Using Archival Documents, Memoir and Testimony to Teach About Jewish Families During and After the Holocaust (original) (raw)
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Stories of Holocaust Survivors as an Educational Tool – Uses and Challenges
This article discusses the value of using Holocaust survivors' testimonies to educate students on the history of the Holocaust and more globally to help them develop critical thinking and citizenship related skills. We will present the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) project, Witness to History, and its use for educational purposes. In the first part of the paper we describe our oral history project, discuss the process of conducting video interviews and cataloguing the testimonies through a database and offer possibilities for sharing the testimonies with the public. In the second part we introduce some of the challenges faced by historians collecting oral history, such as the subjectivity and selectivity of a testimony, as well as how interaction in the interview situation impacts on the emerging story and to what extent they can be treated as authentic accounts of past events. Finally, we discuss some theoretical concerns related to the use of oral history in the classroom. We propose a methodology for the introduction of testimonies in history class, which promotes understanding of the different contributions of the historian and the witness to history and Holocaust education. We illustrate this methodology through presentation of one of the activities developed by the MHMC for teachers.
Collected Stories In the Life Narratives of Holocaust Survivors
Narrative Inquiry, 11(1), 159-194, 2001
This research investigates the use of stories that are found through vicarious experience and told in a life narrative in order to communicate the meaning of the personal past. Through the interpretation of the life narratives of Holocaust survivors, we argue that stories outside of direct experience, collected stories, form the background of personal narratives. Collected stories are pieces of social interaction and context that are integrated in our presentation of the past, and self understanding, because they are personally relevant to us and congruent with the situation of telling. These stories have the potential to lose the indications that they are outside of direct experience and become indistinguishable from other stories that draw upon direct experience. Collected stories serve to situate our stories of the past and identity within a cultural horizon of sense and meaning.
The Oral History Review, 2019
NOTE: THERE IS A REVISED VERSION OF THIS PAPER THAT WILL BE COMING OUT IN WEEKS AND THAT I WILL POST HERE, DELETING THIS ENTRY. engaging Holocaust survivors primarily as “witnesses” who provide “testimony”—which has long been the prevailing paradigm of practice with survivors—radically oversimplifies both survivors’ lives and their accounts of their lives. Similarly, the conventional “testimony” model limits the extent to which we are likely become engaged in, and implicated by, survivors’ retelling. The author has been making those arguments for over forty years. Here, the focus is primarily on teaching “beyond testimony”: especially through immersion in survivors’ recounting as a deliberate, situated, multiply contingent process in which students themselves become, in a survivors’ phrase, “participants in a conversation.” In the author’s classroom, collaborative exploration, participation in conversation, replaces “receiving a testimony” as the guiding paradigm. Students’ responses to such conversations are featured. One student wrote about a survivor who visited the class: “She was not ‘just’ a survivor, if I can say it that way. And that made her being a survivor much more significant. The ‘not-survivor’ part of her—the experiences and traits that are just like us or people we know—is what made the ‘survivor part’ real. Not a symbol of the Holocaust. But one of us.” Engaging individual survivors as “one of us” rather than “symbols of the Holocaust” can transform how we teach about genocide, and the few who live after, even when only memoirs, recordings, and transcripts remain.
Stories of the Holocaust: Teaching theHidden Narrative
1997
Every November, as the world remembers the devastation of Kristallnacht, I teach the Stories of the Holocaust course. The idea of teaching the Holocaust through first person narratives of victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers took shape during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with my father, a survivor of the Holocaust. It was in this visit that I fully realized the power of narratives as I uncovered the hidden narrative I share with my father. His inability to speak his experiences shaped my personal vision of who I am, of my father, and of the world. My father's silence kept me from fully knowing him and myself. In the absence of my father's stories, I shaped him in the image of Holocaust stereotypes. I perceived his silence in my life as the helpless weakness of the victim. Amidst the haunting images housed in the museum, my father began to tell me his escape stories. In his stories, I encountered my father the hero, and saw him as I had never seen him before, through eyes of compassion and deep admiration. This encounter with my father's heroism put me in touch with my own and I was moved to create the Stories of the Holocaust course.
