices, letter exchange

My sweet beloved lady mother, I wish our Lord God had allowed me to write better news for your Grace, my beloved husband was summoned by our Lord God a week ago, leaving us, my poor […] child and me in my present condition [i.e. she was pregnant] rather lonely, I beg your Grace for the living God that your Grace would not leave me alone, but would instead visit me.1

In the first days of her widowhood, the 17-year old Krisztina Nyáry shared with her mother, Kata Várdai, her painful feeling of being an outsider in both of her families: after having lost her husband, she remained alone among her late husband’s kin, while she also had to request support from her mother, who lived far away from her. The present article looks at the ways in which early modern aristocratic women maneuvered in their intermediate position between their natal and marital families. How did they mediate as wives, and how did they use their roles as mediators for their self-fashioning and their individual purposes? How did they negotiate their liminal status as widows to gain support and reintegrate into shifting family networks? Like births and marriages, deaths were followed by an intensive negotiating process among family members (on which the letter cited above touches), resulting in the reconfiguration of the family network. Therefore, in this article I focus on these periods of intensive bargaining in the life-cycles of the families to which Krisztina belonged.2

The protagonist of the following case study will be Krisztina Nyáry (1604–41), whose life, however, was fairly exceptional. Following the untimely death of her first husband, Imre Thurzó (1598–1621), his relatives pushed her aside. She was not only denied to receive the right of tutorship of her two little daughters, but, with the explicit aim of ensuring that her daughters would be raised as Lutherans (Krisztina was Calvinist), their daily care and upbringing was also entrusted to their paternal grandmother.3 This was a fairly extraordinary turn of events, since in Hungary as well as elsewhere in Europe widowed mothers were considered legitimate and capable tutors of their half-orphaned children, who were seldom separated from their mothers, especially at such a tender age. Also, instead of widowed mothers, the remarried mothers tended to be stigmatized as “cruel” and divested of the right to serve as tutors.4

By looking closely at this exceptional case, I aim to better understand typical contemporary concepts and everyday practices within the family.5 I will draw on the argument that familial roles are cultural constructs and have culturally distinct dynamics. It has been repeatedly argued that the maternal role of early modern aristocratic women was overshadowed by their role as wives in the patriarchal family. In other words, husbands expected their wives less to perform their maternal duties and more to fulfil services in the interest of their new families acquired through marriage. In short, female identity (as opposed to male identity) was more decisively shaped by the social bond created through marriages than the blood tie of maternity.6 How did Krisztina Nyáry, widowed in pregnancy and with an eight-month-old baby, maneuver in the spaces and gaps created by the web of familial expectations and ties? Drawing on the letters exchanged among family members, I offer a portrait of her in her natal family fulfilling the role of adult daughter and sister and as daughter-in-law in her relationship with her mother-in-law, Erzsébet Czobor.7

In Krisztina’s natal family, the head of the family was Krisztina’s widowed mother, Kata Várdai (1570–1630). Kata Várdai had played this role since losing her second husband, Pál Nyáry, in1607. In the 1610s and 1620s, she lived together with her adult daughter from her first marriage, Anna Telegdi (1589–1635), in the old Várdai-family residence, the castle of Kisvárda in the eastern region of Habsburg Hungary, next to the Principality of Transylvania. Their unusual co-residence resulted from the fact that, in 1609, Kata Várdai had her 20-year-old daughter Anna marry her stepbrother, István Nyáry, who was the son of Kata’s second husband, Pál Nyáry. The stepsibling match, as usual, promoted both the economic and emotional integration of the stepfamily.8 The step-siblings, Anna and István, were close to each other in age, and as they had been living together as part of the same household for a decade, they knew each other well. The newly married couple found it entirely natural to remain in “beautiful Várda,” in spite of the fact that they had numerous estates to choose from.9 Thus, Anna’s half-sister Krisztina, who was five years old at the time, got a 19-year-old surrogate mother in the person of her half-sister and a 24-year-old surrogate father in her brother-in-law. This cohabitation of the half-sisters came to an end in 1618, when Krisztina left Kisvárda. Kata Várdai, always keeping a sharp eye out for a promising match for her daughter, managed to catch the attention of Imre Thurzó, the talented and immensely wealthy son of the late palatine. In the autumn of 1617, Imre and Krisztina, who was only 13 years old at the time, were engaged, and one year later, they were married.10 As custom dictated, Krisztina moved in with her husband’s family in Biccse (today Bytča, Slovakia), which lay in the western region of Habsburg Hungary.

The asymmetry in the position of the half-sisters provides a good opportunity for a variety of observations. In the case of Anna, the fact that her natal and marital families merged and she remained in her natal home as a married woman resulted in an exceptionally close and intimate but also increasingly hierarchical mother-daughter relationship, on which I have written in detail in another study.11 Krisztina, in contrast, played the common mediating role of married women between their natal and marital families. The dual use of names is one of the indications of the double identities of wives.12 Accordingly, the newlywed Krisztina signed her letters Niari Christina, while others referred to her as “my lady Mrs. Thurzó.” How much influence and freedom of movement did Krisztina have in the court of the Thurzó family, and how did she manage to maneuver and negotiate this space between two dominant mother figures, Kata Várdai and her mother-in-law, Erzsébet Czobor? It seems reasonable to surmise that the role of the go-between and the marginal status of women in the patrilineal family created some space for them to maneuver. Below, I examine the tactics used by the extremely young widow Krisztina, who has been depicted by historians as simple-minded,13 when she mediated between the two very dominant mother figures governing the two families.

The relationship of the half-sisters was asymmetrical not only in terms of their age (Anna was 14 years older than Krisztina), but also with regard to social rank and wealth due to the differences of their paternal and marital families. Historians tend to assume that differences and hierarchies between sisters and brothers, which were typical in patriarchal families at the time, led to conflicts and rivalries.14 We will thus observe whether and how, instead of or alongside the love and solidarity one would expect between sisters and half-sisters, rivalry and negative emotions found expression. It becomes clear from the family correspondence that the cultural backdrop of the mother-daughter, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, and sister relationship was the female aristocratic court in more general terms, the female domestic community. How did these alternative female friendship and kinship ties influence women’s roles and identities as wives, widows, mothers, and daughters-in-law in the patriarchal family?

 

Between “Two Mothers”

When Krisztina suddenly found herself with “two mothers,” the mother-daughter relationship became a triangle. In this triangle, Erzsébet Czobor also corresponded with Kata Várdai, whom she informed about her daughter’s pregnancy:

My loving daughter-in-law and my sweet little grandchild and maiden daughter are in good health […]. I would also like to let you know that on Michaelmas my loving daughter-in-law learned of the gift bestowed by God, whom let his holy majesty allow her to bear in peace joy and bring happily into this world and with your graces reach this time in good health.15

Krisztina found herself in the role of mediator between the two mothers. She delivered greetings and letters from the one to the other. As she wrote in one letter, “My dear heart, My Lady Mother, I have given the letter which your grace wrote to my Lady her Greatness.”16 In other words, Kata Várdai put the letter she had written to Erzsébet Czobor in with the letters she had written to her daughter, and Krisztina passed this letter on to her mother-in-law. Furthermore, Krisztina knew of the letters written by her mother-in-law to her mother, and she adjusted her own letters accordingly, both from the perspective of timing17 and from the perspective of their content: “I know that My Lady her Greatness wrote of our news.”18 And as she was a member of the women’s court of Biccse, she had to adapt in many ways to this life and, first and foremost, to the head of the court, her mother-in-law. On one occasion, she felt obliged to offer an explanation as to why she had not written for two weeks:

I was given four letters from My heart, my Lady Mother to which I could not reply, I beg your grace to forgive me for not having replied, because My Lady her Greatness and my husband his grace were undergoing purgations, and I had to busy myself with them, and this is why I could find no time to write to your Grace.19

 

Thus, Krisztina did not maintain an independent correspondence with her mother. She did not have anyone to deliver letters on her behalf, but rather wrote when the court messenger traveled to her mother’s court. Her letters concerned news of the events which took place in the women’s court of Biccse, including news of visitors, illnesses, weddings, and funerals. This kind of collective character of her letters is particularly remarkable: indeed, instead of a letter exchange between two individuals, the female court community of Biccse corresponds with that of Várda.20 It is common knowledge that early modern letter-writing (the writing, circulation, and reading of letters) was a collective social practice.21

It is of particular interest in this case that, beyond the family network, the female court also functioned as an “epistolary community.”22 At the beginning of her letters, Krisztina often addressed her half-sister and her mother, and at the end she sent her greetings,23 and she also passed on the oral greetings from her mother-in-law, her unmarried sisters-in-law (the “misses” who were still living at home), her married sisters-in-law, who were visiting their mother,24 as well as other female retainers such as the nurses and wet-nurses, and the noble maidens (“young ladies”): “My dear, my Lady Mother, Lady Erdődi is here,25 and Lady Vízkelety26 arrived yesterday, they offer their services to your grace. Similarly, the three maidens27 offer their services with great love.”28

Krisztina brought the so-called “old woman” (Lady Bogáti), the head of her court, from Várda with herself, so she repeatedly asked her mother to arrange for payment of her salary: “I do now know where the payment for my old woman will come from, as here in the upper regions there are other customs, they say, and they do not want to pay her, but rather my sweet lady mother, your grace agreed with her about her payment, so I ask your grace that your grace not leave the poor thing on her own.”29 She also asked her to send news of her children, “for she longs for her children so sadly, the poor thing.”30 As was characteristic of her, Kata Várdai entrusted her younger daughter Krisztina’s request to her elder daughter, Anna, and Anna turned to her cousin, Erzsébet Szokoly, who took care of the children’s placement: “Your grace should bring the sons of the poor Lady Bogáti with you […] my lady fears for their poor mother that she will grow sad, thus your grace, my sweet loving lady should act the way that it be avoided, and Lady Bogáti may serve with good heart around my sweet sister.”31 By the time they had come to an agreement, the “old woman” had returned to her children: “My heart, my Lady Mother, with regards to the affairs of the old woman, there is one who was brought from Léva who twirls around me quite well, but Lady Bogáti has left me, she by no means remained with us. I serve your grace’s good will, but it is already done.”32 With this, the ties which bound Krisztina to Várda and her mother were further loosened, and the ties which bound her to her new home, her new “mother,” and the women’s court of Biccse were tightened, and we are offered glimpses into the functioning of the network of pragmatic relationships among these women.

With her advantageous marriage Krisztina had become the wife of a count, and and thus had risen from the ranks of the barons to the ranks of the counts.33 This had changed her position in her natal family, and this is palpable in the communication between Krisztina and her mother. For example, as opposed to her elder sister, she does not hesitate to make frequent requests to her mother, which indicates a shift towards a more equal relationship with her mother.

Some of her letters to her mother were not written in her hand. Rather, she used the services of a scribe, which was another act with which she negotiated her subordination as a daughter.34 She anticipated that this act would be met with rebuke: “My sweet loving soul, my lady mother, forgive me, your grace, that I did not write your grace with my own hand, I could not write with my own hand, but after this I shall.”35 Beyond the rhetoric of daughterly subordination and obedience, her use of emotional language is remarkable, as it mirrors the emotional language of her mother and thus again positions her vis-à-vis her mother on more equal terms. The newlywed young wife shared her feelings of sadness with her mother in the following words: “Even if I had no other grief, I would still lament that your grace is far from me, my sweet lord is in the camp, he writes nothing to us, our only affair is the many thoughts day and night.”36 Krisztina wrote many times of the abandonment she suffered as a member of her husband’s family, and she expressed her longing for her mother’s love many times:

My sweet heart, my Lady Mother, I understand from your grace’s letter that I wrote that I am of heavy heart in my sweet Husband’s absence, were I closer to your grace, your grace would take me to her, and certainly I would have no grief were I with your grace. Your grace also wrote that your grace can show no motherly love to me, my dear heart, My Lady Mother, I believed that your grace wished me well, I have no doubt.37

The way she shares her feelings suggests that mother and daughter had a confidential relationship, and it also seems expressive of a desire to maintain an emotional bond that would bridge the distance between them: “My loving heart, my Lady Mother, I also understand from your grace’s letter that your grace is glad to hear of my health, even if I am so far away, I believed this, even if your grace does not write it to me.”38 In other words, she sensed her mother’s love for her even in the absence of words.

Krisztina’s sense of alienation in her husband’s family’s court was somewhat eased by her close ties to some of the members of the female court. She cherished a close friendship with her maiden sister-in-law, Katica Thurzó. This friendship must have inspired the rare comic tone of one of her letters, in which she used playful irony deriving from overstatement: “My dear Katica Thurzó offers her loyal, perfect, true, humble, and lifelong services to your Grace as her beloved, kind, and above all beautiful lady and sister. She asks your Grace to keep her among all your Grace’s servants as the smallest dishwashing maidservant.”39 This letter suggests that these domestic female alternative kinship and friendship ties, including the bonds between sisters and sisters-in-law, may have made the marginal status they had in the patriarchal family more endurable for women.

Krisztina had to ask her mother, who lived a great distance from her, to send her a prayer-book for her comfort in her time of mourning, since she could not turn to her mother-in-law with her emotional, spiritual, and moral needs, as her mother-in-law did not strive to play the maternal role in emotional terms: “My dear heart, my lady mother, I ask your Grace to send me a prayer-book, a Hungarian one, I will return it to your Grace as my beloved lady mother, since the one I brought with myself, while I was lying [when she was confined to bed before giving birth] has been lost, I could never find it.”40 István Nyáry, Krisztina’s half-brother and brother-in-law, escorted the mourning mother and the “body of the poor lord” from the court of Biccse to Zsolnalitva, the place of the burial. Although he wanted to calm his anxious wife (Anna, Krisztina’s half-sister) by reassuring her that Krisztina was being shown due attention by her marital relations, his words seem to suggest, rather, the very uncertain place Krisztina had in her late husband’s family: “Thank God my lady sister [Krisztina] is moderately well in her bitter condition due to the fact that the Old Lady her Grace [Krisztina’s mother-in-law] avoids crying in front of her, since my Lady Sister is in a heavy condition [she is pregnant] and there is a great hope that Lord God will bless her Grace with a boy.”41

Following the death of her only son, the most pressing issue for widow Erzsébet Czobor as head of the family was to secure the transfer of wealth to the next generation, if possible on the male line, so she was temporarily concerned about the health of her pregnant daughter-in-law. When Krisztina gave birth to a girl, however, her hopes were dashed. As Krisztina did not help secure the continuity of the Thurzó male line, she lost what little prestige she had had in her marital family. Consequently, the Thurzós not only refused to acknowledge her right to tutor her daughters and rejected any claim on her part to their considerable inheritance, but in order to secure their Lutheran faith in the future, their upbringing was entrusted to their paternal grandmother.42 This was unusual, since widowed mothers were usually deprived of their right to serve as tutors to their underage children only if they remarried, and they often could continue to provide daily care for their daughters and govern the schooling of their sons in their reconstituted families as well.43 In other words, the paternal families of underage half-orphans were concerned not about the influence of widowed mothers on the transmission of wealth, but rather about the influence of their new husbands, who became the stepfathers of the children in question.44 This kind of fear is articulated as a charge during the court trial against Krisztina’s new husband, Miklós Esterházy, over the tutorship of the Thurzó daughters: “Ezterházy is eager for the estates of the orphans […]. This title also deprives the woman of the tutorship, since she has also changed her name of her husband. And she has bound herself to a person eager to acquire the orphans’ estates”.45

But what fed these strong fears of the powerful Thurzó family when the woman they were dealing with was a 17-year-old widow? It seems improbable that they were indeed worried that much about the Lutheran upbringing of the girls under the care of a Calvinist mother, which they claimed before royal judges.46 Rather, they probably saw Krisztina as a risk factor in their campaign to receive the right of cognatic inheritance from the king, since the only tie between the two dynasties47 had been broken with the death of Imre Thurzó, which immediately turned the allied in-laws into enemies (“atyafiakból idegenek”). Repeated marriages between dynasties were remedies of the fragility of family connections and served to prevent or resolve conflicts by stabilizing alliances.48 The marriage arranged by Kata Várdai for her 14-year-old daughter three years earlier had constituted a venturous step: the bride had been the best possible match in the country at the time, but the Thurzós had been outsiders to the dense network of alliances among the Várdai-Telegdi-Nyáry-Szokoly-Melith-Csapy families.

As a result, following the death of her husband, Krisztina’s ties to her marital family were open to negotiation, but it seems that she did not trust her mother to come to her aid and provide support for her either. In this “liminal” moment, it was not at all evident that she belonged to her natal family. This bond was similarly open to negotiation, and in this process, in which their integration into or exclusion from the family was at stake, widows could play an active role. In the transitory period following the death of her husband, Krisztina tried to earn her mother’s support by assuming the role of the helpless and vulnerable widow:

Your Grace can see that I am a feeble woman, who can trust no one apart from God, only in your Grace. One of my supports was taken away from me by God, I am helpless on my own. […] My beloved Lady Mother, I ask you for the living God that your Grace would come to me. The testament of my beloved husband, who now rests with the Lord, is with me, which is another reason that your Grace should visit me.49

Her cry for help fell on deaf ears. Kata Várdai seems to have enjoyed her daughter’s defenselessness and humble plea, since she pretended not to have understood from the above letter that her daughter badly needed her help. Krisztina therefore had to repeat her request:

 

My heart is happy about your Grace’s reassuring words in her letter, which I will return with my services. My God has visited enough sorrow upon me, but his sacred will must be fulfilled. My beloved Lady Mother, your Grace has also asked me to write to your Grace whether your Grace’s visit was indeed necessary. My beloved Lady Mother, yes, it is absolutely necessary, since we have remained rather desolate in our present state. We do not know ourselves yet when the funeral will take place, because nothing is ready yet for it. If your Grace comes up here, we will talk about it together 50

Krisztina’s mother had already refused to provide support for her on other occasions, and Krisztina had had to beg for things that adult daughters of the time would have expected from their mothers. In January 1621, she even had to remind her mother of the risks of her upcoming childbirth: “My Lady Mother, I still ask you not to spare your energy and to visit us up here, who knows whether Your Grace can ever see me again.”51 She had to entice her mother the same way following her husband’s death. In this case, his testament, in which he made arrangements concerning the future of his widow and their daughters, served as the bait. Krisztina mentioned it in the post script: “My beloved Lady Mother, my only beloved husband has ordered in his life that I should not show it to anyone, only your Grace, thus if your Grace refuses to visit us, we will go against his last will.” Krisztina thus strove to earn her mother’s support by presenting herself as vulnerable and her mother as indispensable.52

For Kata Várdai, it was not self-evident that she would remain at her daughter’s side when Krisztina gave birth. In October 1620, István Nyáry, her son-in-law, urged his wife Anna to send her mother to be at her younger daughter’s side:

I would very much like my dear beloved soul, if my Lady her Highness [Kata Várdai] would come here by the time Mrs. Imre Thurzó needs to stay in bed [to give birth], perhaps His Majesty [the Prince of Transylvania] would also let me go in front of her Highness [Krisztina, who was approaching the last month of her pregnancy] and also home. My lord Imre Thurzó has shown me today her mother’s letter, in which she writes that my sister has not got more than five or six weeks before she gives birth.53

 

The son-in-law had to remind her of her maternal duties again, when Krisztina was close to giving birth for the second time: “With regards to your Highness’s desire to leave, I do not see any possibility for your Highness’s departure, since it would be very painful for my Lady Sister.”54

Although Kata Várdai may not have been able to satisfy her daughters’ emotional needs (most probably because of her own traumas she had suffered as a child), when she felt that her authority as mother was in danger, she vehemently defended it. When she was in conflict with her younger daughter and threatened to withhold her affections if Krisztina were to give in to her husband and convert from Calvinism to Lutheranism, she essentially was making a defensive show of her own power and prestige:

I beseech your grace, my sweet heart, Lady my mother, do not be cross with me for this issue of faith, for I have come to know my God and I want to remain in the true faith, as I do this not following my own head, but because I have read the Holy Scriptures and my beliefs are in accordance with them. My sweet heart, Lady my Mother, I also understand from your letter that your grace looks on Lady Erdődi55 as an example, Lord Erdődi, before he married her, took her hand and gave a letter of faith confirming that he would not trouble her over her faith. My sweet heart, my Lady Mother, your grace also wrote that Lady Thököly56 also did not leave her faith, because my sweet heart, my Lady Mother, they also took care for her. Your grace also writes in her letter that I have forgotten your grace’s motherly admonitions. Lord forfend that I forget your grace’s motherly admonitions, but I owe this to my God, and also that as long as I live, I strive to serve your grace with a true heart.57

 

According to the script for emotional blackmail, first Kata Várdai created a sense of fear in her daughter by accusing her of having defied her mother, and then she would withhold her motherly love (“do not be cross with me”). She would then try to appeal to her daughter’s sense of reason or even jealousy by mentioning Krisztina’s sisters-in-law (Borbála and Katalin Thurzó) as examples of women who, though they were in denominationally mixed marriages (to Kristóf Erdődy, a Catholic, and István Thököly, a Calvinist), nonetheless remained adherents of the faith they had received from their parents.58 Then, using the typical tool at the disposal of the emotionally manipulative, she would try to make her daughter feel guilty by accusing her of showing no regard for the religious upbringing she had been given (“Lord forfend that I forget your grace’s motherly admonitions”) and, in doing so, neglecting her duties as a daughter.59

For Kata Várdai, her daughter’s religion was a question of immense importance, as her very prestige as a mother was at stake. By mentioning the Thurzó daughters, she was clearly also sending a message to Erzsébet Czobor, who may very well have had close knowledge of Krisztina’s correspondence with her mother. If her daughters had remained true to the faith into which they had been born, then Kata Várdai’s daughter clearly also should be granted the right to be left in peace on matters of religion. If Krisztina’s actual commitment to her faith had been a question of importance to her mother, Kata Várdai never would have allowed her to marry first a Calvinist and then a Catholic.

