Ágnes Rózsa

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Ágnes Rózsa b. Halász (born December 17, 1910 in Nagyvárad , today Oradea , German: Großwardein , † July 30, 1984 in Kolozsvár ) was a Hungarian-Romanian writer and translator.

Life

When Ágnes Rózsa was born, Nagyvárad was part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and was developing into a modern city. After the First World War, Nagyvárad was added to Romania in 1920 , and the new peripheral location slowed the city's growth. During this time, Ágnes grew up, completed their school career and then became in 1931 her law degree at the University of Oradea .

Then Rózsa studied for three years in Dijon in France. After her return, she worked as an employee in Oradea and, in addition to this activity, she produced translations for the newspaper “Szabad Szó” (Free Word) from the “Weltbühne”, the “Blauen Hefte” and “L'Humanité”. From 1941 she was a teacher at the Kecskeméti-Lipót High School in Oradea. On December 26, 1938, she married Gyula Schapira, a teacher at the Kecskeméti-Lipót High School, who taught art and literature there. He passed away shortly after returning home from forced labor .

In 1944, Ágnes and her parents were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and, after five months, brought to Nuremberg for forced labor.

After returning home in 1945 , the author obtained her second academic diploma in English , French and Aesthetics at the Bólyai University in Cluj (Kolozsvár) . Between 1945 and 1948 she worked in Oradea as a teacher at the commercial college, the Jewish high school and the Hungarian girls' college. In 1949 Ágnes Rózsa moved to Cluj. There she became the head of the Hungarian Girls' School (today Apácai-Csere-János-Lyceum). From 1953 she also taught at the Ady Sincai Lyceum. During this time she married her second husband, Jenö Rózsa. From 1957 until her retirement in 1968 she worked as a lecturer at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, most recently in its French faculty .

Ágnes Rózsa died on July 30, 1984 in Kolozsvár and was buried there on August 3 in the Neolog Jewish cemetery . In the summer of 2005, her grave was given a dignified version for the first time on a private initiative.

Works

  • In retirement, Ágnes Rózsa devoted herself to editing her notes from the time of the Holocaust. They were first published as a book in Hungarian in 1971 under the title “Jövölesök” (Those who hope for the future) by the Bucharest Kriterion Verlag. The second edition followed in 1978 at Magvetö Verlag in Budapest as “Nürnbergi Napló” (Nuremberg Diary) . - The German translation was published in 2006 under the title: "As long as I live, I hope" by testimon Verlag in Nuremberg.
  • In addition, she continued to work as a translator from French, a. a. for the Hungarian literary and linguistic journal “Összehasonlító Irodalomtörténelmi Lapok” (comparative literature on the history of literature) published in Cluj . Tellingly, her oeuvre as a translator also included Voltaire's writings on religious tolerance , such as an edition of letters entitled “I, the Don Quixote of the Persecuted”.
  • “As long as I live, I hope”: Ágnes Rózsa's notes begin where Anne Frank's diary ends: the young teacher was abducted from then Hungarian Transylvania in May 1944 to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp . With a lot of luck, she survived the selections made by the camp doctor Josef Mengele , hunger and illnesses, only to be selected by representatives of Siemens for forced labor in one of their Nuremberg plants in October of the same year . In the workshop, she has the opportunity to steal paper and pencil in order to record her experiences, feelings and reflections. In the form of fictional letters to her beloved husband, Ágnes records the pandemonium that surrounds her from danger to life from the gas chamber or Allied bombs, annoying routine and sadistic SS guards, but also aptly characterizes her fellow sufferers and grants deep insights into their own emotional life and their lonely struggle to remain human despite all the humiliations. In this way , a unique, authentic and moving contemporary document was created with her diary, which if discovered she would have had to face the death penalty .

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rózsa, Ágnes
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Halász, Ágnes (maiden name); Schapira, Ágnes (first married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian, Romanian writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Nagyvárad
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1984
Place of death Kolozsvár