Repressed memory

Dealing with and facing the Holocaust is especially difficult for …………………. in this – once rural – Hungarian family we studied. Some of them do not speak of their Jewish roots, and keep them in secret. Some of them consciously obscure the Jewish past of certain family members, with others this selective memory is subconscious. If I ask about this, the respondent sometimes acts as if it was natural to avoid this theme, and there are some whose personalities have been so distorted by the repression that facing the consequences of the trauma endows the speaker with features that are in some sense anti-Semitic. My work deals with repressed family memories of the Holocaust.

The story of …………………. is elaborated here. I made interviews with her two daughters, who went through the time of the Holocaust with their Jewish – but excluded – mother. I asked both of them the same questions. They both lived close to their mother, in a tight family bond. I wanted to find out how personal remembrance shapes memories in two persons who lived through the period in question together, in the same location almost the whole time. Through the memory of the Holocaust, I want to understand the attitudes of ……………………. and my own generation.