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Gabriella Trebits was a prisoner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp between November 1944 and April 1945. The spaces present in her diary include both the places of the camp and her typhoid hallucinations. Gabriella described venues through their sensuous dimensions. Since the sensory experiences of everyday life mingled with her visions, her diary became a “textual journey” between real and imagined places. Her narratives helped her to express the difficulties caused by her physical environment and the confusion caused by her hallucinations. As a result, the references to changes in her sensory impressions created a discursive space for the diarist to express her feelings. Since her narrative depicts a suffering and painful condition, we use Joanna Bourke’s concept of pain talk in our analysis. Moreover, the diary demonstrates that it was possible for typhoid patients to connect with their environment despite their isolated situation. Even on the periphery of the camp space, social life persisted. This exploration will not only uncover the narrative strategy of one diarist but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which tens of thousands died of starvation and diseases―without mass executions or gas chambers―in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the spring of 1945.

For readers today, first-person accounts provide one of the most effective means of gaining an intimate glimpse into the everyday lives of those experiencing historical events. Diary entries recorded during the Holocaust not only individualize the process of mass extermination, they also preserve the words of those bearing witness to horrendous crimes. Yet should these written records only be interpreted as works of non-fiction? What literary techniques might have been employed in creating these depictions? Other than the period in which they were written, what characteristics may diaries written during the Holocaust share? In an attempt to address a few issues posed by Holocaust journals and diaries, this paper examines Miksa Fenyő’s Holocaust journal, Az elsodort ország [‘A Country Adrift’] (1946), written while the author was in hiding from June 22, 1944 to January 19, 1945 in Budapest, Hungary.

Jewish councils played a key role in the ghettoization of the Jewish population in Hungary in 1944. Their activity is still the subject of intense debate in modern historiography. The present study focuses on the Jewish councils in southern Slovakia, with particular attention to the Jewish Council of Košice and its leading personality, Ákos Kolos. The geographical area under investigation is a specifc border region that belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary between 1938 and 1945. The history of this area represents an ignored issue in modern Slovak historiography, including the Jewish councils, which appear sporadically only in commemorative literature and in some smaller case studies. In the first part of the paper, the establishment and the activity of the Jewish Council in Košice is examined, while the second part of the study is dedicated to Ákos Kolos, the chairman of the Jewish Council of Košice, as well as to his career in the interwar years and his post-war fate. The archival materials and personal documents processed in this study will help scholars to better understand the problems that the Jewish Council of Košice had to solve in the weeks between March and June 1944. It is argued, that the regional Jewish elite of southern Slovakia, remained politically loyal to Hungarian government circles, despite the border changes and the Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation.

Discusses the process of the economic annihilation of the Jews in Hungary, who- from the economic point of view - were more influential than any other Jewish community in Europe. Following the German occupation in March 1944 the collaborating Hungarian government attempted to assert its claim concerning the complete confiscation of Jewish assets at all stages of the road leading to the extermination camps. The cooperation with the Germans proved to be the most problematic in this area. The story of the Jewish Gold Train is a relatively small but all the more emblematic chapter of the economic annihilation. The circumstances of the freight's assembling, the German-Hungarian conflicts concerning the train, the looting attempts, the fate of the assets seized by the Allies (double victimization of the survivors) provide the reader with an insight into the history of the repeated looting of the Hungarian Jewry.

Drawing from the ideas of critical geography and based on extensive archival research, Cole brilliantly reconstructs the formation of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, focusing primarily on the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary--one of the largest created during the war, but rarely examined. Cole maps the city illustrating how spaces--cafes, theaters, bars, bathhouses--became divided in two. Throughout the book, Cole discusses how the creation of this Jewish ghetto, just like the others being built across occupied Europe, tells us a great deal about the nature of Nazism, what life was like under Nazi-occupation, and the role the ghetto actually played in the Final Solution.

As a scholar, critic, and translator, Ozsváth has written extensively about Holocaust literature and the Holocaust in Hungary. Now, she records her own history in this clear-eyed, moving account. When the Danube Ran Red combines an exceptional grounding in Hungarian history with the pathos of a survivor and the eloquence of a poet to present a truly singular work.

Sister in Sorrow offers a glimpse into the world of Hungarian Holocaust survivors through the stories of fifteen survivors, as told by thirteen women and two spouses presently living in Hungary and Israel. Analyzing the accounts as oral narratives, author Ilana Rosen uses contemporary folklore studies methodologies to explore the histories and the consciousness of the narrators as well as the difficulty for present-day audiences to fully grasp them. Rosen's research demonstrates not only the extreme personal horrors these women experienced but also the ways they cope with their memories.In four sections, Rosen interprets the life histories according to two major contemporary leading literary approaches: psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This reading encompasses both the life spans of the survivors and specific episodes or personal narratives relating to the women's identity and history. The psychoanalytic reading examines focal phases in the lives of the women, first in pre-war Europe, then in World War II and the Holocaust, and last as Holocaust survivors living in the shadow of loss and atrocity. The phenomenological examination traces the terms of perception and of the communication between the women and their different present-day non-survivor audiences. An appendix contains the complete life histories of the women, including their unique and affecting remembrances.Although Holocaust memory and narrative have figured at the center of academic, political, and moral debates in recent years, most works look at such stories from a social science perspective and attempt to extend the meaning of individual tales to larger communities. Although Rosen keeps the image of the general group—be it Jews, female Holocaust survivors, Israelis, or Hungarians—in mind throughout this volume, the focus of Sister in Sorrow is the ways the individual women experienced, told, and processed their harrowing experiences. Students of Holocaust studies and women's studies will be grateful for the specific and personal approach of Sister in Sorrow.

In 1944, 13-year-old Fritz Tubach was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth in his German village of Kleinheubach. That same year in Tab, Hungary, 12-year-old Bernie Rosner was loaded onto a train with the rest of the village's Jewish inhabitants and taken to Auschwitz, where his whole family was murdered. Many years later, after enjoying successful lives in California, they met, became friends, and decided to share their intimate story—that of two boys trapped in evil and destructive times, who became men with the freedom to construct their own future, with each other and the world. In a new epilogue, the authors share how the publication of the book changed their lives and the lives of the countless people they have met as a result of publishing their story.

This gender-oriented historical study analyzes the image of Hansi Brand (Budapest, 1912—Tel Aviv, 2000), a member of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest during World War II. After the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Brand—together with Rezsö Kasztner and Joel Brand—took part in the negotiations with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi officials for halting the deportation of Hungarian Jews. In the 1950s, these negotiations were at the center of a major public controversy that became known as the Kasztner Affair. Despite the central role she played in these events, Hansi Brand was marginalized in the Israeli public discourse. She was described as depending on men—her husband, Joel Brand, and her so-called lover, Kasztner. I explore the reasons for this dissonance and demonstrate that Hansi Brand's public image corresponded to and engaged with the gender roles prevailing in Israeli society and with its memory of the Holocaust.

Frank Vajda, a major figure in Australian neurology, was a boy in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War.In the care of his courageous and ever-resourceful mother, he survived the attempt by Hitler's Nazis and a fascist Hungarian militia to murder him, his family and the rest of the Jews of this nation.