János Hoffmann

János Hoffmann (* 1895 in Szombathely ; † 1944 in Auschwitz ) was a Jewish contemporary witness of the persecution of Jews in Hungary . He came from a well-known Jewish family in his birthplace and hometown of Szombathely. The diary entries he wrote from the time of the Second World War were published posthumously by the city in the early 2000s.

Life

János Hoffmann was born the oldest of four children; he had two sisters and a brother. On his mother's side he was related to Heinrich Heine . His father ran a vinegar factory and shop in Szombathely ; the family was known around town as "the Essig-Hoffmanns". Hoffmann studied law in Vienna and Budapest , and received his doctorate for Dr. jur. After his military service he worked in his father's company, after its bankruptcy due to the global economic crisis from 1930 in the department store of his father-in-law in Nagykanizsa .

His diary is one of the testimonies of Jewish life and thought in Hungary before the Holocaust. It begins in 1940 and describes in detail the worrying everyday Jewish life. The entries end shortly before the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, which was soon followed by the deportations .

Among the very first deportees was the Hoffmann family: János, his mother Regina, his wife Helén (Schütz) and the children Sándor and Judit, all of whom were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered there. Only the daughter Judit survived.

Afterlife

As the only survivor of the family, Judit received the records back in 1945 from neighbors to whom her father had entrusted them before the deportation. In a 1999 interview for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation , Judit Varga-Hoffmann mentioned her father's notebooks, which later led to their publication in Hungary (“Ködkárpit”, 2001).

The Hungarian-language diary entries were extracted in 2010 by the Allgäu author Dr. Ernst T. Mader translated into German together with Erika Garics and initially published as an Internet publication in Mader's blog "Sägeblatt". The notes of János Hoffmann, who was born in Szombathely and murdered in Auschwitz, are therefore also available in German in extracts and form a new aspect of the twinning between Szombathely and the German town of Kaufbeuren in the Allgäu , which has existed since 1992 .

The diary

Posthumous book edition

• Ködkárpit. Egy zsidó polgár feljegyzései, 1940–1944 . Szombathelyi Önkormányzati Hivatal, Szombathelyi 2001 (= Szombathelyi memoárok), ISBN 963-00-6868-0 . (Hungarian)

Excerpts from the digital edition in German

• Fog veil. From the notes of János Hoffmann (Szombathely 1895 - Auschwitz 1944) . Excerpts from the notes, with an afterword by Judit Varga-Hoffmann; 2010; Translation: Erika Garics, Ernst T. Mader; Editing : Ernst T. Mader. ( Online )

reception

• The Hungarian scientist Dr. Attila Katona analyzed and interpreted Hoffmann's diary entries and gave a lecture on it, among other things, at the academic conference Forgotten undeservedly… , which was organized in 2004 by the Jewish Theological Seminary - University of Jewish Studies (JTS-UJS) in Budapest .

Web links

• Document of an annihilation . Report in the Allgäuer Zeitung from June 28, 2010
• Fog veil . Excerpts of the records in German for the saw blade

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Attila Katona: Dr. Attila Katona's and Mrs. Szántó Dr. Edit Balázs's lectures on the Prominent Jewish Families of Szombathely. (No longer available online.) In: Forgotten undeservedly… Scientific Conference at the JTS-UJS . Jewish Theological Seminary - University of Jewish Studies (JTS-UJS), Budapest (Hungary), December 11, 2004, archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; accessed on August 26, 2010 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Susi Bergstein. In: The Centropa Interview. Centropa , January 2002, accessed on August 25, 2010 (interview with Susi Bergstein by Zsuzsi Szaszi). 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Document of a destruction. (No longer available online.) Allgäuer Zeitung , June 28, 2010, formerly in the original ; Retrieved August 26, 2010 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.