Faculty of Arts

“AND I DID NOT WORRY MUCH ABOUT THE BOMBINGS EITHER… AT LEAST WE HAVE SOME VARIETY.” CHILDREN’S DIARIES IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The paper makes an attempt to show the significance of children’s diaries, written during the Second World War, from a psychological point of view. Most of these children were born between 1928 and 1931 and started their diaries in different years. What is common among them is that all of them were adolescents when they decided to do so. So the inner problems common in this period of life are very strong and analyzable in the diaries. The influence of the War and the resulting stress and trauma also appear in them – and the an-swers the children themselves gave to these problems are interesting for us. The expression of their mental, psychical and empirical world in the diaries show that they used a kind of psychological preventive mechanism as a self-defense technique. On the whole, we can say that they primarily tried to protect their mental world and their self-confidence – with more or less success. It was typical that in their inner world they imagined something worth living for and in most cases this “something” was some kind of a profession. That was one of the most important part of their identity and they stuck to it to survive. In con-nection to that, they tried to take refuge in those kind of activities which diverted their at-tention from the outside world. For example, keeping a diary was such in some cases, just like the games played in the cellars during the siege of Budapest.

RETHINKING ÉVA HEYMAN’S DIARY

This paper focuses on the book Éva Lányom. Napló [My Daughter Éva: A Diary], published in 1947 in Budapest by journalist Ágnes Zsolt. The volume contains the diary written by her daughter, Éva Heyman, who was murdered in 1944 in Auschwitz at the age of thirteen. This paper offers two possible alternatives of the history of the book’s origin. In the first part, I examine the text as the diary of the teenage girl published by her mother and analyze it in terms of the Holocaust from a child’s perspective as well as Éva’s everyday life and familial relations. In the second part, I analyze the book as the memoirs of the mother, Ágnes Zsolt, whose grief over the loss of her child compelled her to write her memoirs of Éva in the form of a child’s diary due to her severe remorse that her child was murdered while Ágnes herself escaped. Since the original manuscript is still missing, this paper merely offers two different but possible readings of the book as either the child’s diary or the mother’s memoirs, without passing judgment on the validity of either version.

THE MENTAL IMAGE OF THE WALKS IN A MAID’S DIARY

The study is about the diary of a land-bred maidservant working in Sandor Palace, the Hungarian Prime Minister’s residence in Budapest during World War II. The author, Marta Toth, came from an impoverished noble family penetrated with a deep sense of nobility, causing Martha to regard herself as a noble lady. She imagined the Hungarian society as a dichotomy of poor peasants and rich squires, plunging herself into constant humiliation by the rest of the world. People would refuse to treat her the way she expected and she was considered a maidservant or a tib rather than a gentlewoman. This made her try and do her very best to appear as part of high society, which she felt she was, during her walks across the capital city. She would pick pieces of clothing that she thought proper for a gentlegirl, hoping not to appear a maidservant. The most characteristic of these were the gloves, which she was sure to make her look like a real miss. However, all the attempts to disguise hints of her shameful job had fallen through. While she regarded gloves as a symbol of gentility, people drew the conclusion she was hiding something, probably the signs of hard labour on her hands; and the owner of rough hands would obviously disqualify from the elite they conceited themselves to belong to. Therefore Martha had to realize that well-dressed gentles would continue to rate her as a poor maidservant.

18TH-19TH CENTURY ARREST WARRANTS

The study offers an analysis of arrest warrants and the descriptions contained in them, a less known, but very rich and colourful corpus of documents. These documents contain a wealth of information on the history of costume, as well as on marginalised social groups, about whom little is known from other written sources. The documents contain data on the costume of the peasantry, the burg-hers and the nobility; the social „elite" however, is totally neglected.
Warrants were usually issued against murderers, robbers, thieves, bandits and the liké. Their purpose was to ensure that the authorities identified and caught the wanted individual on the basis of the description as quickly as possible. Some warrants were issued for disappeared or runaway family members. One rare variant of the descriptions in the warrants issued after the crime had occurred alsó included a description of the victim in order to discover his identity. The most interesting (and rarest) warrants are the ones containing a dialogue, usually between the prisoner and the clerk.
Most warrants contained more or less similar data: the name, the alias, religious affiliation, age, the form of the head and the nose, a description of the beard, the hair-style, the moustache, the eyebrows, the teeth and the mouth. The success of a warrant depended on to what extent the description fitted the wanted person and to what extent he/she could be recognised from the description. An astonishing variety of expressions were used for describing facial features, gait, intellectual abilities, speech, dialect, accents, individual marks, profession, drinking habits, etc.
Certain decrees on clothing were passed in order to emphasize the social differences. These decrees defined the type of costume, which could be worn. The nobility's financial status can be differentiated in the light of these decrees and the descriptions of their costume in various documents. As a matter of fact, these decrees only had a „documentary" alue, insofar as they recorded the customs of particular place and age. These clothing decrees could never be wholly enforced.
Individual items of clothing were described in great detail since the wanted person usually had a single set of clothes only. At the same time, these descriptions are rarely detailed enough to reflect the differences between the costume worn by various ethnic minorities and Hungarians. Obviously, some elements of the costume did reflect an individual's origins. None of the sources mentions a change in the costume. Various items of the Sunday best clothing - the boots, the vest, the bonnet, etc. - were sometimes replaced with fancier ones. In contrast, the hairstyle was often changed, although with little success, for the authorities apparently learnt of the change and the new hairstyle was also described in addition to the old one.
Peasants usually found it impossible to regularly renew their clothing, and they usually wore „old fashioned" lothes. They had better opportunities for clothing if they found employment as domestic servants or farm-hands. The burghers tried to imitate the nobility, but since their majority was of German stock, they usually followed the German fashion. The nobility had the greatest freedom, at least in principle, to satisfy their whims as regards clothing; however, the descriptons contained in the documents reveal that their clothing was often little better than that of a wealthier peasant.

