The Contribution of Andrea Pető to my Research and Understanding of the Holocaust

I am delighted to be part of this round table to discuss Andrea Pet's contribution to historical research of the role of gender during the Holocaust.In this short presentation on Pet's research I will describe the extent to which her writings have enriched my understanding of the catastrophe of Hungarian Jewry and my broader understanding of the difficult years of the Holocaust.As historians, we often concentrate on a certain country, region, or topic and therefore depend heavily on the work of other scholars.Researching the Holocaust encompasses the whole of Europe and beyond, and thus the interdependence of a community of scholars is crucial.Personally, over the last two decades, my work has centered on the social history of Jews in East European ghettos, the experiences of women during the Holocaust, and the memory of the Holocaust in Israel.The integration of the persecution of Hungarian Jews into my research presented me with great difficulty.First, I do not read Hungarian.Second, most of the research on the Holocaust in Hungary offers political perspectives rather than social and cultural perspectives, and this made it harder for me to understand the large involvement of the population in the ghettoization and deportation of Hungarian Jews.While I was interested in understanding this involvement, the pace of Hungarian Jews' ghettoization and deportation, which mostly took place during the few months between April and July 1944, is hard to grasp, particularly when one considers that Hungary's political leadership would have been well aware that the war was in its final stage and would end with Germany's defeat.(The Hungarian government had been conducting secret talks with the Allies since the spring of 1943).