Interview with 2023-2024 Greenberg Research Fellow Alexandra Szabó
Interview conducted by Charlotte Gibbs (PhD student in History, University of Southern California, and Center Graduate Assistant)
March 21, 2024
Alexandra Szabó, PhD candidate in History at Brandeis University, is the 2023-2024 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She arrived at the Center in mid-March 2024 for a monthlong residency to study what testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive reveal about the experiences of Hungarian Jews and Romani peoples who endured sterilization and castration experiments in National Socialist death and concentration camps, as well as the repercussions and long-term effects of these procedures on the victims’ lives. Alexandra spoke with us about her research trajectory, the centrality of Auschwitz, and what the digital humanities offer Holocaust researchers.
What brought you to the topic of the Holocaust? How did you arrive at your topic?
I am a PhD candidate in History at Brandeis University, but I didn’t begin in History. During my undergraduate degree, I majored in literature. I continued my studies in Hungary in a program of literary and cultural studies. Initially, I was more interested in poetry, but for my program I had to read more prose. Through this project, I met an author named Béla Zsolt (or Zsolt Béla in Hungarian). He was a Hungarian Jewish journalist and author from Oradea who survived the Holocaust. His wife had committed suicide, and he was eventually hospitalized because of his physical state after surviving and died of organ failure in 1949. In the four years after liberation, while he was suffering physiologically and psychologically, he wrote down everything into a book. I read this book and I wanted to know more. I thought originally that I was interested in Zsolt, but I realized it was the topic of the immediate postwar years and how survivors reconnected and got back to life.
After writing my literature master’s thesis on this author and his work, I applied to PhD programs but the literary PhD school in Hungary rejected me, so I applied to the Central European University (CEU). They only had a history program, so understandably they asked me to do a one-year MA program before continuing my studies in a PhD program. I took a course on Genocide Studies and the Holocaust, where I began watching video testimonies for the term paper. What the survivors remembered caught my attention, especially the women I listened to. I noticed patterns, such as problems with pregnancy and miscarriages. I realized that no one had written widely on this topic, which is what led me to the topic of fertility and reproductive issues.
At Brandeis University, I expected my research to follow abortions, miscarriages, sterilizations, stillbirths, and infanticides, but it was a much larger scope than what would be possible for a dissertation. Meanwhile, abortion has become a particularly researched topic, especially after the Polish and US bans, which made me want to focus on sterilizations. The deeper I began to search, it became evident how widespread the issues of sterilization and castration were.
I focus on Hungarian Jews and Romani peoples because Hungarian is a language that not a lot of academics read in English-language academia, and the field is happy to have an understanding of Hungarian sources. Specifically with sterilization and castration, there is a considerable amount of claims with the Claims Conference for victims of mass sterilization experiments from Hungary, as the majority of the victims who survived were Hungarian or Hungarian speaking.
In your study, where are these sterilizations and castrations happening? Do you contend with the centrality of Auschwitz in Holocaust research? In your research on Hungarian Jews and Romani, is this something to be overcome?
The centrality of Auschwitz is definitely a prominent theme in the field. For the Hungarian Holocaust, Auschwitz is central because the Hungarian Jews were the so-called “last chapter” of the Holocaust as the Nazis deported them en masse to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. But it is possible to decentralize Auschwitz in scholarship by understanding that despite the en masse arrivals, the SS transported the Hungarian prisoners further around Germany and its occupied territories, particularly as the war effort had shifted by 1944. It is, however, central for those who the Nazis murdered immediately upon arrival. For sterilization experiments, it is somewhat central as well. When I say sterilization experiments, I’m looking at sterilization and castration, and it is important that it is not based on sex, but the way that the reproductive organs were destroyed. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was the main location of castration by SS physician Dr. Horst Schumann, and Auschwitz I in Block 10 for sterilizations by SS physician Dr. Carl Clauberg. Alongside this, there was the Roma camp (Zigneunerlager) in Birkenau, where there were less-medically professional ways of both happening. Auschwitz is therefore central to these stories.
Another important component is that these sterilizations and castrations were professionalized to the highest level possible in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was not “pseudo-scientific,” but scientific. Forced sterilization and castration was legalized in the Third Reich in 1933 so the experimentations to pursue mass infertility among the persecuted was happening after 10 years of practice by German physicians.
But I also have the urge to make sure that my research does not perpetuate the notion that the Holocaust equals Auschwitz, or that sterilizations and castrations only took place in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I study the Lovara as well, who are a Romani kin (endanya) with a Hungarian background (be it by surnames, language, or residence). The Lovara were taken to the Lackenbach camp, which occupies a very unique borderland space, in which the Holocaust and genocide had complex dynamics in place. Raz Segal speaks about this in the genocide of the Carpathians, where besides the Nazi aim to murder, there are additional layers, such as the nationalist projects, that resulted in destructive dynamics. My dissertation examines how the Lovara had been targets of sterilization and castration in this space as well.
How do you contend with Holocaust memory in Hungary?
Most prominently, there is currently a fight over numbers or competition about the Romani Holocaust in Hungary. It is clear that the Auschwitz decree wasn’t extended to all the Romani peoples, yet there were exceptional measures in place that allowed for their deportation, while the Hungarian authorities also persecuted Roma themselves in the country. In Hungary today, there is a problematic government with a problematic politics of memory, so they say that it was only the Arrow Cross Party (ACP) who persecuted everyone in Hungary. This is not true, because many Jews had been deported before the ACP came to power, and then it got worse with the ACP. There is no denying that. It is the same for the Romani peoples in Hungary.
