Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Yad Vashem Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
48,1-2 (2020) 173-208
Keywords:
Deák, Pál, Diaries
;
Holocaust survivors Diaries
;
Holocaust survivors Biography
Abstract:
The diary of Dr. Pál Deák (1909-1965), written between May and July 1945, is a unique and moving document of a desperate husband’s quest for his wife Éva Gutmann (1912-1945), who was deported from Budapest in November 1944, and perished a few months later in a Nazi camp.Deák, unlike the overwhelming majority of survivors, did not wait passively at home for his wife’s return after the war, but “traveled” westward in order to search for her. The diary can be read as a long love-letter, a one-sided “dialogue” between a husband and the wife he so terribly missed. Deák’s diary is brutally honest; he writes it for himself and Éva, trying to convince himself that, by documenting his daily actions, he was doing everything possible to find her and take her home.The sole consolation for Deák was that during his some 4,000-kms.-long “journey” through war-ravaged Eastern and Central Europe, he received information in Vienna, Prague, Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, and other places, from survivors who had met Éva in different camps. They related that for a long time she had courageously tried to live and survive while helping others who suffered along with her. It is questionable if Deák can be considered to have survived the Holocaust in the true meaning of the word. He never remarried, and, without doubt, suffered survivor guilt, blaming himself because he had remained alive while his wife had perished.“I was left alone… Life goes on with tedious slowness… I linger helplessly, without a will, without a purpose.” He wrote these words in July 1945, and exactly twenty years later, he almost certainly committed suicide, although it cannot be proven for sure.
Note:
In English and Hebrew.
,
With the text of the diary (pp. 178-207).
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
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