Az út szélén
At the Edge of the Road

The lives of people in the Holocaust

Contributor(s): János Kőbányai (Editor)
Subject(s): History, Jewish studies, Recent History (1900 till today), Special Historiographies:, Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), History of the Holocaust, History of Antisemitism
Published by: Múlt és Jövő
Keywords: Holocaust,; Hungary in 20th century;Auschwitz;
Summary/Abstract: The book contains three Holocaust narratives. They are the recollections of ordinary people whose experiences comprise their sole writing, story and message. The three pieces are not just the narratives of three different fates, but also present three different sociological backgrounds, all characteristic of Hungarian Jewry. And emphasis is placed on three different stages in the Holocaust narrative. Pál Kádár’s story (“A körgyógynapszámos” [The seasonal healer]) presents the life of a village doctor and his family – until their deportation to Auschwitz. The narrative featured in the collection’s title (Kornélia Terner: “Az út szélén” [At the edge of the road]) describes all three stages: the uprooting of a Jewish rural household, the events at Auschwitz, and the emotional difficulties of readjusting to ordinary life under the communist system, as well as the wounds that would not heal and finally the outburst after the last political upturn in 1989. Júlia Fodor-Wieg’s piece “Ezekből az emlékekből fogok élni” [I am going to live on these memories] describes the Holocaust as it was experienced by upper-middle-class Jews. The other great Hungarian narrative on the Holocaust is the hunt for men in the jungle of Budapest. The focus of her story continues until her departure from Hungary in 1957. She tells of the demise of a plundered Jewish middle-class, a great and credible document of the will and capacity for life. All three pieces bring us closer to ordinary people who are also heroes. Visual records of the destroyed world illustrate the book. In the epilogue The Holocaust as Narrative, János Kőbányai, who collected the memoirs, analyses and typifies the Hungarian Holocaust as a historical and cultural phenomenon on the lines of Imre Kertész’s “great narrative”.

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