Nincs absztrakt.

The study is an analysis of the diaries of the Roman Catholic teenage sisters Margit and Judit Molnár (fictitious names), to describe a family’s strategies to move from a one-bedroom flat into a two-bedroom one in a Budapest apartment building. Their home acquisition strategies were fundamentally influenced by their perceptions about the society they lived in. One of the primary motifs was the family’s profound anti-Semitism, which rested on the dichotomy of ‘poor Christian Hungarians’ versus ‘rich foreign (i.e. non-Hungarian) Jews’. For them, the Jewish neighbours personified Jewry, and they projected their experience of them onto the entire Jewish population. In 1943 and 1944 they came to assume that the Jewish neighbours’ flat can be obtained through their own connections within the building prior to the flat’s official seizure by authorities. Their strategy based on personal persuasion remained unsuccessful because the neighbours refused to relinquish their right to live in their home until the summer of 1944 when they were forced to move into a segregated Jewish building (one of the so-called Yellow Star Buildings) by the authorities. Finally, the Molnár family was able to swap with a Roman Catholic neighbour and move into a two-bed room flat after the war. Following the nationalisation of real estate, they tried to hold on to this larger flat using the same strategies they previously observed in their Jewish neighbours with malice: they justified their right for the flat by increasing the number of residents registered at the same address.

The present study offers two different points of view of the book Éva, my daughter, published by Ágnes Zsolt in 1947. Ágnes Zsolt was the mother of the eponymous Éva Heyman. Shortly after Éva’s birth her marriage with the father, architect Béla Heyman, ended in divorce. The mother got married again, this time with Béla Zsolt, a civic radical writer. The couple moved to Budapest, but the girl remained in Oradea with her maternal grandparents. Ágnes Zsolt and her husband. managed to escape from the ghetto of Oradea and eventually travelled to Switzerland with the Kasztner Train. The diary-writing child Éva died in Auschwitz. On the one hand, from the angle of what may be called the traditional approach, the book is a child’s diary written by the thirteen-year-old Éva. On the other hand, the book can also be understood as a memoir of the mother, Ágnes Zsolt. In the latter case, the volume is monument to a complex mourning process, that of a mother who lost both her old parents and her only child at a very young age. When Ágnes Zsolt found out about the deportation of her daughter, her first reaction was a suicide attempt. Éva did not have a grave in the cemetery, the grieving mother did not know where her body lied. The fact that she was unable to give her only child a funeral exacerbated her pain. Ágnes Zsolt wrote this book as part of the mourning-process, presenting a perhaps greatly idealized picture of the lost daughter. Writing from the child’s point of view, she portrayed herself as a bad divorced mother. Her relationship with her daughter is not shown as a traditional child-parent bond: she always appears as ‘Ági’, never as ‘mother’, and she is portrayed as someone who is unsuitable for the parent role. Ágnes's pain of loss did not fade over the years. She could not forgive herself that she is still alive while her beloved daughter died in Auschwitz. In 1951 she committed suicide by slashing her wrists and a photo of her daughter was found next to her dead body. How should we read this book? Is it a child’s diary or the memoirs of a mourning mother? The study concludes that due to the lack of original manuscripts readers are expected to formulate their own interpretations.

Why was the irredentism so successful and supported by the wide circle of society? The reasons are probably the following: it was connected to a special occasion by touching the whole society itself, so the social experience and the meaning of cult were concurred. The palling of cult – among others – was related with the exchanging of the actual generation. The new generation wasn’t had the personal experience about the historical Hungary – that’s why the political leaders of the period tried to inoculate with revisionism irredentism the new generation through ceremonies of schools (which were the part of institutionalized educational system). My study based on manuals of ceremonies for teachers. I analyzed that how can manipulate ceremonies of schools the changing political aims between the two world wars. By the analyzed plays, scenes, dramas (for schools ceremonies) it can be told that the speeches and roles of these were all served the momentary aims of the actual political leadership. And they transmitted the actual countersigns, goals, attitude, and picture of enemy towards the children. The ceremonial speeches and roles reflecting steady tendencies. It follows that we can talk about a formally existed revisionistic moreover, irredentist in the level of sources cult by the political regime between the two world wars. That cult wasn’t ended by entering the Second World War but significally overshadowed and – parts of it – transformed. It helped the actual aims of the political regime: mobilization in war or rather the common effortment and trust of community for the winning of war.

Nincs absztrakt.