Sites of Memory
Jacob Goodwin’s great-grandfather was an Austro-Hungarian Jew. That’s what propelled Jacob, a senior history major, to go to Hungary. Though Jacob’s ancestor emigrated to the U.S. in 1900, the Jews who remained in his birthplace in northern Hungary would eventually be deported, and most murdered, by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Jacob is interested in Jewish sites of memory, public places such as cemeteries, synagogues, and memorials that are distinctly Jewish but remain in communities whose Jewish populations have been decimated. How do communities deal with these sites? How do they incorporate them into their historical memory, if they do at all?
Learning that the majority of Jewish cemeteries in Hungary are untended, and armed with a UNH research grant, Jacob crafted a project: in the summer of 2010, he would adopt a Jewish cemetery in Hungary and restore it, and collect oral histories from town residents to ascertain how this site and other local Jewish sites figure in their historical awareness.
He chose a cemetery in Albertirsa, a town about an hour south of Budapest. The town had, at one time, a significant Jewish population, evidenced by an old synagogue. Now its cemetery was run-down and untended, except that a local woman, Judit, mowed the lawn a few times a year on contract from a Budapest Jewish organization. At their first meeting, Judit offered to host Jacob with her family for the summer. It was a stroke of luck for Jacob: total immersion in Hungarian culture (the family did not speak English) and an entrée into the community. Through his host family, he was able to find translators and interview townspeople, including the town historian, the mayor, and the town's only living survivor of the Nazi Jewish deportations.
What did he learn? "A lot!" says Jacob. The survivor interview by itself was amazing: after enduring Nazi brutality, he was freed from a work camp in northern Yugoslavia by a sympathetic Nazi officer and then walked hundreds of miles through a war zone of Soviet and fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross soldiers to his hometown. Quite a feat.
But Jacob also learned things that more directly informed his project. “One of the things I discovered on the first day I was there was that there was a statue to this doctor in the center of town—a famous ears, eyes, nose, and throat specialist,” says Jacob. “Afterwards, I looked it up and he was actually a Jewish doctor. That kind of put a different spin on the project right away because it was this concept of this town memorializing a Jew and incorporating that into their own collective memory…. But no one knew he was Jewish. ‘Oh, he’s just this great man from Albertirsa,’ they’d say. And when I started asking them, ‘So you know he was Jewish?’ they said ‘What? No.’ So they’ve kind of taken this memorial to express their own community success and his Jewish identity didn’t matter to them anymore…. Because they didn’t celebrate him for his full identity, I think that says something. I think it shows the symbolic shifting in memory.”
Jacob explored the functional and symbolic value of several other sites in Albertirsa: the synagogue, a well built by two brothers in memory of their sister who died in Auschwitz, and a memorial built by returned Jews in honor of those who could not return.
He also learned that cemetery restoration is back-breaking work. He moved headstones back into place, cleared brush, and axed down thorn-covered locust trees. The cemetery had over 500 headstones, some of which were giant obelisks. Even when he was able to enlist help from others, some stones were just too large to move. But in the end, he left the cemetery in far better shape than he found it.
Jacob is still sifting through the mounds of information he collected and processing the experience. He seems—even now—a bit stunned by the generosity he encountered from his host-family and the townspeople. But he clearly returned some of that generosity—there’s now one more Jewish cemetery in Hungary that has been remembered.
—Susan Dumais
Jacob Goodwin’s research project is titled "Faded Memories: Confronting the Hungarian Holocaust and Collective Awareness through Cemetery Restoration." His UNH faculty mentor is Professor Jeffry Diefendorf of the History Department. His mentor in Hungary is Professor Laszo Varadi of the University of Corvinus in Budapest.
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