Éva Kovács and Júlia Vajda Abused Past – Forced Future: The Story of Roza and Matild 1 Mengele’s team sterilized both women in 1944. They could thus have no children. They were adolescents when this happened. They did not have the time or chance to become familiar with their adult bodies. Their first sexual experiences were the sterilization itself and the accompanying brutality. Of course they would always be able to adopt children. But for some reason neither of them did so. Even though Roza – unlike Matild – had a happy marriage. Her first husband, who was considerably older, had passed away and she had married a second time. Matild had not. Her marriage was short and unhappy and ended in divorce. Her only happy relationship ended when the man experienced paranoid schizophrenia. It is awkward to ask what the reasons for the differences were. It is awkward because it reaches into levels of human life and suffering where we feel we perhaps have no right to explore. It might be best to just tell their stories, but we do not have the time to do so. Telling stories requires time and trust. But let us pursue this. It is possible that the little time we have may be enough for us to learn something about the life after the Shoah, thereby rehabilitating them in their personality as a whole. This is the way in which we might avoid regarding them exclusively in a humiliating manner as Shoah survivors. * 1 We have learnt the stories of Roza and Matild while conducting interviews with them as part of the work of the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project in 2003. There is possible to find one of our almost sixty Hungarian interviews shortened and translated to German on the web-page www.mauthausen- memorial.at . 1