Krisztina reacted with a show of confidence to her mother’s attempts at emotional blackmail, which shows that she was not as closely dependent on her mother as her sister was and she was better able to protect herself. In order to reassure her mother, she reproduces the lesson she has probably heard many times also from her mother. Drawing on the polemical discourse of the era (and in doing so, showing herself to be resourceful and knowledgeable), she uses the only argument that was considered a legitimate explanation for the choice of faith. She claims that she has come to know the truth, which she came to know, furthermore, by reading the Scriptures. In other words, she made this decision not as the consequence of some miracle, but rather through intellectual endeavor.60 In short, she insists that she is not abandoning the Calvinist adherence to the truth which she came to know, as a child, by reading the Bible. She closes her letter with the following words:

My sweet heart, my Lady Mother, your grace wrote that my loving husband is indeed fortunate, I believe that my God saves his grace from all evil, and anything should happen I believe my God that your grace will not withhold your motherly love from me.61

 

With this sentence, she deviates from her earlier argument according to which her free choice of faith can only be based on knowledge of the truth, and she writes instead of the influences of family ties and the conflicting pressures being put on her by her husband and her mother. In other words, here she speaks of her actual situation, although she uses the conditional mode. It is worth noting that she is actually saying the same thing here, in her own words, that she may have read in Péter Pázmány’s narratives of female conversion:62 family compulsions stand in the way of following the truth one has realized. And while Pázmány, the Catholic archbishop and polemicist, calls on transcendent forces to help resolve this inner drama, Krisztina proposes the possibility of unconditional maternal love. At the same time asks her enraged mother (still using the conditional) to respond with unconditional love were Krisztina to defy the maternal will, or in other words were she chose to disobey her and convert.63 Thus, in the seventeenth century, the idea of conditional parental (paternal) and unconditional maternal love existed side by side, and Krisztina skillfully manipulated this in her conflict with her mother to gain some room for maneuver. By referring to her duties to God (“I owe this to my God”) in her confrontation with her mother, Krisztina seems to put Kata Várdai against God himself.

Krisztina’s assertiveness with her mother was facilitated by her intermediate position between her two families. Her intermediate position found expression very markedly when Krisztina lost her husband, and the two families became entangled in a fierce rivalry for control over the young widow. Though her mother-in-law left Krisztina with no influence over her daughters, this did not mean that Krisztina was excluded entirely from her marital family. On the contrary, Erzsébet Czobor tried to secure the smooth intergenerational transmission of wealth by reintegrating Krisztina (and her considerable paternal and maternal inheritance) into the Thurzó dynasty. She wanted to arrange Krisztina’s next marriage herself (instead of allowing her natal family to arrange it) within the circle of the Thurzó allies and in-laws. Below, I examine the stages of the rivalry between the mother and the mother-in-law, who as the heads of their families sought to strengthen their families’ prestige and influence by forging a new alliance.

The Rivalry between the Two Families for Influence over the Widow

In 1622, Kata Várdai entrusted her motherly role for her daughter and granddaughters to her daughter’s mother-in-law: “My dear beloved Lady, I entrust to your to Highness’s maternal care, as if to my own eyes, my beloved orphaned64 daughter, together with her sweet children, and I ask from my heart your Highness not to withhold your Highness’s motherly love and care, which your Highness has shown them so far.65 This gesture was intended to calm the furious matriarch, who had expressed her indignation when her rival, Kata Várdai, has proposed, as if offering a compromise, that she would take her daughter home with her and the granddaughters would be sent to the Viennese court. Unsurprisingly, Erzsébet was not appeased by the offer. In January 1623, she pressed her daughter-in-law to sign an agreement in which she forfeited any claim to the right to raise her own daughters.66

At the same time, Várdai started negotiations in the background, her intimate allies being her elder daughter and her husband. In February 1622, shortly before Krisztina gave birth to her second child, Várdai sent her son-in-law István Nyáry to meet with one of the highest dignitaries of the country. Nyáry wrote in one of his letters to her to confirm that he had received her instructions: “I have received your Highness’s letter, I understand your Highness’s order that I should talk and arrange my sister’s affairs [Krisztina’s affairs, his wife’s half-sister] with my lord brother, Péter Révay. […] I strive with all my heart to serve in all possible ways my beloved lady sister.”67 Várdai also sought to “free” her daughter from the “captivity” of the Thurzó family. In 1623, she recurrently expressed her anxiety to her elder daughter over Krisztina’s plight: “My sweet daughter, I have no rest day and night in my thinking about my poor sweet orphan, your younger sister, and how could we rescue her from that Purgatory”68 In another letter, she wrote “I am so very desperate about the fate of my poor orphan […]. You could write me, my sweet daughter, what exactly they want, or we can speak about it when God brings you home. Somehow we must rescue your sweet sister from there.”69

Meanwhile, Kata Várdai informed Krisztina that she would “try to please my relatives, which I will do by readily serving them.” The advice she gave as Krisztina’s mother may well have been a tool with which she sought to gain some time in preparation for the next battle in the war for influence over Krisztina and control of her future and for the negotiations taking place in background concerning her next marriage. By this time, Kata Várdai had a candidate for the groom, as is clear form comments made by Krisztina in one of her letters to her mother: “From your Grace’s letter I understand that your Grace anxiously takes care of me, which I fully believe, since after God I trust only your Grace. My sweet heart, my lady mother, with regards to the Kassa affair, I ask your Grace to tell me more about it.”70 The term “Kassa affair” is a reference to Kata Várdai’s attempts in the city of Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) at arranging Krisztina’s second marriage.

At the same time, she asked her elder daughter to procure the approval of the prince of Transylvania for the marriage between and Krisztina this man, since the man was is in his service. Anna touches on this in one of her letters to her mother:

I understand your Grace’s order concerning my sweet sister, therefore I trust my God that I will be able to achieve this, especially if the assembly in Kassa took place, claiming that my husband is ill, as he is, as if he was present at the assembly in your Grace’s name […], I would have a wonderful chance to carry out this plan. He [the groom candidate] was next to His Royalty in Tokaj as well, as Csáky says, who praises him moreover to be a good young man […]. If only my God would allow him to become my kind brother-in-law, whom I could keep as my son. 71

 

While Anna Telegdi readily attempted to carry out her mother’s plans, Kata Várdai soon produced an alternative candidate: Miklós Esterházy, who at the time was the second most influential political dignitary and who soon (in 1625) would become palatine of Hungary. Talks were underway with him at the time too, and Kata Várdai was seeking the advice of her son-in-law for on final decision. István Nyáry offered her the following reply:

Your Highness commands me to write whether I prefer Eszterházy or the other man from Kassa. For many reasons Eszterházy is better, but I do not trust this and cannot imagine any way to carry out this plan. I cannot tell about Lord Csuti of the affair either, the Eszterházy affair, since he does not like Eszterházy. We could achieve this in other ways too, if only my sister has not tied herself in the meantime to elsewhere, since I know well that a servant of my Lord Eszterházy is coming to my lady Highness with whom we can arrange the affair if both God and my sister want it.

 

István Nyáry passed on the latest news to his wife.72 While the married stepsiblings may have had doubts concerning the implementation of their “mother’s” ambitious plans, they unbendingly supported her aim of getting back their sister and marrying her off again. Krisztina’s happiness may well have been an important consideration, but so was the extension of the kinship network with the addition of another powerful in-law. Krisztina meanwhile found herself faced with other pressures: her mother-in-law was mapping the marriage market with the help of her in-law, Szaniszló Thurzó, the palatine of the kingdom (it was after his death in 1625 that Miklós Esterházy would become palatine).73 In the summer of 1623, they were considering having their widowed daughter-in-law marry Ferenc Liszti, the captain of Szamosújvár (Gherla, Romania) and Szaniszló’s brother-in-law.74 In a letter to István Nyáry, Thurzó announced their intentions to the Várdai-Telegdi family, asking them to support their decision:

Last summer with my beloved wife75 we contacted your Grace and your Grace’s beloved wife with our letters sent from Pöstyén,76 announcing our will that we want to marry the widow of the late Count Imre Thurzó, my Lord Brother, to my Lord brother-in-law Ferenc Liszthius and also asking your Grace to promote the case with my lady Mrs. Pál Nyáry,77 on whose good will the issue depends. Your Grace has promised his great the support and solidarity of his kinsmen, in which we fully trust. We have written again to Mrs. Pál Nyáry about the same affair, and we assume that we will not be disappointed in our hopes, if her Highness displays her good will. Therefore, we request your Grace and your Grace’s beloved wife (to whom we offer our services through your Grace) to recommend the case to my lady Mrs. Pál Nyáry so that we receive her kind answer. Your Grace should believe that we will gratefully compensate your Grace’s trouble and kinsman’s solidarity in all times. We recommend the affair also to the Prince of Transylvania,78 so that his Majesty can also propose our affair to my lady Mrs. Pál Nyáry, your Grace should not let his Majesty forget the case. We expect your Graces kind answer.79

 

Assuming that they were superior in power, the Thurzós make a rather extraordinary and even offensive request as if their wishes were merely the natural order of things. Finding a spouse for a woman who had been widowed was considered the responsibility of the families into which they were born, and it was only a question of decency and custom to ask the consent of the family of the deceased husband.80 Nevertheless, as the affair between the Thurzó and Várdai-Telegdi families suggests, the search for a new spouse for a young widow was in fact a power game, during which family relations were subject to negotiation. Obviously, chances for cooperation instead of conflict must have been better in cases in which the two dynasties belonged to the same dense network of marital allies and were connected in several ways. The self-confidence of the Thurzós, reflected in their bold request, was arguably a rhetorical tool intended simply to convince the rival family that they had no say in the matter or little chance of prevailing if they attempted to defy the will of the Thurzó clan. But they were aware of the fact that the Várdai-Telegdi family also wielded considerable influence, and they tried to overcome this by dividing their enemies. The stepson and son-in-law István Nyáry was approached in the hopes that he would be able to sway Kata Várdai, who was the decision-making matriarch of the family.81 István’s phrasing implies that Krisztina did not refuse the idea of this marriage: she preferred to be reaffirmed as a member of the more powerful Thurzó kinship network as the wife of Ferenc Liszthius than to be compelled to marry the man her mother had found for her in the meantime, the young nobleman (whom I could not identify) in the Bethlen entourage.

At that moment, Kata Várdai was definitely losing the battle. The matriarch of Várda did not respond well to challenges to her authority. At the beginning of 1624, she launched a bold, new campaign, as a result of which, in February, the new candidate for Krisztina’s hand in marriage was Miklós Esterházy, the best possible match, the new rising star on the cloudy sky of the divided kingdom. In other words, respecting neither God nor secular power (Esterházy was a Catholic, and he was the leader of the Habsburg-oriented political group), she won him as her daughter’s second husband. He was a widow and 20 years her senior, and he would refer to her as “my son” until his death.82 This was a final blow to Erzsébet Czobor. The royal fiscus was just donating the ancient Thurzó lands, given the failure to produce a male heir, to the political rival of the late Imre Thurzó, Miklós Esterházy.83 And even though Esterházy was a parvenu among prestigious aristocrats like the Czobors, Thurzós and Várdais and they spoke about him among themselves with contempt,84 mothers and widows were still locked in fierce contest for his hand. At his first wedding, in 1612, when he was still unaccustomed to the wealth he had gained through marriage, he made a cheeky show of this. Anna Telegdy, who was present for the wedding, wrote of this in a letter to her mother: “My dear lay mother, no one has presented any gifts, since Eszterházy refused to accept them, saying that he has enough wealth anyway.” Anna also wrote to her mother of how she had been unable to resist the pressures put on her by the groom, and she had accepted the role of bridesmaid.85 Kata’s new son-in-law, like her, was not lacking in willpower, which he learned to assert shrewdly and delicately, thus securing the loyalty of others and avoiding uses of force. Anna wrote of his generosity in a letter to her mother written twelve years later during the preparations for Krisztina’s marriage: “I have received today from my lord Eszterházy a very nice pearl necklace and a diamond ring, and we gave him a handkerchief and a chief of flowers.”86

Krisztina was apparently not disturbed by the huge age gap. She decided to go home to her mother, leaving her daughters behind in the Thurzó court only once Esterházy had become her betrothed. Thus, maneuvering between the two family matriarchs, she managed to make the decision concerning who would be her second husband. Her distancing from her marital family is reflected by her newfound ability overtly to say no to her mother-in-law’s requests, which she did more than once in her letters sent from her natal home following April 1624. This constituted a shift in the language of subordination that she continued to use.87

Erzsébet Czobor, who was also very sensitive to the smallest challenge to her authority, sought like wounded animals to the end. Anna wrote of this in a letter to her mother five days before Krisztina’s wedding at their curia in requests: “Mrs. Thurzó wanted to grab my sister from us and take her to the castle of Árva,88 only the palatine89 could stop her from holding the wedding there and having it consummated by Krisztina and Liszthius”.90 Krisztina therefore needed to be attentively guarded: “My beloved lady mother, yesterday I sent the steward and the old woman [the head of the women’s court] to Letava91 for some of my belongings, since I was not allowed to go myself.”92Esterházy had an entire army to escort him, and he oversaw the preparations himself.93 The successful outcome of the “battle,” however, remained uncertain up to the very end: “People were rather afraid that the events will take another turn, […]. God be praised, in modest silence, not blatantly, my dear lady mother, God’s power is abundant and your Grace find calmness in her sweet motherly heart.”94

The Half-Sisters

Anna often played the role of caring mother not only with her mother but also with her sister. Given the large age difference between them, the elder half-sibling regularly found herself in the role of a mother. Anna seems to have played this caring role with the child (1610–1618), the wife (1618–1621), and the widow (1621–1624) Krisztina, too.95 She worried about her little sister when Krisztina was pregnant, much as a mother might have.96 Anna—not Kata Várdai—replaced the book of the gospels which had gone missing when Krisztina was confined to her sickbed: “What my sweet soul sister writes, I take with great joy, though they brought no money, but were I to set some aside, I will buy it for my soul. I will send the Gospels in Károly,97 the great national crowd will be there, when we arrive.”98 After having worked with her mother for two years on her widowed sister’s “liberation” and the task of finding her a second husband, in the end, in July of 1624, the task of tending to the preparations for the wedding also fell on her shoulders: “Our wains, my sweet lady mother, have not yet arrived, and this will be a great loss, for we do not have good vinegar. [...] Indeed, I face great difficulty, I have come not to a wedding, but rather to worry, they are dancing, drinking, I have to make a fortune from nothing.”99 Reading these lines alongside Krisztina’s letter written the same day, one senses some disapproval of her sister in her tone, as Krisztina played the role of a child next to her elder sister and enjoyed the lack of responsibility. Krisztina wrote, “We are quite happy here, the sick girls also danced away the cold. My Sweet loving Lady Mother, I know my loving sister informed your grace of everything.”100 With the unusual manner in which she indicates the place in which the letter was written (“from Szucsány, with which I am bored”), Anna subtly hints to her mother that she is fed up with the motherly role she has had to play for her sister.101

Anna Telegdi could not openly express her negative feelings about her sister (her indignation in the passages cited above, perhaps a touch of jealousy in passages cited below) to her mother: “my sister was very happy indeed for the money your grace provided her, she will serve your grace as her loving lady mother, though thank God, she did not have great need of it, since the lady her greatness102 has given her a nice income, I cannot write your grace how pleased she was to see it.”103 There is an enigmatic sentence in a letter she wrote in February 1622, after her husband had brought her back from Biccse and Kata Várdai had remained with Krisztina, who was soon going to give birth: “I could write your grace of something quite wondrous concerning my sister, but as God gives me life, I am not an ill-willed sibling, about whom, with your grace coming before God, I will speak amply on whom your grace will marvel.” 104 Anna was referring to her bewilderment at her sister’s conduct. The fact that Kata Várdai was in a position to express negative feelings while Anna was not stems from the fact (and demonstrates) that Anna was in a position of subordination to her mother. She may have felt the compulsion to use veiled references instead of open communication because she had already learned that it was not worth expressing her true feelings bluntly, as they would be ignored or, in a worse-case scenario, she might even be punished for having voiced them.105

These veiled expressions of negative feelings came to the surface during the family negotiations after the death of Imre Thurzó and Krisztina’s remarriage, but even in these conflict-laden periods, gestures of support and solidarity remained dominant in the relationship between the half-sisters. After the death of her first husband, Krisztina found herself in a difficult situation. Her mother-in-law had been given guardianship over her two daughters and had essentially excluded her from the girls’ upbringing in a manner that was extraordinary. She had also tried to assume control over the issue of Krisztina’s potential remarriage. During these long two years, Anna worried a great deal about her widowed sister’s fate: “Just that my sweet Krisztina Nyáry should live, and may the Lord give her good fortune,” she wrote in a letter to her mother.106 In addition, she took on numerous tasks in order to bring her sister home from the Thurzó court and ensure that she and her mother find Krisztina a second husband. Her own interests coincided with those of the family: another good match for her sister would serve to raise the social standing of every member of the family.

