Two Layers of Text, Many Layers of Meaning: The Materiality of the Pál Szegö Diary

“Well, at the night of Good Friday when the Lord suffered and prayed, and following that carried the cross, I started to walk, and carried my burden, and I wish that after the Golgotha, resurrection will come, liberation [will come].” 1  As he wrote this entry dated “March 30, Good Friday,” Pál Szegö waited in Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, Austria with other Hungarian forced laborers for the boat that would send them to the Mauthausen concentration camp. 2  This excerpt is emblematic of Szegö’s approach to diary writing. The entries about the horrors of the Holocaust are often accompanied by—or expressed in terms of—his Christian faith, including references to holy days, written prayers addressed directly to God, and the use of language mirroring passages from the Gospels. Like many (but not all) diarists who managed to write in and en route to concentration camps despite the severity of conditions and scarcity of materials, Szegö repurposed what was likely the only paper object in his possession. His diary was not written in a composition book or on paper fragments but in the 5 ¼ in. x 3 7/8 in. Hungarian language New Testament he carried in his pocket.

Even if this was the only writing surface available to him, it proved an apt home for a diary in which faith figured so prominently. From November 28, 1944, to May 7, 1945, he wrote a series of dated, chronological diary entries in his small book of Scripture using first a fountain pen and then an alternating series of graphite and pigmented pencils. In 2004, Szegö’s family donated the diary to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) where it is now part of the Museum Collections. The USHMM eventually digitized the diary and it now hosts the images using a viewer on its Collections website. This article conducts a codicological analysis of Szegö’s Holocaust diary written in a holy book, examining the manuscript as an object and the significance of its material features. While the diary entries are a rich text that deserve more scholarly attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries is equally important. Doing so foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

• 12004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, DC, images 206-7. All quoted passages are from an English translation of the original Hungarian prepared by a former USHMM archivist. This translation is accessible in the sidebar of the digitized collection viewer and there is currently no print edition of the diary with an English translation. There are some passages where the English grammar and syntax are not reflective of perfect English structure and the publicly available translation does not offer an explanation as to why this occurs. It is possible the translator tried to capture how a native Hungarian speaker would write in English rather than having the entries read as though written by a native English speaker. The citations are also referred to by image number (a label found on the viewer) rather than page number given that there are several fragments without page numbers in the collection.
• 2While he later changed his name to Paul Szego, this article will refer to him using the name and spelling he used during the time of the diary’s composition.

Szegö’s separation from his family and deportation from Budapest were the catalysts of composition; he started keeping a diary on November 28, 1944, after his forced labor battalion was taken by train from Budapest to the border between Austria and Hungary. Szegö was one of over fifty thousand Hungarian Jews the fascist Arrow Cross Party “loaned” to the Reich as forced laborers between November and December 1944. 3 According to the biography on the USHMM Collections webpage for the diary, he converted to Christianity before the start of the war and was born to a Jewish family in Szentendre, Hungary. Even before the start of the war and despite his conversion, Szegö would have been understood by the Hungarian government as a Jew and subject to the Anti-Jewish laws, a situation exacerbated by the Nazi occupation of Hungary in March 1944 and a coup that brought the fascist Arrow Cross Party to power in October of the same year. 4 Both the Nazis and the Arrow Cross Party shared a drive to complete the “Final Solution” in Hungary and annihilate the remaining Jews. 5 The “loaned” Jewish forced laborers were sent by the Reich to the border between Hungary and Austria to construct a fortification known as the “Southeastern Wall” (Südostwall) to protect Vienna against the approaching Red Army. 6 In the diary, Szegö describes the brutal conditions he confronted in this context from December 1944 to March 1945, including scant rations, brutal cold, hard labor in the forests and trenches, and the death of his comrades. The toll these experiences took are even evident in the diary’s chronology. He notes in the February 13, 1945, entry that he had not written since January 7, 1945, because frostbite on his hand meant he could neither work nor write. 7

