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Housed in archives throughout the world are videotaped oral testimonies documenting the memories of individuals who have lived through prolonged trauma. The testimonies in these archives consist of unconstrained recall of personal experiences in the context of larger historical events. The most extensive of these collections have been provided by survivors of the Holocaust. The testimonies in these archives support research in oral history, but they also constitute a valuable resource for cognitive researchers studying memory for traumatic events. This chapter focuses on a particularly important form of emotional memory: memory of the Holocaust by its survivors. How does the sharing (or not sharing) of memories shape the Holocaust survivors' recollection of the event? Archives of Holocaust memories speak powerfully about these issues, and these memories are analyzed in order to explore (among other topics) the general characteristics of traumatic memory, how emotion itself is recalled, and how the recall of a memory can lead to the re-experiencing of emotion.

This chapter details an event which occurred in May 2005. Hundreds of people were gathered to hear six Holocaust survivors speak. These speakers had come from different states—Louisville, Lexington, Winchester, Paris, and Prestonburg—for the opening of the exhibit “This is Home Now.” Robert Holczer, Ann Klein, Alexander Rosenberg, John Rosenberg, and Oscar Haber were five of the six Holocaust survivors who gave their speeches that night. The chapter also explores the misinformation and outright denial of the Holocaust in the face of Holocaust education in Kentucky. It examines the burdens and benefits of speaking out felt by the six survivors, and also details their life experiences, how they exercised their faith, and how they struggled to make a place where little was familiar home.

This chapter presents a case study of a survivor for whom the Shoah is indeed central. The subject is Jake, a Polish Hasid, for whom a bitter taste of galut, rather than an empowering diaspora, is pivotal to his sense of himself as a Jew. It argues that collective memory—the product of the transmission of a group's history and culture from one generation to the next—is crucial to individuals' identities as members of the group and products of its culture and history. Since the Shoah figures centrally in recent Jewish history, it has become a crucial component in the transmitted collective memory. The chapter draws on Jake's postwar life to accomplish two goals. First, to illustrate the difficulties that characterize the lives of many survivors. For Jake the end of the war marked the beginning of injustices created by family members. Second, to demonstrate that the methods used in Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation can undermine the richness of survivors' stories, while perhaps encouraging a Jewish identity based on victimization. A more nuanced oral history, one that examines the reactions of Jewish kin and the Jewish community, might yield a richer set of images.

This chapter assesses Holocaust survivors' stories told today not just as witness accounts, but as narratives expressing life stories that become integrated into family identities and are retold by succeeding generations. For the Jewish historical and cultural narrative, particularly of the last century, the experience of trauma and dislocation is communicated on two levels: as family discourse and as communal oral history. Evyatar Friesel has noted the ways in which the Holocaust affects contemporary Jewish consciousness. Meanwhile, Dan Bar-On describes the interpretative strategies that survivors and their children employ to communicate real and imagined lessons of the Holocaust. From these and other studies, the forms of recording and transmitting the experiences of Jewish Holocaust survivors offer lessons in the modes of adaptation and meaning-making in the aftermath of trauma. Ethnographic and autobiographical materials have thus become rich resources for research devoted to issues of survival and identity, providing an insider's view of the suffering endured by trauma victims as well as the processes by which these ordeals are experienced, incorporated, mediated, constructed, and transcended.

This chapter describes the first meeting of Nazis' children and the children of Holocaust survivors through group discussions sponsored by the Harvard Medical Education Center in an attempt to restore an equal moral relationship between both groups. The facilitator of the program managed the flow of discussion and kept a record of the relevant occurrences through video tape. Part of the data analyses included observable communication patterns, negative socio-emotional responses (withdrawal responses and attack responses) that hinders sharing about past injustices, and evaluation of their interaction during conversations. Overall, the experience was cathartic — participants were able to release most of their bottled tension. Unfortunately, the group discussions did not bring their ideas into any collaborative standpoint and participants remained resistant throughout.

The authors studied intergenerational processing and search for meaning in families in which the Holocaust survivor wrote and published a memoir. Survivors’ writing of their traumatic narrative and the reading encounters of their children and grandchildren involve the search for meaning in passing on the family legacy. Survivor-writers and the second (child) and third (grandchild) generations in 12 Israeli families were interviewed. Qualitative analysis led to identification of two axes: family cohesion surrounding the traumatic narrative and familial communication about Holocaust experiences. Mapping the families along these two axes led to a three intergenerational family types: (1) high family cohesion and open communication, (2) low family cohesion and silence, and (3) partial cohesion and survivor–third generation open communication, with “knowing-not knowing” in the second generation. In the Israeli context, processing the tensions between the overt and covert legacies transmitted through the generations facilitates searching and creating integrated meaning for family members.

