Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust - Reactions by Sue Vice

Although my interests lie in Holocaust literature and film, I have frequently turned to Andrea Pet's work for her analytical insights.As Dalia Ofer puts it in her contribution to this forum, Pet's methodology is distinctive in following the dual path of 'positivist history and memory studies'.In this way, Pet's article of 2019 on the 'non-remembering' of Holocaust history in Hungary and Poland (Pet 2019) has been crucial to my study of Claude Lanzmann's never-released film interviews with Holocaust eyewitnesses, including that with the Jewish activist Hansi Brand from Hungary (Vice 2021).This recourse to historical research for the sake of understanding fictional and cinematic texts and their context emphasizes the necessarily interdisciplinary and transnational nature of Holocaust studies and that of Pet's practice within it.Pet has analysed not only archival materials of wide-ranging kinds but also artefacts and representations, many of which are cited in the articles for this forum.These range from memoirs to film, with a focus on figures including the Auschwitz survivor and author Edith Bruck but also the right-wing Arrow Cross leader Piroska Dely.Indeed, the role of Hansi Brand, as the colleague in Nazi-occupied Budapest of Rezs Kasztner and wife of Joel Brand, both better-known rescuers, typifies that of the occluded or misremembered woman.Such an individual, as Helga Embacher points out in her commentary on Julia Rajk, another such figure from Hungary, continues to be seen primarily in relation to a man.Embacher addresses the 'double discrimination' combining gender with 'ethnicity' or religion, and the politically motivated suppression of acknowledging resistant acts by, or crimes against, women like Rajk, but also Jews and Jewish women.In the widely repeated pattern Embacher identifies, Rajk's efforts to rehabilitate her late husband Lszl and other anti-Soviet figures such as Imre Nagy, 'leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956', has succeeded, but at the expense of her own renown.In a parallel with Hannah Szenes,