“Hungarian Jewish Camp Diaries and Early Post-war Memoirs: Discovering the Unknown Sources of the Hungarian Holocaust”
Professional Background
Heléna Huhák received a PhD in history, a master’s degree in historical-museology, and a bachelor’s degree in history at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She worked as a museologist at the Holocaust Memorial Center (Budapest) before receiving her research fellowship at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities at the Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2018. During this time she also participated in the COURAGE (“Cultural Opposition – Understanding the CultuRal HeritAGE of Dissent in Former Socialist Countries”) Horizon2020 project.
Dr. Huhák has collaborated on the publication of Holocaust diaries, memoirs, and letters, and has interviewed Holocaust survivors and conducted research in several archives in Hungary, Germany, and Israel. Her main research interest focuses on personal sources of testimony about the Hungarian Holocaust, everyday life, and the social history of Hungarian deportees in concentration and forced labor camps. Her additional research expertise includes the examination of everyday life in communist Hungary. She has published extensively on the history of political participation and propaganda on the local level in Hungary during the socialist period, and published a book on the topic in 2022.
Fellowship Research
Dr. Heléna Huhák was awarded a Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship for her research project, “Hungarian Jewish Camp Diaries and Early Post-war Memoirs: Discovering the Unknown Sources of the Hungarian Holocaust.” Her project aims to discover unknown and unpublished accounts of Hungarian Jewish deportees. Her research aims to explore what can be learned from the texts of diaries, from the authors’ practice of writing diaries, and from the lives of their authors about the everyday life of Hungarian Jewry in concentration and labor camps. Dr. Huhák’s main questions are: how did diarists write about everyday life in the camps? What narrative patterns did they follow and to what social identities did the authors of these personal texts conform? How can we create a comprehensive social history of diaries, camps, and diary-writers? To answer these questions, Dr. Huhák focuses on the meta-history of camp diaries, including their writing, creation, and preservation. At the same time, she approaches diary-writing as a historical event with a historical context that can be better understood and about which it is worth learning more. Additionally, her research aims to develop and apply a broad methodological framework for the analysis of diaries and to integrate Hungarian Jews’ camp diaries into the international discourse on the victim-centered history of the Holocaust.