New York Public Library: Rena Grynblat, b. 1926, Warsaw, Poland. Image ID: 5164371
Abstract This article examines how Holocaust survivors interpret the meaning of specific "iconic," all-absorbing memories that seldom find their way into the survivors' public account of their Holocaust experience. Utilizing the idea of public and private space, and personal and corporate pain as heuristic tools, I examine how survivors organize experience. In the final section, I argue that survivors live with countervailing pressures: the struggle to forget and remain silent and the need to tell and to memorialize. Oral testimony's communal, didactic, and therapeutic nature make it a unique platform for these conflicting forces to work themselves out by transforming narratives of suffering into narratives of witnessing.
Zachor is a place where there is no forgetting--where forgetting cannot even exist. - ZOHAR
In the course of a telephone conversation, SB, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Germany, shared with me an experience he had as a boy of sixteen. In 1941, he and his family were deported from Germany to the Riga ghetto. One night, two SS men appeared at his family's door and asked for him. The family believed that he was being called to do some task for the Germans. The men took him to an abandoned house in the ghetto and raped him. It is an experience that he thinks about "one or two times everyday," yet this is the first time that he has told the story. At the end of the story, I felt that I was in a place of risk. SB had already taken a risk and shared with me a deeply personal experience that until this moment had been left unsaid. For me, the risk was to open the door wider and ask the questions that as an oral historian were on my mind. But I was unsure. Per- haps the story should not be open to scrutiny, no matter how "objective" or "scientific" my motives. But perhaps by the very telling, the survivor had invited me to open the door wider and to probe.
MN: Did you tell anyone immediately after the experience?
SB: No.
MN: Was it a one-time experience or did you have other experiences with the same guards or others? SB: No, no other experiences.
MN: Did the experience "color" the way you saw the world while you were in the ghetto or in the camp? SB: No, it was only an experience among other bad experiences.
To read the full journal article in JSTOR, click HERE.
Auschwitz: the very name evokes the strongest loathing, the worst nightmare, the darkest side of the human experience. Auschwitz: where on some days, as many as 20,000 people were murdered. Auschwitz: the largest graveyard in human history. There lie the ashes and stories of some 1.5 million Jews and countless others. So many died; so few lived. Five decades later, all that remains are ovens, gas chambers and mass graves preserved as curious antiques for tourists. Add to this some grainy film and various slips of paper: reports and documents of various sorts. And finally, there are memories (fewer and fewer as time passes) and nightmares beyond the imagination of Kafka or Dante. Yet our knowledge of this awful place, this terrible time, is considerable. Knowledge of the Holocaust has been transmitted across time and distance through a broad array of texts: from contemporaneous accounts of journalists and escapees (typically ignored) to historical accounts and public memorials. Many of the handful who lived have told their stories: through art, fiction, poetry and memoirs. Each text paints its own picture, delivers its unique tale. Taken together they form a collage of images and stories from which Americans draw their knowledge of the Holocaust.
To read the full journal article on JSTOR, click HERE.
