Hungarian Infiltrees: Mass Migration 1945-48

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Between 1945 and 1948 Europe experienced the largest mass migration of people in Modern European history before today. This paper will follow the illegal trafficking of people across Hungary’s borders, the administrative decisions that made it possible to cross “illegally,” especially in the mass movement in 1947, and the exigencies of travel and refugee maintenance in a war torn continent. The paper will explore the work of NGOs in Hungary and in the DP camps and touch on the fear that often dictated refugee actions as well as the response of the majority communities to their presence.

This period of migration has been subsumed into the Cold War pathos of the peoples fleeing the Soviets, or in the case of Holocaust survivors as an “interlude”, a limbo for those suspended between the Holocaust and new lives elsewhere. The present refugee crisis reminds us of the impact of this interlude on the political and medical structures, internal national/nationalist politics, and of course, the lives of the migrants.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Alice Freifeld received her PhD (1992), M.A. and B.A. from University of California, Berkeley. She joined the University of Florida in 1994 after teaching at Wheaton College, University of New Hampshire-Durham, University of Connecticut-Storrs, University of Nebraska, and Transylvania University, Lexington, KY. Professor Freifeld has published Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (2000), which won the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize in 2001. She also coedited East Europe Reads Nietzsche with Peter Bergmann and Bernice Rosenthal (1998). She has published numerous articles and is currently working on a manuscript entitled Displaced Hungarian Jewry, 1945-48.