Language:
Hebrew
Year of publication:
2005
Titel der Quelle:
דפים לחקר השואה
Angaben zur Quelle:
יט (תשסה) 95-113
Keywords:
שפס, פלה
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
Abstract:
Noting that thousands of diaries were written by Jews during the Holocaust, and that some of these played a role in shaping Holocaust awareness internationally, asks whether they are a documentation of history or of trauma. Although trauma is "a basic undermining of the optimistic experience of human existence" that is difficult to describe in words, some diarists succeed in shedding new light on the horrors of the Holocaust, making them unique. Studies the diary of Fela Szeps, who was born in 1918 in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland. In 1942 she and her sister were deported to the Grünberg labor camp in Germany. In 1945 they were taken on a death march and liberated, but Szeps died soon afterwards. She had studied philosophy and psychology at Warsaw University just before the war, and her descriptions of her own feelings and those of other inmates "burst forth from the subconscious", making her diary an important record of the Jewish experience in the Holocaust. However, it focuses on the trauma rather than on events. States that diaries written during the Holocaust are more authentic, but also more subjective, and therefore not as useful for historians.
URL:
אתר את הפרסום בקטלוג המאוחד של ספריות ישראל
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