Babyn Yar as Oral History // Babyn Yar: History and Memory / Edited by Vladyslav Hrynevych and Paul Robert Magocsi. – К.: DUKH I LITERA, 2016. – p. 179-203. (original) (raw)
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The article addresses the presentation of the mass murder of Jews during WWII in the Soviet printed production. An overall trend of ignoring the topic of the Holocaust in the Soviet media discourse is unquestioned. Yet, (non)presentation of the mass destruction of Jews in the Soviet literature, which is commonly emphasized by the researches, needs clarification. If we look at the Soviet literature on the Great Patriotic War (including fiction prose), we can trace a phenomenon described in this article through war memoirs. Alongside official ignoring of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, the whole post-war period experienced mass publishing and re-publishing of memoir books which provided direct references to the murder of Jews by the Nazis during the war. Herewith, combatants’ memoirs would often touch very briefly on the murders of Jews, but give no explanations. Such reference style implies that the authors targeted the readers’ background awareness. Detailed descriptions of Jew...
Scientific Journal of Polonia University
The aim of the paper is to apply theoretical framework elaborated in oral history for the research of the Holodomor. The first aspect is relation of the collective and the individual. Regarding the Holodomor, one can find absence of pressure of official historical memory over the individual; massive of Holodomor oral history is huge (thousands of units of narrative) that allows to solve the problem of verification and to generalize the experience of the respondents in many parameters. The author also shows how problems of the degree of censoring, reference points and regarding the harmonization of the public and the private can be solves with the oral history of the Holodomor. Specificity of gender’s recalling of the past is also proposed. The second component of analyzed framework is correlation between memory and time. The author illustrates that there are no obstacles to non-trusting of the narrative of the Holodomor survivors. Third component of the framework is trauma. Using or...
The Application of Social Scientific Methods to Oral Histories of the Holocaust
2016
What new insights can social scientific methods uncover from material predominantly situated within the humanities—oral histories, in particular—and why might this methodological development be valuable for the greater interdisciplinary field of Holocaust (and Genocide) Studies? In this project, I use the videorecorded testimonies of the Shoah Foundation archive to create a testable and replicable theory about the influence of national rhetoric on memory. In particular, I research how and why the typical Soviet-Jewish Holocaust testimony is likely to differ from a non-Soviet—for example, Polish, French, or Hungarian—narrative of victimhood and oppression. I hypothesize that national rhetoric impacts memory, in particular the memory of child survivors that remained in the Soviet Union until its collapse. The mechanism that links national rhetoric to memory is the socialization, or assimilation, that these young people experienced during their formative postwar years. I suggest that these factors—national rhetoric, socialization, and assimilation—lead child survivors to recall those who helped or harmed them in a particular manner. To operationalize my study, I developed a code to trace the confluence of proper nouns and strong emotional responses in videotaped survivor testimonies. I chose videotaped testimonies, as opposed to written or audio testimonies, as the presence of metadata (namely: silences, facial reactions, and body language) is most observable with this medium. In this preliminary test of my methodology, I began with survivors born in Minsk, who remained there after the war, but intend to expand my analysis to other cities that demonstrate assimilative variation throughout the post-Soviet region. In addition to the empirical portion of this research, I also address the potential ethical problems in quantifying sensitive archival material. By reading oral testimonies as both text and a response to text, I demonstrate patterns in how this group of Soviet-Jewish survivors uniquely remembers their own childhood, wartime experiences. Ideally, this method could not only reinforce, objectively and systematically, our current hypotheses about history and memory, but could also generate new theories that scholars may have overlooked.
Himka, John-Paul. 4. “Ukrainian Memories of the Holocaust: The Destruction of Jews as Reflected in Memoirs Collected in 1947.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 54, no. 3-4 (September-December 2012): 427-42.
In 1947 the Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg held a memoir contest. Sixty-four memoirs were submitted, and most of them are still preserved in Oseredok’s archives. I examined all extant submissions in order to determine what they had to say about the Holocaust. Altogether twenty-five memoirs concerned World War II, and of these fourteen made at least some mention of the Holocaust. This body of memoirs is the earliest collection of Ukrainian memoirs of World War II that I am aware of, the closest in time to the events of the Holocaust. Already then, however, Ukrainians had become quite defensive about their behavior towards the Jews; this perhaps explains why close to half the memoirs about the war omitted the fate of the Jews altogether and why the memoirs that do mention the Holocaust say almost nothing about Ukrainian involvement. The memoirists did, however, reproduce the image of Jews as agents of communism, particularly active in the organs of repression. The majority of the 1947 memoirs none the less indicated horror at and disapproval of the murder of the Jews by the Germans. Perhaps characteristically, the account expressing the strongest such feelings was written by an older man from outside Western Ukraine. Conversely, the most outright expression of lack of sympathy with the Jews came from a man twelve years younger and from Galicia. Although the latter felt pity for some individual Jews he knew and gave them alms, he expressly stated that he had no sympathy with them as a group, as “a nation that had done so much evil to my nation.” Perhaps this is a case that corresponds to the phenomenon noted by Jan Gross in Fear, that individuals hate whom they have injured: this memoirist served in the civil administration.
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Sixty years have passed since the end of World War II in Belarus, or as Belarusians call it, the Great Patriotic War. Before the war, as Belarusian historian Kuznetsov reports, the Jewish population in Belarus made up ten percent of the national population and was as high as thirty-eight percent in the capital city, Minsk. On the eve of the war estimates of the number of Jews living in the area now called Belarus range from 400,000 to 1,500,000. During the war it is estimated that at least 400,000 Jews were killed in Belarus (Chernoglazova, 1995). Today, the entire population of Jews in Belarus accounts for only one tenth of one percent of the national population. After the war this ethnic tragedy was recorded in numbers, photos and in documents, but because of Stalin’s repressive policies many stories of survivors were never told. As a result there still remain many questions about what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust in Belarus and a repressed history is only now being told.
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Oral history constitutes one of the pivotal source categories through which we investigate the Holocaust. The more diverse the source base, the more accurately we can reconstruct the events that transpired. Initially, the study of Holocaust history heavily relied on German documentsessentially, viewing the events through the lens of sources produced by the perpetrators. These sources presented the perspective of the Holocaust's orchestrators and executors.
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Memory is rightly seen as a faulty lens, but witness testimony also provides insight and understanding to the historical narrative that would otherwise remain unlocked. This paper weighs the limitations of memory with the unique contributions of memory to address the question, "what is the appropriate role of memoirs in histories of the Holocaust?"