In late March 1945, an order was issued to “evacuate” the laborers along the Southeastern Wall, including Szegö and the surviving members of his battalion, to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria as the Red Army drew closer. 8 Szegö chronicles the journey from Bruck an der Leitha to Bad Deutsch Altenburg, the boat to Mauthausen in which many of his dead comrades were thrown into the Danube, and his arrival in the overcrowded camp. His diary remained with him while he was a prisoner in the concentration camp from April 6-17, 1945. While he does not describe how he managed to keep the book in his possession, he was able to write an entry on each of these days, describing the overcrowding; the limited rations that led to widespread starvation, disease, and death; and the rumors of liberation and the impending “evacuation” of the camp. The consistency with which Szegö was able to write is remarkable; as Renata Laqueur observers, informed by her own experience keeping a diary in Bergen-Belsen, the diarist writing in a concentration camp, “generally could not write ‘day by day’; interruptions of several days and even longer periods of time are to be found in these diaries.” 9 On April 11, 1945, Szegö records the possibility that his time in the camp would end not with liberation but on a death march, noting, “they announced that if the enemy will approach us, we will be taken in groups containing 500 persons. They won’t let us be captured by the enemy. They do not want to take our lives, but if we try to escape, they’ll shoot us.” 10 From April 17 until his liberation on May 5, 1945, Szegö writes about the death march he was sent on from Mauthausen towards the Gunskirchen subcamp and the squalid conditions upon arrival. Such marches were a wider phenomenon towards the end of the war during which prisoners were forced to march strenuous distances as the Third Reich collapsed. The violent conduct of many guards and debilitated state of the prisoners who were already starving before being forced to march resulted in the death of thousands. It is nearly miraculous that Szegö managed to write an entry every day of the march. These passages recount the death of many alongside him on the march and after reaching Gunskirchen—including his own brother, Gyuri.

Having been a dedicated diarist throughout his persecution, Szegö stopped writing on May 7, 1945, shortly after his liberation in Gunskirchen. Although the chronological entries conclude at this point, Szegö later inscribed a blank leaf in the pocket New Testament with a timeline of events described in the diary and three that are not: the months he spent in a hospital in Linz with typhus after liberation, the time he spent in a camp controlled by the U.S. in July 1945, and a journey on the Danube from July 16 to August 1, 1945. Szegö originally wrote this timeline in graphite pencil and it was later traced over with a ballpoint pen. He added additional notes later in ballpoint pen in the second half of the page, including a reference to his arrival home on August 14, 1945. 11 The map in Fig. 1 depicts the various locations Szegö carried the diary from November 1944 through August 1945.

• 3Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 217-218. Randolph L. Braham, Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Condensed Edition (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 51.
• 4Braham, Politics of Genocide, 24-5.
• 5Braham, Politics of Genocide, 185.
• 6Blatman, Death Marches, 218.
• 72004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, images 66-69.
• 8Eleanor Lapin, “The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945,” Yad Vashem Studies 28 (2000): 203-202, accessed 1 June 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/the-death-marches-of-hungarian-jews-through-austria.html.
• 9Renata Laqueur Weiss, “Writing in defiance: concentration camp diaries in Dutch, French and German, 1940-1945” (PhD diss, New York University, 1971), 8.
• 102004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 248-9
• 112004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 35.

As noted in the biography underneath the digitized diary on the Collections webpage, following the conclusion of the war, the diary accompanied him and his son, Peter, when they fled Hungary in 1956 and eventually relocated to Montreal, Canada. The diary remained in the family’s possession following his death in 1995 until they donated it to the Museum in 2004.

One of the most important traces of Pál Szegö visible in his diary is his handwriting. His distinctive cursive marked by flourishes on letters with tails (such as j, g, and y) memorializes the act of writing, preserving his repeated physical encounters with the book during the diary’s composition. The handwriting found in the diary is also a material reminder of his individuality. Scholars from a variety of disciplines recognize handwriting’s ability to distinguish writers from one another and remind readers that specific individuals are responsible for the text on the page. Manuscript scholar Peter Beal states that handwriting reveals “peculiar distinguishing features and personal idiosyncrasies reflecting the character or identity of the writer as an individual.” 12 José van Dijck makes a similar claim when she approaches handwriting as a media and digital society scholar, describing handwriting as a definitive element of the diary as a literary genre which signifies the diary’s authenticity as well as the diarist’s personality. 13 Handwriting’s ability to communicate and preserve selfhood is especially important when it belongs to someone persecuted during the Holocaust who experienced violence and dehumanization due to the homogenization of their identity. Szegö wrote of such moments in the diary, including when his battalion had yellow stars painted on their coats to mark them as Jews and the cruel treatment of corpses in Mauthausen which were stacked on top of one another or discarded in pits. 14 The handwriting visible when encountering Szegö’s diary either as a manuscript in the USHMM reading room or as digital images hosted online recenters his status as an individual, not just one of millions subjected to the atrocity of the Holocaust.

