VAJDA JÚLIA (BUDAPEST)
Clinical psychologist, sociologist, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
For several decades, she has been researching the personal and social consequences of the Holocaust, the survival of historical trauma, and the relationship between individual and collective identity. She applies his clinical psychologist and sociologist's perspective in unity: she sees man as both an individual with a soul and a person living in social relationships. Her work is characterized by special patience, trust-building, and respect for the dignity of those who speak out.
Since 2004, he and his colleagues have conducted more than four hundred narrative life-course interviews with Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses and rescuers. The collection is also available to researchers at the OSA Foundation and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The interviews are based on the method of Gabriele Rosenthal and serve both as a scientific source and as a narrative space in which the traumatized speaker can tell his own life story in context. He has published the results of his research in studies and books. She co-authored the volume Mutatkozás with Éva Kovács, and in 2023 he defended his MTA doctoral dissertation entitled Ott, akkor… – Túlélestörténetek a shoából. In her work From an External Perspective, she examines the period of danger through the narratives of bystanders, onlookers and eyewitnesses, thus making the question of the responsibility of the silent or passive majority in addition to the victims researchable.
She teaches at ELTE and OR-ZSE, and involves his students in research based on narrative interviews. For more than ten years, she has participated in an international encounter group in which descendants of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators meet; he also contributed to the establishment of a similar group in Hungary. In her psychological practice, she works with the inherited traumas of survivors, eyewitnesses and their descendants.
By preserving personal stories, her work enables new generations to learn not just data, but the importance of individual choices, indifference, responsibility, and solidarity. By listening to the voices of survivors, witnesses, and descendants of perpetrators alike, she creates a dialogue that builds knowledge and social self-awareness from the painful past. Her work combines scientific rigor with human compassion.
For me, the most important thing in my job is – the candidate wrote
I do various things - social research, university education, individual psychotherapy, leading groups to help with social reconciliation. In both social research and groups to help with social reconciliation, my main focus is on the Holocaust, how its burden is carried by survivors and their descendants, as well as by those who witnessed the persecution of their fellow human beings, and of course by those who inherited this burden. What I have in common in all of the activities I have listed is the help, on the one hand, to the individual, on the other hand, to society, and as part of this, the reconciliation of individuals with themselves and their peers, as well as a kind of general reconciliation both in relation to the Holocaust and the current "regime change". I would like to contribute to the fact that members of different social groups that are in conflict with each other become able to "hear" the problems of members of the other group, and through the understanding that emerges from this, they can also reconcile with each other.
I would like to create groups based on this latter objective, and I would like to research how those who feel like losers in the current new social situation can cope with this feeling.