Remz, Sean (2020) Interethnic Relations, National Identifications, and ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust in the Northeastern Hungarian borderlands. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
This thesis addresses the conceptually ambiguous matter of the bystander during the Holocaust in the borderlands of ‘Greater Hungary,’ tracing the longer-term historical trajectory that led to a variety of responses to the ghettoization, plunder, and genocidal deportation of the Jews of Subcarpathia, (Southern) Maramuresh, and Northern Transylvania. It uses dozens of memoirs of Holocaust survivors from irredentist Hungary in order to explore this topic, while also taking note of the self-identification of these survivors.
This primary source evidence suggests that non-perpetrator ethnic Magyars who were neither peasant nor aristocratic tended to participate in the plundering of Hungarian Jewry. Conversely, it reveals that ethnic Romanians of Maramuresh provided support for ghettoized Jews, while Ruthenians often displayed an emotional distance from them. The specific history of these emotions requires analysis of language and education politics in interwar Czechoslovakia, and of the Hungarian invasion of autonomous Subcarpathian Ruthenia in 1939.
The causal factors explaining this ethnic difference in the behaviour of Holocaust bystanders arise from the relationship between a given ethnonational group and statehood. The Hungarian state explicitly privileged Magyars in the distribution of the plunder it allotted in 1944. Romanians in Southern Maramuresh and the northern partition of Transylvania awaited the return of the Romanian state, and perceived Hungarian authorities’ anti-Jewish persecution and genocidal opportunism as imbricated with the xenophobia against themselves. The Ruthenians’ national ambiguity and interethnic relations forces us to focus the conceptual debates around the viability of the term ‘bystander’ primarily on them.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > History |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Remz, Sean |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | History |
| Date: | August 2020 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Bergholz, Max |
| Keywords: | Holocaust, East-Central Europe (Hungary, Romania, First Czechoslovak Republic), borderlands (Transylvania, Subcarpathia), interethnic relations, nationalism, bystanders |
| ID Code: | 987358 |
| Deposited By: | SEAN REMZ |
| Deposited On: | 25 Nov 2020 16:44 |
| Last Modified: | 25 Nov 2020 16:44 |
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