Changes in the handwriting near the diary’s conclusion are tangible indications of the changing material conditions in which he wrote and his agency in a context of significant hardships and deteriorating health. The translator who prepared the English translation of the diary for the USHMM described how the increasingly harsh conditions in which Szegö wrote became palpable when trying to decipher his hand in later portions of the diary. Midway through the translation of the April 17, 1945, entry, the translator inserted the following note in the translation: “The diarist was running out of paper, consequently he tried to make better use of space. At the same time he might have problems with his writing instrument. He was weak, desperate. The result of those contributing factors is that the writing is very difficult to read at this point of the diary.” 15 It is no coincidence that this fluctuation in Szegö’s hand became particularly noticeable on the first day of the death march. At this point, he started writing on the move, something described in the diary entry where the portion of the passage that could be translated includes a reference to writing during the noon break of the march. He was also in an even more weakened state given that he details being given no food or drink before leaving Mauthausen and no rations to take with him. He confesses that he ate clovers when they stopped in St. Florian after the first day and was so hungry he could not see. 16 Many of the earlier entries describe how he was already weakened by hunger and exposure to illness before this point. The less controlled hand that is more hurried and slanted in the entries written on the death march than at the beginning of the diary is a visual cue to Szegö’s deteriorating physical condition, making his writing during this period all the more remarkable.

The change in hand that becomes particularly noticeable at the beginning of the death march is a reminder of how the material conditions in which Szegö found himself impacted his ability to write and his commitment to continue in these adverse circumstances. It is thus a material quality that raises questions about why he considered the diary and the process of adding to it so important. While the act of writing undeniably required some of the limited energy he had left and could have potentially jeopardized his survival, it is possible that continuing to write was also a factor in his survival. The diary anchored him to memories of the family he hoped to return to, served as a receptacle for his prayers to God for survival, offered a space to record and process watching the death and murder of many around him, and likely provided spiritual comfort as he could turn to the words of Scripture for consolation while composing an entry. In an entry from April 18, 1945, after recounting the murder of those who could not keep pace on the death march, Szegö addresses his words directly to God and implores, “I beg you, keep me alive in the future in your mercy, don’t let me to [sic] disappear that way, please, allow me to get home one more time to my loved ones, my Father be merciful to me. Amen.” 17 Continuing to write the diary could perhaps also be seen as an effort to ensure he would not “disappear” even if he were killed like so many alongside him because it would be a physical remnant of his existence, thoughts, and feelings.

Observable changes in the writing instruments Szegö used similarly act as markers of his worsening situation and the agency he exercised to try to survive. While there are several instances in which the entries are written in a different color or medium, the most significant occurs when the entries transition from being written in pen to being written exclusively in pencil. All entries written between December 1, 1944, and February 13, 1945, were written using a fountain pen. In the February 13 entry, he confesses to bartering the pen and his watch for bread and lard to supplement the meager rations the battalion received. He attributes his survival and recovery from frostbite to this trade, writing, “that supply helped me to recover.” 18 It is likely that he stored these acquired supplies in a haversack he carried with him. Later in the diary he references a haversack containing his canteen, tin plate, spoon, soap, and towel that was stolen on April 21, 1945. 19 He successfully recovered it the next day. 20 The fact he wrote about the bag’s loss and subsequent retrieval in the diary additionally indicates that the diary and writing instrument were likely not kept in the bag but directly on Szegö’s person.

