scholarly journals Review Article: "A Hungarian Refugee in England and Holland." Pogany, George. 2012. When Even the Poets Were Silent: The Life of a Jewish Hungarian Holocaust Survivor under Nazism and Communism. Afterword by Istvan Pogany. Kenilworth, UK: Brandram, Imprint of Takaway Publishing. 263 pp.; Pogany, George. 2014. Where Is My Home? A Hungarian Refugee in England and Holland. Lexington KY: CreateSpace. 209 pp. Illus.

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 220-230
Author(s):  
Ruth G. Biro

The personal experiences of individuals who lived through the catastrophes of World War II, the Holocaust and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution have been told in many recent memoirs, greatly expanding our understanding of these historical events. In addition to the experiences of the narrators, the fate of their family members, friends, colleagues and entire communities who were all impacted by these events are also illuminated in these accounts. The two memoirs by George Pogany (b. 1928) cover his life since the early 1930s in Hungary, the Holocaust, communism, his escape to the West in 1956, his settlement in England, resettlement in Holland and his years as an international management consultant in several countries. Few memoirs transmit so vigorously the sweep, resiliency, and duration of the author's life and reflections as in Pogany's exceptionally detailed and insightful twofold memoir.

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Ruth G. Biro

Recent personal documentary works about major historical events of the twentieth century, e.g., World War II, the Holocaust and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, offer their readers a rich and multifaceted narrative, or a history that is also "his story," "her story" and that of entire families, cohorts and communities. Often, these works are accompanied by visual artifacts such as photographs, family tress, maps etc., or supported by concise historical surveys. Thus these memoirs complete the work of historians with the lived experiences of the few that represent many. Such is the case with two 2013 books by Charles Farkas and Nick Barlay depicting their mid-twentieth century Hungarian families, one Christian and one Jewish, through two World Wars and the anti-communist uprising, culminating in their escape to the West and in the two authors looking back upon the Hungarian past of their families.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
Evi Blaikie

How did the rich and the super-rich Hungarian Jews in Budapest fare during the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust, and beyond? Two new books deal with their stories: Marianne Szegedy-Maszák's "I Kiss Your Hands Many Times" and Katherine Griesz's "From the Danube to the Hudson". Szegedy-Maszák was able to use her journalist's profession and skills to explore and vividly present her family's story in a work that can likewise satisfy the historians, the romantics and all those who like a “good read.” Griesz’s epic family memoir encompasses the same time period and topic as Szegedy-Maszák's book in its portrayal of a multi-generational Hungarian Jewish family's fate in the crisis -full mid-twentieth century, as seen and interpreted by its female descendant decades later.


2021 ◽  
pp. 119-148
Author(s):  
Anna Wylegała

AbstractThis chapter focuses on the multidimensional trauma of witnesses to mass ethnic violence. The author analyzes the personal experiences of civilians during World War II in Eastern Galicia (once a multi-ethnic borderland region: before 1939 in Poland, now in Ukraine). What makes Galicia an exceptional case study is the continuity of mass violence of different kinds and against different groups of the population: Soviet repression and mass killings, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing of Poles committed by Ukrainian nationalists, and conflict between Soviet authorities and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Drawing on existing concepts from the field of bystanders’ studies, for example, Michael Rothberg’s implicated subject and Omer Bartov’s communal genocide, the author proposes to understand the trauma of Galician bystanders as a complex and multidimensional experience, psychological as well as collective and communal.


Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Dean

This book offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. The text explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. It argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of “Never Again”: as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are. The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s. The book also argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Borhi

This article explores how the U.S. and British governments' wartime strategy against Germany affected their policies toward Hungary, a country that had allied itself with Germany when World War II began. U.S. and British leaders wanted to facilitate an Allied landing on the French coast by diverting German troops to other theaters, thinning them out as much as possible. To this end, the United States and Britain were cool toward Hungary's peace overtures in 1943 and were willing to brook Germany's military incursions into Hungary and Romania in 1944 because German troops operating there could not be quickly redeployed to the west. Germany's occupation of those two countries led to the destruction of what remained of the once-large Jewish communities there, a tragic price that Allied leaders were ultimately willing to risk. The failure of Hungary's secret peace overtures also contributed to the later Soviet occupation of Hungary and the grim fate that befell the country after the war.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitav Acharya

While the West woke up to the threat to the liberal international order when Donald Trump was elected U.S. president, its decline was apparent even at the height of the Obama-Clinton era. What follows the end of the U.S.-dominated world order is not a return to multipolarity as many pundits assume. The twenty-first-century world—politically and culturally diverse but economically and institutionally interlinked—is vastly different from the multipolar world that existed prior to World War II. China and India are major powers now; and globalization will not end, but will take on a new form, driven more by the East than the West and more by South-South linkages than North-North ones. The system of global governance will fragment, with new actors and institutions chipping away at the old UN-based system. Liberal values and institutions will not disappear, but will have to coexist and enmesh with the ideas and institutions of others, especially those initiated by China. This “multiplex world” carries both risks and opportunities for managing international stability. Instead of bemoaning the passing of the old liberal order, the West should accept the new realities and search for new ways to ensure peace and stability in partnership with the rising powers.


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