Carrying a Secret in My Heart
Children of the Victims of the Reprisals after the Hungarian
Revolution in 1956
An Oral History
Zsuzsanna Kôrösi and Adrienne Molnár are
sociologists at the Institute for the History of the
1956 Hungarian Revolution, based in Budapest.
Translated by Janos Hideg and Rachel Hideg
"This book will fascinate anyone who is interested
in Hungary, and also be of great interest to students
and scholars working in the fields of historical memory,
myths and identities... The book is intelligently organized,
with sufficient historical and historiographical background
so that it will probably be easily intelligible to people
without specialist knowledge of Hungary. All the quotations
are attributed, and the book could almost be read as
a novel, if one started with the biographical notes
at the back and followed the individual respondents
through the book. The translation, by Rachel and János
Hideg, is excellent." - Slavonic and East European
Review
"Probably the only scholarly analysis available
in English on the effect of the policy of retribution
and the attendant social and economic devastation on
the psyches and subsequent educational and career opportunities
of the children." - Contemporary Review
"Carrying a Secret in My Heart is well
worth reading and will interest not only historians,
but political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists
as well. While several analyses of the children of the
martyrs of 1956 have been published in Hungarian (including
the Hungarian original of this book), Carrying a
Secret in My Heart is virtually the only source
in English."
- The Hungarian Quarterly
For a decade now, the authors have been conducting interviews
for Hungary's Oral History Archives, with the children
of those Hungarians - national heroes, as they are generally
seen today - who were imprisoned or executed for their
involvement in the 1956 revolution. The vast body of
material that has been collected, and is now at the
disposal of sociologists, psychologists and others in
the academic community, forms the basis of this volume.
This is a documentation of memories of the revolt and,
more particularly, its aftermath. The virtually spontaneous
twelve-day uprising exerted a lasting effect on the
fates of the families of the more than 20,000 who were
imprisoned and 229 executed by the régime in the harsh
reprisals that followed the crushing of the revolution
(the last of them as late as the early 1960s), with
active police surveillance extended to tens of thousands
more. This intimidation, and the attendant social and
economic devastation that it wrought, bore especially
hard on the psyches, upbringing and education, and hence
the subsequent opportunities and life courses of the
children who grew up within those families.
The material is grouped by theme: e.g. the effects
on communication within families, changes in social
status, how relatives and friends reacted, and what
sorts of problems these children encountered in pursuing
their studies, in trying to assimilate into society
as adults, and in relating to those fathers who did
return. In an appendix, the editors present detailed
biographies of the people most directly affected, offering
an unparalleled glimpse into the fates of those they
interviewed. The documentation includes letters that
the children wrote to their imprisoned fathers and the
farewell letters of the executed to their families.
Contents
Foreword Introduction Chapter 1 The revolution
Chapter 2 It's a changed world Chapter 3
Communication within the family Chapter 4 Living
with a stigma Chapter 5 Society and the families
of political victims Chapter 6 The pressure of
duality Chapter 7 Together again Chapter 8
The turn: belated recognition Chapter 9 The legacy
Appendix Biographies of the interviewees Bibliography
2003
196 pages
ISBN 978-963-9241-55-8 cloth $39.95 / €33.95 /
£25.95
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