This chapter introduces a woman's perspective in order to unravel the gendered dimensions of the process of creating a national identity, uncovering a profound ambivalence animating Yehudit Hendel's writing on Holocaust survivors. Hendel managed to shatter the hegemonic Zionist mold that depicted partisans and participants in ghetto uprisings as having a faster and easier transition than those who survived the camps. Nevertheless, all European Jews inexorably had to be reconstructed into Israelis in the fictional texts of postwar decades. The chapter reveals that Hendel disrupts such a view by inserting the voice of a survivor into her narrative. Thus, competing accounts vie with each other, reflecting Hendel's own ambivalence and anticipating trends in Israeli culture that ultimately gave primacy to survivors in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter also discusses that Hendel challenges the articulation of Zionist as male and Jew as female, which dominated the early decades of statehood.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Holocaust survivors were represented in Eretz Israeli documentary cinema. In the initial period from 1945 until the 1960s, documentaries, as was the case for other facets of Eretz-Israeli/Israeli culture, emphasized the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust and centered on the national collective transformation of Holocaust survivors from “ashes to renewal.” Documentaries produced in the 1960s and 1970s began dealing with the Jewish past in the diaspora and with the Holocaust itself in greater depth; by the late 1980s, they were exploring such issues as how survivors dealt with post-trauma and the transgenerational transfer of trauma to survivors’ children. This chapter focuses on the representation of second-generation Holocaust survivors in Israeli documentary cinema from the 1980s onwards.

Using the concept of place, this chapter explores the child survivors who came to Britain after the end of the war and initially settled in the Lake District. It explores how the heritage of the area, which is dominated by William Wordsworth, both excluded but has recently managed to include the experiences of these children as ‘Wandering Jews’. It provides a longer term history of such child refugees by incorporating the experiences of Serbian refugees who were sent to British schools in the First World War and how and why they have subsequently been forgotten. The experiences of the Holocaust survivor children is explored, especially with regard to place identity. Finally the chapter concludes by considering contemporary child migrants with the focus on those who attempt to reach the USA from central America and why concepts such as children’s rights has not impacted on their negative treatment,

This chapter examines the relationship between the Kohl government and the American Jewish community during the 1980s. Helmut Kohl wanted to “normalize” West Germans’ relationship to the Nazi past. The unprecedented boom in American Holocaust memorial culture, however, challenged such policies, especially with regard to the image of Germany abroad. The chancellor and his closest advisors personally dealt with and reacted to these issues, and they perceived relations with American Jewish organizations as a particular challenge in this context. The chapter explores some of the most contentious episodes of German–Jewish relations during the 1980s, such as the Bitburg controversy and German plans to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, but also explores how German diplomats and politicians at home dealt with American memory of the Holocaust, as well as Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors in the United States.

Since the early part of the 20th century, the Catskill Mountains of New York State (also known as “the Borscht Belt”) was famous for its hotels and resorts. This chapter explores a lesser-known aspect of the Catskills: the bungalow colonies where thousands of working-class New York Jews spent their summers. Focusing on the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors during the 1950s–1960s (the “golden age” of the Catskills’ popularity) it shows how the bungalow colony was not only an enjoyable summer environment, but also an ideal place for children to run free and feel safe, especially those whose parents went through unspeakable horrors during the war. In addition, for survivors whose wartime/Holocaust traumas were still fresh, it was a uniquely relaxing and comfortable setting that served as a means of social and psychological transition to the New World.

While autobiographical narratives are often associated with how a certain person has lived his or her life, exploring memories concerning the Holocaust would involve testimonies about death and how one was able to survive the various events in the German killings. The subtexts of such Holocaust testimonies exude a theme that seems to be relatively difficult to comprehend and articulate—how several people were undergoing severe sufferings and how many were dying. In this context, therefore, survival is not seen in a negative light, as how one avoids death; but rather in a more positive sense that involves how one is making an effort to stay alive. This chapter looks into how these Holocaust survivors, through recollecting and reflecting upon their experiences, are not just recovering their lives through their narratives but are also realizing how they have been able to escape their death destinies. We look into the various aspects of these testimonies, including the imagery and the consciousness involved.

In the Third Reich, suicide became a routine phenomenon among German Jews. This chapter concentrates on Nazi Germany, but also goes beyond the confines of the Third Reich: to exile, to Auschwitz, and to later times. It focuses on German-Jewish suicides during the Third Reich and analyses the links between Nazi racial policy and German-Jewish suicides. There is a rich literature on the suicides of prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Paul Celan, Primo Levi, and Bruno Bettelheim, who killed themselves decades after the final solution. This chapter primarily concerns the social and political context of German-Jewish suicides and their individual motives, using hitherto neglected archival sources, including suicide notes of German Jews. It also asks how far, if at all, Jewish suicide was a form of resistance towards Nazism, or how far, on the other hand, it was an act of despair and hopelessness.

This chapter investigates the songs in Yiddish and Polish remembered by survivors of the łódz ghetto. It draws on interviews with two teenage survivors of the łódz ghetto who settled in Australia after the war in order to document and preserve personal musical experiences and memories of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It also references long and established literatures on examining witnesses and testifiers in Holocaust and trauma studies that speaks at length of delicate dynamics and ethical responsibilities of representation. The chapter analyzes the claim that sonic experiences remain in memories of people and travel with them throughout their lives, providing moments of nostalgia, evocations of past connections, ties to culture, friends, and family, and frames of reference. It explains how memories of dark, distant, and problematic times are enabled and returned to resonate in the present lives of testifiers and witnesses.

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.

This chapter continues the discussion of humanitarianism and victimization. Among the works discussed here are those by Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, Jörg Friedrich, Hans Erich Nossack, and Alexander Kluge. The photographs in the book are examined in the context of what is often not seen. There is an explication of Alain Badiou’s refusal of victimhood as grounds for suffering, and Emmanuel Levinas’s very different view on the subject. The chapter also questions whether, finally, a photograph can be understood at all.