The rivalry and envy between the two sisters may well have been caused by the difference in their social ranks, which was a consequence of the different paternal inheritances of the maternal half-siblings and the differing statuses of their fathers’ families. The comparatively modest estates left by Pál Telegdi to his daughter, Anna, in Bereg-Zemplén could not compete with the significant estates which Pál Nyáry left his daughter, Krisztina.107 The resulting inequality, however, was more or less offset by the two clever moves made by the mother, Kata Várdai, who became the head of the family as a widow. The respectable bequest left by István Báthori and the marriage between the stepsiblings, through which Anna Telegdi became István Nyáry’s wife, significantly improved Anna’s position. Krisztina’s two marriages then elevated her well above her sister in social position in principle, but the prestige the two girls enjoyed as the wives of prominent men came largely from the family of their birth, which continued to expect loyalty and service from them.108 That is why, even when she was the wife of “count” Imre Thurzó and then of “count” Miklós Esterházy, Krisztina Nyáry still referred to herself as the “little sister who serves with a true heart” in her letters to her sister, which indicates her lower position in the family hierarchy. In other words, status in their relationship was determined primarily by their birth order, which typically meant a significant age difference for half-siblings. As we have seen, Krisztina became a playmate of her nephew, Ferkó, who was much closer to her in age, while her elder sister played a motherly role at her side, and she continued to play this role even after Krisztina had married. Krisztina herself associated Anna’s performances of loving concern with Anna’s role as a mother figure: “In this very hour your grace’s humble servant Kristóf Egry has arrived, and I understand from what he says that you are very worried about my sick state. Indeed, I believed him, sweet loving sister, for like my dear mother, your grace has always had such a kind heart to me.”109 The letter which Krisztina wrote to her mother differ little from the letters that she wrote to her sister. She was able to count on compassion and consolation when she wrote of the unpleasant feeling she had in her husband’s court of being a stranger. Her sister passed on these concerns to her mother, as if it were considered self-evident that she would do so: “My sweet lady mother, as my letter will make clear to you concerning my dear sister’s state, I sincerely pity her sweet soul when she writes that she had no other music than the howling of the wolf, of whom I know God has so far consoled her, because lord Thurzó [Imre Thurzó, Krisztina’s husband] went home. 110

However, the exceptional, playful, even joking tone of Krisztina’s letters to Anna, which seems more the tone of an exchange between equal partners than an exchange between people in a vertical hierarchy, is a clear break from the register of a mother-daughter relationship. The following lines offer a glimpse into the moment when the hierarchy between the two sisters was suspended:

Sweet, loving, dear lady sister, I understand from your letter that your grace found Lady Mihály Czobor111 in Pricopan,112 and your grace merrily lived with her, only your grace caused sadness in my heart, when I thought of how in this merriment we cannot be together with sweet Katica Thurzó,113 I could not bear it without shedding tears. Sweet, dear lady my sister, I ask your grace, let us not be forgotten by your grace, let us be in your grace’s memory, if not every time, then at least when your grace sits into the baths.114

Conclusion

The cultural context of the relationships discussed above between female family members (mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, sisters) was the domestic space, which in this case was the aristocratic female courts. Letter exchanges between female family members have drawn the contours of this pragmatic and intimate kinship network, which functioned alongside the hegemonic patrilineal family and which was organized and inhabited by women, their central figures being mothers and their daughters. This alternative female space and horizontal web of relations may have rendered the marginal status of women in the patriarchal family more livable, since the central role of female networks in making marriages, mediating conflicts, and forming public opinion offered them a significant form of power.115 Thus, I suggest that the longevity of the patriarchal family across centuries can perhaps be attributed not only to its inner “structures of mitigation,” its own flexibility, as Linda Pollock has argued, but also to these alternative female networks and the connections between sisters and sisters-in-law, cousins, and female friends, which contributed to its sustainability.116

We have seen Krisztina Nyáry negotiating her mediating role as wife between her two families and two “mothers,” and the letters exchanged by the sisters and their mother also offer insights into her tactics of gaining the support of her mother by painting a dramatic image of herself as a vulnerable widow. Her excessive use of a stereotypical self-representation as a vulnerable widow may indicate her lack of trust in her short-tempered mother, who was unable to provide unconditional love and predictable support for her daughters due to her narcissistic personality. We also saw how, by maneuvering shrewdly between the two dominant mother figures, Krisztina was ultimately able to make the decision concerning her second husband herself.

One of the general lessons of our case study is, therefore, that women’s in-between position between their natal and marital lineages and their marginality in the patrilineal family could be appropriated by individuals for their own purposes. How widows were reintegrated into the hegemonic family system via their remarriage (assuming that they did remarry, as most widows under the age of 40 did) depended greatly on their own choices and performances, too. Though the mother-in-law’s efforts to reintegrate her wealthy daughter-in-law into her own alliance network may seem exceptional, it was obviously possible, even if Krisztina’s natal family happened to win the rivalry in this particular case. In other words, the remarriage of widows was a negotiating process depending on power relations rather than on static norms or family structures.

The elder half-sister offered gestures of maternal care not only to her mother, who often assumed the role of the child, but also to her younger sister. The structural asymmetries of their age, rank, and distance from their mother notwithstanding, the maternal half-sister bond operated on a basis of strong emotional and familial solidarity rather than rivalry. The continuity of the maternal role played by Anna Telegdi throughout Krisztina’s childhood, adulthood, and widowhood suggests, moreover, that married women remained in close connection with their natal families.

The manner in which Anna consistently played a motherly role in her relationship with her sister, even during the consecutive life-cycles of Krisztina, plausibly suggests that married women continued to maintain strong bonds with their natal families. This was of particular importance for Krisztina, who was only loosely integrated into her husband’s family. The intermediary role played by Krisztina between her two families and the greater spatial and emotional distance from her mother (in comparison to Anna, who lived in the same household as their mother and was thus arguably more dependent on her wishes and her goodwill) rendered her more capable of defending herself from their mother’s anger and emotional abuses. The close reading of the mother-daughter debates highlights, furthermore, that in the religious climate of the seventeenth century, alongside the notion of unconditional maternal (or, more generally, parental) love, the concept of conditional love was also accepted.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian National Archives] (MNL OL), Budapest

P 108. The archives of the princely lineage of the Esterházy family

P 707. The Archive of the Zichy Family, Correspondence

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár [National Széchényi Library], Budapest

Manuscript Collection, Fol. Hung. vol. 2638/2. The collection of copies of letters by Hungarian women

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Bor Forced Labor Service as Reflected in Diaries

Tamás Csapody
Semmelweis University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 3  (2020): 391-407 DOI: 10.38145/2020.3.391

Military forced labor service was introduced in Hungary during World War II. Men who were unreliable from the aspects of origin, religion, nationality or politics were conscripted for forced labor. Initially, forced laborers constructed primarily military objects on the home front, while later they were also dispatched to the battlefield. They had no weapons or uniforms, their provisions were poor and often they had to do building or mine clearing in the most dangerous areas. Hungary sent a total of approximately 6,000 forced laborers to work in the southern operational territories in 1943 and 1944. They had to undertake forced labor in the mining district of Bor in Yugoslavia, which was under German occupation. The majority were Jews, but there were also Jehovah’s Witnesses, Reform Adventists and Nazarenes. They lived under Hungarian military supervision and worked under German management. The locations of forced labor, the durations of time spent in the mining district, the experienced sufferings, etc. were very different. The forced laborers themselves were also different, for example with regard to their origins, occupations, and age. Several Jewish forced laborers wrote diaries and some of them managed to take those home. Later diaries written in Bor had a particular fate. Some were lost for a time or have remained in fragments, while others with important additions were deposited in archives or taken abroad by the diarists. All the diaries analyzed in the study testify to the survival of their writers. However, they mostly bear witness to the everyday life of forced labor service in Bor (otherwise difficult to learn about) and the behavior of those who held them, as well as the forced laborers’ sufferings, faith and hope. At the same time, they speak about the entirety of forced labor in Bor alongside its personal stories. The diaries are ego-documents, yet also historical sources. Their factual descriptions and subjective approaches augment our knowledge gained in the past. The six diaries written in Bor and analyzed in this study are personal confessions with significant source value.

Keywords: World War II, forced labor, Jews, diaries, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bor, Holocaust, ego-documents

Diaries written in Bor occupy a special place in the history of the Bor forced labor service. They were written during World War II, but they cannot be classified as typical war diaries. True, they were not written in the hell of war, during a retreat or on the home front. Yet they were still penned under conditions of war, confined between fronts, in theaters of military operations, far from the Hungarian border, in a foreign land, and often also under infernal circumstances. Although those who wrote the Bor diaries in forced labor service were subordinated to the Hungarian and German military, their diaries cannot be regarded as soldiers’ diaries or work diaries, even though they contain descriptions of places of work.

It was not prisoners treated as prisoners of war but forced laborers in captivity who wrote the diaries in secret. Although most of the diaries contain descriptions of journeys and the texts also record forced and frequent changes of place, they naturally cannot be called travel diaries. Though the fear of destruction appears repeatedly in the descriptions, since the shadow of death was present in the diarists’ lives due to accidents at work, illnesses, beatings, murders, and executions, they cannot be regarded as camp diaries written in concentration or extermination camps. In truth, we can say that they were written by victims of the Holocaust in forced labor camps.1 They simultaneously represent letter, camp, prisoner, and travel diaries. The Bor diaries found during my research are ego-documents written by Jewish forced laborers, more or less regularly and chronologically recorded, which are fragmented and which contain personal notes.2

The Known Bor Diaries

At present, we have knowledge of six diaries that were written at least partly in Bor.3 Of the six, only four can be appropriately described, since two have survived only in fragments. Those two have more content missing than what exists (László Faludi) or what can be accessed at present (György Szöllösi). The content that is known of them deserves far more than just a mention, yet it is clearly insufficient to allow a comparison with the four that can be read in their entirety (the diaries of György Laufer, Imre Pártos, Béla Somló, and Lajos György).

The diaries cover durations of varying lengths. Information about the call-up for forced labor service in Bor is the earliest initial point of time (May 31, 1943), while arrival at the authors’ place of birth in Hungary and accounts of subsequent experiences mark the latest (April 3, 1945). However, the diaries were written over very different time spans between the two time limits. Time frames are defined essentially by “external” circumstances, such as who was called up for forced labor service in Bor, when (1943 or 1944), and which group (the first or second “stage”) the person left Bor as part of. “Internal,” subjective differences also played a role in terms of from when and until when the diaries were written. Differences defined as “internal” and “external” were naturally closely connected, since, for example, the forced marches and mass murders which were common during the first stage made it impossible to record the events. This was very different from the situation of those who were dispatched from Bor in the second stage and had plenty of opportunity to write diaries in the period following liberation after they arrived in Temesvár (Timişoara) or Szeged, which both represented freedom and calm for them.

Three of the Bor diaries are held in public collections, while I was able to study or was informed about the other three from contacts of former Bor forced laborers or their descendants. All of the diaries, except for one, are unpublished.

László Faludi’s Diary

One of the two diaries that cannot be studied in full was written by László Faludi.4 His hand-written diary is of unknown length.5 However, the existing numbered eight pages suggest that its length must have been some 100 pages. His notes written in a grey pen on lined pages are clearly legible.

László Faludi, whose permanent residence was in Budapest, was a forced laborer in Páhi. From there, his unit was ordered to Szeged and then to Bor. According to his diary, the steamer which transported them to Serbia was sailing between Titel and Belgrade along the Danube on July 14, 1943.6 They reached Belgrade at night, after having experienced a huge storm lasting an hour. The following day, they reached their destination, the port of Prahovo on the Serbian side of the Serbian-Romanian border along the Danube. The journey by rail to Zaječar and then to Bor took two days. The 3,000 forced laborers arrived in Bor on July 17. He was held captive in Bor in the camp called Berlin for exactly 14 months to the day, until September 17, 1944.

The accessible (presumably) one tenth of the diary suggests that he wrote about three major themes: the forced labor in Bor, the past labor movement and the communist future, and his personal life. Employing the diary genre, Faludi wrote an autobiographical memoir, which is not at all unusual in such literature. He used his diary as a memoir and as a result it has a retrospective character.

His diary is explicitly for posterity. It is addressed not only to those who might find his notes, but to “the future generation who will appreciate”7 his writing. Thus, for Faludi, writing a diary was an activity intended for a larger, anonymous readership rather than any specific individual or, at least according to the text, the author himself. It is a message for the youth of the future, written amidst the suffering of forced labor service. It is full of pathos and is ideological, almost with an overtone of propaganda.

Considering the proportions of the fragmented diary, the largest section is a description of the past labor movement. The text clearly shows that Faludi came from the organized labor movement, in which he was socialized, started to read literature, and found his best friend. He defined himself as a skilled worker in a cotton mill and a proletarian who “struggled against the infringements of capitalism” and engaged in anti-war propaganda both inside and outside the mill. He believed in “the matter of liberty, equality, brotherhood, peace, work, and bread,” and his soul “was united with the souls of other proletarians.” “Socialist poets” became his “soul mates” in the movement, and he mentions Endre Ady, Attila József, and Sándor Petőfi by name. Influenced by their writings, he himself began writing poems and short stories. His younger brother became his colleague in the movement, and Faludi refers to him as always being the “best comrade and brother.”8 Faludi also recounted two experiences of key importance connected to the labor movement: reading something9 and May 1, 1938.

Faludi was sent back from Bor in the first group, and he must have escaped somewhere on the way while still in the Serbian mountains. He joined Tito’s partisans.10

Nothing more could be found about László Faludi in Hungarian archives, and only tiny bits of information were accessible in online data bases. His brief letters were usually published in the letters section of dailies and weeklies. They suggest that he remained on the left and maintained his critical attitude and sensitivities in terms of public life and his positive vision of the future.11

György Szöllösi’s Diary

The author of the other Bor diary that cannot be read in full is György Szöllösi.12 His hand-written diary exists in full, yet it cannot be accessed at present. Neither the few pages at my disposal nor the diary extract sent by György Szöllösi’s son13 provide sufficient information to analyze the diary.14 However, Szöllösi’s life and, within it, the period of forced labor service in Bor can be reconstructed on the basis of a video interview recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History15 and his testimony in one of the trials held by the people’s tribunal.16 Although it is impossible to get closer to the notes in the Bor diary, we still learn that Szöllösi was taken to the Bregenz subcamp in the spring of 1944. In the one and a half months he spent there, he experienced instances of “tying” (being hung from his hands after they had been tied together behind his back) ordered by the military detachment, and he witnessed the mutilation of two of his fellow laborers following their unsuccessful attempt to escape. Later, Szöllösi was ordered to work in the mines from a railway construction, and thus he ended up in the Straflager (punishment camp) in Bor. Here, he did not live under the supervision of the Hungarian military but rather of German soldiers. Since he did not get there as a form of punishment, he was far better off than he had been in the Bregenz subcamp. In the end, he was sent home as part of the second group.

Tito’s partisans liberated him on September 30, 1944. Like many of his fellow forced laborers, he first went to Temesvár and then to Budapest, which had been liberated in the meantime. (Subsequently, he probably wrote his diary from spring 1943 to the beginning of 1945.) Following his return home, he became an assistant police inspector in Sopron in the summer of 1945. After spending a short time in Germany and France, he left for the United States in May 1947. He settled in Chicago, changed his name to George Brent, and became a businessman.

György Laufer’s Diary17

At present there are four Bor diaries which can be accessed in full. The first note in György Laufer’s18 36-page hand-written diary, which is now part of a public collection,19 was written more than two and a half months after his arrival in Bor on October 5, 1943. His last note was recorded ten days before the first group left Bor on September 7, 1944. So the diary starts “too late” and finishes “too early,” including a duration of almost 11 months to the day: a large proportion of the nearly 14 months he spent as a forced laborer in Bor. With regard to its total length and the number of entries, the diary can be described as “brief.” Laufer wrote his diary continuously, but not daily. The longest gap, which lasted nearly two months, occurred between January and March, 1944. It was presumably cause by an illness which lasted for five weeks. Like László Faludi, Laufer was in the Berlin camp, and he also worked in the limestone quarry in the village of Krivelj to the north, as well as in Bor, but in Bor, he worked as a photographer.

His diary touches on the series of changes which occurred in the life of the Berlin camp beginning in early 1944. When the new chief commander of the camp, lieutenant colonel Ede Marányi,20 arrived in this period, the life of forced laborers changed dramatically. As Laufer noted in his diary, prisoners were treated more and more strictly. Individual and group “tying” took place regularly and frequently, and as a result, more and more people tried to escape. From his notes, it is possible to reconstruct precisely to the day the time when 15 “lads” fled on March 27, 1944. More people were able to flee within a few days. Of those who tried to escape, 10 were captured the same week. Ede Marányi had two of them executed on Sunday, April 2, 1944. In his diary, Laufer reported the death of a “Jehovah’s Witness” escapee (April 11, 1944). Although he does not mention names, the dates of the deaths agree with the data in the official records of military graves.21 However, the attempts to escape were motivated not only by the increasingly common practice of “tying,” but also by other forms of abuse. Laufer noted that from the beginning of April 1944, prisoners were only allowed to receive letters from their parents or wives, but not from girlfriends.

György Laufer identifies August 29, 1944 as “the most exciting and eventful” day of the time he spent in Bor. This was because, as he writes, “we were called upon to be ready to march because we could expect the order to set off at any moment.”22 The following days were spent waiting, although Laufer had only recently ended up in Bor as a photographer. A one-line note in his diary was made at 4:50 a.m. on September 7, 1944 saying, “Alert! My God be with me.”23 However, the alert was not followed by marching orders at that time. He had to wait another ten days, though there is no record of this in his diary.

The diary comes to an end here, but Laufer’s story in Bor, of course, continued. He was dispatched from Bor in the first phase. He did not write his diary during the marches. He was shot in the head in Cservenka (Crvenka/Tscherwenka) in western Bačka or its vicinity, but shockingly, he survived, and after he had recovered, he returned to Budapest in April 1945.24 The effects of György Laufer’s severe head injury inflicted in the vicinity of Cservenka accompanied him throughout his life.

Little is known of the photographer György Laufer who finally settled down in Budapest and started a family after his years in Szeged. Taking the circumstances of the period into account, the fact that his name is included in the list of profiteers published in the Bulletin of the People’s Tribunals in its issue of March 1946 does not tell us anything about him.25 He became an active member of the Bor group, and his name appeared in the documents of secret investigations in connection with the death of Miklós Radnóti (1967–1975).26

Imre Pártos’s Diary27

Law graduate Imre Pártos and economist Béla Somló belonged to the older generation among the Bor forced laborers. Pártos was 42 years old and Somló was 41 when they reached Bor in 1943. They were taken to Bor in the same group as the much younger György Szöllösi and Lajos György, who also wrote diaries. Pártos and Szöllösi presumably knew each other, since they were taken to the same subcamp.

From the day of joining his unit (June 5, 1944), Imre Pártos recorded something in his diary every day up to the last day of the year. He wrote entries in his diary for a total of 210 days, regardless of which Bor camp he was in or which way he had to take after liberation. He spent four months in Bor camps and two months wandering, marching, and fleeing between Bor and Szeged. He then spent two months in the liberated city of Szeged.

He generally summed up the events of a given day in three concise sentences. An obvious reason for being concise was that he wrote his diary in a small notebook (the only one among the Bor diaries) which offered him only a limited amount of space. Unlike the other diarists, he did not have to do physical work. From the very beginning to the very end, he was a clerk, and he was aware that this was a privilege. He was not held in contempt for being a legally qualified clerk, and if he had anything to fear, it was only the members of the detachment outside his unit. Enjoying the trust of both the detachment and his fellow forced laborers, he became president of the “welfare committee.”28 His estate29 includes an original document that indicates an income of 10,092 pengős and expenditures of 4,469 pengős. This suggests that a self-help social support system was organized with the approval of the camp commander in the Bregenz subcamp. However, Imre Pártos was able to take home both this unique document and a possibly complete list of names (497 in all) of those in the subcamp.

Pártos and the other forced laborers alongside him were liberated by the partisans from the second group setting off from Bor. This meant that he was finally freed from Bor, yet neither had the war come to an end nor was he no longer in danger. The story of his march with the partisans and his escape from the Germans is unusual but, thanks to his diary, we know it. Pártos did not advance in the direction of Arad or Temesvár, as one would have expected, but traveled instead to Szeged via Nagybecskerek (Zrenjanin). He arrived barely two weeks after Szeged was liberated. One day, he was still threatened by the horror of public work and “malenkij robot,” while the next day he was already working as a detective with the Szeged police. Although the diary provides information about the increasing workload at the police, it does not reveal details. It is also known only from a note which was written after he had stopped regularly writing in his diary that he was appointed as Szeged tribunal prosecutor on June 6, 1945. Pártos worked in both job in which he had both political and professional competencies for 16 months, until October 31, 1946, when he was relocated to Budapest.

The files of the people’s tribunal and the local press provide a fragmented picture of Imre Pártos’s work as a prosecutor. Newspapers in Szeged and its vicinity reported on some 35 people’s tribunals for which Pártos served as prosecutor.30 During the trials, he acted as prosecutor in cases in which charges were brought against particularly important war criminals and “anti-people” criminals, such as the commander of the former ghetto of Szeged, the former chief of police, the former Lord Lieutenant, the former deputy mayor, and the former guard commander of the Csillag Prison. In several cases, Pártos was the people’s prosecutor in the trials of military superiors of Jewish forced laborers. As a tribunal prosecutor he participated in at least two cases when the people’s tribunal passed sentence on former detachment members in Bor.31

After almost exactly two years spent in Szeged, he was appointed to the position of people’s prosecutor in Budapest (October 31, 1946) and deputy chief people’s prosecutor eight months later (June 6, 1947). This took place at a time when the Communist Party was seizing power. The people’s tribunals often played a role in this. Pártos represented the prosecution during certain phases of the trials of the Arrow Cross chief of press Mihály Kolosváry-Borcsa,32 minister from the Smallholders’ Party Endre Mistéth,33 and social democratic leader Károly Peyer.34

After the people’s tribunals ceased to function, the government appointed Pártos deputy chief state prosecutor (January 27, 1950).35 About five years later, the Presidential Council of the Hungarian People’s Republic awarded him the “Order of Merit for Socialist Labor” in “recognition of his excellent work in the Chief Prosecution Office.” At the time, Pártos was the prosecutor of the main department of the Chief Prosecution Office (December 24, 1954).36 Following the suppression of the 1956 revolution, he did not participate in the show trials.37 Pártos began his career as a solicitor before the war and retired as a legal counsel from the Budapest Contractors’ Company on December 31, 1966.

