Monica Csango, journalist and public debater. Lecture and conversation about Norwegian anti-Semitism. Monica Csango tells this about her background.

– I had to grow up before I understood that the Holocaust was about me. That feelings I had carried were about someone else, but they were part of my life.

Ever since I was a child, I had taken in and interpreted my family’s history and constantly carried it with me: Even if words were exchanged between people, the meaning lay in everything that was not said. No one liked to talk about what had happened. So when I turned 31 I started on a journey in my own and my family’s history.

It was then that I understood that feelings can be inherited. That what my family had experienced would shape my life and my thoughts. Later, this has become a kind of life project for me and it has resulted in a documentary film “Evig Din”, a book “Concealments” and a number of lectures.

The content of these is historical, but the subtext is: History is part of us. And feelings they can be inherited between generations.

Monica Csango has worked as a journalist and editor for 20 years. In 2005, she received the Amanda prize for best documentary for the film Evig din. She is an active social debater and lecturer, and has written a number of chronicles about human rights, democracy and what it is like to be Jewish in Norway today.

In 2005, Csango made the documentary film Evig din, which was about her Hungarian family and her grandfather’s mysterious disappearance during the Second World War. In the same year, the film received an Amanda award in the category of best documentary film. In March 1942, the grandfather Ferenc was sent from Hungary to forced labor in Donetsk (in today’s Ukraine) together with 70,000 other Hungarian Jews, while the pregnant grandmother Magda managed to escape. The last traces of the grandfather were in Bombay in 1946. It is unknown how the grandfather got to India.

Csango’s father came to Norway as a refugee in 1969 (via Yugoslavia and Italy) helped by the diplomat Geir Grung. The grandmother Magda died in 2014 without having seen the man again. The grandmother and grandfather came to Norway as refugees in 1947 from a war-torn Hungary. In 2017, the book Fortielser came out. My Jewish family history published by Kagge forlag. This book delves deeper into the psychological aspects of how emotions are passed down in families.

The more Csango delved into his family’s history, the more emotions were brought to life. She shows how people carry history with them in their lives, and how Jews living today process it. It made her understand the grief she herself had carried for many years: A grief for all those she had lost.

Csango is currently communications manager for the Church’s SOS

Photo: Sturlason