The study investigates how surveillance affected the lives of former Gulag prisoners. In nearly thirty oral history interviews, children of former Gulag prisoners all noted the parent’s surveillance and some related how their parents’ fear of informers affected their childhood. Individuals returning from Soviet prison camps in 1953 and 1955 were treated as political prisoners and they were monitored in the Kádár Era for a long time. Both their employers and their building’s caretaker were approached to provide information about them, their neighbours reported about them, and some of them were approached to cooperate with state security at their workplace. Due to their fear of surveillance they chose not to keep in touch with each other or met only in secret. This was revealed by members of the second generation, the children of the Gulag prisoners during their interviews. The story of János Rózsás is also part of this study of former Gulag prisoners and surveillance. Rózsás was the first former prisoner to publish his tragic life story, Keserű ifjúság (Bitter Youth) but in the early 2010s he, too, was found to have worked as an informant for a couple of years in the mid-1970s. Using survivor accounts, own interviews with the second generation, and archival sources, the present study describes how surveillance was conducted among former prisoners returning from the Soviet Union and what it meant for them in their everyday lives.

The study examines where and in what form 1956 footage was used and presented to the public in the first decade of the Kádár era. First, Murai focuses on the individuals who captured the events of the 1956 Revolution on film, tracing the history of the footage after the revolution. A significant amount of footage was taken abroad, the rest was forcefully confiscated and placed under the government’s control. As dictated by the memory politics of the Kádár era, footage shot during the revolution was first used in political propaganda films. In 1957, the ideological tenets of the regime were formulated, in which the creation of the ‘counter-revolution’ interpretation played a central role. One of the key elements of the ensuing propaganda campaign was visual memory, especially reframing and re-interpreting footage shot in October and November 1956, the subject of Murai’s enquiry. After the years of retaliation, from the beginning of the 1960s onwards, some of the footage is repurposed in feature films following the ‘agreement’ brokered between the establishment and the filmmakers. The role of these moving images in this context was to recreate the visually authentic setting of the era, at the same time they also contributed to a more nuanced representation of the revolution. 1956 footage was first featured in a motion picture in the 1963 film Dialogue (Párbeszéd) directed by János Herskó. The study devotes a detailed analysis to this film, especially the view of history it represents, the function of inserting archival footage into the film, and its reception in contemporary media.

The premise of this present study is the idea that documentaries attempting to reconstruct the ‘original settings’ significantly influence our understanding of the Holocaust, by way of creating secondary memory. How do we imagine the ghettos and the lagers? Where do we place the series of humiliations and destruction? And what are the methods of documentary films as the means of collective memory? What narrative and visual solutions are deployed to reconstruct the past? These questions are important not only because they are connected to one of the cornerstones of Holocaust discourse, the paradox of the necessity and impossibility of representation, but also because the spatial imaging of past events is indispensable both for our personal and collective memory. Analysing Hungarian documentaries along with Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah, a milestone in Holocaust representation on film, the study highlights four different techniques for the reconstruction of Holocaust sites: returning to the site, the absence of traces of the past, reconstructing the place from narratives, and the use of archive footage. Place, both in the sense of revisiting it, and being confronted with or finding no traces of the past at the original site, is shown to have an exceptionally important role in the films discussed in the study, some of which were made during the socialist era when this subject was taboo. The road leading to the original site and the passing of time gained symbolic power in these documentaries. The most vivid images were achieved by showing the lack of people and the loss of original sites, by the visual representation of absence.