National Research Excellence Program – ADVANCED_25 research project (2026-2030)
For a long time, the literature on the Shoah was based on the assumption that the subject was surrounded by a collective silence. Lots of oral history research projects have been carried out on the survivors of the Shoah in recent decades, with pioneering work done by Hungarian sociologists and psychologists at an international level. Much less attention has been paid to the second generation, the children of survivors. They have almost exclusively been the subject of psychological studies on the mechanisms of trauma transmission. The issue of trauma is only indirectly involved in our research. Instead, we use a mixed methodology to explore the "silence" between the two generations. The study is based on our own collections of second-generation interviews at the Voices of the 20th Century Archive and the Hungarian language interviews conducted in Hungary at the USC Shoah Foundation.
We start from the premise that silence is co-created, regulated and reproduced by the two generations in their everyday interactions, and therefore we can understand the experience of silence expressed almost unanimously by the second generation only by including the narratives of their parents in the study. Therefore ‘statistical parents’ are selected from the first generation interview collection and matched with the interviews of the second generation. The aim of the research is to analyze, compare and facilitate a ‘dialogue’ between the two text corpora. The mixed methods include statistical analysis, sociolinguistic qualitative analysis, corpus linguistics and narrative biographical analysis.