Fabricating fantasies
Women’s diaries from a forced labor camp
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12904284 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heléna Huhák (0000-0002-1643-7587, ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Holocaust Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1750-4902 • E-ISSN: 2048-4887 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17504902.2026.2629681 |
| OpenAlex | W7128777240 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
In the forced labor camp of Sömmerda, a group of Hungarian Jewish women formed a diary-writing community whose writing offers a unique perspective on the Holocaust. Escaping the monotony of their day-to-day existence, the women constructed a world of fantasy centered on their lost loved ones. In the Sömmerda diaries, pre-camp life appears as a world without Nazis, where the families that had been separated by the time of writing were still together. However, in the diaries’ post-war narratives, the women positioned their persecution as Auschwitz survivors rather than forced laborers or diarists.
Labor relations · Unemployment · Work (physics · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Industrial relations · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis
Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory
Hitler's Slaves
Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries
The Generation of Postmemory
"Living on" in the American Press
Women Readers as Agents of Social Change among Eastern European Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century
The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable
Beyond the ‘Auschwitz syndrome’
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |