Memory as a Social Reality and Survival Technique in Mária Ember’s Hairpin Bend

The memory of the Hungarian Jewish Holocaust was canonised almost immediately after the liberation as the last chapter of deportation to Auschwitz and the annihilation of the last sizeable, untouched Jewish community of Europe. The experiences of slave labourers in Vienna could not fit into this narrative. How can the suffering of slave labourers in Vienna be recognised on the same level as suffering in a Nazi concentration camp? How can survival in Vienna be compared with death in Auschwitz? These questions often emerged in the private commemoration practices of Hungarian Jews after 1945 and significantly influenced the form and meaning of testimonies. While researching everyday life in Strasshof, one needs to confront the methodological question of how to construct a reliable narrative if the majority of the available sources are diaries, testimonies, works of memoir-fiction, and fragmented interviews conducted with people who survived the Holocaust as children. How can one harmonise personal accounts given at different points over seventy years? Not only the dynamics of personal memorialisation, but also changes in the cultural and political climate have left significant traces on the sources during that time. In our study, we aim at delineating those traces as well as examining the tension between personal memory and cultural-political conditions.