Szegö wrote the remainder of his diary with various graphite and pigmented pencils. There are a small number of notes and underlines made with a ballpoint pen but, given that ballpoint pens were not widely available in wartime Europe, these were likely interventions made after the war. 21 Interestingly, the history of the ballpoint pen and the reason it would not have been accessible to Szegö while writing his diary is connected to the experiences of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. László Bíró—a Hungarian Jewish journalist—developed a ballpoint pen that worked on paper (as opposed to John J. Loud’s 1888 design for a ballpoint pen that was too harsh for the material) and contained an ink formulated by his brother that would minimize the smudges characteristic of fountain pens. He received a patent for his design in 1938, the same year the first Anti-Jewish Law in Hungary went into effect. The onset of World War II impacted the pen’s ability to go to market and Bíró and his brother fled Europe in 1941, eventually emigrating to Argentina. The first pens based on his design were released in Argentina in 1943. Beyond an order placed by the Royal Air Force, the pen was not widely available outside of Argentina during the war. 22

The shift from entries written in ink to those in pencil is a trace of Szegö’s decision to trade the pen to try to stave off starvation and survive. The pencil entries also attest to how he may have considered continuing to write crucial to his survival. While he easily could have stopped writing after the loss of his original writing instrument, he sought out a new implement to continue the diary. We can infer that he had to secure a new writing instrument multiple times based on the changing color of the pencil entries from February to May 1945 where they were written in a mix of blue and purple pigment and graphite. When explaining why many concentration camp diaries lack edits and revisions, Laqueur argues that “the keeper of the concentration camp diary was driven by his need to get things down on paper, to escape the present and hold on to an ideal or a concept in order to survive.” 23 Szegö’s repeated efforts to acquire a new writing instrument captured in the changing color of the entries is a manifestation of this “need to get things down on paper” preserved in the book’s pages. The role of Szegö’s faith in the diary also lends insight into how his religious convictions were some of the strongest particular ideals he held on to in an effort to survive.

• 12Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450 to 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 184.
• 13José van Dijck, “Writing the Self: Of Diaries and Weblogs,” in Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media, ed. José van Dijck, et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 118.
• 142004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 50, image 254.
• 152004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 275.
• 162004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 273-6.
• 172004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 277.
• 182004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 70.
• 192004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 289-90.
• 202004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 295.
• 21Jane Klinger (USHMM Conservator) in discussion with the author, December 2022.
• 22Stephen Dowling, “The cheap pen that changed writing forever,” BBC, October 29, 2020, accessed 1 June 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20201028-history-of-the-ballpoint-pen..
• 23Laqueur Weiss, “Writing in defiance,” 8.

Along with remnants of Szegö’s individuality, his desire to survive, and the conditions in which he wrote, this bound object also preserves traces of Szegö’s complex identity as a Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish. Some Hungarian Jews pursued conversion as a strategy to attempt to escape antisemitism in interwar Hungary, the late 1930s, and under the Nazi occupation. 24 Given the prominence of Christian themes in his diary, it is unlikely that Szegö’s conversion was strategic. It is interesting that he kept a pocket New Testament that only includes Scripture specific to Christianity rather than a pocket Bible that would include books shared between Christianity and Judaism. Perhaps it was less likely that a pocket New Testament would be confiscated in a context in which persecutors sought to destroy individuals and objects affiliated with the Jewish tradition. Materials that accompanied the diary after it was accessioned by the USHMM reference his conversion in slightly different terms and frames of reference. The biography that currently accompanies the digital scans of the diary on the Collections webpage notes, “He was Jewish, but converted to Christianity after marrying his wife, a devout Catholic, in the 1920s.” By contrast, the biographical/historical note from the finding aid previously included with the collection states, “He was born Jewish but converted to Christianity (Protestant) as a young adult and married a Catholic woman. Although he was an avid reader of the New Testament, he never belonged to any congregation and never attended church. Nevertheless after 1938 the anti-Jewish laws of Hungary affected him.” 25 The reason behind the change to his biography is unclear but the newer biography’s language that he converted to “Christianity” aligns with the earlier biography’s note that he was not a formal member of any specific denomination or congregation. The earlier biography’s description of Szegö as an “avid reader of the New Testament” also sheds light on one possible reason for his decision to write in his pocket New Testament beyond the lack of other paper supplies. As argued by Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, “people in desperate circumstances rely on familiar things in their effort to retain memories and maintain a sense of self.” 26 The diary entries referencing Szegö’s memories of his family and attempts to cling to his humanity in a context of ever intensifying dehumanization attest to his use of the book to “retain memories and maintain a sense of self.” Inscriptions found within the diary indicate that the pocket New Testament was such a “familiar thing.”

On the inside cover of the book his name, date of birth, mother’s name, and address in Budapest are written in ink in the same hand as the diary entries. There is also a note addressed to “My dear brother, who is reading these lines” that asks him to “please, notify my wife. Tell her tactfully [the news] when you can” (Fig. 2).

