Indispensable Interpreters: Recovering Hungarian American contributions to the Hungarian refugee resettlement program

Type of Abstract (select): Individual Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
While the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and related Exodus are well-known, the critical role of Hungarian American community to the successful resettlement of over 36,000 Hungarian refugees is understudied. Drawing upon records of the President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief and local Hungarian-language newspapers, this presentation argues that local diasporic communities played a pivotal role in the US resettlement program. These sources reveal that local Hungarians worked to aid both their American and Hungarian counterparts in Austria, inside Camp Kilmer, and in local communities across the US. Recovering these actions requires two interconnected interpretative steps.
First, recognizing that while the refugee resettlement programs were global in scale in the US they were executed locally; thus, detailed attention to disparate local actions is required. Unfortunately, hyperlocal activities are also most easily lost to the unknowable past as they leave fewer and less-preserved records than national bureaucracies. However, local diasporic newspapers provide a lens into the actions of local Hungarian communities, albeit an incomplete one.
The second interpretive step is recognizing that Hungarian contributions were documented but coded. The most common encodings involve language with staff and volunteers labeled as “Hungarian-speaking” or “translator.” Then as now, there is negligible interest in learning magyarul outside of the diaspora, meaning that these terms can be understood to represent diasporic contributions.
By combining hyperlocal, Hungarian-language sources with decoded, English-language, ones it is possible to reconstruct the critical and overlooked contributions of the Hungarian American community to the work of the US government-led resettlement program.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr. Patrick Leech is Assistant Professor of History at Anderson University in Anderson, SC. His teaching emphasizes global perspectives on the history of the world around us. His research focuses on Hungary and Hungarians within the context of a global Cold War. Additionally, he draws upon digital methodologies that allow him to fuse a previous career in information technology with his teaching and research.