Walking a Fine Line: Hungarian-Jewish Survivors and the Discourse Surrounding Sexual Violence in Postwar Testimonies

An online lecture by Allison Somogyi (Yale University and University of Southern California)
2019-2020 USC-Yale Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Supported by the USC Libraries Collection Convergence Initiative 

In this lecture, Allison Somogyi will discuss her research project considering sexual violence among Hungarian-Jewish women during the Holocaust and the ways in which victims have – and have not – talked about this (often) gender-specific trauma. In her research, she explores the difference in the ways Hungarian-Jewish women discussed sexual violence at the time of the Final Solution and its immediate aftermath by analyzing wartime diaries and letters. She compares these contemporary narratives to the ways in which sexual traumas were discussed in the early postwar testimonies of the mid-to-late 1940s, and the ways in which the parameters of this discussion changed in the subsequent decades. Her current work as the 2019-2020 USC-Yale Postdoctoral Research Fellow explores how differing interviewing processes and methodologies at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California affected survivors' discussions of sexual violence in postwar testimonies. This ongoing project examines the intersection of Holocaust memory, gender, and societal taboos as they change (or do not change) over time.