• 24Braham, Politics of Genocide, 173.
• 25Finding aid and translation accompanied the diary when it was catalogued as RG-10.515 and is currently in the collection’s curatorial file. File accessed in the USHMM David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center in December 2024.
• 26Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell: Cornell University Press), 3.

It is unclear when Szegö intended to give his brother the diary or how he imagined he would relay the experiences written within it given that his brother died as a result of the death march from Mauthausen. Nonetheless, these inscriptions in the inside cover are signs of ownership and an indication that—after the diary served its purpose as a space for Szegö to try to process his experiences and write to God—it was also envisioned as an evidentiary account and an heirloom in his family’s custody. The biographical information added to the inside cover resembles the longstanding tradition of inscribing family histories in Bibles, although the dark nature of the history conveyed, and the extent of information provided by the diary entries that follow differ from a typical family Bible.

The placement of the handwritten entries, or their mis-en-page, is a lingering trace of Szegö’s relationship with the pre-existing text in his pocket New Testament. Szegö’s reverence for the original text is reflected in his use of space; the diary entries are limited to the margins and blank areas of the pages containing Scripture. He occasionally wrote over the page numbers or the captions accompanying the illustrations of scenes from the Gospels interspersed throughout the book, but he never wrote over the main text or the illustrations themselves. The only instances in which his writing encroaches on the typeface occur when his flourishes on letters with tails intersect with the words of the New Testament, such as when these tails intersect with the section header “Akik a mennyben várják a hetedik pecsét felbontását” from the Book of Revelation on page 578 (Fig. 3). This care to not write over the existing text suggests that Szegö exercised great respect towards the book’s original contents, an impression cemented when coupled with the magnitude of entries infused with language from the New Testament.

Given that adequately analyzing all the religious references in Szegö’s diary would require a separate study, this article focuses on three specific instances in which the entries that parallel passages from the New Testament also exemplify the connection between the writing surface and the diary’s contents. Two passages in the pocket New Testament were underlined and bracketed in ballpoint pen: Matthew 6:9-15, the passage containing the words to the Lord’s Prayer, and Matthew 7:7, the passage imploring believers to ask and they will receive. 27 While it is impossible to know when exactly these interventions were made between the end of the war and the diary’s donation given that ballpoint pen would not have been available during the period of composition, these markings singled out two passages that are important touchstones for the handwritten text in the margins. The annotation of passages that are referred to multiple times within the diary could identify verses of personal importance or signal to later readers, when the diary was passed down to other members of the family, that this language figured prominently in the entries and were essential to understanding them.

Several entries incorporate language and sentiments associated with the Lord’s Prayer. The most explicit reference to the Lord’s Prayer occurs in the entry from December 31, 1944, when he writes, “My Father, thy will be done.” The translator recognized the clear reference to the prayer and made it even more explicit by adding in brackets “[on earth as it is in heaven]!” 28 In another entry Szegö expresses the conviction found in Matthew 7:7 that if one asks, one will receive. While laboring in the forests and trenches he writes, “He knows the reason, and I am grateful for the tribulations and sufferings, but I ask Him to give me strength [to bear it]. And he who is asking will be given to.” 29 This passage from Scripture also influences how he attempts to process the brutality of the death march and find the will to carry on. The entry from the first day on April 17, 1945, reads, “I keep asking the Father to dive [sic] me strength, because I don’t want to stay at the side of the road [dead]. I’m sure He will give that to me, because those who ask will be given to.” 30 Other than the entry from New Year’s Eve, which was written in the margins of Matthew 28, this selection of entries anchored in the underlined language from the Gospel of Matthew are found in the margins of other books of the New Testament—namely, the Gospel of Luke and Second Timothy. There are also instances, however, where the diary entries specifically reference the portion of the New Testament they are written alongside.

