“It is not fair to born afterwards. Simply a fraud. Because the question pops up all the time. What would I have done there, that time. Naturally, my situation is an easy one. As Jewish I did feel back than that the question is not particularly harsh. But definitely existing. It approached me first during pregnancy. When on the corridor in front of my gynaecologist’s waiting toom we waited for nearly an hour. With Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. I was reading. The standing felt exhausting. And then came the question for the first time: how would I have bare there, at that time? And many times since then.
Discussing parners are the author, Júlia Vajda, sociologist and psychologist at ELTE TáTK and her sociology students, Réka Vályi, KRE and Dóri Szegő.
The discussion will be broadcasted on the YouTube channel of FUGA where it is going to remain available afterwards:
The life stories that were given by our interviewees evolve specifically and somewhat become parts of our own stories. The author of the volume has been researching the narratives of life stories of Shoah survivors for decades – via the 1980’s interview approach of Fritz Schütze, with the help of the narrative interview technic. This summary volume is a selection by her from the hundreds of collected life path interviews, which she analyzes through the glasses of Gabriele Rosenthal’s hermeneutical case-reconstruction method.
The interviewers are usually not asked about their own stories. Hence, the volume is outstandingly thrilling as Júlia Vajda reconstructs her own story along the life narratives collected in the materials gathered. Following the simulatenously running, intertwining individual and family stories, including the author’s own – even though the reader would not question the academic seriosity of the book – one might notice that they read a rather belletristic work, a novel rather than a scholarly work.