Béla Somló’s Diary

The author of the longest diary known among this admittedly small group was Dr. Béla Somló.38 The text, which exists in a typed transcript in a public collection, is several times longer than any other Bor diary.39 The manuscript is a typical example a work with a retrospective character which is not “intact,”40 since in the absence of the original hand-written diary, it cannot be established whether subsequent changes were made and what expectations the author wanted to comply with in relation to any potential changes. Béla Somló passed on to succeeding generations all of his diaries about marches into the regions of the southern borders of Hungary and to Ukraine in the same way.41 At that time, the anti-Jewish laws had not yet affected Somló, and he participated in the reinforcement of the occupying troops as a soldier of the Pécs mechanized division.

Somló’s diary written in Bor is a source of abundant information about the lives of forced laborers who were taken to the Rhön subcamp in the second group. After his fortunate liberation, he provides a uniquely rich description of the colorful life in Temesvár, a city which survived the war with relatively little damage and had already been liberated. It was an urban center in which Jews, Hungarians, Romanians, and Russians lived together.

The bulky file of surveillance documents kept by the State Security Authority reveals more about Béla Somló’s post-1945 life than any other source. Somló, who was not a party member, spoke several languages and liked music. He was kept under surveillance on suspicion of spying for six years between 1950 and 1956. The suspicion was unfounded, and his case was closed.42

Lajos György’s Diary43

The author of the sixth Bor diary which has survived in full44 is Lajos György. While I had to make inquiries about László Faludi and Béla Somló and about György Laufer’s authorship, the opposite was true in the case of György. Also, he was the only person among the Bor diarists with whom I was able to meet in person.45 His son, aesthetician Péter György, first mentioned the existence of the diary in a biographical essay published in the literary journal Alföld in 2010.46 A year later, in his essay-novel Apám helyett47 (Instead of my father), which met with considerable interest, the story of his father’s forced labor service in Bor and his Bor diary played essential roles in the first seven chapters.

Lajos György’s Bor diary can be divided into three distinct sections based on chronological and topographical aspects: Bor, liberation and wandering, and finally, being home in Budapest. Regarding its themes, it is a historical and a personal diary. The personal thread is intense in the sections written during his time in Bor and during the period he spent wandering and also in the notes made after he had returned home, although in the latter, the proportions are naturally turned around completely. The narrative changes from a war-time forced labor camp diary into a “travel diary” and a personal one. It is the diary of a year in the life of a young man who was 18 and then 19 years of age and who was taken to a forced labor service, compelling him to cross international borders, pass through theatres of military operations, and learn about the old and new systems from close-up, and yet György was barely able to separate from his parents. In addition, he was in love. So the text is also a diary documenting his turbulent emotional life over the course of a single year of his first love. Moreover, the diary has another important layer. The text is a document which sheds light on the ways in which his attitude towards the communist idea developed via practical trials. Thus, Lajos György’s diary can clearly be regarded as a diary of transformation, mobility, and the process of becoming an adult.

Lajos György wrote his diary between May 31, 1944 and April 3, 1945. The section on Bor embraces a shorter period, and it also contains entries written during and about the liberation and the events of the months after György had returned home. It begins when he was drafted to work as part of the forced labor service, and the diary contains entries kept over the course of a year, almost to the day. Over the course of this period of time, according to his entries, György slept in a total of 58 places, starting with Jászberény, the location specified in the summons he received, followed by the locations in Bor, and on the way home following liberation as far as to his residence in Budapest.

György’s diary contains drawings, which is not unusual in diary literature, though his is the only one among the Bor diaries that contains drawings. Tiny sketches in red ink are found in the margins and, in some instances, at the top of the pages. They are connected to the texts. György drew a castle, rails, mine carts, piles of bricks, a red star (with “Long Live Tito” underneath in Serbian), a hammer and sickle, a red cross, tanks, books, a watch (with the word “watch” in Russian underneath), a Christmas tree, and a traditional Hungarian Christmas cake.48 In the same red ink, he underlined titles, sub-titles, some dates, and words or names which he regarded as important, presumably when he reread the diary later.

Lajos György was placed in the Laznica camp, which was, relatively speaking, the best in Bor. It was the only subcamp of Bor that was situated inside a village and was not surrounded by a fence due to its location. It was the furthest Hungarian subcamp from Bor and it was not along the busier north-south main road. Last but not least, the commander of the camp, ensign Jenő Halász, had a comparatively humane attitude.49 Yet later, Lajos György encountered a member of the detachment named János Császár in the Berlin camp.50 The cruelty of this sergeant major had the same negative effect on him as it did on the other diarists. Later, like László Faludi, György Laufer, and György Szöllösi, Lajos György also participated in the people’s tribunal trial of János Császár.51

Summary

On the basis of the number of diaries which have survived, even if in some cases only in fragments, one has the impression that very few of the forced labor service men in Bor wrote diaries. Two of the authors of the surviving six diaries were taken to the Berlin camp with the 1943 group and spent 14 months in Bor. The others arrived a year later and were held captive in different subcamps in the mountains. The diaries clearly show how differently the diarists experienced their forced labor service, depending on their ages, qualifications, assignments, and the conditions in the camps. Nothing was previously known about how a forced laborer lived and thought during his time in Bor if he worked inside the camp, for instance in the kitchen, or he was a photographer or a clerk or if he had been in the organized labor movement. The Bor diaries provide us with a few impressions of the experiences of forced labor in theaters of military operations or under Hungarian and German control. Notes made in the present tense at the locations and the later transcripts make it possible to draw a more nuanced picture.

Another perspective from which the diaries may offer a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of people assigned to forced labor camp service involves the so-called “Jewish question” in the camp. As György Laufer writes in his diary (which is the only source known so far which touches on this), the Jewish forced laborers were marked with “the Mogen Dovid,” which was daubed in “oil paint” on their chests and their backs (Laufer writes about this in the entry from March 30, 1944).52 So from then on, the Hungarian Jewish forced laborers held as prisoners in the Berlin camp were compelled to wear the Star of David on their clothing until the liberation. Béla Somló dealt most with the situation of the Jews in the camp. He was preoccupied with the difference between the position of “whites” and “yellows” (the term “white” referred to people who were born Jewish but converted to the Christian faith. They were officially considered Jews). He often wrote about the distinction between “white” Jews and non-baptized “yellow” Jews. Thus the anti-Jewish laws carried weight in acts of discrimination even in Bor. Those with yellow armbands could not be cooks, nor could they work in the kitchen. Moreover, they could not be workers within the camp or be present in the office. They had to turn in their boots and wear the Star of David. Béla Somló, Imre Pártos, and Lajos György had white arm bands, as did the poet Miklós Radnóti and the philosopher Sándor Szalai, who were also taken to Bor.

With one exception, the Bor diaries did not end in Bor. They record the liberation and the experience of encountering the partisans and Russian soldiers. They also describe what the forced laborers experienced during their escape, on the way home, and at the locations where they stayed. After having survived Hungarian and German captivity, they were still exposed to threats from the partisans and the looming danger of falling into Russian captivity. The diaries show precisely how the war, its consequences, and the temporary situations affected them. Arrival home also presented them with losses, since they learned that many of their relatives had perished in the Holocaust. They had to rethink their lives, including their personal lives. In different ways, they participated in the emergence of a new world, including the rise of a different dictatorship, the complex circumstances of which they themselves struggled with later.53

Bibliography

Primary sources

Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára [Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security] (ÁBTL)

Béla, Somló. 3.1.5. O–9054.

Budapest Főváros Levéltára [Budapest City Archives] (BFL)

Nb.206/1945. 160–161. Lajos György

Nb.3281/1945.80. András Tálas

XXV.1.a. 3757–1947, Károly Peyer

XXV.2.b. 13981–1945, Mihály Kolosváry-Borcsa

Holocaust Emlékközpont [Holocaust Memorial Center]

Károly, Koltai. 2011.360.1.

Honvédelmi Minisztérium Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzezum [Ministry of Defence Military History Institute and Museum Military History Archives] (HM HIM HL)

PGy 2826. Béla, Somló. Diary. The participation of the Pécs motorised heavy vehicle division IV/2 in entering the region to the south of Hungary’s border in 1941 (1980)

PgyM/368 and M/368. Béla, Somló. Diary (Bor, 1 June 1944–Temesvár, 19 October 1944). Diary (Temesvár, 19 October 1944–Budapest, 27 February 1945).

TGy 2811. Béla, Somló. Diary. The participation of the column of the Pécs motorised vehicle division IV/2 in the rapid deployment force of the military campaign in Russia (1941).

Hadisír Nyilvántartó [Records of Military Graves], http://www.hadisir.hu/hadisir-nyilvantarto

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Csongrád-Csanád Megyei Levéltára [National Archives of Hungary Csongrád and Csanád County Archives] (MNL CSML)

Szeged Nb.206/1945. Trial of cadet sergeant János Császár

Szeged, Nb.1106/1945. Lance corporal Mihály Palócz’s war crime

Szeged, Nb.1200/1945. Captain István Vida’s anti-people crime.

Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum [Hungarian National Museum] (MNM)

Legújabb Kori Iratgyűjtemény [Collection of Contemporary Documents]

83.242.1. Faludi, László. Diary of a Bor forced laborer

Történeti Fényképtár [Department of Historical Photographs]

78.386. Faludi, László. Three camp postcards

Magyar Zsidó Múzeum és Levéltár [Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives]

B/327 L2_E4_75. Laufer, György. Diary written during Bor forced labor service

Visual History Archive (VHA)

USC, Shoah Foundation, George Brent, interview 19753, 1996.

György, Lajos. Diary. 31 May 1944–1 April 1945. The original copy of the diary is with Lajos György’s widow, Otília Vass (Budapest), while the copy seen by me is in Péter György’s ownership.

Magyar Közlöny [Hungarian Official Gazette], 124.12.1954, no. 106, 754.

Magyar Közlöny [Hungarian Official Gazette], 16.02.1950, no. 28, 1.

Nemzeti Emlékezet Bizottsága [Committee of National Remembrance] (NEB)

Datebase. https://perek56.hu/ords/f?p=1051:1

Pártos, Imre. Diary. The original diary and Imre Pártos’s documents connected to his forced labor service in Bor are in the ownership of his daughter-in-law and granddaughter (Budapest).

Somló, Béla. Diary (Bor, 1 June 1944–Temesvár, 19 October 1944). Diary (Temesvár, 19 October 1944–Budapest, 27 February 1945). The originals are owned by Márta Koczka Sántháné (Debrecen).

Szöllösi, György. Diary. The original copy of the diary is owned by Dennis Brent (Dallas).

 

Secondary literature

Anonymous. “Itt a feketézők, valutázók, árdrágítók második hivatalos listája” [The second official list of black marketeers, illegal dealers in foreign currencies, and profiteers]. Világosság, March 3, 1946.

Csapody, Tamás. “Laufer György naplója” [György Laufer’s diary]. Múltunk 64, no. 1 (2019): 184–224.

Csapody, Tamás. “A naplóíró Somló Béla” [The diary writer is Béla Somló]. FONS 24, no. 3 (2019): 339–402.

Gyáni, Gábor. “A napló mint társadalomtörténeti forrás: A közhivatalnok identitása” [The diary as a social history source: The identity of a public servant]. In Gyáni, Gábor, Emlékezés, emlékezet és a történelem elbeszélése [Remembrance, memory and the narration of history], 145–60. Budapest: Napvilág Press, 2000.

György, Péter. “Az amnézia-terápia: A Kádár-korszak fausti egyezsége” [Therapy of amnesia: The Faustian pact of the Kádár era]. Alföld 61, no. 1 (2010): 64–69.

György, Péter. Apám helyett [Instead of my father]. Budapest: Magvető Press, 2011.

Kunt, Gergely. Kamasztükör: A hosszú negyvenes évek társadalmi képzetei fiatalok naplóiban [Reflections of adolescents: Social ideas of the long 1940s in diaries of young people]. Budapest: Korall Press, 2017.

Sinclair Jr., Upton Beall. Kutató Sámuel [Samuel the Seeker]. Translated by Dezső Schöner. Budapest: Népszava, 1913.

The Corporeal Continuation of the Holocaust: A Look at Miscarriages

Alexandra M. Szabó
Brandeis University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 3  (2020): 408-429 DOI:10.38145/2020.3.408

Scholarship on women’s experiences is recently surfacing to understand a broader and more nuanced picture of Holocaust history. This case study wishes to add to the currently emerging interpretations of gendered experiences through the events of miscarriages that persecuted women experienced before, during, and after the Shoah. While the topic of miscarriages is only a segment of the larger subject of pregnancy, this research aims to offer a methodological example of including corporeal experiences into the gender analysis of the examined time period. This case study thus presents its relevance in bearing the ability to alter previous scholarly understanding on the demographics of Jewish communities after 1945 by showing that women’s reproductive and fertility experiences have not been included in social scientific discussions.

Keywords: Women and the Holocaust, gendered experiences, gender analysis, pregnancy, miscarriages, Jewish women.

In this paper, I examine experiences of miscarriages caused by the Holocaust in order to present the idea that defined timelines of history and demographic indicators do not necessarily align to the social reality of corporeal and gendered experiences. Originally, the wider scope of my research was about returning Holocaust survivors who had been deported from Hungary,1 and the initial step was to review demographics concerning the Jewish population from the immediate postwar period in comparison to the past decades of the twentieth century, especially the interwar period. My examination of the demographic data led me to the discovery that Holocaust survivors are mainly treated as a homogenous group in Hungarian scholarly work, and this failure to draw distinctions among them has led to some unexplored ground in the history of survivors.2 The aim of this paper, therefore, is to look deeper into the social history of the Hungarian Jewish population in the so-called transitory period of the early postwar years in Hungary from liberation in 1945 to the beginning of Communist rule in 1949.3 The purpose of such a case study about a specific group of people within a specific timeframe is, ultimately, to provide a lens we can glean insights into societal changes from a wider but also from a closer perspective. Therefore, this paper is going to complement quantitative research with a qualitative approach. Through this examination, I seek further explanations and a more nuanced understanding of alternate realities that lay behind macrosociological knowledge with the help of a feminist approach.4

Such an approach provides further questions about the context and actors of a given societal reaction or change, especially about women and their role. Given the outstanding shifts in the demographics of the Jewish community in Hungary post-1945, sociological and historical analyses specifically highlight the low amount of live births, which becomes an even more so focused aspect when taken the contemporary general claim into consideration that it became the Jewish woman’s social duty to recuperate the lost souls of the Holocaust.5 Therefore, the aim of this paper is to turn towards the survivors with an inquiry that allows us to understand further possible reasons of the low statistics through a qualitative approach instead of a quantitive one, yet with the aim of integration. Consequently, my examination has led me to the understanding that women miscarrying in this era was just as significant, if not greater, as in other contexts. However, claiming definite causality is not the aim of this paper, in that the traumas of the Holocaust affected all of the women’s reproductive health and led to high rates of miscarriage; the intention is rather to present that such casualties did happen, as by nature, such explanations are omitted from the statistics.

 

Demographics after Survival

As Viktor Karády’s extensive work on the Hungarian Jewry after 19456 clearly shows, the main change in the social structure of survivors was the high demographic losses due to casualties (illnesses and the poor physical state of survivors, self-destruction, and even pogroms), conversion, emigration, and mixed marriages. Moreover, a significant upsurge can be observed in terms of Jewish marriages, and a change in family structures. Given the importance of the latter two shifts, I have chosen to consider the realities of starting a new family, as such decisions amount to and represent significant social changes.

The demographic boost in marriages within the surviving Jewish community in Hungary in the immediate post-war period becomes significant in comparison to before and during the active years of the Holocaust. This compensatory demographic process is noteworthy if we seek to understand familial choices, at least in part, as fundamental coping strategies of Holocaust survivors on a macrolevel. A prevalent response was to (re)marry, and this led to a surge of approximately 1,000–1,200 more Jewish marriages in 1946 than in 1943/5, and more than 2,200 Jewish marriages were held in Budapest in 1947.7 The demographic upswing is extraordinary if one considers the growth of the numbers of Jewish marriages to the stagnant number of marriages among people of other faiths in this time period in Budapest.8

The tremendous growth in the numbers of new marriages did not, however, mean a similar upward trend in birth rates. The demographic recuperative tendency of Jewish communities in Hungary, according to Karády, is not significant in other than getting (re)married; recuperative fertility is thought to have lessened or ceased due to several reasons, such as the destruction of households, losses of property and wealth, psychological effects of persecution, etc.9 The female experience of not being able to bear a child for psychological reasons, physiological reasons, or a complex combination of the two, and further realities, remains unexplored. Therefore, after carefully presenting the demographic data on the number of live births, I will turn my attention to those mothers who are not counted in the statistics due to unsuccessful pregnancies.

I find this dimension extremely important because it constitutes an essential, if not overlooked, component of the social history of Holocaust survivors; it shows that the trend of Jewish births after the Shoah, compared either to the number of Jewish marriages or the live birth rates among couples of other faiths, is not exclusively due to inherent structural differences in Jewish families. My discussion of some of the reasons behind the numbers will show that, at the time, this was a silenced social reality, and it remains a silenced part of the past to this day. This is true in part because women who lost pregnancies or were unable to conceive are not included as distinct categories in demographic data and in part because sociological inquiry on the Holocaust has, in general, failed to include gender as a perspective.

