András Szécsényi is a research fellow in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (Budapest) and holds a Ph.D. degree from ELTE (Budapest). He has worked as Head of Collections in the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest between 2005 and 2017. He is currently working on a research project about the history of the Hungarian inmates of Bergen-Belsen (1944–1945) and its political-societal contexts. As such he came to the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam as an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow. He tells us:

I have been researching the history of those Hungarian Jewish citizens who were deported from Hungary to Bergen-Belsen in 1944/1945 for years.

I have previously revealed many historical sources in libraries, archives and private collections in Hungary, England, Germany and in the USA.  As a second-time EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow  in September 2022, I had the opportunity to conduct researches at NIOD to investigate primarily on the relationship between the Dutch and Hungarian prisoners of the Star Camp and the Hungarian Camp sectors of the Exchange Camp of Belsen. I am interested in the everyday life of the former prisoners and I focused the narratives on camp life based primarily on ego-documents.

With the financial support of EHRI and institutional support of NIOD, I managed to collect relevant sources of these topics that prove to be an essential contribution in implementing and finishing my researches on the Hungarian inmates of this concentration camp. Beside this, I was also able to explore some narrative sources from digital collections which are available at NIOD (such as the Fortunoff Collections of Yale), and even crucial secondary literature on various aspect of the Holocaust, which are not available in Hungary. I visited other cities of Holland as well, where I successfully interviewed former deportees.

I am grateful to the academic and administrative staff of NIOD for their helpful and collegial welcome. They guaranteed a calm, supportive environment to achieve these research goals. I would like to say special thanks for the assistance of Claire Boost (Project Manager EHRI at NIOD) and Ana Bărbulescu (responsible for the Conny Kristel Fellowships) in finding appropriate accommodation in Amsterdam, which was really challenging for all fellows who  came to NIOD.

Look here for more biographies of Conny Kristel Fellows.