Torma Attila: Győr a II. világháború sodrásában - Győri Tanulmányok Füzetek. Tudományos Közlemények 15/2014 (Győr, 2014)

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

I love my hometown and use every opportunity to collect its relics. I often kneel down at flea markets to browse the hidden treasures of suitcases found in dusty attics. Once I came across a handwritten diary. It was the personal day-to-day account of a wagon works clerk who moved from Győr to Germany. I flicked through the old pages with curiosity and added it to my “treasures”. Recendy, I’ve come upon it again and started reading the faded handwriting. I had to realize that my knowledge about the events of 1945 was confined to the horrible acts committed by members of the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross Party and later by Russian occupying forces. I knew litde about the daily life of ordinary citizens. I was aware of the horrors but knew scarcely anything about the other events of the holocaust and the subsequent occupation albeit these events had directly affected my close family.

The other day, I was chatting with my Mum who is about to celebrate her 90th birthday in good health. We were talking about the war, the months after and the year 1945. My elder brother was 2 then and my elder sister was just a baby born in September 1945. What was the life of the city like those days? What about the siege? How did the local community cope with the fear and defenselessness? I was shocked by the answer.

“I don’t know, my son. I don’t know, we hardly had any news from home while fleeing the country. Your Dad was fighting at the front without news from home. We and your Grandpa, a second lieutenant of the army service corps in Győr, hit the road to the west and returned to Győr only in September.”

I found it incredible that I knew so little about a year influencing the life of masses of people. And many people living in Győr those days were just as ignorant about this period as I was, because they left the city. Győr was abandoned by nearly 50% of its people.

Perhaps it was during the Turkish occupation of Hungary in medieval times that Győr last saw a migration of this size.

After this, I did some research to find that this period of Győr was so little studied that even the birth data of Győr’s Arrow Cross Party member mayor were not available.

I thought that if Gyula Szávay wrote a monograph on all local details and events of the 18 months of the revolution and war of liberty in 1848 and 1849, then researching the year 1945, the holocaust and the subsequent occupation was also necessary or at least useful.

I started researching the subject. Having studied the incredibly valuable diary as a starting point I recorded the memories of my mother. Later, I got hold of a very exciting source when a friend in Irlbach sent me a document about civilian refugees from Győr given shelter there.- 13-