Kata Bohus

The Agency of Survivors investigates the changing role of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the formation of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg’s global memory and his war-time rescue operation in Hungary. It uses a transnational perspective to investigate the interplay between the postwar mobility of Hungarian Jews, Cold War political tensions, and the evolution of Holocaust metanarratives in creating and recreating stories about Wallenberg’s relative heroism and victimhood. Analyzing the accounts of those who worked in and were saved by the rescue mission and following the storytellers and their stories globally throughout a longer period, the project complicates our understanding of the role of Holocaust survivors as witnesses in the postwar world-order in two ways. First, by investigating their changing role in informing basic concepts of the Holocaust, and second, by writing them into the history of the Cold War as a specific category of memory agents whose narratives moved across the Iron Curtain, shaping ideas of a desired postwar world simultaneously on both sides.