I will complement my discussion of the background of this social history with elements of oral history by concentrating on the voices of women about intimate topics related to the establishment of families. I thus focus on the unexplored and rather unarticulated topic of miscarriages as one of the many almost unmentioned events in the lives of women survivors and the several different responses with which miscarriages were met and the outcomes they had. My paper will show that miscarriages were (and are) a hidden yet significant topic and that pregnancy losses changed the responses and roles of women even after the Holocaust. My discussion thus also adds to the theoretical literature on how gender is a fluid social category and women do not have an “essential nature” under any circumstances.10

Women and the Holocaust

To begin an inquiry from the perspective that women survivors did not consistently respond in “typical” or expected ways to pregnancy or a miscarriage is to suggest that women should be studied independently in Holocaust history. The historiography on women in the Holocaust follows an evolution of thought, beginning with an insistence on distinguishing women from men, since history and the study of history have been largely influenced by men, yet men have had different sets of experiences than women. This starting point includes emphasis on allowing women to speak for themselves and also to be seen and heard.11 However, gender analysis in Holocaust scholarship has been a rarity, though a more recent trend of studying women separately in the Holocaust follows the same route as studying women in general history, and this has made women somewhat more visible in Holocaust studies.12

Feminist scholarship on war and women, moreover, has gone beyond conclusions based on simple gender dichotomies and has been able to shed light on new realities while deconstructing myths that limited further knowledge production.13 A crucial distinction which has been drawn is that war affects women, and it affects women in different ways than men in terms of torture and murder (for instance), an aspect which has been marginalized by the standard that war is “men’s business.”14 Yet, there are several experiences that easily debunk this standard. For instance, a specific form of psychological torture as a result of wartime rape affected only women, namely being made pregnant by one’s rapist, who was also the enemy in the larger conflict, and then being stigmatized within one’s own group. Moreover, women in the wars of the twentieth century constituted a significant share of direct casualties as civilians due to the strategy of so-called total war, which drew no distinction between combatants and civilians,15 while Jewish women, together with Jewish men, were “nonpersons” unworthy of life according to Nazi ideology.16

Nazi ideology was genocidal based on racial distinctions, thus it might seem as it took no consideration of gender, but it has already been established that Nazi practice was not gender neutral,17 so it is important to note that it was so because Nazi policy never neglected the aspect of gender, rather it added to the complexity of its power structures. The Holocaust was inherently a gendered process, wherein the forced changes of location, forms of forced labor, forms of treatment, etc. were all gender based and thus had formative effects on experiences, survival, and death.18 A significant example includes the initial selection upon arrival in the camps, which determined the fates of the persecuted based on gender. Visibly pregnant women and women with children were immediately sent to their deaths.19 Those who were not sent to the gas chambers after arrival were then segregated, also based on gender, which then marked the differences in how women and how men faced hardships and experienced the modes of survival.20

Moreover, specific strategies applied in genocidal practice are gender-focused, such as sexual assaults and other means of targeted attacks on reproductive abilities, which coheres to the main aim of annihilating an ethnicity and culture.21 Women’s bodies could function as a weapon of war, as raping women who were regarded as part of the “enemy” group had the effect of stripping their husbands and fathers of their masculinity and destroying their status as protectors within their communities.22 This practice was also part of the Holocaust, although the policy of Rassenschande under the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor might suggest otherwise, given that it prohibited sexual relations with anyone identified as Jewish.23 Whether the rapes which were committed during the Holocaust were part of a military strategy or acts prompted in part by the genocidal desire to dehumanize, historians agree that sexual violence against their did happen and is an important part of their experience.24

Survivor accounts also inform us that the fear of suffering any sort of sexual violence was constantly present, and sterilization is a central theme in many of the women’s memoirs.25 However, accounts in which experiences of sexual assaults, menstruation, pregnancy, etc. are elaborately discussed are rather scarce. Women did not talk about them in part, as Joan Ringelheim comments in her discussion of interviews with Holocaust survivors, because the assaults were seen as having “no significance within the larger picture of the Holocaust,” even by the victims themselves.26 Whether this is the result of a male-dominated memory of the Holocaust or of the stigmatization mentioned above, the silencing added to the exclusion of female experiences from the history of the Holocaust. And although not every woman may have suffered any or every form of sexual assault or gendered violation, the sources concerning practices of sexual assault in some camps suggest these experiences were more common than not. For example, in the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, the methodologically planned steps against menstruation were coffee-like drinks which contained bromide, and as in other camps, invasive sterilization methods were used to prevent pregnancy, while infants and children were sent to the gas chamber.27

A Feminist Framework

Study and discussions of exclusively female experiences are not intended to measure the sufferings of women and compare them to the sufferings of men, but rather to learn about fertility before, during, and after the Shoah in order to gain a better understanding of the success or failure of the coping strategies of survivors regarding family structures. Much as women’s responses to experiences are not universal, the timelines of physical and psychological recuperation were not either. Therefore, when discussing miscarriages specifically happening to survivor women, I refer to fetal loss as a possible corporeal continuation of the Holocaust to strengthen the need to include this aspect not only to sociological analyses but to an overall historical understanding. The basis of this approach is Lenore J. Weitzman’s and Dalia Ofer’s sequential framework, which offers a methodological scheme to understanding women’s responses to the Shoah in Holocaust historiography.28

The sequential framework complements the continuity and the disruptive frameworks by inviting Holocaust historians to broaden their view of women in a timely manner, which in my interpretation means looking at the “longue durée” of women’s lives, to follow the shifts in responses and behavior through the entire course of the Holocaust, and not statically.29 This framework is divided into three stages: 1) the general reaction of the continuity model at the beginning of the Nazi assault on Jews, 2) the in-between stage of coping strategies changing into disruptive patterns as Nazi measures intensified, and 3) the tipping point, when change came about in the women’s perspective, and the “new me” was born, usually due to a fatal trigger (e.g. a miscarriage, the death of a loved one, etc.).

I have chosen the sequential model to put survivors’ testimonials that mention instances of miscarriages into a framework because of the attention this model devotes to time. The other frameworks either consider the roles of women from the prewar period as mothers, wives, and homemakers as roles which were kept up or roles which retained their relevance30 or they focus on forms of female behavior that were or are considered discontinuous, i.e. the dramatic ways in which women abandoned their prewar roles and conventions eventually to engage in activities that would have been unthinkable prior to their experiences of the reality of the Holocaust.31 The main argument of this paper about miscarriages concentrates on the time aspect in a sequential sense, i.e. that it is not only characteristic of the female experience during the Holocaust statically, in singular point(s) of time ending 1945. According to this view, I find it important to reconsider the sociological findings on the population of Hungarian Holocaust survivors in the immediate postwar setting and, more specifically, to explore the underlying reasons for the low number of live births in a retrospective manner.

Demographics Revisited

As a demographic examination of the Jewish population shows, although there was a high compensatory upward trend in the immediate postwar years in Hungary, this was mainly visible in the number of marriages but less so in the number of births.32 In 1945, the number of Jewish births (529) was about half what it had been in 1944 (1,164). This figure rose significantly to approximately 1,500 births by 1946/7, but this meant only a return to the prewar figures (1,540 births in 1938).33 Moreover, the main argument of Karády’s chapter on reproduction and the family structures among Holocaust survivors is that after the compensatory upward trend of demographics, in the long run, the Hungarian Jewish population returned to its tendency towards decrease.34 This statement fits the overall thesis of Jewish social studies about a general trend of decline in terms of Jewish populations most commonly due to a low number of live births, conversion, and mixed marriages, etc., namely, that there is a threat of “Jewish disappearance.”35

However, conclusions concerning a “Jewish disappearance” as a general trend turn out to be too vague and lack a qualitative approach for more precise consideration, offering explanations borrowed from history through the lens of statistical data as decontextualized pieces of information.36 Even if changes in demographics concerning a decreasing Jewish population is worrisome at a given time, the interpretation of a “Jewish disappearance” does not work in all cases. In this respect, other, deeper analyses of given set of demographic data could show that the numbers have been decontextualized and this decontextualization explains why social histories fall victim to general conclusions concerning loss or “disappearance.” In a study on Breslau Jews, for instance, Till Van Rahden shows that the linear understanding of intermarriages leading to integration was not applicable to the Jews of the city. Rahden demonstrates how this understanding or assumption (that intermarriage leads to assimilation) does not do justice to the complex identities of the Jews of the city and that choosing a Gentile partner did not always represent a break with the Jewish tradition, since in many instances, the intermarried spouses continued to follow Jewish religious practice, and in several cases they did so with the children born to the mixed families.37 Similarly, the decreasing demography in Hungary after 1945 can hold further realities which offer other explanations for low birth rates.

When contextualizing the declining numbers of births, Karády elaborates on the possible reasons for this drop by reviewing the corporeal explanations. He reviews the statistics from a vast societal starting point on an annual basis, and he includes a list of the psychological effects of persecution alongside a more detailed explanation of the consequences of migration, political shifts (the increasingly powerful Communist Party, the rise to power of which caused a new wave of shock among Hungarian Jews), the disproportionately large number of women aged 0–20 in comparison to men, and the structural changes of families in terms of trends (having one or two children after the war instead of seven or eight, which had been typical before the war).38 However, Karády does not include, in his discussion, the possibility that some couples had other underlying reasons, or that women were not able to become or remain pregnant, though in some cases, this inability to bear a child would constitute a further effect of the Holocaust which did not cease with liberation.39

I contend that a woman’s inability to have a child after the Holocaust must be included among the possible reasons for low birth rates among Jews and must also be studied if we seek to arrive at a nuanced understanding of women’s sexual vulnerability and the potential consequences of the experiences of persecution that Jewish women suffered during (and in this case also after) the Holocaust. These are issues which remain largely unexplored in the secondary literature.40 In order to initiate such an understanding, I have conducted qualitative research based on oral history using the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation. When I searched for survivor testimonies using the indexing term “miscarriages,” I found 16 accounts in English, which I have chosen to use as the basis for the present case study. A larger sampling could be achieved by adding further indexing terms and by including other resources and databases, which is an aim for further extended research on the topic, wherein I can go beyond identifying miscarriages as an additional explanatory point, and achieve a deeper understanding of the extent of miscarriages, its direct and indirect effects on the population, its scope in connection to the era’s politics of reproduction, and other related questions. Nonetheless, given the framework of the paper, I corroborate my argument about the urgency of identifying the survivor women’s reproductive issues by using the results found in the narrower search of the VHA testimonies.

It is important to note the time scope of the oral histories examined. The survivors’ accounts were videotaped in the 1990s and early 2000s, and a very small number at the end of the 1980s. This might, of course, mean that elements of memory and remembrance are problematic, since over 45 years had passed since the actual events had taken place, yet in the specific case of miscarriages, I believe that being embedded in the social matrix of the time of speaking is of greater impact. In case of the VHA Shoah Foundation interviews, women talking about pregnancies can be articulate, but surely not as emphatically as today, when there is a more assertive mindset and vocabulary with which to talk about sexuality (or the vulnerability of sexuality, for that matter). This might further explain the low number of testimonies in which women discuss their experiences of failed pregnancies. The majority of the searched testimonies, moreover, discuss the event of a miscarriage before or after the Holocaust, and there are less recollections of pregnancy losses during the murderous Nazi persecution when forcibly removed from home.

Instances of miscarriages during the Holocaust, either in ghettoes, camps, or in hiding, are more silenced due to the fact that the pregnancy itself had to be kept a secret for the woman in question could thus avoid being murdered immediately or, because of the lack of medical help, the mothers passed away after the miscarriage. Here, the risk of comparing experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust might arise. Any attempt to measure or quantify sufferings, in my assessment, would be misguided, as each of these three time periods was unique for its own reasons. Moreover, each experience is distinctive and unmeasurable since these events happened to individuals, much as, more generally, the pain and torments suffered by woman cannot be meaningfully compared to the pain suffered by men and children.

Qualitative Research: After the Holocaust

Of the 16 testimonies, one is a duplicate (possibly a system error of the search engine), so the actual number of interviews on which I based my case study is 15. Of the 15, two accounts were told by men about their wives and their lost children. Almost half of the people (seven) mention miscarriages that happened after liberation, while two mention miscarriages which took place before ghettoization in Poland and six speak of miscarriage which took place during the active years of the Holocaust, out of which four happened in Auschwitz and two in hiding. Although the quantity of the testimonies is too narrow to be of representative value of an entire society, it does include these different sets of experiences that allow the sampling to be an indicative case study, i.e. miscarriages occurred in this period and thus its examination needs to be elevated into the historical inquiry, however small a number of witnesses testify.

One of the male interviewees claims that he and his wife were constantly trying to get pregnant and his wife had several miscarriages for about twelve years after liberation, during which time they migrated to Israel, and they were only successful in their attempts at childbearing later, in Canada.41 This indicates the complex circumstances of the aftermath of the Holocaust in a survivor’s life, which might illustrate the different tolls this complex new reality might have had on restarting life. Another male Holocaust survivor speaks about his wife’s miscarriage after their marriage in 1956.42 Considering the over ten years that had passed since liberation, discussing this miscarriage in terms of Holocaust trauma might rather be of a speculative nature but especially because Charles does not elaborate further on the fatality. Nevertheless, this testimony is also of crucial importance in the discussion of miscarriages as it instigates the question how far can we think in terms the continuation of the Holocaust in women’s bodies if 1945 cannot be declared as an end point, and whether such a question could be sufficiently examined at all.

Similarly, the women who speak about miscarriages which took place after 1945 note that they lost several pregnancies, some at a late stage. Two female survivors mention multiple miscarriages which took place in 1947–1948. One of them gave birth in 1946, right before making Aliyah, but her baby died in infancy.43 Another mother, Tobi was seven months along when she had a miscarriage.44 Tobi got married to her husband in Canada in 1950, after which she had a miscarriage when she was in her seventh month (the child would have been their first born). When seeking medical attention in the local hospital, she was told by the doctor that she would have to start trying to have another baby immediately and not spend too much time grieving.

Seven months after the loss of her first pregnancy, Tobi gave birth to her son, who weighed five pounds. Similarly, her second child was born prematurely at six months and was kept in an incubator for seven weeks. The hospital required payment for the child to grow strong while in the incubator, which was a financial burden for Tobi who had her firstborn child at home while his husband earned $45 a week. As she had to pay rent and feed her family, Tobi offered the hospital a deal: “or you gonna take 15 dollars from me per month or you keep the baby. And when I’m gonna have money, I’m gonna come for the baby to take it home. And he was ‘Ok, ok, 15 dollars…’.” She thus managed to pay for the intensive care her baby needed in a year’s time, spending $1,000 to save her children.

Tobi’s recollections about the beginning of a new (family) life after having survived the unthinkable shows the politicized significance of a woman survivor from a social and biological viewpoint. She was to bear a child, not mourn the loss of a pregnancy, to fulfil her familial desires, and perhaps a social, and even a religious duty.45 The demographic indicators, as well as the interview questions (embedded in the framework of VHA’s interview methodology in 1996) do not allow us to extend this investigation further, and thus leaves room only for speculation. For the “business” of keeping her child alive, she was the primary caretaker and the primary executive power concerning the financial aspects of the necessary healthcare in an emergency situation, thus reversing the prewar gender differences of spatial orientation within the family structure. Her husband was earning the income for the household, but it was she who had to negotiate for the future life and health of their children, outside of the home.

However, the multiple and late miscarriages from the sampling of this case study show that stability was trembling in women’s bodies to the extent that even successful childbearing did not guarantee life for the newborn. One of the stories told symbolically invokes the sensation of trembling, possibly a result of a seemingly never-ending persecution: Lena,46 Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Thessaloniki, got pregnant again around 1947 after her husband arrived back from deportation, at a time when they were living in a small room in their previously confiscated apartment with several Greek strangers. Once, while she was having a shower, one of the men pushed the door in and entered the bathroom to which Lena’s sudden reaction resulted in her falling to the floor, and losing her child, a baby girl. “I fell down, and I had miscarriaged. And was a girl. A little girl. And I start to cry, all the time, I was crying because they took me in the hospital, to clean me, to do whatever it was, it was a miscarriage, it was not like normal. And I was all the time crying that it was a girl, it was a girl, a little girl, a little girl. That was the problem.”

Lena’s account shows that the underlying psychological effects are in a complex relationship with physical fear that could have resulted fetal loss in such a direct way because of falling, but presumably also in indirect ways. The underlying reasons of fear can be not only complex in its nature but caused by a number of causes, such as the stress of having to live in a previously confiscated apartment with others, the justifiable or unjustifiable threat of Gentiles in the early postwar period, or that of antisemitism that was prevalent in several countries even to the extent of newly occurring pogroms47, and possibly several other factors depending on the time and space (in Greece, for example, the overshadowing of the Holocaust and the survivors returning to Greece by the Greek Civil War48).

Pregnant women were also exposed to unsafe conditions since they were often on the move, as emigration was one of the most common coping strategies for previously deported Holocaust survivors, and this also constituted a risk to a healthy pregnancy. Maria W., for example, was on her way to make Aliyah when, in Marseille, she had a miscarriage. As she did not speak French, she felt even more vulnerable and was rather an observer of what was happening to her. After she had spent some days in the hospital, she was taken to a DP camp, where she was left lying on the floor for two weeks. Only later, after having arrived in Israel, was she given the professional medical attention that a miscarriage would necessitate.49 Maria never had a child after this experience. In her recollections, she does not elaborate on not having had children, i.e. she does not indicate whether this was for physiological or psychological reasons. However, it becomes clear that for all the women whose accounts I read, the circumstances of childbirth were rather difficult, often even harsh. Women had to deal with the continuation of the Holocaust in their bodies, both mentally and bodily, and they also had to address the circumstances and environments in which they found themselves at a moment of emergency.

Qualitative Research II: Before and During the Holocaust

The sources indicate different reactions to the growing tension and hostility during the period leading up to the Holocaust as well and to the changing structures of family lives. Some of the findings offer significant examples of the experience of unsuccessful pregnancies due to the growing tensions of Nazism in Poland in the 1930s. One account is about a neighbor who was pregnant, while another survivor talks about her own story. Chronologically, the first incident happened before ghettoization, but when German soldiers were already strolling in the streets of Kazimierz (a district of Kraków) in Poland. One day, soldiers entered a store-holders’ property and were greeted and served by the store-holder’s daughter, who had recently gotten married and was pregnant with their first child. For unknown reasons to the narrator, the pregnant daughter was kicked in the stomach by one of the Nazi soldiers, causing her to miscarry. After having lost her child, the mother also passed away. The acquaintance of the storyteller remembered this regrettable event specifically because the funeral which was held for both mother and child was the first funeral she had ever attended.50

Similarly, when more drastic measures of persecuting Jews were implemented in Poland, a woman named Fay lost her father to “some gangsters” in their town, and later her mother also died during the German invasion. Fay remembers the Germans entering Grodzisko Dolne, the small village in which they lived, with their huge motorbikes and cars. According to her account, the fear she experienced caused her to miscarry. “I was so scared,” she said, “I lost a baby.”51 Although Fey was not directly attacked by any of the Nazi invaders, the fear of the unknown preceded the actual events of aggressive persecution, and it may have been this fear (as she herself seems to have thought) that caused the death of her unborn child. This is the only information she provides in her testimony in 1988, without further comment. She does not talk about the emotional aspects of this experience or of her grief. Her articulate but hardly detailed account offers an example of one way in which a Jewish woman felt it acceptable or appropriate to speak about the loss of a pregnancy.

Of the fifteen testimonies, two tell vividly detailed stories of miscarriages which took place while the mothers were still in the camps. Marika, a Hungarian Jewish woman held in Ravensbrück, formed a close relationship with a woman named Elvira in the camp, and Elvira eventually told her story. 52 Marika had become pregnant in the previous concentration camp she had been taken to in Frankfurt am Main (Elvira hints that Marika may have been a victim of rape). Marika did not tell anyone anything of her pregnancy, but she started to become very sick, and eventually, she could not eat or stand anymore. Those in the same barrack with her realized that she was pregnant when the older women interpreted these signs as clear indications of pregnancy. The miscarriage happened when she was lying on the top bunk. Elvira and the other women saw blood flowing down onto the floor from the top bunk, so they took her down (“And we had to drag her down from the top”). They wrapped her in a blanket and took her to an isolated part of the camp where corpses were lying and they left her there, crying out in pain. According to her account, Elvira went back to where Marika lay several times, possibly tormented by the (a)moral decision they had made, against the other girls’ warnings not to return. Eventually, she left her there. Elvira said several times that there was nothing they could have done for her, but she also showed doubt as to whether the decision to abandon Marika, who was presumably in the midst of losing her baby, was the best choice.

The act of giving an account of this event, whether as an intentional compensatory act or not, seems to have been critically important for Elvira throughout her testimony. And her account is, indeed, an important part of Holocaust history, as it demonstrates the extent of secrecy that pregnancy called for in camps and how a pregnant woman would attempt to tackle such a situation in order to escape immediate murder at the cost of (unanticipated) pain (not to mention offering an example of one of the reactions of those in her immediate surroundings). Marika’s attempt to keep her pregnancy a secret as long as she could tragically suggests that similar events (pregnancies and miscarriages) during camp life remain not only untold but unexplored.53 Although I find the tendency towards reticence on this subject common among the different survivor groups for the abovementioned reasons, the secondary literature on the world of the concentration camps is again outstanding in this respect, i.e. in its failure to explore this subject, much as it has largely failed to explore the subject of rape as a sexual and not just violent act.54 It is crucially important, therefore, that Elvira told Marika’s story, as it now offers textual evidence of Marika’s tragedy (and thus makes her part of Holocaust memory), even if by telling it, Elvira risked moral judgement.

Another miscarriage that we know of happened in Auschwitz, where initial secrecy was just as much a factor, but here the mother’s life was saved by some medical attention. The story of the woman involved, Eszter, perfectly illustrates the lack of adequate medical treatment and hygiene. She managed to keep her pregnancy a secret until giving birth to her son on December 5, 1944, when she was taken for medical care to one of the healthcare facilities in Auschwitz. After the birth, her placenta did not come out, and a Polish woman attending to her (not a Jewish woman, yet it is not quite clear who the personnel were from the testimony) did not call the doctor for medical attention and help. Though she was bleeding continuously, the doctor arrived only two hours later and pulled the placenta out, when the bleeding finally stopped. Eszter recalls that the people treating her did not wash their hands, though she did not come down with an infection. The people who knew about her childbirth did not put her back in the barracks, because then she would have been sent to the gas chambers, so they gave her a job in the hospital.55

Although the medical staff saved Eszter’s life by keeping her pregnancy a secret, the mistreatment she had to undergo put the health of her reproductive system and indeed her very life at risk. Most definitely such events in the camps had an impact on the women’s future ability to bear children, but if one accepts the definition of health (including reproductive health) found in the preamble to the constitution of the World Health Organization, according to which health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,”56 the health of women who did not have miscarriages during the historically defined timeline of the Holocaust were also affected, not necessarily at a specific moment of the Shoah, but throughout it.

