‘Silenced Shame’: Hungarian Women Remember Wartime Rapes
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One of the film’s survivors, Magdolna Prosz, recounts in horrifying detail her attempt to resist four soldiers by clinging to her older sister, and then describes her sister’s slow death from a shot in the head following the struggle. Another witness, Mrs. Miklos Ujj, tells how women “were made to look ugly” as a form of protection: “We didn’t wash and we were covered in fleas . . . My mother made a hump for my back and I went around like that.”
According to Skrabski, it’s possible that as many as
800,000 Hungarian women were raped, and the violence included gang rape and sexual torture. Pregnancy resulting from rape was so widespread that the government suspended its ban on abortions for several months during 1945, offering abortion and STD treatment services free of charge.
Skrabski believes that “Hungarian men were also victims.” Because they were ashamed that they hadn’t been able to protect the women, she says, “[the rapes] were secrets for the men, too.”
Her documentary explores how the physical and emotional suffering of the rape victims was compounded by layers of shame–their own and that of their families–as well as by politically imposed psychological repression. Under post-war Communism, not only was it forbidden for Hungarians to criticize the Red Army, but they were required to celebrate the Soviets as their anti-fascist liberators. The women who had been raped were systemically silenced. In the film, Mrs. Lajos Vincze remembers: “You never brought the subject up—even indirectly. Forget it—that was the word. We tried to forget it.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...wartime-rapes/
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