Coming of Age During the Holocaust: The Adult Roles and Responsibilities of Young Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which teenage Hungarian Jews responded to persecution in Auschwitz-Birkenau by examining survival mechanisms through the lens of young people and their accelerated development into adults. Rejecting traditional approaches that view young people as passive victims, it argues that they employed a variety of mechanisms more commonly associated with adults for survival, rooted in their fitness to work; the strength of their individual and collective memories, emotions, and imagination; and their ability to maintain and forge family and other relationships. Building on recent trends in Holocaust research exploring the complexities of Jewish agency, this article recognizes that each young person responded in his or her own individual way to the dehumanizing environment of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As such, there was no single, standard experience of persecution or survival for young people. There are, however, common themes that deserve closer examination, based on a wide range of first-hand survivor testimonies. Exploring these themes, not only does this article recognize the actions of young Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it also seeks to reconceptualize survival by acknowledging both the physical and mental ways that were the domain of adults in normal times yet became the norm for young people in their mechanisms to cope in the camp. In doing so, it advances a more humane and subjective understanding of their experiences and builds a more accurate and realistic history of survival.