The Past is not Past

Cultural memory expressed in memorials and historical markers does not always reflect historical reality accurately or honestly.  This was certainly the case in Győr, Hungary.  There, the gap between visible remembrance and what actually happened leaves places that had played roles in the systematic pauperization and deportation of the Jewish population ignored, unmarked, and often entirely unknown. 

When my wife Irene and I started visiting central Europe around 1990, we weren’t thinking about these things, but my family’s experience in the Holocaust did lurk in the background.  My Jewish parents had fled Hungary early in 1939, just months before Germany invaded Poland and Europe shut down.  Those who stayed did not fare well.  Victims included two of my mother’s siblings and my paternal grandfather.  The history was bleak, but the pull was strong.  I  was born in the US, but my native language was Hungarian, and the location in the centre of Europe attracted both Irene and me.  So, in 2002 we bought an apartment with a view into  the interior courtyard of an 18th century nobleman’s palace, in Győr, halfway between Budapest and Vienna.  After spending the academic year of 2003-2004 as a Fulbright lecturer at a university in Transylvania, we moved into our new home, where we lived four to five months a year from 2005 through 2019.

During that time, I researched and wrote my book The Past is not Past:  Confronting the Twentieth Century in the Hungarian-Austrian Borderlands.  The book was published this spring by Peter Lang as volume 22 in the Cultural Memories series of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. So, I had been thinking about local memorialization practices for over a decade when the local tour company launched a new excursion in 2017 highlighting the “7 Wonders of Győr.”  Until then, I didn’t even know there were 7 Wonders connected with the city, and I never learned what the tour included because it rained the day Irene and I planned to enjoy this outing.  When we came back the following year, it had disappeared from the offerings.  But I decided that when the opportunity came, I would assemble my own 7 Wonders and highlight obscure and unknown locations that played roles in the Holocaust.

There were a lot of potential choices.  I could have picked the Capuchin Church, along the banks of the Raba River by the Kettös híd (bridge).  Devout churchgoers packed the house for a special mass in August 1938, praying for the health of imprisoned Ferenc Szálasi, head of the virulently anti-Semitic Hungarist movement with its black-uniformed Arrow Cross equivalent of the Nazi SS.  Or I could have selected the empty lot on Arpád utca (street), where the local Gestapo office had been.  I chose a cluster that ranged from the first McDonald’s in town, built on the site of the Arrow Cross headquarters, to the county archives where Arrow Cross goons and their fellow travellers in the gendarmerie jailed, interrogated, and hanged their victims.   At least two of my choices, the path of the miserable trek from the ghetto to the collection camp before deportation to Auschwitz and the archipelago of theft that included government offices and warehouses where property stolen from Jews was managed, stored, and distributed, stretched the notion of specific places, but this was my list, and I could do what I wanted with it.

Those places that survived the cut form the substance of the presentation shown here.  The occasion was a one-day conference relating to the Holocaust within a reunion of Jewish people connected to the city.  The event during the weekend of July 5-7, 2024, marked the 80th anniversary of the isolation, pauperization, and deportation of the city’s Jews.  Many of the nearly 200 people who attended came from Australia, Israel, and the United States.  The affair was ably planned and organized by Peter Krausz and his Jewish Roots in Győr Foundation.   When Peter invited me to make a presentation, I knew this was my chance to reveal my version of the 7 Wonders and accepted immediately.  Coming twenty-five years after my first series of lectures at a Hungarian University and more than a decade after my earlier book Hungarian Borderlands:  from the Habsburg Empire to the Axis Alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and the European Union appeared, this put a period on a long fraught personal relationship with the country of my parents’ birth.

Dr Frank N Schubert