Deportation from the Szeged Brick Factory in the Summer of 1944

Facts and the Interpretations of the Survivors

Authors

  • Kinga Frojimovics Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0224/art_kfro01

Keywords:

Jewish communities, survivors, collaboration, legal system, post-war history, Holocaust in Hungary

Abstract

To this day, the role of Jewish functionaries during the Holocaust remains highly controversial among scholars and a broader public. Immediately after the war, Jewish survivors already attached particular importance to the so-called Jewish collaborators. In the displaced persons’ (DP) camps, Jewish courts tried Jewish functionaries, and in Israel the “Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law” (1950) was designed to filter out collaborators, primarily from among immigrants. This article presents a case in Hungary. Immediately after the war, in May 1945, the Szeged Jewish Community launched an investigation against some members of the community. These members had, before the deportation of the local Jews in the summer of 1944, and on German orders, selected the persons to be deported on various deportation trains. The study shows that the survivors did not find the forced collaboration
itself unacceptable. What they could not accept was that the members of the committee had carried out their task arbitrarily, with some redefinition of the sorting criteria. In this way, according to the survivors, they were actively involved in determining the fate of the deportees.

Author Biography

  • Kinga Frojimovics, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies

    PhD, historian and archivist, senior archivist at VWI. Frojimovics studied history, archival studies, and archaeology at ELTE University in Hungary, and Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She is the former director of the Hungarian Jewish Archives (Budapest, 1993-1997), and was head of the Hungarian Section of the Yad Vashem Archives (Jerusalem, 2006-2018). From 2010 she is member of the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous among the Nations of Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel), and from 2011 Member of the Academic Advisory Committee of Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA, USA). Her research fields are the history of the Holocaust in Hungary, Jewish religious life in Hungary, and cataloguing of Jewish and Holocaust-related archival collections. She has authored six monographs, edited eight volumes, and published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals.
    E-Mail: kinga.frojimovics@vwi.ac.at

Downloads

Published

2024-12-04

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2024): S:I.M.O.N. – SHOAH: INTERVENTION. METHODS. DOCUMENTATION.

Section

ARTICLES

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Kinga Frojimovics

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

S:I.M.O.N. operates under the Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives). This allows for the reproduction of all articles, free of charge, for non-commercial use, and with appropriate citation information. Authors publishing with S:I.M.O.N. should accept these as the terms of publication. The copyright of all articles remains with the author of the article. The copyright of the layout and design of articles published in S:I.M.O.N. remains with S:I.M.O.N. and may not be used in any other publications.

How to Cite

“Deportation from the Szeged Brick Factory in the Summer of 1944: Facts and the Interpretations of the Survivors”. 2024. S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 11 (2): 94-102. https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0224/art_kfro01.