Szilágyi-Pető Collection

During 1986-1987, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Soros Foundation's Board of Trustees for Social Sciences supported with a grant the research entitled "The effect of long-term and vitally threatening social discrimination on the mental life of the children of survivors", which sought to explore the specific mental problems of second-generation Holocaust survivors and the inherited trauma, primarily from a medical and psychological point of view. The research group was led by psychiatrist Júlia Szilágyi, its members were psychiatrists István Cserne and Katalin Pető, and writer György Szőke. Szilágyi, Pető and Cserne, who had received psychoanalytic training together in the eighties, worked as practicing psychiatrists. It is not mentioned in the available research documentation, yet it is clear from their other communications that the problems they became aware of during their self-analysis were helpful in uncovering and understanding the family history events behind the psychological symptoms of their patients. The motivations could therefore be partly similar to those of Ferenc Erős and András Kovács in their research on Jewish identity ("Jewish identity among the generation born after the Holocaust"): the researchers wanted to come clean about their own Jewishness. At the same time, an important difference is that during their medical practice Szilágyi and her colleagues encountered both people traumatized by the Holocaust and young adults born after the war who inherited family trauma.

As a result of these two kinds of personal experiences, Szilágyi and her fellow researchers came to the decision to prepare a series of scientific interviews focusing on the traumas caused by the Holocaust. The interviews were recorded by the members of the group, who were treated as equals: during the processing of the interviews, everyone received a copy of the transcript and the group analyzed and wrote notes and publications together - this kind of close joint work also fits into the tradition of medical scientific publications. During the investigation, psychiatrist Miklós Kun and sociologist Rudolf Andorka acted as mentors.

Based on the literature and their own experiences, the researchers examined complex family histories: they were interested in life histories, and in addition, they focused on the relationship to Judaism, diseases occurring in the family, and syndromes considered abnormal. Based on their psychotherapy practice and their knowledge of international literature, they assumed that the causes of various psychological complaints could often be hidden, unconscious parental trauma. The interviews were supposed to uncover details about the transmission mechanisms of the mental problems the Holocaust survivors were struggling with. Although the conversations were perceived as non-therapeutic occasions, the medical approach resulted in a kind of preventive intention of the research: "Our study is given special relevance by the fact that this generation is now at the age when its members are raising children. So with their exploration and analysis, it is extremely important to prevent these mental injuries from being passed on to [this second generation]."

Szilágyi and his colleagues planned to conduct what we call today narrative interviews, using open-ended questions, as they deemed closed questions unsuitable for exploring subconscious content: "We did not have targeted questions - letting them know the purpose of the investigation, we asked our interviewees to talk about their lives, their families, past, present, everything that they considered important. The questions we asked during the interviews, while respecting the free flow of emerging thoughts, served to uncover the near-conscious (or to use a professional term, preconscious) content of what was said," says one of their research reports (February 24, 1988). As a matter of fact, contrary to this plan, the transcripts with an average length of 50 typed pages contain quite a few closed questions, while there are scarcely any uninterrupted, long passages.

The interviewees were reached using the snowball method - several of them known from the psychiatric practice of the researchers - and the participants were assured of anonymity. According to research reports, 40 interviews were recorded with first- and second-generation Holocaust survivors, and with one child who was a third-generation survivor. Conversations with parents, children, siblings, and in some cases with entire families were recorded separately or together, usually in two or three sessions. Most, if not all, of the interviews were conducted with people living in Budapest. 40 interviews were completed in a year and a half. No one else but the four named contributors conducted interviews. The transcripts are not supplemented by questionnaires containing personal data, but the texts usually reveal the age, occupation, and family situation of the respondents.