Through the study of a life story, the essay presents remembering and forgetting mechanisms that have developed and operated back-to-back throughout the years, seemingly inseparable from one another for an outsider. The analysis concentrates on how and what individuals narrate – those who have processed their trauma and those who have not. The study is based on interviews (a biographical and several other structured ones), as well as archival sources and a documentary. The life story of the individual presented in this essay is characterised by a mixture of personal trauma and historical trauma, and an intertwining of remembering with forgetting—in this case more involuntary repression than reparative oblivion. It demonstrates that the ideal processes of forgetting and remembering, as described by Plato and Aristotle, tend to be irrevocably entangled in real life.

This study is searching for answers to the question how personal memory is affected by a crime committed in the past. How do people who were forced to commit betrayal remember their past? How does the tragedy of the past become the trauma of the present and future? The microhistorical study presents the dramatic life story of a woman participating in the 1956 Hungarian revolution. E. V., a single mother at the time of the revolution, got involved with the revolutionaries of Corvin street in Budapest, where she worked as a nurse and kitchen hand. It was here where she met and fell in love with László Iván Kovács, one of the leaders of the corvinista fighters. After the suppression of the revolution, Iván Kovács was arrested and jailed. To save his life, even at the price of her own, E. V. followed him to the jail voluntarily. According to our sources, the political police enrolled E. V. as a ‘patriotic agent’, between the first and second hearings, right before Iván Kovács’s execution on 30 December 1957. The agent network employed her services until 1977, when her supervising officer initiated her release due to what in police terminology was termed a ‘lapse in employment’. The study traces the developments in her personality across the sources. What can a woman say about herself after betraying the man she loved and the case he died for, to be able to return to her home and children?