The aim of this study is to reveal the sociocultural agents through the case of a teenager boy Pál B. (born in 1906) lived between the two World War. The main source of the study is his unpublished diary dated from 1923 to 1925. In this diary I was analysing the role played by the agents of socialization (his family, the school and the peer group) in his search for self and personal development.  According to his diary he lived in a family which hold the Jewish religious tradition strictly. His mother and stepfather had an own leather shop in the Dohány street. It was especially his stepfather who ran the business and he was deeply involved into the micro society of leather merchants in Budapest. So his family as an agent of socialization should have influenced him in continuing the family business and become leather merchant.  But in his diary another very important agent appears, namely his peer group recruited from his neighbours in his tenement house and from his school class. In this milieu Pál was recognized as a dancer, pianist and famous composer. He was deeply integrated in this society, but this group and his composed works was despised by his family, as it was considered unacceptable in his merchant stepfather’s eyes.  He tried to orient his stepson towards leather business and established a small own leather shop for him. Pál’s independent shop ran for a very short time and ended bankrupt. Afterwards, he had to work for his stepfather’s shop. Pál found it very degrading, he regarded the situation of becoming an employee as the lost of his independence. Finally he turned against his family pattern and became piano player and conductor. So according to his diary, the peer group as an agent of socialization overwrote the business related family pattern.

How Anna Szenes [Hannah Szenes/Hannah Senesh 1921-1944] (Israel national hero) became Zionist during her grammar school years in Hungary? – this is main question of this study. The paper lays an emphasis on the question how this social and religious context of her school class in the Baár-Madas Protestant Girls’ Grammar School. The study reveals her peer group by the help of social network analyses which based on the comparative analysis of her diary and register of students. Anna mentioned in her diary several friends, girlfriend and acquaintance from the school, so her peer group can be precisely mapped by the register of students. In Anna’s class was a protestant majority. But the identifiable members of her social network show a different pattern – the domination of Jewish peers is observable. Her four girlfriends were Jewish. But her Jewish girlfriends all became Calvinist or Roman Catholics in the last school years. With the analyses of Anna’s social network system we can learn an important episode that is explicitly not mentioned in her diary: among her girlfriends, she remained the only Jewish as religion in her peer group.  This circumstance could have played an important role in her growing interest towards Zionism, since it gave her the feeling of belonging to a community.

This paper analyzes the rhetoric of a manuscript written in Budapest immediately after the Holocaust to record the personal experiences of the author, Margit K. I examine the text in terms of the role of writing and narration in processing trauma and how these appear in the narrative. In her memoirs, Margit K. had imbued her personal history of persecution with meanings that facilitated their integration into her life history and her self-definition. She chose to narrate her tragic past using euphemistic, mitigating, or ironic language and constructed her stories to have positive outcomes while attempting to write as little of the pain and tragedy of her persecution as possible. The euphemizing narrative methods used in the memoirs disappear entirely in the diary and the themes discussed in the diary are also different, which shows the advantages of constructing a desired past within the genre of the memoirs in contrast to the more strictly defined genre of diary-writing. However, these memoirs of the past stand in sharp contrast with the rhetoric of her diary concentrating on the present, where Margit K. writes in greater detail of the horrors of her everyday life following the liberation of Budapest and without any trace of the euphemisms characteristic of her memoirs.

A tanulmány a kitelepített áldozatok egykorú perspektíváját mutatja be a kamaszkorú Somlay Gizella naplójának és 20 év körüli nővére, Györgyi felmentési kérelmeinek elemzésével. A kitelepítés során alkalmazott megfélemlítési eszközöket már a témával foglalkozó korábbi kutatások feltárták, de annak vizsgálata elmaradt, hogyan reagáltak erre mikroszinten az áldozatok. Gizella a kitelepítés mindennapos traumáját két eszközzel igyekezett feldolgozni: a szimbolikus ellenállással és a naplóírással. Az előbbi a napló szerint azt szolgálta, hogy önállóságát megőrizze azáltal, hogy egyes cselekedeteit szembeszegülésként, olykor pedig revansként értelmezte. Az ellenállás ezen mikroszintjét jelentő cselekedetek nyomait hivatalos dokumentumokban hiába keresnénk, és az emlékezetben is elhalványulnak. Pillanatnyi, szituatív jelentőségük azonban abban, hogy önbecsülését megőrizte, rendkívül nagy volt. Hiszen a szimbolikus ellenállás mint védekezési stratégia arra szolgált, hogy saját cselekedeteit tetszőlegesen értelmezze, így magára mint önálló, aktív cselekvőre, nem csupán a terror passzív elszenvedőjére tekinthetett . Másrészt rájött arra, hogy az ellenállás érzése csak olyan cselekedetekkel teremthető meg, amelyek a hatóságok vagy a külvilág számára nem észrevehetők. A kitelepítéssel való megküzdésnek emellett másik fontos eszköze maga a naplóírás volt: Gizella többnyire humorral számolt be az eseményekről, így adva új, elviselhető értelmet a kitelepítés mindennapjainak.

This paper examines the narrative tropes of Hungarian adolescent diaries written during and after World War II, primarily focusing on the rhetorical forms of beginning a diary that fall into two categories characteristic of adolescent diary-writing – beginning with an introduction describing the author and their environment, or beginning with a memoir in which the author summarizes the most important events of the period between their birth and the start of the diary. The paper also discusses how adolescents personified their diary books and in addressing the persona of the diary seemed, often, to seek to establish a dialogue with their future adult selves.