Although there are two layers of text within the book (handwritten and typeset), the Szegö diary is not a palimpsest in the literal sense given that the original text remains visible and the handwritten diary entries do not overlap with the typeface passages of Scripture. In some instances, the two layers are entangled where the diary entries parallel the verses originally printed on the page. While on the boat to Mauthausen on April 4, 1945, for instance, Szegö writes, “My Father, help me, my dear Redeemer have you abandon [sic] me? No, it cannot be the case, Christ helped me always so far, and He’ll help me now again, in the last minute. I believe in it. This afternoon they throw [sic] into the Danube the body of a brother-in-arms, who died in the morning, and this was not the first one. I got also [sic] sick because of the hunger.” 31 This passage is found in the margins above the first chapter of the Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, including the bolded section header that translates to “The apostle's thanksgiving for divine comfort in tribulation.” 32 Along with language evoking the Passion of Christ and Psalm 22, Szegö’s conviction that God will come to his aid and ease his suffering mirrors the passage printed on the page: “ . . . so our hope is strong in you, knowing that as you are our companion in affliction, so also are you our companion in consolation” (Fig. 4). 33

• 272004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 14-15.
• 282004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 60.
• 292004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 120.
• 302004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 276.
• 312004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 232.
• 32Translation courtesy of Dr. Heléna Huhák
• 332 Cor. 1:7. Translation courtesy of Dr. Heléna Huhák.

When writing in the pocket New Testament, Szegö did not flip through the original text to write alongside passages that were especially pertinent to the entry at hand. He started writing on the final page of the Book of Revelation, likely because it offered some of the most available blank space in the book where half of the page was blank. After running out of blank leaves, he turned to the first page of the Gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, to continue writing his chronological diary. As a result, it is reasonable to infer that entries like this one are directly influenced by the pre-existing text on the page. This suggests that when Szegö repurposed his pocket New Testament to keep his diary, he added a new function to the object and simultaneously maintained its original purpose by continuing to read the religious text it contained. These indications of Szegö’s Christian faith are important because they preserve the nuances of his religious identity that were stripped away by his perpetrators. 

The Pál Szegö diary is both a written account and an artifact of the Holocaust. The traces of Szegö’s interactions with the diary and some of the experiences he describes remind viewers that the book accompanied him throughout this period and is a “survivor object.” In The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, art historian Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh introduces the concept of “survivor objects,” material objects that acquired new significance because they “experienced genocide and survived.” Her study is primarily an object biography of the Zeytun Gospels, highlighting how the Gospels and their Canon Tables survived the Armenian Genocide. However, Watenpaugh also identifies art, liturgical objects, and Torah scrolls stolen by the Nazis as survivor objects that “acquired the power to recall the horror of genocide, to recollect the absent persons and objects that the Holocaust consumed. They symbolize violence but also survival and resilience.” 36 Szegö’s diary is a repurposed liturgical object that likewise “experienced genocide and survived.” Like other survivor objects, it evokes absence through lingering material traces accrued during the genocide and symbolizes survival through its continued existence. Unlike many survivor objects, it contains a written account of its own trajectory as well as specific objects and individuals lost during the Holocaust. It evokes the known and unknown along with the tension between survival and absence because the diary entries contain information relevant to its object biography while certain details—including how the diary was concealed—are not included.

Recognizing the diary as a survivor object emphasizes that its endurance and subsequent existence as a family heirloom, artifact in a museum archive, and digitized diary accessible to users around the world was far from guaranteed. Both Szegö’s diary entries and the secondary literature on death marches describe how difficult it was for prisoners to hold on to their personal possessions. For instance, in the section of his study dedicated to the Hungarian Jews sent on death marches from Budapest to Hegyeshalom, Daniel Blatman notes how many of them abandoned the rations and clothes they brought with them to try to not fall behind. 37 There are three entries in the diary—April 17, April 19, and April 21, 1945—in which Szegö describes the fatalities he observed on the death march as well as the vast number of discarded possessions. On April 17 he writes, “Horrible, terrible, so far we saw 14 fatalities lying at the two sides of the road, all of them shot in the head. The clothing, coats, blankets and other valuables in a pile on a nice [green] pasture.” 38 This entry highlights how improbable it was that Szegö himself survived the entirety of the march, let alone that he managed to write about it and keep the diary and the writing instruments, including ink for his fountain pen prior to the trade and sharpeners for pencils, in his possession. The entries also reveal that the diary is quite literally one of the only precious objects he carried during the Holocaust that remained in his possession upon his return to Hungary. As mentioned earlier, he recounts bartering his watch along with the fountain pen on February 13, 1945. 39 On April 24, 1945, he finally traded his wedding ring—an object he insisted he would never exchange in an earlier entry—for bread in the hopes that it could save Gyuri and himself from starvation. 40 Likely the diary was not considered an object of value to anyone other than Szegö during the time of its composition and was thus ill-suited for trade compared to objects with more clearly universal exchange value.