Conclusion

Overall, I find that though we have only a small number of sources which touch on miscarriages suffered by victims and survivors before, during, or after the Shoah, it is important to examine them closely in order to gain some insights into the personal stories which demographic statistics alone do not offer. After having reviewed the sociological findings with the inclusion of survivor testimonies, I found that sociological analyses do not suffice in achieving far-reaching conclusions. The damaged state of women’s reproductive systems could easily constitute as a significant reason for the lower rate of childbirths in Hungary in the period of 1945 to 1949.

This conclusion suggests that in order to add nuance to our understandings of societies which were strongly influenced by the Holocaust, we should expand the scope of our inquiry to include groups and forms of trauma which have been largely overlooked. This is not an easy task. The difficulty is caused by the intimate nature of women’s experiences and the fact that their experiences were not given voice or were actively silenced for so long. Therefore, unsurprisingly, sexuality, sexual vulnerability, or miscarriages specifically and the sufferings they caused were not easily brought up, nor were questions specifically concerning miscarriages asked by the interviewers. My findings, however, could be grounds or directives for further research on the allocation of resources for the study of testimonies and ego-documents as well, which could complement sociological findings and offer a wider perspective and more intimate knowledge of the continued traumas of the early postwar era. Such a wider scope of investigation could even result in a historiographical rebalance which would put more trust (back) into memoirs as primary historical sources, a concern which has been resurfacing in the works of other historians as well.57 Without meaning to overstate the potential implications, it is perhaps unsurprising that by including women’s voices through a feminist approach to a structural rethinking of history, one may draw more attention to and encourage more interest in survivor narratives.

Finally, after we have discussed these experiences and allowed gender analysis to inform “the memory of violence and the destinies and decisions made by those targeted for annihilation.”58 it would be important to analyze modes of expression. Further research could explore how the narratives were formed, what this entails, and how potential results could add to the conventional narratives of the Holocaust and of other genocides. Women’s narratives shed light on experiences which have been left untold, and they offer new perspectives even when describing the same events. A significant example could be emotion as a determinative factor59 due to the unique connection between gender and memory.60 This would represent just one of the additions further research could offer towards the general aim “to give women the voice long denied them and to offer a perspective long denied us.”61

Bibliography

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Karády, Viktor. Túlélők és újrakezdők: Fejezetek a magyar zsidóság szociológiájából 1945 után. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2002.

Karwowska, Bozena. “Women’s Luxury Items in Concentration Camps.” In Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, edited by Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, 64–76. Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2015.

Katz, Steven T. “Thoughts on the Intersection of Rape and Rassen[s]chande during the Holocaust.” Modern Judaism 32, no. 3 (2012): 293–322. doi:10.1093/mj/kjs025.

Kovács, András. “Hungarian Jewish Politics from the End of the Second World War until the Collapse of Communism.” In Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Vol. 19, Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilage, edited by Ezra Mendelssohn, 124–57. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Králová, Kateřina. “The ‘Holocausts’ in Greece: victim competition in the context of postwar compensation for Nazi persecution.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23, no. 1–2 (2017): 149–75. doi: 10.1080/17504902.2016.1209837.

Laczó, Ferenc. “Introduction” to Confronting Devastation: Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors from Hungary. Canada: The Azrieli Foundation Press, 2019.

Lorentzen, Lois, and Jennifer Turpin. The Women and War Reader. New York: NYU Press, 1998.

Mühlhäuser, Regina. “The Historicity of Denial: Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the War of Annihilation, 1941–1945.” In Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories. Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence, edited by Ayşe Gül Altınay, and Andrea Pető, 29–55. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Novák, Attila. Átmenetben. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő Kiadó, 2000.

Ouzan, Francoise S. How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, The United States, and Israel. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2018.

Pető, Andrea. Elmondani az elmondhatatlant: A nemi erőszak Magyarországon a II. világháború alatt. Budapest: Jaffa Kiadó, 2018.

Pető, Andrea, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska. “Introduction” to Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges. Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2015.

Pető, Andrea. “The Future of Women’s History: Writing Women’s History in Eastern Europe: Towards a ‘Terra Cognita’?” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 173–81. doi:10.1353/jowh.2004.0087.

Pollin-Galay, Hannah. Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Rahden, Till van. “Intermarriage, the ‘New Woman,’ and the Situational Ethnicity of Breslau Jews from the 1870s to the 1920s.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 46 (2001): 125–50.

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Place Attachment in a Concentration Camp: Bergen-Belsen

Heléna Huhák
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 3  (2020): 430-451 DOI: 10.38145/2020.3.430

In this paper, I examine ego-documents created by two Hungarian deportees regarding the Bergen-Belsen concertation camp: Margit Holländer’s diary and Magda Székely’s letters to her father, Károly Székely. Holländer’s diary sheds light on two periods of Bergen-Belsen. The letters offer insights into experiences in two different parts of the camp at the same time. These sources include details about the everyday lives, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of the inmates in the most extreme space of persecution. I argue that, with its focus on the attachment to place, by which I mean the emotional bond between person and place (an important concept in environmental psychology), Holländer’s diary reveals how she reflected on the different spaces in the camp and how her emotions regarding the physical and natural environment shifted depending on the situations of camp life. Magda Székely’s letters to her father reveal how the different sectors of the camp influenced the emotional bonds between father and daughter. I also argue that the attachments that these individuals seem to show to some of the sectors of the camp suggest that there were emotionally “positive places” in an otherwise negative environment. The illegal world of the camp, the secret act of letter writing, meetings in the “positive places,” and the exchange of goods on the black market are all indications of the very limited freedom of space usage, which continued after the liberation of the camp.

 

Keywords: Hungarian Holocaust, Nazi concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, ego-documents, place attachment, emotional history

Margit Holländer had a pleasant surprise at the third stop of her “lager journey”1 in the Salzwedel concentration camp (after Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen). She wrote about this experience in her diary: “[...] I was taken along with many others to block no. 2. I could not believe my eyes. This cannot be true. A real desk, chairs, wooden bunk beds covered with blankets. Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen! Heaven after hell. I tried the chairs right away. It was so good to sit on them after four months, considering that I have not even seen any chairs so far, only from afar, in the rooms of the barracks leader. Everything seemed more humane here.”2

The furnishings in the barracks of the concentration camps were minimal. The interiors were dark and had little more than three-story bunks. Holländer, who was drifting among places completely unsuitable for housing humans for months, felt as if she has regained some of her humanity at the sight of a desk and a few chairs. The diary entry cited above highlights the role of furniture as a sign of stability and the impact of the material environment and spaces on an individual’s emotional wellbeing.3

In this paper, I examine ego-documents created by two Hungarian deportees who were writing on the Bergen-Belsen concertation camp: Margit Holländer’s diary and Magda Székely’s letters to her father, Károly Székely. These texts further an understanding of the inner world of the camp society that be more subtle and nuanced than the understanding we glean from other sources. First, the diary and the letters touch on life in different sectors inside the camp at different periods of the war. Second, they include many details about the inmates’ everyday lives, perceptions, and feelings in and about the most extreme space of persecution.

In the Holocaust historiography, there are several volumes about ghettos,4 camps, train journeys, and death marches5 that approach the subject from the perspective of space and experiences of space. The works dealing with the concentration camps focus on the structure and development of the camp system from the perspective of operators, organizers, and architectures.6 In comparison, relatively few studies focus on the social dimensions of the inmates’ daily lives.7 However, the strategies used by the inmates were also influenced by the physical features of the camp. I argue that space-related experiences were key elements of everyday life in the camp, and perceptions, understandings, and uses of space were essential to survival in the camp.

By analyzing the deportees’ texts from the perspective of attachment to place, which is a primary concept in environmental psychology, we can see how complex this use of space and, in connection with this, the organization of everyday life was. Place attachment is considered “the bonding of people to places.”8 We find signs of these attachments in the notes and drawings, which suggest that the prisoners reflected on their built and natural environments. The inner world and the closed society of Bergen-Belsen and the similar concentration camps and forced labor camps were shaped by the diversified systems of relations among individuals and groups. The prisoners, however, did not connect to other people only. Inevitably, they formed attachments to the places themselves, including the built and natural environment, the objects, sounds, noises, and even the weather. The physical environment created a certain emotional environment around the individual. What kind of bonds evolved between the spaces of the camp and the prisoner’s emotions? How did the physical features and the symbolic meanings of the environment influence their way of thinking?

The personal stories which unfold in the ego-documents I examine in this article suggest that the prisoners should be viewed not simply as victims of SS terror, but also as actors.9 According to this broad assumption, the spaces of the camp could be characterized not simply as tools of repression in the hands of the SS, but also as spaces within which the prisoners had some (admittedly limited) opportunities to adapt. From this perspective, one can raise the question, how did the deportees use the spaces of the camp for their benefit? Were they free to use the spaces in various, even if limited ways? I search for answers to these questions in my discussion of Holländer’s diary and Magda Székely’s letters, but before presenting their stories, I offer a brief overview of the place where they were forced to spend some months in 1944–45.

The Camp

The implementation of the so-called Final Solution, i.e. the attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, can be examined as a spatial process.10 The persons concerned were deprived of their homes and new places were established for them, including ghettos, collection points, and labor, concentration, and extermination camps. The world of the camps was a completely new spatial experience for those who ended up there, something they had never seen before.11

Bergen-Belsen was one of the largest Nazi concentration camps.12 This camp has a very complicated history and a special place in the web of Nazi camps because of its unusual mission. Bergen-Belsen functioned as a “residence camp” (Aufenthaltslager) from 1943, and this fact had a great impact on the history of the Hungarian Holocaust, too.

Having acquired Adolf Hitler’s consent, in the spring of 1943 Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of a collection camp for Jews who might be used in prisoner exchanges or permitted to travel to neutral territory in return for money. He made clear that the conditions in this camp should be such that the Jewish prisoners “are healthy and remain alive.” These “exchange Jews” were placed in the special sector of Bergen-Belsen, the Sonderlager.13

The passengers on the so-called “Kasztner train” from Budapest were housed in the Hungarian camp (Ungarnlager) inside the Sonderlager in the summer of 1944. They left the camp and arrived in Switzerland in August and in December 1944. Then a next transport came from Budapest with 2,001 people. Forced laborers were added to this group, Károly Székely among them, on December 14. The passengers in total 582114 on these trains were placed in the Hungarian camp, where the conditions were better than in the other camps. Families were kept together, they weren’t taken to do forced labor, and they were permitted to keep their luggage.15

In the summer of 1944, Bergen-Belsen went through a huge transformation. It went from a site for the “exchange of prisoners” to a reception camp for inmates from other camps, mainly sick forced laborers.16 Several transports brought inmates from Auschwitz (for example Margit Holländer) and other concentration camps. Thousands of Hungarian prisoners were placed in the barracks in the camp for normal prisoners (i.e. prisoners who were not treated differently by the camp authorities). The overwhelming majority was placed in the women’s camp (Frauenlager) and a smaller number was put in the men’s prison camp (Häftingslager).

As a result of the evacuation of the other camps because of the Soviet advancements, the population of the Bergen-Belsen grew from 15,000 to 44,000 by March 1945. In March, 18,000 people died of famine, hypothermia, sickness, and a typhus outbreak which had begun in February. According to the estimates, the death rates were highest in the women’s camp, where Magda Székely became one of the victims of the epidemic. By the last months, the camp where the prisoners who were being held for potential exchange and therefore were being given somewhat better treatment also became a site of mass death. The Hungarian camp was evacuated only a few days before the arrival of the British-Canadian Army, and the prisoners were liberated in Theresienstadt, Hillersleben (where Károly Székely was being held), and Tröbitz.

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated on April 15, 1945, by the 8th Armored Division of the British Army. They were greeted by the sight of 53,000 emaciated prisoners and more than 10,000 corpses. Those who were liberated in Bergen were waiting for repatriation in the displaced persons (DP) camp established in the military camp. Holländer was one of them.17

The differences in the perspectives from which the personal stories are told are explained in part by the different statuses of the deported groups (“exchange Jews” and the ordinary prisoners). Margit Holländer was brought from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in August 1944. She was transferred to Salzwedel to work in a factory in early October, where she was liberated in April 1945. Three months later, she was brought back to the DP camp which had been established in Bergen-Belsen in the meantime, from where she returned home in October. Károly Székely and Magda left Budapest in December 1944, but they did not arrive at Bergen-Belsen at the same time, and they were held in two different sectors of the camp, Károly in the Hungarian camp and Magda in the women’s camp. The letters they exchanged were written between December 1944 and March 1945, when Károly was evacuated and Magda died.

 

Diary and Letters

The story of Bergen-Belsen is mainly known from the narratives of its liberation.18 The secondary literature and the testimonies of the British-Canadian Army and the members of the medical teams offer impressions of the period (April 1945) when the history of Bergen-Belsen as a concentration camp came to an end, albeit the history of the site and the life stories of the inmates had not come to an end. The accounts of the people who suffered deportation, however, are conspicuously absent from the international (mostly English language) publications.19 This is particularly true in the case of the Hungarian Jews and political prisoners.20

Margit Holländer’s diary21 includes five handwritten notebooks 10.5 x 15 cm. In addition to the manuscript, which comes to 97 pages, there is a typewritten transcription which was made in 1962 and which contains supplements.22 Holländer did not start her diary in Bergen-Belsen, but in Salzwedel in April 1945, and she continued writing entries in the DP camp in Bergen-Belsen. Thus, her notes about the time before the liberation are technically not referred to as a diary but rather as a recollection. Some diaries survived from the Hungarian camp, where the conditions were much better from the perspective of an inmate’s ability to keep a written record of the events, as I mentioned above.23 In comparison, similar sources from the prisoners’ camps (i.e. sources that were written at the time and not decades later) are very rare. As far as I know, only two texts were written by Hungarian deportees in the prisoners’ camp and based on original diary notes, or at least only two survived.24

This mixed genre, which includes reminiscence and contemporary notes, is very typical among the personal sources. The survivors got their hands on paper and pencils after or around the liberation and started to record their time in the ghetto and the camp. At one point, the memoir turns into a diary because the story catches to the moment of writing.

Holländer wrote her notes at a time when she was quite close to the events of summer and autumn 1944. Moreover, the inmates in the Hungarian camp, including the authors of the diaries, were mainly intellectuals and members of higher social strata. Holländer came from a poor peasant family. Before she was deported, she had been working as a factory laborer and, later, a maid. Thus, she had a different background and point of view compared to the perspective of the diary writers from the Hungarian camp.

Her diary is also interesting because it includes 39 drawings, floor plans, and maps of the camps. She made drawings of places which were significant for her for some reason, inducing both positive and negative associations: the Auschwitz bathhouse, the Salzwedel barracks, the environment of the DP Camp, and the route of the funeral procession after the liberation. These drawings could not be called maps. They are neither accurate enough nor precise enough from the perspective of scale to enable someone to identify the locations, so the term befitting them is a “mental layout plan.”

Magda Székely’s letters are also a rare surviving source. While there are numerous indications of communication and letter writing inside the camp in testimonies, the letters themselves were not saved. So far, I have found only one other example of a letter that was sent by a Hungarian prisoner inside the camp.25 In comparison, the Székely bequest includes 14 letters.26 The messages, which were written on shapeless pieces of paper and sent between the two barracks between December 1944 and March 1945, put the authors at serious risk since they would have been killed had the letters been discovered. Magda Székely died, so only the letters her father wrote have survived, as they were saved by him. The letters are, in part, about the women’s camp and, in particular, about how it was connected to the Hungarian camp. None of the prisoners knew both camps from the perspective of the prisoner, but these letters refer in a certain way both of them.

The diary and the letters represent the history of the camp from unique perspectives. Furthermore, the texts are related to the different sectors of the camp and cover different periods, so they further a more subtle understanding of the complicated history of the camp.

The Story of Margit Holländer

“March 6, 1942, is a day that I will never forget. It was the day I came to Újpest, not even thinking about how far I will go from my home village.” The first entry in the diary reports a change of location. At the time, Újpest, a working-class neighborhood close to Budapest (since 1950 part of Budapest), was still a faraway land for a girl growing up in a little village Doboz in southeastern Hungary. Three years later, in October 1945, during her homecoming journey of 1,000 kilometers from Bergen-Belsen, Holländer presumably thought differently about distances.

The 18-year-old Holländer was deported from the ghetto in Újpest in June 1944.27 She was taken to three different concentration or extermination camps, though this meant being held in a total of five different camps, as the functions of the individual sites changed: Auschwitz (camp B III), Bergen-Belsen (the women’s camp), the Salzwedel forced labor camp, the transit camp for people who had been liberated in the same location, and, finally, the Bergen-Belsen DP Camp.

The journey is an important part of the Holocaust narrative. It is related to the loss of home, and the physical circumstances of traveling. This is true of Holländer’s diary. From a practical perspective, the conditions of the terrain over which the prisoners were forced to move on foot between or inside the camps were not irrelevant. When Holländer was punished, she had to kneel on the ground of Lagerstrasse, which was covered with sharp stones, but it was not easy to walk on the ground either, as the small stones injured her feet.28

Open spaces such as Lagerstrasse and the Appellplatz easily became sites of dangers compared to the shelter of the dark and crowded barracks.29 Prisoners were often beaten, and the guards would hit them with sticks when they did not walk fast enough or if the guards felt that they were in the way. As Holländer notes in one of her entries, they struck her during one of the marches. Her feet were size 37 (US 6.5), but she was given a pair of men’s boots that were so big that she was unable to walk in them at a normal pace.30

The road is mentioned in different entries. Holländer was at the same sites first as a prisoner, later as a free woman in the DP Camp, and then as a mourner commemorating her dead companions. Her account suggests that, as she revived memories of people walking down Lagerstrasse in September 1945, the different experiential layers of the timelines and the journey piled one on top of the other:

 

A little girl came half an hour later, saying that there will be a headstone unveiling in the death camp. Boriska and I went there. On the same road on which we had been walking exactly a year ago on this day. We met three Jewish boys on the way. One of them told us that he had been brought here a few days before the liberation, the whole road was full of trees and electric lines. The over-exhausted people had to get through these obstacles. If any of them dropped to the ground, they were taken into the woods. They heard a shot and it was over.31

 

Holländer’s entries and drawings also describe or depict the buildings in the camp. One of the drawings is of the Auschwitz bathhouse, the Brezinska.32 The notes describe the devices in the rooms (clothes racks, partition grilles, windows, furnaces), their functions, i.e. what was happening in the given space (“the depilated body parts were anointed with some acrid fluid”; “we had to put on the clothes while walking in front of the men”; “they painted an X on our backs with yellow oil paint”), and where the men were standing compared to the girls who were going along the route marked by arrows.

The women, who had not had a bath for two weeks at the time, saw the clothes racks in the first room as accessories of the civilized and cultured process of undressing. However, the huge windows in the hallway did give them any light. Rather, they let in the cold and the wind. The most significant aspect of this space, however, was the clothes and the process itself of being forced to undress, having one’s clothes taken from one, and being given prison clothes.33 The depiction of the hallway leading from the undressing room is long in the drawings. It may indeed have been long, but the distance between the two rooms on Holländer’s mental map may have been increased by the feeling of humiliation caused by the fact that she was forced to march naked in front of men.34 Thus the clothes and the site itself (the disinfection building) were associated with the ritual and the emotional process and impact of becoming a prisoner.

