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Author(s) -
Tim Cole
Publication year - 2013
Language(s) - English
DOI - 10.7788/az.1973.69.1.91
Tim Cole: Traces of the Holocaust. Journeying in and out of the Ghettos. Continuum. London u.a. 2011. IX, 177 S., Ill., graph. Darst. ISBN 978-1-441-16996-9. (€ 29,99.) Tim C o l e ’ s innovative previous monograph on ghettoization extensively drew on insights gained from the “spatial turn” to deal with the history of Budapest during the Holocaust. The merits of Holocaust City were among the primary bones of contention in a recent Hungarian debate on the level of theoretical and methodological sophistication in Hungarian Holocaust historiography and its current international standing. C.’s new book is similarly rich in conceptual reflection but here he rather aims to provide new case studies on ghettoization and deportation to show how, especially during the early phase of the Holocaust, place mattered in many “smaller ways” as well (p. 136). Focusing on how Holocaust journeys were taken, initiated, aided and watched, the author hopes to weave together questions of “place and space, movement and stasis, people and their stories, similarities and differences” (p. 4). The stories C. tells are framed around rich and diverse material traces such as name lists, orders and receipts, newspapers, maps, passes, photographs, reports, diaries, memoirs, and letters. While some of the explorations start from historical events and go on to pursue their relevant sources, others consciously “work from the surviving traces back to the events that generated them” (p. 2). The first five chapters adopt “a place-based approach” and follow “a number of journeys into and out of a handful of Hungarian ghettos” (p. 3). The remaining four chapters in turn explore how journeys “into and out of ghettos were narrated by those we tend to dub perpetrators, victims and bystanders” (p. 4). Through reflecting on various pieces of evidence we have of these processes, C. not only manages to show how highly visible but also how strongly gendered the Hungarian processes of ghettoization and deportation were. In Chapter 1, C. discusses the curious fact that “Jewish men were leaving ghettos in a large number of towns and cities” even while deportations from Hungary were already taking place in 1944 (p. 21). Jewish men were still being called up to work in labour battalions at this point and thus, rather ironically, the Ministry of Defense became involved in saving them. C. argues here that not only was the previous vulnerability of Jewish men undone in 1944, but that, more generally, “the intersections of age and gender” proved “absolutely central to radically different experiences of what we call the Holocaust in Hungary” (p. 27). The second chapter goes on to address the mass participation of non-Jewish Hungarians in the Holocaust, exploring in particular the deportations to the city ghettos in Szabolcs County that were carried out using horses and carts. C. points to “a remarkable degree of [popular] complicity”, the centrality of personal enrichment in motivating involvement in the deportation of Jews, as well as to the widespread knowledge and discussion of various problems related to it (pp. 39-40). Chapter 3 analyses the initiatives taken by the local press in the city of Szeged, focusing on explicit plans for the future urban ghetto. It not only reveals that the location of the ghetto was publicly debated but that non-Jewish urbanites in fact managed to influence the decisions of the authorities. Part of C.’s conclusion is that “implementing anti-Jewish measures” was thus “a shared concern in the city” (p. 54). At the same time, in Tolna county patchwork ghettos were created in order not to violate non-Jewish property rights: Chapter 4 explores the motivations behind their creation and their concrete daily implyca-

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