Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary
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Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Dan Ben-Amos University of Pennsylvania Advisory Editors Jane S. Gerber City University of New York Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett New York University Aliza Shenhar University of Haifa Amnon Shiloah Hebrew University Harvey E. Goldberg Hebrew University Samuel G. Armistead University of California, Davis Sister in Sorrow Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary ILANA ROSEN Translated and Edited by Sandy Bloom Wayne State University Press Detroit English-language edition ∫ 2008 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Hebrew-language edition originally published by the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Publishers, 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosen, Ilana. [Ahot le-tsarah. English] Sister in sorrow : life histories of female Holocaust survivors from Hungary / Ilana Rosen ; translated and edited by Sandy Bloom. p. cm. — (Raphael Patai series in Jewish folklore and anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8143-3129-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8143-3129-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jewish women in the Holocaust—Hungary—Biography. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Hungary—Personal narratives. 3. Holocaust survivors—Hungary—Biography. I. Bloom, Sandy, 1955– II. Title. ds135.h93a16713 2008 940.53%180922439—dc22 [b] 2007037111 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Mary Dickey Masterton Fund for financial assistance in the publication of this volume. isbn-13: 978-0-8143-3888-9 (e-book) Contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii 1. Brainstorming about the Life Histories of Women Holocaust Survivors 1 2. Mother-Daughter Discourse: A Literary-Psychoanalytical Analysis of Five Life Histories 23 3. The Holocaust Experience of Its Listeners and Readers: A Phenomenological-Hermeneutic Analysis of Ten Life Histories 83 4. A Journey without a Conclusion 127 Appendix: The Life Histories 135 Notes 223 Bibliography 233 Term Index 251 Name Index 265 Place Index 267 v Preface and Acknowledgments Sister in Sorrow: A Journey to the Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary began as a PhD thesis that was written in the 1990s and devoted to the experiences and narratives of both male and female survivors living in Israel and in Hungary. At that time, the idea that Holocaust testimonies, as they were regularly termed, are narratives or stories with themes, structures, metaphors, and messages was not yet as widely accepted as it is today. Furthermore, the voices of women sur- vivors had not yet started to receive the literary, artistic, academic, jour- nalistic, and political attention they presently enjoy (if such a verb can be used in such a painful context). The present work is fortunate to have been part of these processes or developments, and to have been one of the pioneering projects in Israeli personal-oral narrative study. The follow- ing persons and organizations have a share in this accomplishment: First and foremost are the Holocaust survivors in both Israel and Hungary who were willing to share with me their painful memories, losses, and grief, and also their remnants of hope, which they still had despite all that they had endured. While carrying out this research project, I enjoyed the support of the Institute of Jewish Studies (now the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies) and the Rosenfeld Research Project on the History of the Jews of Hungary and the Habsburg Empire, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as that of the World Sephardi Federation. The adaptation of this work into a book more widely accessible to the general public in Israel was enabled by the support of the President, Rector, and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) as well as the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Redemption Studies at BGU. The translation of this work from Hebrew to English was supported by the Jewish Memorial Foundation at New York. Throughout my academic career, I have benefited from the guid- ance, advice, expertise, experience, and critical eye of my PhD mentor, Professor Galit Hasan-Rokem of the Department of Hebrew Literature vii viii Preface and Acknowledgments and the Program of Jewish and Comparative Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I greatly appreciate the fruitful communi- cation we have had and still have. For this project specifically, as well as for others related to Hun- garian Jewry, I thank Dr. Michael Silber of the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University for his advice and support. Likewise, I thank Dr. Gavriel Bar-Shaked of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, for his help with Hungarian terms and the lore of Hungarian Jewry. The same thanks go to Professor Katrin Kogman Appel of BGU for her help with German and to Dr. Dalit Berman of BGU for her help with Yiddish. Next, I am thankful to Professor Dan Ben-Amos of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, who is the general editor of the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology by Wayne State Uni- versity Press. His trust and interest in this work and myself from a very early point have been invaluable. Parts of this work were previously edited by Sarah Fine-Meltzer of BGU. More inclusively, my regular editor for abroad publications, Sandy Bloom, stands behind both the English edition of this entire volume and the translation into English of its analytical parts. (I am responsible for the translation of the oral-literary parts.) Shlomo Ketko has dexterously indexed this book. Finally, this work has profited from the thorough and professional treatment of Beth Ina, the freelance copyeditor hired by Wayne State University Press. Last, but never least, all my projects are carried out and exist to- gether with my loving and beloved family, my husband Michael and our three children, Yasmin, Oriel, and Itamar. In many senses, works such as this one are written for our children and future generations, for whom we wish a much happier history. 1 Brainstorming about the Life Histories of Women Holocaust Survivors And the poor, unfortunate one, this little sister of mine, they took her away. All four of us wanted to follow her. They beat us but would not let us die. The poor one, they took only her, and us they put on a transport, again on a train. We marched, did not know where nor why. We marched. Rachel Markowitz, Szilágysómlyo–Petach Tikva, 1991 In the Beginning There Was a Name The beginning of this book is a name: Ilana, my Hebrew name, or Ilona, the Hungarian name of two of my female relatives, one on the side of each of my parents. Both women were murdered in the Holocaust. For some reason, my parents named my sister and two brothers after their own parents and other relatives who had died from natural causes long before the Holocaust. Only I was given a ‘‘memorial candle’’ name, a practice well documented in the study of the ‘‘second generation’’ of the Holocaust in psychology and related fields.∞ The first Ilona, or Ilush, was my mother’s aunt on her mother’s side. Little was known about this aunt in my family except that she was very religious and red-haired, as were some of her children. Along with them, 1 2 Chapter 1 she was deported to Auschwitz (her husband’s fate is completely un- known), and to the best of the family’s knowledge, none of them ever returned. The second Ilush was also called an aunt, although she was in fact my father’s first wife who had died in Auschwitz, together with their son, Péter-Pinchas. Until I reached adolescence, this distinction in status or familial relationship did not matter. For me, this Ilush too was an aunt, just like my other aunts and uncles whom I never met, either because they had died long ago or because they never came to Israel like my parents. Péter was, therefore, part brother, part cousin, though his very existence was so vague to me that I never grasped the problematics of defining our kinship. Only as an adult, while writing the PhD thesis on which the present book is based,≤ was I at times lured to the fantasy that my half brother was alive somewhere and that circumstances might still bring us together, although I knew that the chances for that were nil. During World War II my father served in the so-called labor bat- talions, or forced labor service within the framework of the Hungarian army.≥ Once the war was over, he waited for his wife’s return, but her name never appeared on the lists of the survivors. Instead, at the o≈ce where the lists were published, he met the woman who would be my mother. The two married and started a new family. In this family, whenever one of the deceased Ilushes was mentioned, it was always with the emphatic adjective ‘‘poor,’’ which is widespread in the Hungarian language when talking about su√ering and su√erers, in the same way that the adjective dear (drága) (sometimes in the literal meaning of sweet [édes]) is almost automatically attached to first-degree family members. It is my clear recollection that my mother never ex- pressed any resentment toward her predecessor, very much unlike the treatment of such phenomena in world literature or in Israeli narratives dealing with ‘‘second generation’’ and ‘‘second’’ families.∂ In addition, Ilush’s brother, Mishka, was a frequent and welcome guest at our home who played and joked with us children just like a real uncle.