Excavating Voices and Silences

The Early Testimonies of Hungarian Survivors through a Cross-Archival Approach

Authors

  • Ildikó Barna Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Social Sciences, Budapest https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7710-8402
  • Alexandra M. Szabó Brandeis University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0223/art_ibas01

Keywords:

early testimonies, cross-archival analysis, DEGOB, Arolsen Archive, social death, Hungarian survivors

Abstract

The National Relief Committee for Deportees (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság, DEGOB), in addition to its extensive aid activities, had two other important tasks: to send expeditions to previous concentration and displaced persons camps in order to bring back survivors to Hungary, and to document all of the obtained information. An important step in the collection of information was the recording of the personal experiences of the deportees. The employees of DEGOB recorded survivor testimonies in the form of protocols based on the interviews that they had conducted with survivors. The unique collection of DEGOB protocols contains more than 3,600 such recollections. This article introduces and contextualises these DEGOB testimonies and then presents a cross-examination of a selection of them with documents created several years later by the International Refugee Organisation. These documents are kept in the International Tracing Service, today known as the Arolsen Archives. Our article represents the first step in a larger research project, in which we have found that the cross-examination of various archives not only yield further information about the life story of a survivor, but also points to important inconsistencies. In our case study, we have found “silences” and gaps that are of significant historical value and which provide greater insight into the societal structures that survivors navigated in the immediate post-war period. In order to uncover these instances, we utilise the concept of “social death” as a theoretical framework.

Author Biographies

  • Ildikó Barna, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Social Sciences, Budapest

    Ildikó Barna is a sociologist. She is an associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Social Sciences, Budapest, where she also serves as head of the Department of Social Research Methodology. Her research topics include early Holocaust testimonies, Hungarian Jewish displaced persons and refugees after the Holocaust, and quantitative research on archival sources. She is the co-leader of the Research Center for Computational Social Science (RC2S2, rc2s2.elte.hu/en) and one of the founders of the research project Digital Lens at RC2S2. In 2015, she was a visiting fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM, Washington DC. In 2017, she was the recipient of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Fellowship and the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

  • Alexandra M. Szabó, Brandeis University

    Alexandra M. Szabó is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University and one of the founders of the research project Digital Lens (RC2S2, ELTE University). Her doctoral dissertation focuses on Hungarian Jewish and Romani men’s and women’s experiences of sterilization and castration in Nazi camps and how the mass experiments affected their reproductive and personal lives later. She was the recipient of the EHRI Kristel Fellowship in 2020/21, the inaugural Strauss Fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2022/23, and is the Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2023/24. Alexandra has received several graduate research awards, such as from the Hadassah- Brandeis Institute and the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry in 2022.

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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 Ildikó Barna

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How to Cite

“Excavating Voices and Silences: The Early Testimonies of Hungarian Survivors through a Cross-Archival Approach”. 2023. S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 10 (2): 73-90. https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0223/art_ibas01.