What I contend with in my dissertation is debunking this numbers fight. What happens with the Romani victims is that they are said to be “only X number of victims compared to Y number of Jews.” In Central Europe generally, there hasn’t been an adequate way of practicing history or historiography in terms of understanding what the Roma genocide was. And now it is too late – we don’t have survivors, and the majority of survivors were illiterate. So to understand what the numbers are and what they actually mean is not precise anymore. The Germans wrote everything down about the Jewish victims. We have clear lists of names, numbers, etc., but the Romani peoples were possibly lower on the racial hierarchies in Hungary, so as historian László Karsai notes, in the view of the perpetrators, the Romani peoples weren’t even worth documenting. Therefore, I think it is important to look beyond the numbers to prevent an unproductive victim comparison narrative.
In your research, do you see the sterilization and castration of Jews and Roma as interrelated issues, or are Jews and Roma a point of comparison?
By focusing on the local contexts, I’m exploring the specific interrelated nature of sterilization and castration. While I disagree with the numbers competition, it is true that the persecution for the Roma and Jews was, in fact, different. Sterilization and castration were types of persecution that mainly the Romani peoples were victims of. Indeed, in Germany, the Roma and Sinti had been legally sterilized since 1933. By the time mass violence extended beyond the German borders, including the Lovara, Romani peoples’ sterilization and castration was not even a question because it had been a practice for over 10 years.
When studying the Roma and Jews together, it is very interrelated. From a medical point of view, one of the explanations for the sterilization and castration extending over to Jews in a large scale in concentration camps and killing sites could be that there was a bigger number of Jews, and therefore Nazi physicians had more subjects to experiment upon and establish their own professional careers by testing newer methodologies and substances they had researched, alongside the Nazis’ original colonial plans.
When researching Jews and Romani, do you use different sources and methods for each group?
The main differences I find are between Romani and Jewish sources. The Lovara are the highest “caste” of Romani peoples, so that means of the victims who survived the Lackenbach camp, many weren’t illiterate. In the Burgenland region of Austria, they were asked about their experiences, and there are written sources of their accounts. I’m very lucky to have found this. This is not true for other Romani victims in Hungary. The majority of them were illiterate, and this is a silence in the archive that requires a different approach. I need to excavate silences, and for that, I’m using Black feminist methodologies. I read medical documents against the archival grain and biases, and I will be returning this summer to look at archived hospital registrar documents. My other approach is asking Lovara descendants, but they don’t know that much, nor want to talk about it, which ethically I must consider. But now I am in touch with a Lovara artist, and she wants to talk about this and have people learn about her legacy, so she is helping me find more Lovara accounts, and Romani sources more generally.
The Jewish sources – obviously among them the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive – are of a greater volume. With that said, there are significant silences present regarding infertility and the sterilization/castration experiments here as well, which I will talk about in my lecture. But there are amazing surprises the more time I spend watching and searching video testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive because I actually found a Lovara man recently. I have also visited archives in Hungary, Vienna, Berlin, Yad Vashem, and next year I will be a Randolph and Elizabeth Braham fellow at the USHMM in Washington, DC.
You have conducted interviews for testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. Does this experience as an interviewer change how you approach oral testimonies in your own research?
Yes. Before interviewing survivors myself, I was very frustrated with interviewers, especially with the interview styles of the 1990s. But I understand that a lot of time has passed, and we have a different understanding than that of 30 years ago. For instance, we didn’t even have the language as we do today from the field of gender and sexuality studies. What changed, however, is that now I know how hard it is to sit in front of a survivor, ask questions to have them open a part of themself, and give us painful memories. I’m sensitive about this myself because my topic in particular is intimate. My approach to interviewers and survivors is totally different. I have also recorded my own interviews with Hungarian Jews myself that I will never publish for these reasons.
You have also worked a lot with digital humanities. What does this work allow you to do?
Yes, I am a researcher in a project called Digital Lens together with sociologist Ildiko Barna and data scientist Eszter Katona at ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary. We work with immediate postwar survivor testimonies that were based on interviews conducted by the National Committee for Attending Deportees (DEGOB). There are over 3,666 typed interviews that were the result of a grassroots effort in Hungary where they had the survivors sit down and tell the staff what had happened. This is an incredible source base because at the time of typing up these experiences, there was no conventional Holocaust language yet. The whole collection has already been digitized, translated to English, and made available online here. With Ildiko, we wanted to understand the language, the topography, and the gendered experiences in the immediate postwar period, so we decided to do something with this. Ildiko as the Head of the Department of Social Research Methodology introduced me to other amazing scholars, who had access and knowledge of amazing digital methodologies, including AI and data visualization. So we sat down, wrote a grant application to connect the source base with these innovative research methodologies, posing our research questions, and we were awarded a major grant to host a research group for three years. We have just recently finished our work and are going to have an exhibition in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives to showcase our results between April and June 2024. We use all kinds of digital tools to show the survivors who express their immediate postwar memories through these typed interviews and also the language, the gendered differences in language, and the ways of remembering. You can check out or work here.
Learn more about Alexandra Szabó here.