The Return of György András M.: Writing Exceptional Stories of the Holocaust

György András M. was on vacation in the small village of Csehimindszent in Western Hungary in the early summer of 1944. He had left his parents behind in Budapest and travelled to spend the summer with the village tobacconist. However, in the middle of May 1944, György András was taken, along with other "Jews"² from the village, to the ghetto established in the nearby city of Vasvár.³ Finding out about this, his father János wrote to the town authorities requesting that his son be returned to his family home in Budapest. On May 23 1944, the chief constable (főszolgabíró) of Vasvár agreed to his request.⁴ Given the boy's age – he was eleven or twelve years old – a local lawyer was entrusted with accompanying György András on his journey out of the Vasvár ghetto and back to the capital.

Reading through a microfilmed collection of documents from Vas County, György András' story jumped out at me. But there did not seem to be any other documents referring to him, apart from this single memorandum outlining the chief constable's decision. It was one of those moments, so familiar to historians, of chancing upon a fragment of someone's story. As Carolyn Steedman describes this experience, "You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities."⁵ In the case of this particular story that I had come across in the middle, what I really wanted to know was how it ended. Did György András leave the Vasvár ghetto and take the train to Budapest, and if he did make it back to rejoin his family in Budapest, did he survive the Holocaust?

It does seem that he left Vasvár in May 1944. There is no mention of his name on the Vasvár ghetto list, under the section listing the small number of "Jews" taken there from the village of Csehimindszent in 1944.⁶ The absence is significant. But more significant is the presence of György András' name on another list – a city-wide survey of "Jews" living in Budapest in 1946. In the list of surnames beginning with the letter M, is a György András M., born in Budapest in 1933 to Margit Magdolna Sz., and living in 1946 on Dohány Street.⁷ His father, the original letter writer, is not there.⁸ But it seems that his mother is. There is a Mrs János M., whose maiden name was Margit Magdolna Sz., born in Budapest in 1907, and living in 1946 on Dohány Street along with her mother, György András' grandmother, the 66-year-old Lujza.⁹

It seems that György András left the Vasvár ghetto in late May 1944, and travelled back to Budapest where he survived the war, and was living in the capital with his mother and maternal grandmother in 1946. György András is a boy, like so many others, who enters and then rapidly disappears from the historical record.¹⁰ We never hear György András, like so many ordinary people in the past, tell his own story. But we do have fragments of his story, told by others. György András is one person like countless others, whose name and something of his circumstances appear in the historical record because of what Michel Foucault, describes as "an encounter with power." As Foucault argues:

Without this collision, doubtless there would no longer be a single word to recall their fleeting passage. The power which lay in wait for these lives, which spied on them, which pursued them, which turned its attention, even if only for a moment, to their complaints and to their small tumults, which marked them by a blow of its claws, is also the power which instigated the few words which are left for us of those lives: whether because someone wished to address themselves to...