Szombathely, Vas County, Hungary
Anyone wanting to experience an outstanding example of placing people and families within the history of a place, should make a side trip to SZOMBATHELY and see this unique exhibit.
This exhibit brings us face-to-face, eye-to-eye, with the individuals and families of the Jewish community, from their settlement to after WW2.
Inspired by both the necessity to tell and to personalize the everyday lives of those who lived there, it builds on the history of Szombathely’s Jewish community during the 19th and 20th centuries and attempts to render tangible the void left behind by the ravages of the Holocaust.
Szombathely is within easy driving distance from Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest. Do not miss this exhibit!
I have a personal link to Szombathely. Following my initial query, Kristina Kelbert sent me a photograph of a cousin, Olga Günsberger, born in 1929 in Szombathely. We have traceable, common ancestors.
In addition to the exhibit, Kristina Kelbert spent 3 years preparing a 650 page hard-cover book that weighs about 10 lbs. More on the book below.
My notes and suggestions
For the exhibit
I must re-emphasize the importance of this exhibit to anyone interested in placing their ancestors in history. Both in the exhibit and the book, we can see members of the Szombathely Jewish community during several time periods: from settlement to entrainment to Auschwitz.
I regret not having had the opportunity to experience the exhibit personally, but my grandson Aaron’s reaction and video provided a virtual visit.
A traveling exhibit exists. I hope it will allow people in Canada and the USA to appreciate this project, and maybe replicate it for another location.
I also hope that the full exhibit will be copied and established as a permanent exhibit in a museum setting such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
My final fantasy is that an immersive exhibit can be designed to provide an experience similar to the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit in Toronto.
For the Book
The book is a fantastic feat in quality and communication. Initially published in 2016, I have had it for a few years. There are three things that I wish could be changed for a new edition targeting the English-speaking population:
Although the bilingual nature of the current book is practical, the light color of the English language font is hard to read. If a new edition is considered, use only the English translation and enlarge the font (in black) to take up the space on the page.
Considering the cost of shipping (Fed Ex was used) is way more than the cost of the book, the Print-on-Demand model could be a viable alternative. Some printers can provide international service so that a Hungarian printer can, through its network, access printers around the world.
Finally, I would love to see the book much more manageable, i.e., less heavy and cumbersome. Randolph Braham’s The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary was published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in three volumes. This approach could be decided with the printer, particularly if the Print-on-Demand model is used.
Finally
I am not suggesting a choice between the exhibit and the book. They are both valuable and outstanding resources to genealogists and historians.
My gratitude to the team who created and sponsored these projects.
This exhibition is supported by Szombathely City; the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (MAZSIHISZ), Savaria County Municipal Museum and the Jewish Community of Szombathely.
Special thanks to the team of creation:
Curator: Krisztina Kelbert
English translation: Róbert Balogh
Photo: Nóra Dénes
Graphic design: Ferenc Kassai
From Kristina Kelbert regarding the exhibit
It is impossible but necessary, and therefore possible in spite of all (that is, incompletely).
Georges Didi-Huberman wrote this in his book on whether the Holocaust can be explained, written about, and understood. This paradoxical aphorism condenses the ‘inexpressible yet expressible’ horrors of the Holocaust. It is impossible to understand and portray what happened, yet one must because it demands an answer. In the first days of July 1944, nearly 3,000 Jewish citizens of Szombathely were crammed into cattle cars and sent towards Auschwitz.
In the summer of 1945, scarcely more than 300 people returned from the death camps. Nearly three thousand; scarcely three hundred. These are fates shrouded in approximate numbers, mere names that are unable to raise awareness of and clearly express the loss.
The exhibition ‘Eye to Eye’ is intended to provide possible answers to these two dilemmas.
Inspired by both the necessity to tell and to personalize the everyday lives of those who lived there, it builds on the history of Szombathely’s Jewish community during the 19th and 20th centuries and attempts to render tangible the void left behind by the ravages of the Holocaust
Using the rich, emotional realm of photography and the multi-layered content of personal accounts, it relates the dramatic devastation wrought by the Holocaust. The objectives of the exhibition are comprehension, representation, and remembrance. Its method is to bring textual and visual representations into dialog. Its agents are the people who appear with their own gestures and movements, speaking in their own voices.
Focussing on personal fates and human experiences, the exhibition presents the history of the 3,200 strong Jewish community through 957 archive photographs, 40 themes, and the faces of 439 people, depicting the lives of individuals, families, groups, their community’s material and spiritual culture, religion, traditions, society and history, as well as its destruction in the Holocaust and its regeneration afterwards.
By doing so, it provides an insight into a part of Szombathely’s history that has remained hidden until now. At the same time, it allows one to see the everyday history of Jews living outside the capital cities in Hungary and Central Europe through the prism of a specific community.
The recurring motif of the star-shaped mirror allows us to face and reflect on history and individual human fate. Moreover, it prompts one to embark on an inner journey. In the words of Hermann Hesse:
Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path.
By posing questions about stigma, empathy, responsibility, and many other issues, a journey together through real and symbolic space might bring us closer to understanding our own personality, and also help in understanding history. The venue of the exhibition was formerly the upstairs classrooms of the Neolog Jewish Primary School from 1893 to 1944. For more than fifty years, from generation to generation, hundreds of Jewish students began their studies and lives within these walls.
Legalized violence just before deportation turned it into a place of humiliation and brutality, events that left an indelible mark in the memories of the survivors. Seven decades of silence have remained in this building’s past until the protagonists of the history of Szombathely’s Jewish community returned to tell their story in pictures and words.
Source for Exhibit Information
About the book
We succeeded in creating a unity of the textual and pictorial world, with which the complex and rich past of the Jewish community in Szombathely in the 19-20th centuries has become presentable in its reality.
The photographs in the volume span more than 80 years. The earliest dated photograph is from 1880, while the latest was taken in 1961. The basis of the photographs was provided by the so-called Knebel Photo Archive of the Historical Department of the Savaria County Museum in Szombathely, which has more than twenty thousand glass negatives. In addition, among the photographs of the photographer Géza Farkas (1890-1971), who gained recognition in many parts of Europe, there were also surviving images of the life of the Jews of Szombathely.