By Csaba Szilágyi, Chief Archivist and Head of Human Rights Program at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA)
Cover image: Interior of the Blinken OSA Archivum | Dániel Végel ©
Archives have prominent roles in memory work. They do not preserve or carry memories per se but provide documentary and material sources for collective memory creation and, increasingly, space for memorialization. A 2020 UN report on memory practices in the aftermath of grave human rights abuses explicitly relates the effectiveness of memorialization—the “fifth pillar of transitional justice”—to the existence of and access to relevant archives. Knowledge creation in archives is as dependent on the availability and content of key documents as on the agency and curatorial decisions of the archivist. Beyond determining what is preserved for posterity and how archives are accessed and used, archivists assign memory values to records in their custody; a process that is by nature selective, as it highlights certain sources for memory formation, while leaves others in the shadow of oblivion. From this position of power, archivists “are responsible in the present for how we narrate the past” in the archives, which are the space of contestation and political struggle for multivocal narratives and self-representation. EUROM’s cooperating partner in Budapest, the Blinken OSA Archivum (the Archivum) operates on this theoretical foundation.
An international archives, research and education center and urban cultural venue established in 1995, the Archivum preserves and makes available records relating to the history of communism and the Cold War—and human rights movements and violations worldwide—,post-authoritarian and post-conflict societies, and marginalized communities including ethnic, religious and sexual minorities and people with disabilities. It also serves as a safe haven for archives and even archivists at risk. The Archivum promotes free, open, and equal access to recorded information in a welcoming archival infrastructure and research environment.
The Archivum positions itself at the intersection of a socially conscious, mainstream archival institution and broadly conceived community archives, which involves representatives of the communities inscribed in its records in the archival work (appraisal, cataloging and exhibitions). It offers professional support, transfers knowledge and, on occasion, “repatriates” (copies of) relevant document collections to these communities. Throughout its various activities, it strives to recontextualize and mobilize records in its care for evidential, human rights and social justice purposes, and memory work. As an activist archive, it reflects on and offers professional responses to matters of societal concern, including human rights abuses and social injustice, historical oblivion and revisionism, genocide denial and triumphalism, political propaganda, and (mis)appropriation of memory and mnemonic practices.
As the teaching-research unit and archives of the Central European University (CEU) founded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist and investor George Soros in 1991, the Archivum contributes to the overall mission of the CEU in supporting socially and morally responsible, self-reflective critical thinking, promoting open and democratic societies based on the rule of law, and respecting human rights, diversity and human dignity. Its founder—with the core values of the CEU—was seen as an enemy of Hungary’s current far-right, autocratic, and populist regime, and the university was forced to relocate its academic programs to Vienna in 2019/20, due to an ill-willed change in the higher education law (“Lex CEU”, 2017), which targeted the CEU’s dual Hungarian-American accreditation. Although in a 2020 judgement, the European Court of Justice concluded that Hungary broke EU law and annulled “Lex CEU,” teaching activities remain in Vienna to date, while non-degree, research, academic support, and civic engagement programs are carried out in Budapest, including the Archivum and a larger part of the now public CEU Library, the best English language social science library in the region.
Set in this contemporary geopolitical context, the Archivum’s largest foundational collection, that of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Research Institute, epitomizes the struggle of oppressed societies and individuals of the communist bloc for fundamental rights and freedoms. Established in Munich (then West Germany) at the height of the Cold War, the two American radio stations were intended to counterbalance the information hegemony of the Soviet Union, while the Research Institute collected background information and provided analysis for their broadcasting services. Besides airing what they considered “real and truthful” news to audiences behind the Iron Curtain, their growing archives quickly became a repository of systemic human rights violations and state sponsored political violence, censorship and propaganda, dissident and political opposition movements, and religious and cultural resistance, and—following the fall of communism—the transition to constitutional democracies.
