Hungarian Jewish Women: Rape and Liberation (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
This paper will focus on two iconic moments, one is the moment of liberation in 1945 and the other Horthy marching into Cluj on his white horse in 1940. The newsreel footage for both are of a moment of jubilation. In 1940 young wholesome women are photographed waving flags and beaming in their national attire. Likewise, Hungarian Jews felt a patriotic fullness, recalling the “World of Yesterday” when Hungary acquitted Jews with civil rights, permitted them to flourish. They would speak their mother tongue on the streets again. My mother’s disillusionment and trauma began when soldiers in the entering army gang raped her on her way to work downtown. She contracted syphilis and in 1944 was deported to Auschwitz. Similarly, liberation is documented as a moment of jubilation in western newsreels and growingly as a time of rape and pillage in the East. Instead, for my mother and so many others who survived the last death marches, liberation happens on the road with the war raging around them. The Red Army was too busy to tend to them, either to feed them or to rape them. For these vulnerable women, it was a circuitous road home that took many, many months, very often in the wrong direction.

This paper will use testimonies from Transylvanian women including my mother, weaving her story into the larger picture. It relies on the work of Andrea Pető on rape, but even Andrea’s work seems to focus more on the Russian and German armies and the western literature on rape. I will, of course, do my own digging, but I also hope that presenting this topic at the AHEA will help me locate more information about the Hungarian army’s interactions with the public in Transylvania as they reoccupied the area.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
ALICE FREIFELD, Emeritus
Ph.D.: History University of California, Berkeley 1992
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, Associate Professor Fall 1994-2021; Jewish Studies, UF, Spring 2023
Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000). Barbara Jelavich Book Prize ASEEES, Hungarian Studies Association book prize

East Europe Reads Nietzsche, co-edited with Peter Bergmann and Bernice Rosenthal, East European Quarterly Monograph Series, no. 514, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
 Work in Progress: Displaced Hungarian Jewry, 1945-1948.
Hungarian translation of Nationalism and the Crowd, l'Harmattan Press, Budapest.
"A kijózanodott tömeg," [The Sobered up Crowd] Határokon túl [Beyond Our Borders] (trans. by János Boris), Tanulmánykötet Mark Pittaway (1971-2010) emlékére [Research in memory of Mark Pittaway], ed. Eszter Bartha and Zsuzsanna Varga (Budapest: L-Harmattan, 2012), 414-438.
“Displaced Persons and Hungary's Porous Borders, 1945-48,” in Border Changes in 20th Century Europe, Eero Medijainen and Olaf Mertelsmann, eds., Tartu Studies in Contemporary History, vol. 1 (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2010), 163-182.
“Conflict and De-escalation: The Hungarian people and imperial politics from 1848/49 to the ‘Ausgleich’ of 1867,” Comparing Empires, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies series (FRIAS), volume 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 409-424.
“Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian Queen: The Uses of Celebrity Monarchy,” in Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky, eds., The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York : Berghahn Books, 2007; paperback, 2009), 138-161.
“War Crimes Trials: A Public Discourse in Postwar Hungary,” in Beyond camps and forced labour. Current international research on survivors of Nazi persecution (Osnabrueck, Germany: Secolo Verlag, 2008), 231-239.
“Identity on the Move: Hungarian Jewry between Budapest and the DP Camps, 1945-1948,” The Holocaust in Hungary, Sixty Years Later, edited by Randolph L. Braham and Brewster S. Chamberlin, Social science monographs, no. 678 (New York & Boulder: Columbia, 2006), 177-200.
“The Tremor of Cain: Return of the Deported to Hungary,” Hungarian Studies (English language journal published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), 18:2 (2005), 243-250.
“Displaced Hungarian Jewish Identity, 1945-1947,” in Beyond camps and forced labour. Current international research on survivors of Nazi persecution (Osnabrueck, Germany: Secolo Verlag, 2004), 447-455.
“Kossuth: The Hermit and the Crowd,” Hungarian Studies, vol. 16:2 (2002), 205-214.
"The Cult of March 15: Sustaining the Hungarian Myth of Revolution, 1849-1999," Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present. Edited by Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001), pp. 245-275.
"Marketing Industrialism and Dualism in Liberal Hungary: Expositions, 1842-1896," Austrian Yearbook, vol. 29, part 1, 1998, 63-91. Article prize in Hungarian Studies

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies,
. Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Invitational Scholar for the Study of Antisemitism fellowship, Sept 1, 2019-May 31, 2020. USHMM Associate, June 1-Aug 31, 2020.