Holländer’s feelings regarding the Bergen pine forest are more complex.35 Emotional attachment to place is a complex phenomenon. Holländer’s diary entries offer accounts of three different experiences regarding the trees which are related to three different times and different states of mind. Upon arrival, the sight of the pine forest created a bad feeling inside her due to a fear of the unknown:

 

We are walking down the road in rows of five with armed SS soldiers with dogs on either side. There are woods are either side, and it’s getting darker and darker. The leaves on the trees are moving, and you can see strange mounds and holes among the trees. Everyone is overwhelmed with bad presentiments, such a fearful sight this forest was. I started seeing graves in my mind. I was getting really scared. This is death, I thought to myself. They will execute us right here.36

Somewhat later, when she considered her situation more tolerable (compared to Auschwitz), the pine trees intensified Holländer’s desire for freedom while she was in a state of apathy. After she had survived the first encounter with the forest, nature no longer seemed to symbolize death to her, but rather came to embody freedom which was the opposite of the built environment of the camp:

We were heading back to the lager. The road goes through the forest, our grievous procession was marching while we were surrounded by armed men. There was a nice smell of pines among the trees standing in line along the road. I was overwhelmed by the desire if only I could walk alone freely once again!37

 

Entries written after the liberation of the camp contain descriptions of the forest which present it as a picturesque landscape. No longer the backdrop for scenes dominated by the fear of or a symbol of freedom, the pine forest finally turned into what it would have been without the lager: it appeared as a pleasant natural environment at the edge of a populated area.

 

I love wandering around together with Manci. There are so many beautiful landscapes and nice forest trails in the camp. It is vast. The camp is like a city at the edge of the forest. Especially in the evening, when the lights are lit along the fine asphalted roads.38

The drawings in her diary show the areas of the camp with which she was familiar at the given time. After liberation, when she was given the freedom to move around at will, the horizon grew. The windows became one of the central places of daily life in the DP camp because they opened onto the noises of the “street” and offered views of the neighboring barracks and social life outside. The diary entries written at this time suggest that it was a period filled with relatively positive emotions. The former prisoners were able to socialize with one another freely. The young women and girls joked while sitting on the window sills, and Italian and Russian prisoners of war and British and Hungarian soldiers came over to chat with them and court them: “We were under a real Italian invasion.”39 Although the diary suggests that the women and girls sometimes enjoyed the attention that they were paid by the men, some entries also suggest that they did not want to let everybody get close to them and that the autonomy over the spaces even entailed shutting out certain groups:

 

We have a habitual place where we go near the stables, that’s where Manci and I usually go. We sit there for hours. One day, there was a German nurse and a German Red Cross soldier at the place, so we wrote a note and nailed it to the tree with the following text: Ferbotn Dautcsh Fherflhuhte. Kaput Hitler.40

Holländer indicated the location of the episode in one of her drawings, and she did a drawing of the sign.41

However, these descriptions of vivacious social life touched only on the surface of life in the DP camp. In addition to the challenges of physical recovery, almost all of the inmates were grappling with mental and psychological traumas.42 The physical and mental burdens which were endured by members of the Jewish families who were deported had begun, in many cases, before the deportations. The story of Károly and Magda Székely takes us back to Budapest in 1944, to the events which resulted in the letters written by Magda several months later in Bergen-Belsen.

The Székely-family

Károly Székely (1898–1965) grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Budapest. He earned a living as a chemist-perfumer. He lived together with his wife Katalin Stern, their daughter Zsuzsanna (born in 1943), and Magda, who had been born in 1921 from his first marriage. Rózsi Günsz, Zsuzsanna’s nanny, was also part of the smaller family. They lived in Király Street, in the seventh district of Budapest, which was known as the traditional “Jewish quarter” of the city.

The first shock to their family life was the conscription of the head of the family into the labor service in 1942.43 Beginning in the spring of 1944, the women in the family went through the stages of discrimination against Jews in Budapest. In the summer of 1944, Károly Székely served in a forced labor service camp in the capital, separated from his family. In June, Katalin and the others were relocated to a so-called Yellow Star building.44 Until the Arrow Cross Party took power, however, they were not in any immediate danger of death. On a winter’s day, they were all taken to the bank of the Danube, where the paths of women’s lives parted. Katalin and Zsuzsanna were taken out of the queue by a “more humane” Arrow Cross member (or a Zionist rescuer in disguise), who released them and warned them to “get lost quickly.”45 However, until the liberation of the city by the Red Army, they had to struggle with the inhumane conditions in the Pest ghetto. Magda and Rózsi, however, were not as fortunate. They were expecting to be shot into the river with the members of the group lined up on the pavement of the riverbank. All we know for sure is that the Arrow Cross members, who were often acting on ad-hoc decisions, forced them to do work removing rubble in parts of the city that had been bombed.46

A new twist in their story occurred when, in December 1944, Károly, Magda, and Rózsi were deported to Bergen-Belsen, though not at precisely the same time. Károly was taken to the Hungarian camp as a member of the so-called protected forced labor unit.47 Magda and Rozsi were put in the women’s camp, so they essentially ended up in very different living conditions, but Károly and Magda found each other again.

The tools used for written communication, i.e. the paper and the pencils, came from the Hungarian camp, and that is how they ended up in the system of information exchange and news circulation within the women’s camp. The messengers were probably people who brought food or other prisoners with functions which enabled them to move more freely between the different parts of the camp. Since clothes and foods were changing hands not only on the camp market48 but occasionally between the correspondents as well, the letters can also be considered as a report on objects migration within the camp. Magda mentions socks and bread as concrete items, and she even managed somehow to get her hands on some cigarettes, which were like currency in the camp. The prisoners were given cigarettes in the Hungarian camp for a while, which were, in a way, more valuable for non-smokers, as they could more easily exchange the cigarettes for other items than people who craved tobacco. The father was a heavy smoker, but he did without cigarettes, getting them instead to Magda and Rózsi in order to enable them to trade them for clothes and food.

The letters report on failed and successful attempts to meet and seem mostly intended to soothe Károly. Movement within the camp was adapted to the expected meetings by the fence, and thus, the spot by the fence had a central role in the daily lives of the Károly and Magda. Károly had more freedom to move around due to the internal autonomy of the Hungarian camp, and the girls were also able to move some, as they had to do forced labor in their part of the camp only occasionally. By late 1944, the camp had become so crowded that it became easier for Károly and Magda to meet, and they were less likely to get caught.

Attachment to place is not always positive. Some research emphasizes the plurality of emotional bonds to places, bonds which include negative feelings as well as positive.49 Despite the harsh and inhumane conditions in the camps, prisoners still developed attachments to some specific sites.50 Since the Holocaust involved the displacement and murder of individuals and the destruction of communities, one might well assume that the only emotional attachments which were formed to the spaces within the camps were attachments involving abstraction, separation, and apathy. However, in the case of Magda, optimism, the will to live, and mental integrity have also created “positive places.” The meetings among Károly and Magda created a “positive place” in a negative environment. This was possible in this hostile place, where inmates were deprived of freedom and rights because place attachment behaviors are not necessarily territorial. Territoriality is based on ownership and control of space, but attachment to places is an affective, proximity-maintaining bond that can be expressed without the underlying purpose of control.51

The meetings by the fence had an undoubtedly enormous emotional resonance for Károly and Magda. This site came to embody the hope each must have cherished to see the other again. The quarantine meant increased restrictions on movement and thus effectively eliminated the “positive places” within the camp. Magda wrote about the quarantine on February 28:

Unfortunately, we can’t leave this place at all for a while. This is a so-called quarantine barrack. I do not know why they brought us here, because t. [thank] God, we are fine. I would love to fly into your arms, but there is a gate here with a German guard, no one can leave this place, not even for work. I don’t know how long it will last.52

 

The thoughts were written with few words but with much more emotional resonance. Positive exaggeration is frequent means: “Our appetite is great, we eat everything”; “The hot water was marvelous”; “The air is great”; “The sock is wonderfully warm.” Besides love and her desire for her father, gratitude is the most common feeling the sentences refer to; every letter has a “thank God” phrase.53

Regarding liberation, Magda often refers to their hopes that her father will go and rescue them from the barrack. The vision of freedom becoming a reality was linked to a vision of Károly as a savior figure:

 

We think about you a lot, about going home as soon as possible. This keeps us going. When the moment comes, please, I want you to come for us, because that is a lot safer. We are waiting for you like the Jewish people for the Messiah.54

Due to the specificity of the situation in Bergen-Belsen, the euphemistic exaggerations and expressions of gratitude and the appreciation in Magda’s letters may not have been entirely sincere. Rather, they may have been intended to provide some comfort for her father, who Magda must have thought undoubtedly feared for his daughter’s wellbeing (and life). She may also have feared that he felt helpless, and she may have sought to assuage this fear. Károly indeed may have felt a terrible sense of helplessness, given the divided world of Bergen-Belsen, which consisted of different spaces that provided fundamentally different opportunities for survival. People in the Hungarian camp were aware of the conditions in the prison camp. György Bognár, who was held in the same barrack as Székely, wrote the following: “K[ároly] Sz[ékely] is talking about his family. Everyone is crying at such times, I was crying too. My daughter, he says, we left Teleki Square together and now she is in the other camp. They are treating her worse than me, why are they treating her differently? And then he begins weeping and crying.”55 However, the existence of the Hungarian camp also made it possible for Károly to provide some support for Magda and Rózsi, who, as young women, could have even survived the adversities with the clothes, foods, and cigarettes (which they could use to trade for more food and clothes) that they received from Károly if the typhus outbreak hadn’t claimed their lives.56

Magda’s last letter, written March 5, seems full of desperation and fear. Though at the beginning of the letter she writes, “thank God we are fine” (perhaps in an effort to comfort her father), she then offers an account which seems dire:

 

Rózsi is dying. The last minutes. Daddy, only you can help us. I don’t know what will happen. There’s an epidemic too. My feet are swollen, I can barely walk. We can’t drink any water here, but we are always thirsty. This is terrible. I say your name at night, can’t you hear it? Daddy, help me! I am waiting for you in terrible desperation. Hugs and kisses from Muki [a pet name for Magda].57

In spring 1945, father and daughter were separated again. Károly Székely was taken from Bergen-Belsen on the occasion of the evacuation on April 7. After the liberation, he traveled from the DP camp in Hillersleben to Bergen-Belsen in the hopes of finding Magda, but he did not know anything about her whereabouts. He found his wife, their daughter Zsuzsanna, and his mother-in-law unhurt in Budapest in June. However, regarding the fate of Magda, months of uncertainty followed for the Székely family. Finally, in 1946, they received the official announcement of her death by the International Red Cross.58

Conclusion

According to Edward W. Soja, “thirdspace” is the combination of the physical world around us and our conceptions of and thoughts about this physical world. The third, lived space is the reality experienced by the subjective consciousness “here and now,” in the given moment. These three spaces are closely connected to and mutually affect one another. Every space is physical, imagined, and lived at the same time.59 In the personal sources, Bergen-Belsen figures as a “thirdspace.” The environment meant the physical setting and the symbolic meanings of this setting in Margit Holländer’s diary. We can see that the bath and the process of being compelled to strip were physically and mentally difficult for her. Later, a few basic accouterments of normal life, such as a table and chairs, made her more hopeful. Finally, in the DP Camp, the window of their flat served as a backdrop for her acquaintanceship with the young Russian and Italian prisoners of war and had a strong psychological effect on girls and boys companies.60

Though one may have an understanding of the camps as isolated built areas, the natural environment also figures in Holocaust stories. In testimonies, “nature functioned both materially and imaginatively during the Holocaust.”61 Men and women developed emotional attachments to the plants and weather. One recurring motif in the testimonies is referenced to nature as the last thing that the Germans did not take from the prisoners. One of Margit Holländer’s drawings captures this. The drawing is of the prisoners standing on the Appellplatz, but it includes the sun shining down on them.62

Holländer also mentioned in her entries how her feelings about the natural environment changed according to the situation. In the extremity of the deportation, the forest was a source of potential danger.63 In the normal, safe situation it was the place of relaxing and enjoyment. What happened in the built environment, between the fences, on the camp roads, on the Appellplatz, and in the barracks meant the reference point of her feelings about the natural environment. Emotional attachments to the spaces in the camp (sectors of the camp and the fence between them) are also a key element of the Székely-letters. These texts draw our attention to the emotion-filled points of the space. Some of the spaces were sites of trauma, but others had positive associations, such as the barbed wire fence where Károly and Magda saw each other.

The coincidence of one member of a family being incarcerated in the prisoner’s camp and another in the Hungarian camp was not rare. There are hints of this in other testimonies, though with very few details. Magda Székely’s letters show how difficult this separation was for the two people who were related, mainly for a father who knew that his daughter was being held under worse conditions on the other side of the camp. The separation of the physical spaces of the camp (due to the special status of Bergen-Belsen) determined the emotional bonds between the father and the daughter.

The illegal world of the camp, the secret letter writing, meetings at the “positive places,” and the exchange of goods on the black market are evidence of prisoners’ capacity and room for maneuvering. However, the camp inmates’ opportunity was very limited compared to the power of the SS. This depended on the circumstances and the physical environment every time. The open camp road could become a site of danger because of SS aggression, but at other times, it could be a site where prisoners had an opportunity to talk and meet. The meanings of the spaces of the camp and its surroundings changed after the liberation when for Margit Holländer the forest became a place with positive associations and she dared post an announcement banning Germans from going to their favorite spot. However, the Magda Székely’s letters make clear that the use of space was still limited. Károly was not able to change his daughter’s circumstances meaningfully, and while he had advantages as a prisoner who was being held in the Hungarian camp, these minimal advantages did not enable him to save his daughter.

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Cole, Tim. Traces of the Holocaust. Journeying in and out of the Ghettos. London–New York: Continuum, 2011.

Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály, and Eugene Roschberg-Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. doi:10.2307/2067526.

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Hungarian Holocaust Testimonies in Global Memory Frames: Digital Storytelling about “Change” and “Liberation”

Edit Jeges
Central European University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 3  (2020): 452-469 DOI 10.38145/2020.3.452

This article provides a comparative and intersectional analysis of East-Central European Holocaust testimonies by women survivors narrated in writing at the time of the Shoah and recorded five decades later by the USC Shoah Institute’s Visual History Archive. The comparison explores both the continuities and changes particularly in the beginning and end of the persecution, which are usually associated with the terms “occupation” and “liberation.” I suggest that these conceptualizations prominent in the archive collide with survivor testimonies from the region in that survivors do not interpret Hitler’s rise to power and the German occupation as formative events of the persecution against the local Jewry. Further, I provide a typology of liberation narratives arguing for a multiplicity of interpretation based on survivor narratives countering the popular consensus of liberation as a carefree moment in time. Lastly, I conclude that the regional approach is particularly useful in understanding Holocaust memory in Hungary today as it is conducive to highlighting the specific relation of the global to the local.

 

Keywords: testimony, framing, East Central Europe, digital storytelling, intersectionality

This article explores the ways in which the global nature of the USC Shoah Institute’s Visual History Archive (further: VHA) shapes Holocaust testimonies. The thematic focus is the analysis of the intersection of global and local memory frames, which becomes manifest in the sections of the testimonies pertaining to the beginnings and the end of the Holocaust. I argue that the archive is unwelcoming to the marginal or even taboo narratives in the canonized memory and conducive to memorializing standardized narratives. Several memory frames collide and merge with one another in the digital testimonies: the “Americanizing”/personalizing1 and the “Germanizing”/denationalizing2 Holocaust interpretations, the interpretation of “invasion/occupation” and “liberation” in line with the local memory cultures, and the counter-narratives emphasizing continuities of persecution. Regarding the beginnings of the Holocaust, the testimonies analyzed in my research stress the continuities of local anti-Semitism or relativize persecution and thus contrast with the overarching interpretation offered by the VHA, which defines the beginning of the Holocaust as the single event of Hitler’s rise to power. Regarding the topic of liberation, I point out that the VHA’s conceptualization of liberation follows the common interpretation of liberation as a joyful moment, and this constitutes another contrast with narratives by survivors from East Central Europe.

Holocaust history has entered the “era of the witness,” and digital storytelling will influence Holocaust memory in decades to come.3 The process of the “institutionalization” of memory in the online archive involves an element of standardization, therefore it is imperative to analyze what memories are created and disseminated for future generations. The VHA is the primary global repository of Holocaust testimonies, with its 52,000 digital narratives, and its rationale has been the collection of authentic stories (with an emphasis on first-person accounts and, preferably, eye-witness testimony) for the public record (with the conceptualization of testimony as chronological sequence instead of associative process). It has been characterized as offering a “dichotomous view”4 as an “archive of survival”5 because of its focus on Jewish regeneration after the war, which has the overtones of a Hollywood-style happy ending.

I analyze the interaction between local and global memory frames (i.e. how women survivors with East Central European origins6 narrate their testimonies in an “American” archive) by considering these frames not as cultural opposites but as interdependent.7 As the nation-based interpretative framework would be anachronistic to the multiethnic communities of the region8 at the time of the genocide9 and the countries in the region are also similarly situated in terms of the legacy of the socialist memory cultures, I adopt a regional approach. In this analysis of narratives by women survivors, I analyze gender as a relevant vehicle of representation.10 The aim of my gendered Holocaust analysis will be to “interrogate its very assumptions.”11

In my dissertation research, I compare 25 pairs of testimonies by women survivors from East Central Europe written at the time of the Holocaust and then recorded five decades later by the VHA.12 My sample consists of what I term exemplary and unexemplary narratives taking into account the status of the hic et nunc and the video narratives. In doing so, I build on Noah Shenker’s categorization who identifies three types of testimonies in the VHA based on the archive’s internal ratings: exemplary testimonies are the ones deemed most dramatically compelling, unexemplary testimonies are considered the least compelling, and circulating testimonies are displayed in their educational materials to highlight the foundation’s mission. In my typology, the exemplary testimonies include those that became canonized both as written narratives (published and widely popularized in most cases) and as video testimonies (included in the VHA’s online selection13 and incorporated in their educational materials in most cases), whereas the unexemplary sources are the unknown written (unpublished diaries and memoirs collected as a consequence of local archival efforts14 in most cases) and the uncirculated video testimonies (sporadically indexed and in the local languages in most cases). In this article I discuss a section of my findings which focuses on twelve video testimonial narratives in detail, half of which are exemplary and the other half of which are unexemplary. The names of the witnesses in the case of the first six are Aranka S., Gerda K., Halina B., Jane L., Olga L., and Vladka M. The names of the witnesses in the case of the second six are Erzsébet G., Halina M., Lidia V., Margita S., Piroska D., Olga K. Half of the survivors self-identify as Hungarian (Aranka S., Erzsébet G., Lidia V., Olga K., Olga L., and Piroska D.).

I suggest that the VHA identifies the beginnings of persecution with change and characterizes the end of the Holocaust as spontaneous joy. The beginning of the Holocaust, according to this definition, is premised on the assumption of historical discontinuity. In other words, it is assumed that the survivors would narrate the beginning of persecution as a clean turning point. In the video testimonies analyzed in my research, this can either result in productive tension or interpretative conflict between the interviewers and interviewee survivors.

Narratives of the “Beginnings”

The VHA’s interpretation of the beginning of the Holocaust rests on a notion of abrupt change caused by Hitler’s rise to power. To quote the Foundation’s Interviewer Guidelines, “[t]he interviewee is asked to speak about his or her experiences under German occupation.”15 In other words, the central question of this thematic block is how Hitler’s rise to power affected the survivor’s life personally. This implies three thematic foci: the assumption of change, the centrality of personal experience, and the equation of the beginning of persecution with Hitler’s rise to power. According to my findings, however, these foci, as assumptions on the basis of which experiences are to be narrated, do not fit the narratives by survivors from the East Central European region for three reasons:

1) survivors narrate the persecution suffered during the Holocaust as a manifestation of the continuation or intensification of local anti-Semitism, and therefore not as a novelty or change;

2) survivors from the region do not narrate Hitler’s rise to power as a decisive moment or a turning point; rather, they narrate their experiences of persecution within local contexts;

3) the VHA’s focus on personal experience and more specifically on eye-witness recollection can be contrary to the survivors’ interpretations of persecution, which can be narrated within a collective, relational framework.

Variations on the questions and suggestions which present the beginning of the Holocaust as a moment of change include: “[w]hen was the big change in inverted commas,” (Lidia V., s.79), “[w]hen did things change,” (Mania G., s.20), and “[l]et us move to the first signs that there was danger ahead” (Halina N., s.34).16 In Helena M.’s video testimony, the interviewer asks about the change in attitude towards Jews in Poland. Helena is of the view that there was no such change. She replied, “the Poles have been anti-Semitic before,” and she considered the political changes as a continuation of general Polish attitudes rather than as a German influence, as reflected in her contention that “it has always been happening in Poland” (s.12). In Halina M.’s video testimony, in response to the interviewer’s question “[w]hen did the situation start to worsen for you,” the survivor explains that “it did not worsen at all,” given that she had had a very happy childhood up until the fall of 1939 (s.42). Although Helena M. and Halina M. have diametrically different messages for future generations (the former stresses the importance of tolerance and the fight against anti-Semitism, whereas the latter voices sentiments of religion-based Judeophobia when she blames the local Jewry for the Holocaust), neither of them follow the suggested narrative of historical discontinuity.