There are also features of the book that attest to its fragility. While the water damage visible on many of the pages cannot be definitively attributed to Szegö’s journey on the Danube to Mauthausen or back to Budapest after his liberation, it is a reminder that the handwritten entries could easily have been erased or the pages destroyed beyond recognition during the periods it was exposed to water. Like many writing surfaces used for Holocaust diaries, there is a discrepancy between the production quality of the original object and the longevity required of it once it became a survivor object and archived artifact. The book’s binding and external appearance now show signs of wear and tear. A few persistent remnants of the same black book cloth found on the spine cling to the mottled hard boards of the front and back covers. The book cloth on the spine is coming loose from its stitching and the text block was bound using staples, many of which are now rusting. As a result, some of the leaves detached from the binding.

The user encounters this separation in different ways depending upon whether they interact with the diary in the USHMM reading room or online. In the reading room, these fragments are stored in a separate folder where they are separated from one another by acid-free paper. Some have also been re-mounted by a conservator due to tears and water damage. When accessing the collection online, the fragments are the first 36 images in the viewer, which does not reflect their original locations in the book. This physical disruption also affects the reader’s sense of the diary’s chronology where they must piece certain entries together based on the page numbers and dated entries on the fragments. The diary’s binding is in delicate condition where readers working with the physical diary might have to use the digitized diary as a reference to determine the original sequence of the entries to avoid over-handling such a fragile artifact.

The reader is further disoriented by the fact that Szegö did not begin his diary at the beginning of the pocket New Testament. The first entries—dated November 28, December 1, and December 2, 1944—are found at the end of the book in the blank half of page 604, the final page of the Book of Revelation. While this could initially be perceived as a retroactive entry recounting the early days of his persecution, the two December entries are written in fountain pen—likely the pen he recounts bartering in February 1945. In the digital viewer, this sense of the diary’s chronology can be somewhat difficult to detect when first encountering the object because the scan of this page is image 34 out of 325. After running out of the blank leaves that likely followed the Book of Revelation (something that can only be inferred as the leaves containing entries from early December 1944 are now fragments), Szegö turned to the start of the Gospel of Matthew—the first book in the New Testament—to continue writing on December 9, 1944. This page was already full of typewritten text, so he limited his entry in the margin above the title of the Gospel and completed it in the margins and blank spaces of the next page. From then on, he wrote chronologically in the New Testament in the margins and available blank spaces on the remaining pages. Reading the diary in its original sequence always required attention because of Szegö’s decision to start writing at the end of the book and then double back, perhaps because he was uncertain how long he would be on the forced labor battalion, able to write, or alive. The re-ordering of entries created by the way in which fragments are presented to the reader further complicates their initial understanding of the diary’s sequence. Nonetheless, while they make it more difficult for those who interact with either the physical or digitized diary to orient themselves in the chronology of the entries, damage and fragmentation are reminders that the text and the object are entangled. Szegö’s real-time account of forced labor, Mauthausen, the death march, and attempting to make sense of his suffering through the lens of his faith would be lost if not for the survival of the object in which it was first written.

When it was first published, Szegö’s pocket New Testament was an inherently religious object but not unique; it was merely one of many mass-produced typeface translations issued by the Scottish National Bible Society. When he chose to add an additional layer of handwritten text to the margins of the book and carry it with him during the Holocaust, Szegö also added additional layers of meaning to his pocket New Testament as it accrued traces of his interactions, the choices he made, the conditions he endured, his determination to survive, and the relationship he had to its associated faith tradition. These traces and the context in which the book was kept transformed a once unremarkable book containing a sacred text into a singular survivor object that helped Szegö himself survive by preserving his prayers for endurance and memories of the family he hoped to return to. Its importance will only increase as memorial institutions like the USHMM confront the approaching era without survivors who can share their eyewitness accounts. The traces of Szegö preserved within the book’s pages may even inspire a degree of reverence as objects like his diary become our main connections to survivors and their experiences.

• 36Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 40.
• 37Blatman, Death Marches, 218.
• 382004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 273-4.
• 392004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 70.
• 402004.375.1, Pál Szegö Diary, image 297.