Lecture targets victims' ordeals

The victims' diverse backgrounds mean different experiences during the Holocaust.
By SEAN BARRON
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
YOUNGSTOWN -- A key to better understanding what took place during the Holocaust is to place the events in broader cultural and social contexts, and to bring to the table individual victims, stories and experiences.
Any such studies also need to be mindful of the effects age, life experiences and gender played on victims' interpretations of having gone through the Holocaust.
Those were two of the main themes of a lecture about Holocaust studies that Tim Cole gave Sunday at Youngstown State University as part of a three-day symposium "Beyond Numbers, Beyond Names: The Experience of Holocaust Victims." About 100 people attended Cole's presentation, "The Return of Gyorgy Andras M. and other [Exceptional?] Stories: Social and Cultural Histories of the Holocaust."
The conference, put on by YSU's Judaic and Holocaust Studies program, also featured "Remnants," a play spotlighting testimony of survivors, and will include numerous panel groups. It will conclude Tuesday.
About the lecturer
Cole, a social historian and professor at the University of Bristol in Great Britain, shared what was known about the experiences of Gyorgy Andras M., a Jewish child in Hungary who escaped being deported to a concentration camp during World War II.
Cole told his audience that Andras M., whose full name had been kept confidential, was sent by his parents on a vacation in May 1944 from the family's home in Budapest, Hungary. A short time later, the child was taken to a ghetto, a fenced-off residential district where many Jews were placed before being deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Cole explained.
Somehow, Cole continued, the boy's father was able to persuade his handlers to return Andras M. to his family, an unusual and "exceptional" story, since most Jews in ghettos ended up in the camps, Cole noted. Historians are unsure how the father was able to save his son, despite a pro-Nazi government being in power in Hungary, he added.
Deportation took place quickly in Hungary before Russia liberated many of the ghettos in 1945, Cole said. In one eight-week period, an estimated 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to concentration camps, he noted.
A wider view
Cole, author of two books on the Holocaust, said it's oversimplistic to define the Holocaust in terms of victims and their perpetrators. Victims‚ ages, gender and where they were raised often mean different experiences and interpretations of the Holocaust, Cole noted.
Such an approach means that "a variety of experiences will emerge, which can complicate and destabilize the master narratives," Cole said. Master narratives are the larger, generalized stories depicting the Nazis killing Jews, without taking individual stories into account, he noted.
Another challenge for writing and capturing victims' stories is that in some places many documents have been found in some cities in Hungary while few have been discovered in other places, Cole said. In addition, many documents have been lost, he added.
Cole said his research looks more at how the Holocaust happened as opposed to why.
Helene Sinnreich, the Judaic and Holocaust Studies program's program director, said one of the main purposes for the conference is to address the victims and their experiences. It's also important and timely because "genocide is still being perpetrated," said Sinnreich, who organized the conference.
"A lot of history focuses on what the Nazis did instead of what happened to people and their experiences. It's a way to give victims a human face," she said.