Concurrently, the Archivum acquired and built a significant collection on global human rights, including records on forced internal displacement and migration, persecution of dissidents and minorities, attacks on civilian population during armed conflicts, war crimes, and genocide. One of the strengths of this documentation is the Yugoslavia Archive Project with over 35,000 records covering the post WWII history of the region, a large part of which cover human rights abuses committed during the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and subsequent criminal trials and forensic investigations. The donors include international organizations, human rights NGOs, and private individuals, such as the UN Expert Commission on Investigating War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Physicians for Human Rights, the American Refugee Committee’s Balkan Chapter, and the American journalist David Rohde.
These documents are proving increasingly meaningful and useful sources for critical inquiry and memory work given the democratic backsliding of (Southern and Eastern) European countries, the resurfacing of new (but in fact, old and reinterpreted) conflict zones and the emergence of authoritarian and populist trends globally, the increasing need to understand what went wrong subsequent to the collapse of communism, the roots and causes of these antidemocratic changes, and to find antidotes by examining past forms of oppression and rights violations, and instances of resistance and resilience.
The three examples below illustrate how the Archivum turns its records inside out, uses its expertise and archival space in support of memory work applied to contemporary phenomena that are of concern in our society.
The Srebrenica Memorial Center Archive
The genocide committed against over 8,000 Bosniak civilians by the Bosnian Serb Army in the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica in July 1995 was Europe’s worst mass atrocity since the Holocaust. While it was declared genocide by two international courts, and sentences totaling 206 years in prison were handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to 17 accused, it is relativized and denied widely in Republika Srpska and Serbia, and by their close allies, such as Russia and Hungary.
The Archivum had been active in preserving, publishing, and promoting archival documentation on the prehistory, fall, and afterlife of Srebrenica. A pioneering exhibition entitled Srebrenica-Exhumation in 2010, based on unique forensic documentation from its own collections, numerous blog posts and scholarly articles, public events and institutional cooperations—including with Sarajevan artist Šejla Kamerić in her Ab uno disce omnes multimedia installation—ensured that the Archivum kept the memory of victims and survivors of the Srebrenica genocide on the agenda.
A more recent (2019-2022) cooperation between the Archivum and the Srebrenica Memorial Center (SMC), with the participation of the Dutch peace organization PAX, aimed at establishing a modern archive for preserving crucial documentation for the study of the Srebrenica genocide. The project involved designing and equipping the facility on the premises of the SMC—a prewar battery factory and the former HQ of the Dutchbat III peacekeepers from 1994 to 1995—staff training, and organizing working visits at memory institutions in The Netherlands, Germany, and Hungary. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the SMC Archive was opened in July 2021. The Archivum donated newly digitized collections and relevant duplicate copies from its repositories. The final act of this collaboration was an international expert meeting held in December 2022, at which prominent archivists, memory scholars, historians, forensic scientists, and activists, together with representatives of victims’ associations, discussed the importance of archives in justice making and memory work.
The outgoing High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, imposed changes in the criminal code outlawing genocide denial in 2021. The United Nations General Assembly recently adopted a non-binding resolution which designated July 11 the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. (The only EU-member state which voted against it was Hungary, along with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Serbia, among others.) However, by making relevant documentation on human rights abuses, war crimes, and genocide openly and freely available to everyone, and located in the place of the trauma, the SMC Archive remains a permanent and effective tool for combating the culture of societal denial and triumphalism. Today, any relevant discussion on the roots, causes, execution, and memory of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide must start in the archives.
Telling the Global Refugee Story
In the summer of 2015, an unusually high number of refugees from the Middle East and Central Asia crossed Hungary’s southern borders on their way to Western Europe. The influx caught the authorities off guard, and the few refugee camps left in the system filled up very quickly. Improvised transit zones were created at the main railway stations in Budapest, where over 1,000 refugees waited in subhuman conditions for their situation to be solved. While the unwelcoming authorities hesitated and were busy disseminating xenophobic propaganda against the refugees, the local population and civil society organizations offered basic services by distributing water, food, clothing, and other personal effects.
The contrast between the official handling of this refugee crisis and the country’s positive recent history of refugee administration, including the welcoming of the UNHCR regional office, and illegal refugees from Romania and the German Democratic Republic in 1989, and the hospitality towards people fleeing the former Yugoslavia during the 1992-1995 wars could have not been more stark. Not to mention the case of over 200,000 Hungarian refugees, who escaped after the bloody suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks and found new homes in various countries across the globe.
