“They Drew What Was in Them: The Past, the Present”

Testimonial Drawings as Schoolwork in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0223/art_vbrh01

Keywords:

Holocaust survivor children, children’s drawings, Jewish girls, Arrow-Cross era, liberation

Abstract

A source group consisting of twenty-six drawings that was created by thirteen- and fourteen-year-old survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust is analysed in this article. The youngsters who drew the testimonial drawings as compulsory school assignments were pupils of the High School for Girls of the Neolog Jewish Community of Pest. Our aim is to demonstrate that these drawings are crucial historical sources that document both the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath. Until recently, these kinds of documents have been routinely viewed as merely marginal sources of historical information, mainly because they are visual in nature and were created by young teenagers. Certain factors, such as the school environment, age, gender, and the shared historical experiences of the children turn the drawings into a source group from which additional information can be gleaned by analysing the individual pieces in one another’s contexts. The analyses of the drawings show that the girls consciously took the role of the witness upon themselves. We also examine how the fact that these drawings were created by females influences the source group.

Author Biographies

  • Viktória Bányai, Institute for Minority Studies, Budapest

    Viktória Bányai is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Minority Studies at the Centre for Social Sciences HUN-REN, and an assistant professor in the Hebrew Studies Department of Eötvös University in Budapest. Her research field is Hungarian Jewish history and culture in the pre-modern and modern times. She has co-authored the book Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History, (Budapest: CEU Press, 1999). Her current project, from which she has published several articles, examines the experiences of Jewish children in the immediate post-war period Hungary. Her publications include “Children’s Institutions and Education, 1945–1956”, in “My Homesickness Drove me Home ...”: Jewish Life in Postwar Hungary, ed. Sharon Kangisser Cohen (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018), 109–168, and “The Impact of the American Jewish Joint Distribu- tion Committee’s Aid Strategy on the Lives of Jewish Families in Hungary, 1945–49”, in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, eds. Eliyana R. Adler and Kateřina Čapková (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 115–127.

  • Rita Horváth

    Rita Horváth, a literary scholar and historian, has been a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, Waltham, since 2010. Her fields of research include the history of the Holocaust in Hungary, Holocaust literature, trauma and literary theory. In 2003, she received her PhD from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She was a research fellow at, among others, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, Waltham. She has taught at McDaniel College Budapest, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan in Israel, and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Her publications in-clude Previously Unexplored Sources on the Holocaust in Hungary (2007), together with Anna Szalai and Gábor Balázs), “Never Asking Why Build – Only Asking Which Tools”: Confessional Poetry and the Construction of the Self (2005), and The History of the Na- tional Relief Committee for Deportees, 1944–1952 (1997). Some other relevant studies that she has authored are “Children’s Memory: The Experiences of Hungarian Jewish Children as Forced Labourers in Vienna and its Vicinity in 1944/1945”, S.I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation 6, no. 2 (2019): 75–92, and, with Boaz Cohen, “Young Witnesses in the DP Camps: Children’s Holocaust Testimony in Con- text”, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 103–125.

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Published

2023-11-23

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 2 (2023): S:I.M.O.N. – SHOAH: INTERVENTION. METHODS. DOCUMENTATION.

Section

ARTICLES

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Viktória Bányai, Rita Horváth

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How to Cite

“‘They Drew What Was in Them: The Past, the Present’: Testimonial Drawings As Schoolwork in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust”. 2023. S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 10 (2): 50-72. https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0223/art_vbrh01.