A Discovery Report from Archives: The Forgotten Hungarian Jewish Correspondence to Stockholm, Summer 1943

Abstract

Nearly 2,000 forgotten letters from Hungarian Jews, sent to a Jewish aid organization in Stockholm during the summer of 1943, were uncovered in the Swedish National Archive by Elena Medvedev during her initial research into the personal micro-archive of historian Paul A. Levine. The discovered artefacts sought information about Jewish men conscripted into Hungary’s Jewish labor battalions under an increasingly repressive regime. The survival and decades-long neglect of this correspondence is both astonishing and revealing. Now housed for starting scholarly examination at the Osteuropa-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin, the letters will be studied through both quantitative and qualitative methods—initially analyzing socio- demographic variables and narrative content to explore patterns of assumed selective repression. Were intellectuals and cosmopolitan figures especially targeted? What mechanisms allowed these letters to bypass censorship? More than historical documents, the letters supposed to display logic that guided the regime’s repressive choices; they challenge us to claim the Holocaust details left in silence.