As a first reaction, the Archivum immediately opened its exhibition gallery for collecting dry goods for the refugees; later, in the fall, it organized a special section entitled Screening the Refugee Crisis as part of its annual Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, and a filmmaking workshop, which focused on the individual faces and voices of people on the move. Following this line of action, the Archivum decided to produce a curated online collection entitled Refugee DocsMap, by revisiting its already cataloged documentary film collection (mostly from Verzió submissions since 2003), and selecting 600 items related to the global experience of displaced people at varying stages of their journey.
In order to focus on the unique, yet universal individual stories of migration spanning from the early 20th century until present time, the Archivum reworked its methods, describing the selected films in a new way that considered a specific set of metadata including the country of origin, the temporal span, and a more personal description of the experience, as well as a set of keywords from the UNHCR’s Master Glossary of Terms. For copyright reasons, instead of the digitized films themselves, the Archivum added weblinks to publicly available trailers and their original archival catalog entries. All this data was plotted on a map, so the resulting visual geographic catalog offered a correlated map and list view of films on a split screen. Browsing options included the country of origin and specific refugee keywords. The platform offered a more intuitive access to visual stories of refugees and also served as a resource for informing and diversifying public discourse, as well as sensitizing diverse audiences and helping them to establish responsible and morally acceptable approaches to the complex aspects of migration.
Unforgetting the Yellow Star Houses
Although its collective focus is on recent history, the Archivum also ventured into topics related to the memory of the Holocaust. In 2004, it organized a physical and an online exhibition entitled Auschwitz 1945-1989, which reconstructed the first two official Hungarian communist exhibitions in Auschwitz in 1965 and 1980, respectively.
Partly building on this experience, the Archivum launched the Yellow Star Houses public history project to reflect on the official Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year 2014, which promised controversial events and inaugurations. Another motivation was to honor the memory of the last prewar owner of the Archivum building, the textile industrialist Leó Buday-Goldberger, who was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died of starvation.
The project memorialized the forced cohabitation of Budapest’s 220,000 Jewish citizens in almost 2,000 buildings allocated by mayoral decree, effective of June 21, 1944, all of them marked with a large yellow Star of David. This tragic and shameful intermediary stage between being forced to wear the yellow star and later being transferred to the walled ghetto, is hardly mentioned in the history of the Budapest Jewry, and thus barely remembered.
The pivotal element of the project was an interactive map (available on the EUROM website) showing the current view and location at street, district, and city level of all existing and demolished yellow star houses. Relevant historical documents obtained from archival research were added to the website, and, where possible, to individual houses, including pertinent decrees, lists of houses, photographs, letters, personal recollections, and video testimonies. These sources are complemented by a timeline of events and a glossary. The platform is open to further recollections from anyone who used to live in the houses.
After the map was launched, the Archivum invited people currently living in all the surviving former yellow star houses to create and participate in a public event on June 21, 2014, commemorating Jewish families who used to live there 70 years before. There were over 120 positive responses and open-house events were organized, such as mini exhibitions based on historical documents pertinent to the buildings, musical performances, and tours, recording over 10,000 visitors across the city. Recordings of local commemorations are available on the Archivum’s YouTube channel. The day culminated in a closing ceremony at the Goldberger House, the current home of the Archivum, where an open-air piano concert (Beethoven: Appassionata) was organized under an enlarged photo of Jewish men wearing yellow stars on their jackets, lined up for inspection at the Kistarcsa internment camp just outside of Budapest in the spring of 1944, projected onto the façade of the building. Among them was Leó Buday-Goldberger.
Epilogue
Records are never complete or finite, they are “always in a process of becoming.” Every interference, exchange with the record by the creator, archivist or user activates the record for a new purpose, providing it with a new meaning. As the above practices show, archives sensitive to inclusion and social justice, such as the Archivum, can facilitate collective memory creation by mobilizing records within and even outside the archival space, whether physical or online, allowing different users to engage with the recordings of an often traumatic past. Memory work performed in these spaces can have healing and redressing effects and help restore the damaged social status of various neglected and underrepresented communities or individuals.