Variations on the question pertaining to Hitler’s role in the persecution of Jews include the following: “[h]ow did Hitler’s rise to power affect your life personally,” (Vladka M., s.4), “[w]hat things did you observe as Hitler rose to power in 1933,” (Gerda K., s.31), and “[h]ow was Hitler’s rise to power perceived in your community” (Halina K., s.30). These questions often lead to interpretative conflicts between the interviewers and survivors, which becomes evident in Vladka M.’s testimony. The thematic block dealing with her wareness of prewar anti-Semitism leads to a series of follow-up questions as to whether the subject of the discussion is conditions “before the war,” “before Hitler came to power,” “before Hitler came to Poland,” or, as the interviewer, insists “before Hitler became chancellor” (s.4–5). Vladka M. emphasizes that in her understanding, anti-Semitism is rooted in Polish society and the Catholic Church and was not a Nazi German specificity.

However, the interviewer, Renee F., continues to ask provocative (or leading) questions: “[H]ow do you explain that Poland was a stronghold of Jewish culture,” “[b]ut Jewish culture flourished in this country which was anti-Semitic,” and
“[s]o when did you begin to really feel the change” (s.6). Finally, in response to the last question, Vladka M. complies with the expectation to narrate a change in the persecution of Jews which was specifically linked to Hitler’s rise to power: “As soon as Hitler was settling in Germany, the stronger the anti-Semitism was felt and seen in Poland” (s. 6). Most of the survivor testimonies from East Central Europe analyzed in my research17 do not depict any connection between Hitler’s personal responsibility with and their the survivors’ Holocaust experiences.

Variations on the question emphasizing personal experience include
“[c]an you describe how external events started to impact your lives,” (Olga L., s.53), “[d]id you notice that trouble was looming, any signs,” (Dora S., s.12), and “[d]id you also sense that Jews were being persecuted” (Piroska D., s.94). Some responses to these questions point to the perceived continuity of local discrimination and anti-Semitism, for instance as Dora S. put it, “Jews could live but not thrive” (s.12). She narrates the intersection of gender-based and ethnicity-based discrimination in instances when “the Jewish girl could not be best student” (s.12). This meant that though she was the best student in class and even in the whole school, she was not recognized with any distinctions and instead the second-best gentile students received acclaim.

Other testimonies offer evasive responses, as the survivors refer to their gender, social status, or age as an explanation for their lack of awareness. For instance, in response to the question “[h]ow did Hitler’s rise to power affect your life personally,” Jane L. responds that “[i]t did not affect my life personally, in 1933 I was only 9 years old” (s. 28–29). Jane’s testimonial narrative about the prewar and wartime years focuses on her involvement in a youth organization, and her personal experiences are wrapped up in a relational framework. However, the interviewer’s questions, which are more tailored to the survivor’s experience (“[w]hat do you remember about the day your town was occupied” and
“[w]ho occupied it”), elicit the story of her personal experience of hiding in the nearby woods with her family, which is narrated as the first event pertaining to her Holocaust experience (s.31). The archive’s focus on personal experience is an effort to enhance the “authenticity” of the survivor testimony, yet personal experience is not necessarily central to the accounts given by East Central European women who survived the Holocaust.

Narratives of Liberation

The questions outlined in the Interviewer Guidelines18 pertaining to the topic of liberation focus on the day of liberation, the first day of being free, and often even more specifically on first catching sight of the liberators.19 I suggest that the VHA conceptualizes the topic of liberation as a “rapturous moment in time” (to borrow the phrase used by Dan Stone in his characterization of Red Army films and popular films like Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List),20 and, more specifically, as the single event defining the end of the Nazi genocide. However, survivors, and even in some cases interviewers, voice offer counter-narratives to this interpretation.21. I identify four frameworks of narrating for the narratives of liberation by the Red Army: sexual vulnerability, glossing over or elusion, continuation of persecution, and spontaneous joy.

The narrative framework of sexual vulnerability

The most prevalent narrative framework in the liberation narratives by East Central European Jewish women survivors is sexual vulnerability, the threat of sexual abuse or violence, evasion, and instances of liberator violence, although when it comes to this subject there is still a lacuna in the scholarship on liberation.22 I suggest that the narratives about sexual vulnerability are glossed over in the VHA’s video testimonies, which can be attributed to the institutionalization of Holocaust memory in the online archive.23 This means that the narratives of vulnerability appear either as matter-of-fact stories or as atypical short stories within the narrative style of the interviewees, the majority of which are not indexed as “sexual violence.”

Liberation in Lidia V.’s testimony appears in the context of sexual vulnerability. First, she quickly mentions the liberators as those whom they merely passed by. However, when she returns to the topic, her narrative style changes. She becomes hesitant, and the pace of her speech slows down as she narrates the following:

 

Lidia: On the following day [i.e. after liberation], as I told you, we met the Soviet soldiers. They were behaving [pause] fortunately [pause] very nicely with us. [Pauses and tilts her head]. They gave us food [pause] and in first days helped us get accommodation. It was not always easy, we could not always get accommodation. (s. 395)

Nina: When did you start going home?

Throughout the eight-hour long interview, the interviewer, Nina W., asks follow-up questions to the topics to which Lidia alludes, though she reverts to a question pertaining to chronology. This can be partly attributed to the fact that the VHA’s interviewers were instructed to devote approximately 25 percent of the length of an individual video testimony to the years after the war, i.e. beginning with liberation.24 Some suggest that as a consequence of this the VHA testimony is prone to become a more directed conversation, the interviewers ask increasingly polar questions (generally about marriages, children, and the rebuilding of lives).25 The fragmentariness of the narrative can also be attributed to what Pető terms “silence as the built-in element of narration”26 in interviews by victims of rape by Red Army soldiers. This appears in this narrative on two levels in that the story itself is interrupted by pauses and the “experience” of sexual vulnerability is glossed over.

The survivor Margita S.27 was interviewed by Robert S., whose interviewing presence is strong. He asks a variety of questions following the archive’s framing, the local context as well as his own conceptualizations.28 Due to his probing interviewing technique, two modes of narrative about liberation (spontaneous joy and sexual vulnerability) appear in the testimony. Regarding Margita’s liberation, he first asks a question following the archive’s focus on first-person experience: “[D]o you remember the first time you saw an American soldier?” She replies by narrating her spontaneous joyful reaction and starts recounting her journey home. As Neustadt-Glewe was liberated by more than one allied force, Robert S. raises other questions:

 

Robert: Were there differences between the liberators?

Margita: The Russians behaved very badly.

Robert: Did they steal from you?

Margita: No, they raped the girls in Neustadt-Glewe, so in one of the rooms we had to put a cupboard in front of the room so that they could not enter, but then they received an order that it is not allowed [...] they were afraid to come near us.

Robert: They were afraid?

Margita: Yes, yes, they were not allowed to enter our barracks. (s. 50)

 

The interviewer’s technique here is indicative of his previous knowledge or assumptions about certain characteristics of liberation by the Soviet army (i.e. his association of “bad behavior” with looting), and despite the fact that he is offering an interpretation of the events to the survivor, he is contributing to the unfolding of a narrative that otherwise might have remained untold. Margita’s story is a succinct one, in which she curiously alternates between the third-person plural and the first-person plural as a manner of distancing. Her use of the third-person and the first-person plural could be described as characteristic features of narratives of evasion, as they make a given experience seem either collective, not individual.29

Narratives of sexual vulnerability do not harmonize with the expectations of the agents who were crafting the archive, something that becomes especially pronounced in Olga L.’s testimony, which is highlighted with the indexing term “liberator sexual assault.”30 The interviewer, Nancy F., asks generic questions regarding liberation and freedom suggested by the Interviewer Guidelines, and in response, Olga narrates her experience of attempted sexual violence in a village near the Auschwitz camp by the Soviet liberators. The “troupe de choc” arrived in town during the night “in search of enemies” while Olga and her two friends were sleeping. One of the soldiers handcuffed and dragged Olga out to the courtyard with “evident motives.” They struggled, moving back and forth between the courtyard and the room, and eventually the soldier bit off Olga’s wristwatch and she fell into the cellar in the middle of some feathers and Polish locals who were hiding (s. 37). Despite the suggestiveness of Olga’s narrative (or maybe precisely because of it), Nancy F. focuses on the interrelation of freedom and liberation, as if insistently committed to the generic focus of the archive:

 

Nancy: When did you know that you were liberated, that you were really free?

Olga: Next day, because the Russian came and occupied the village and every woman who was in the village was violated and raped that night but bear in mind that troupe de choc it was not the real Russian army, I don’t want to defend them, but that is the fact. [...] A few days later I was called to Russian headquarters about this [pointing at her wrist]. He advised don’t complain about the Russian to the Russian, so I said this was an accident, how they treated me. [...] I went back and in this house, I had the first day of liberation.

Nancy: What did freedom mean to you?

Olga: [...] that I am not in the concentration camp [...] I had food, I had bread, it was paradise. (Italics mine, s. 38)

Olga speaks of sexual violence as an inevitability of war, though she also emphasizes the role of the army hierarchy in policing (and interpreting) these instances, as does Margita. She initially resists the interviewer’s attempt to frame her experience of liberation by narrating her meeting with a senior officer. Although the chronology of her story is askew, the significance of her narrative, from the perspective of this discussion, lies in her mention of sexual vulnerability as a determining experience of the “first day” of liberation. This echoes Levenkorn’s assertion that “for some Jewish women, the liberation began with rape by the liberators.”31 Olga uses her account of “the first day” to some extent in a metaphorical sense to represent her first moment of freedom, which is not identified as a moment of joy.

The narrative framework of the continuation of persecution

In these testimonies, liberation is narrated as a continuation of persecution in the widest sense of the term. Persecution continued, according to the narratives, in the form of discrimination against Jews, oppression by the liberating/invading Soviet Armed Forces, and the persecution of the nation. This narrative mode of liberation, which offers a counter-narrative to the VHA’s conceptualization of liberation, is particularly characteristic of the narratives by Polish survivors.32

Jane L.’s liberation narrative is a very special and rare testimony by a resistance fighter who smuggled Jews from Poland via Slovakia to Hungary. Jane and other members of her group were liberated by the Soviet partisans, who flew them to Moscow, where in the end she was sentenced to four years of forced labor in Siberia as a “dangerous element.” In her testimony, persecution continues even after liberation in that her Jewishness was questioned and ridiculed by the Soviet authorities who did not consider her Jewish because she did not know Yiddish (s.193–194).

In Halina M.’s33 testimony, when the interviewer asks about “future message,” she indicates that Polish anti-Semitism must be understood in the context of the isolation of Polish Jews, i.e. expressing traditional anti-Semitic sentiments and delineates two options for the Jewry: either assimilation or emigration (s.251). Furthermore, she stresses the continuity of the persecution of the Polish nation, first by the Nazi Germans and then by the invading Soviets. Thus, her narrative fits in (and strengthens) the framework of Polish national martyrology34 (s.249–250).

In the case of Olga K.’s testimony, the interview does not always follow a strict chronological order thanks to the interviewer, Anita Cs., who follows instead the survivor’s associative narrative style. In some instances, however, Anita introduces topics that have not yet been raised in the interview, for example when she asks whether some women were raped in the concentration camps (s.102), to which Olga responds in the negative, though she offers the following narrative pertaining to the period of liberation:

 

Olga: Violence happened when we were liberated two weeks later and we were taken to the Soviet zone 40 km away on trains […] and we were handed over to the Soviet soldiers. These things did happen there unfortunately, to young Jewish girls, to one or two of them, but there were people who saved them.

Anita: How did you spend your way home? (s.103–104)

Unfortunately, the interviewer does not follow up on the survivor’s fragmentary story in which the experience of sexual violence is merged with liberation, nor does she offer an open ended question along the lines of “what happened next?” Instead, she steers the narrative back into a chronological trajectory. As a result, not only is liberation not narrated as a specific and joyous event, it is not even discussed in detail in the testimonial narrative. Moreover, since Olga’s narrative of liberation is prompted by a question about sexual violence and is contains clear references to the threat of sexual violence, it might be suggested that liberation is narrated as a continuation of persecution in terms of sexual vulnerability in her testimony. Thereby, the continuation of persecution is premised on Jewish identity, national identity, and gender identity in the three testimonies analyzed above.

The narrative framework of glossing over

Narratives that do not offer a detailed account of liberation as an action initiated by external agents, i.e. the liberators, offer a variety of counter-narratives, starting from narratives of self-liberation, through quick allusions to liberation as part of a chronological recollection, and finally to the total omission of liberation as a specific event from the testimony. The variety of these narrative frameworks can partly be attributed to the different life trajectories and Holocaust experiences of the survivors, yet if we take the most extreme narrative type as an example, the omission of liberation, it cannot be said that there was a correlation between a lack of a historical event and its omission from the narrative. Instead, I suggest that the glossing over or outright omission of any references to liberation in its traditional understanding can be attributed to the recurring themes (such as Jewish resistance and sexual vulnerability) and, broadly speaking, to the Archive’s commitment to thematic coherency.

Lidia V. narrates the first day of freedom as a distinct and separate experience from the event of liberation. The first day of freedom for her was the day on which the camp administration fled the area. As Lidia puts it, “we were the conquerors of town” and “we didn’t need any liberator” (s. 391). She further develops her conceptualization of liberation by calling it “our self-liberation” (s. 392). This concept certainly acknowledges the agency of Jewish survivors in regaining their freedom by starting to organize life anew. According to the VHA’s interpretation “liberation is typically characterized by the arrival of Allied forces.”35 In Lidia’s atypical narrative, the first day of liberation included “self-liberation,” while the second day brought about the threat of sexual vulnerability, as discussed previously in this article.

In Vladka M.’s testimony, her involvement with Jewish organizations is the continuous thread which links the prewar, wartime, and postwar years. This is equally true of her narrative on liberation, which is part of a chronological recounting of events, an intermezzo before her involvement with the community continues. In particular, the liberation of Warsaw, her return to Warsaw, and her subsequent move to Łódź are all a matter-of-fact listing of events which culminate in her reuniting with the Jewish community and organizing the first events for survivors there (s.28–29). The interviewer, Renee F., does not raise any provocative questions in these segments of the interview, in contrast with their dialogue about the beginnings of persecution analyzed earlier in this article. Instead, she leaves space for the interviewee’s thematic focus. Thus, Vladka’s narrative points to the conceptualization of liberation as a process instead of a “rapturous moment in time” (to borrow Stone’s phrase again). As a result, liberation as an action by the Allied Forces is omitted from the testimony.

The return to the community in Aranka S.’s testimony is even more central to the narrative in which the traditional interpretation of liberation is similarly glossed over. After being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, she joined the men reciting the mourner’s Kaddish over the dead (s.34). In so doing, the survivor initiated a double border crossing: she returned to her Jewish community and crossed the gendered boundary to recite the prayer for the dead, from which women are traditionally excluded. At the same time, as Aranka was reciting the Kaddish literally over the heap of dead bodies, she tells of the “first sympathetic caress” by an American Jewish soldier, who put his arm around her in an effort to comfort her (s.35). Aranka’s narrative of liberation follows her interpretation of the events, in which the focus is on her symbolic reunion with the Jewish community and her processing of the loss of her loved ones, which is enabled by Leslie B. F.’s attentive interviewing practice.

The topic of liberation is entirely omitted from the discussion in Halina B.’s testimony, which is an out-of-the-ordinary narrative in that it was filmed on site instead of in Halina’s home, first at the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation and then in front of the entrance to the Auschwitz camp. The interviewer, Adelle Ch., draws attention to the extraordinary choice of location by asking Halina, “please [to] tell us why you chose this place so that there was a cross there, please tell us why that is so important now” (s.114). This question gives an opportunity for Halina to explain her message for future generations, after which she continues her short narrative about her time in Auschwitz, which comes to an abrupt end with her mention of the forced march (s.135). The interview ends with segments shot outside the camp. Any discussion of liberation is omitted from her testimony, which offers an alternative ending to the majority of testimonies recorded by the VHA.

The narrative framework of spontaneous joy

Associations of spontaneous joy with liberation appear in the testimonial narratives in three variants: joy as a stock-feature of the narrative, joy over the return to the (political or religious) community, and the joy of romantic love.36 Erzsébet G.’s narrative offers a perfect example of an expression of joy as a stock feature of an account of liberation. Erzsébet exclaims, “[t]hanks may be given to the liberators even after fifty years!” (s.91). This exclamation was part of her testimony written right after the war and part of what she read out loud during her video testimony.37

Joy over return to the community is often narrated by survivors who identified with communist ideals. However, their specific life trajectories color the narratives in that liberation as joy is narrated in a different way, for instance, by a communist Hungarian Jewish woman who was a concentration camp prisoner (Piroska D.) and by a communist Polish Jewish woman who was a partisan fighter during the Holocaust (Mania G.). In Piroska D.’s38 narrative, May 1 appears as a repeated reference: “So well it is 1st of May, I would not have thought I would be free then” (s.221). She associates this date, when the camp administration fled, with freedom. Liberation, strictly speaking, happened on May 2. Erzsébet offers the following description of her encounter with the Soviet liberators on this day: “There were three Russian soldiers and these skeletons jumped on them and started kissing them” (s.224). Thus Piroska’s narrative about liberation contains an expression of spontaneous joy, which, however, is not depicted as an apolitical feeling or as a genderless one, considering her references to International Workers’ Day (May 1) and the women survivors’ reaction when they caught sight of the liberators.

Only one survivor in my sample, Gerda K., offers in her narrative an expression of spontaneous joy at the sight of the liberators. Gerda claims to have met the love of her life that day She recounts that after having been told that the war was over, the next day she met two American Jewish soldiers. When one of these two soldiers held the door open for her and restored her humanity, this was “the greatest moment of my life” (s.116). Thus, Gerda’s narrative is compliant with the VHA’s intended focus on liberation as a joyous first meeting with the liberators and its emphasis on a happy rebuilding of life after the war.

In this article, I offered a “view from below” of the Hungarian Holocaust by examining narratives given by Jewish women survivors. I offer this discussion as a complement to the more prevalent areas of Holocaust research in Hungary, namely that of perpetrator history and the involvement or collaboration of the gentile population. Local and global memory frames meet, merge, and clash in survivor testimonies from the online digital archive that at best provides productive tension between the archival expectations and survivors’ testimonial narratives, and at worst results in interpretative conflict. The VHA’s volunteer interviewers were trained by the VHA in recording chronological life story interviews for historical and educational purposes, which in some cases resulted in their perseverance in asking questions closely following the archive’s interpretation of the Holocaust. In contrast, in other cases, they molded the Interviewer Guidelines to the specific survivor’s narratives and their styles. The emergence of alternative memories and counter-narratives is reliant on the dialogue with the interviewer and the “impact” of this dialogue on the testimonial narrative in the ways in which they approach the archive’s interpretation of the beginnings and the end of the Holocaust.

I argue that the VHA’s assumption about change, a turning point in the beginning of the Holocaust, rests on a thesis of historical discontinuity, which is a long debated topic in research on the relationships between anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The account given by most of the survivors from East Central Europe whose testimonies are analyzed in this article do not fit this interpretative framework. Instead they constitute counter-narratives of the survivors’ experiences in the region. The narrative analysis of liberation may contribute to the bypassing of this interpretation inherited from the Cold War, a tradition which still affects Holocaust memory. This analysis offers alternative interpretations to the common understanding of liberation in several ways. In terms of agency, liberation can be conceptualized following survivors’ understanding of self-liberation instead of an action via external agents. In terms of temporality, liberation can be approached as a process instead of a “rapturous moment in time.” In terms of its emotive impact, liberation was remembered by some of the survivors as the continuation of persecution and sexual vulnerability, rather than as an event of spontaneous joy. Moreover, as the four narrative frameworks identified in this article intermingle in the testimonies, intersectionality as an analytical tool is especially useful in that the categories of Jewishness, gender, and political identification co-create Holocaust memory in the online archive.

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