Sister in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary

4. A Journey without a Conclusion

127 4 A Journey without a Conclusion It’s not hard to tell, as long as I don’t tell about all we went through. Piri Meister, Gyergyóvárhegy– Ra’anana, 1991 As mentioned in Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies, cited in the introduction to this book, narratives about the Holocaust generate not one but many truths.∞ Among them is, first and foremost, the truth of the narrators, which often includes their conflicting accounts or viewpoints about how and what to remember and tell. Then there is the truth—or truths—arising from the interaction around and interpretations of these narratives. Two of the narrators in this book exemplify this process in their life histories and in the afterlife of the narrative events in which these were told. Human and professional sensitivity regarding the issues that will be discussed dictate that I do not reveal their names. The two women, distant relatives, used to live in the same town and in the same street in Europe. One of the women was particularly expressive and recounted her life history with great detail and relish. Therefore, when I was invited in 1994 to lecture on the topic of my research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem , I saw fit to invite this narrator to join me and tell her story. Despite some initial misgivings, she agreed and came to the event accompanied by her granddaughter, a high school student. Before the event, when we prepared our presentation, she asked me whether to 128 Chapter 4 include certain incidents in her speech. Among them, she mentioned her suicide attempt soon after liberation, an event she had not referred to in the life history she had told me previously. I advised her not to bring it up in public. When we appeared in Yad Vashem, she spoke about her experiences with great confidence and zeal. Needless to say, she did talk about her suicide attempt and even joked about it, as if to say: I survived that as well. This woman then asked me if I had turned to the other survivors that she had recommended to me during our previous meeting. She mentioned her relative and former neighbor, whose narrative is extremely brief and obscure, and asked me if this woman had mentioned certain experiences. For example, she told me that this woman had had the task of evacuating the dead bodies in the concentration camp, and that in return for dragging them to the collection spot by their ankles, she received extra portions of food. No, the woman in question had not revealed this to me. Instead, she had tiptoed around the whole issue and avoided describing her Holocaust experiences in detail. The fact that I encountered these ‘‘postscript’’ stories only through accident made me realize that many more such hidden or side stories might exist in the minds of other interviewees and Holocaust survivors in general, as the epigraphs to this conclusion and to the appendix to this work well exemplify. This brings home the message that the Holocaust experience cannot ever be truly fathomed or exhausted. Of course, all narratives contain within the potential for a multiplicity of versions and interpretations, but it seems that in relation to the Holocaust, there is special room for thought and discussion of the factors working to conceal or reveal, dismiss or stress, exclude, include, or hint at significant portions of the lives and life histories of its survivors. This work presented a reading of life histories of elderly Hungarian Jewish female Holocaust survivors currently living in Israel and in Hungary . Although I approached these women mostly through the ‘‘snowball ’’or‘‘friendrecommendsfriend’’networkingdynamic,whichusually creates an arbitrary group, it eventually turned out that these subjects do share a set of personal traits and cultural characteristics related to their places of origin. Born in most cases in the 1920s, these women are still part of the Austro-Hungarian mentality and cling to its memory and remnants. That Jews were by the 1920s accused of the Empire’s fall or of Communismdoesnotseemtoa√ectthesewomenandtheirfamilies.The Hungarian Jews of this time were proud of their participation in World War I, and of both the handicaps and the medals they accrued. They A Journey without a Conclusion 129 identified themselves as Israelite Hungarians and were sure that antiSemitism was but a passing cloud on the skies of Hungary as of the 1860s (when...