A Cache of Family Letters and the Historiography of the Holocaust: Interpretive Reflections
The Journal of Holocaust Research 36/4, 2022
Scholars of the Holocaust have long recognized that ordinary people’s accounts, by definition subjective and individual, can deepen our understanding of the experience and impact of the genocide. The distinctive value of personal letters, however, particularly collections of sustained correspondence among multiple writers, has not yet been fully appreciated or explored in Holocaust historiography. Over the past decade or so, more and more collections of personal correspondence relating to the Holocaust have been unearthed. Their distinctive form and burgeoning numbers stimulate questions about their potential historical significance and how, in both practical and analytical terms, they might most fruitfully be approached. Building on my longstanding work with the family letters of Rudolf Schwab, a German-Jewish refugee who eventually ended up in South Africa, Ireflect in this essay on a series of methodological questions surrounding the use of such private collections in Holocaust historiography. How might they differ, as sources, from the many testimonies, diaries, and other ego-documents with which Holocaust historians already work? Are they simply another addition to this already vast archive? To what extent might they enrich, complicate, or even disrupt our prevailing understandings? What new perspectives might they offer scholars about the Holocaust, the experiences of refugees, and beyond?
Memories of survivors in Holocaust education
Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings, 2018
The paper suggests answers to the question how the voices of Holocaust victims can still be present in educational settings when survivors are no longer able to address an audience in person. It gives an overview over very different kinds of resources like diaries, autobiographical accounts, written, audio- and video-recordings of interviews and briefly discusses recent experiments with holography to present three-dimensional images of survivors allowing interaction with the audience. Furthermore, the differences between listening to survivor interviews and to recorded statements of perpetrators and bystanders are emphasized. The author underlines that educators should be clear about the aims and rationale of their lessons when making a choice between the various resources and approaches that are available.
The Humanities of Contingency: Interviewing and Teaching Beyond "Testimony" with Holocaust Survivors
Oral History Review, 2019
THIS PAPER RECEIVED THE 2020 ARTICLE AWARD FROM THE ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION. Engaging Holocaust survivors primarily as "witnesses" who provide "testimony"--which has long been the prevailing paradigm of practice with survivors--radically oversimplifies both survivors' lives and their accounts of their lives. Similarly, the conventional "testimony" model limits the extent to which we are likely to become engaged in, and implicated by, survivors' retelling. I have been making those arguments for over forty years. Here, the focus is primarily on teaching "beyond testimony": especially through immersion in survivors' recounting as a deliberate, situated, multiply contingent process in which students themselves become, in a survivor's phrase, "participants in a conversation ." In my classroom, collaborative exploration-that is, participation in conversation-replaces "receiving a testimony" as the guiding paradigm. Students' responses to such conversations are featured. One student wrote about a survivor who visited the class: "She was not 'just' a survivor, if I can say it that way. And that made her being a survivor much more significant. The 'not-survivor' part of her-the experiences and traits that are just like us or people we know-is what made the 'survivor part' real. Not a symbol of the Holocaust. But one of us." Engaging individual survivors as "one of us" rather than "symbols of the Holocaust" can transform how we teach about genocide, and the few who live after, even when only memoirs, recordings, and transcripts remain.
Abstract The project deals with the analysis of Jewish Holocaust survivors' testimonies who were children when the Second World War broke out. The project, initiated by Professor Miriam Gillis, Head of the Carlebach Institute, Bar-Ilan University, has been carried out at Ahad Ha'am high school in Petah-Tikva since 2006. I have chosen to implement this particular project in my 11th grade class because the project offers a structured process of learning about the Holocaust from the micro, the personal experience, to the macro, the historical phenomenon. The project itself involves the study of a particular written testimony in English through predefined criteria. The idea is to introduce to young Israeli high school students the personal experiences of survivors who were children at the time of the war. Presumably, individual experiences (of children) are thought to be more accessible emotionally to youngsters. However, the process of analysis reveals the difficulty and ambiguity of Israeli teenagers to relate to Holocaust survivors. The students' attitude to the survivors ranges from identification and sympathy to anger mingled with repulsion. This is prominent mainly in those parts where the pupils had to express their own feeling towards what they have read. In other words, I have found that young Israelis, refrain from coping with the legacy of the individual Holocaust victim as confronting it on a personal basis, evokes a generally ignored threat, that of being a victim as well as the Israelis' vulnerability as Jews.
This article examines the depiction of the loss of close family members in selected child Holocaust testimonies of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland (CJHC) in relation to the representation of trauma and the practices of historiography that governed the collection and composition of these early postwar accounts, as well as contextualizing them within contemporary Jewish and Polish traditions of autobiographical writing. The CJHC’s testimonial endeavor was informed by a range of potentially conflicting motivations: documenting Nazi atrocities for future historiographical, Jewish-voiced research into the Holocaust; collecting potential courtroom evidence for legal prosecutions; engaging with the young survivors on a more psychological level; and effectively creating testimonies affirming the individual survivor’s identity as a member of two different Jewish communities: those who had perished and those who lived.