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  • Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives  (18)
  • 1
    Article
    Article
    Narratives of resistance, moral compromise, and perpetration : the testimonies of Julia Brichta, survivor of Ravensbrück. (2022)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 36,2-3 (2022) 240-260
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2022
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 36,2-3 (2022) 240-260
    Keywords: Ravensbrück (Concentration camp) ; Holocaust survivors Interviews ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives ; Jewish women in the Holocaust Biography ; Jews Biography ; Guernsey
    Abstract: Julia Brichta, a Jewish–Hungarian refugee, came to the Channel Island of Guernsey in 1939, a year before the arrival of the German occupying forces. The story of what happened to her during the war in Ravensbrück was told in her own words on several occasions between 1945 and 1965, yet the specifics of her path to Ravensbrück and her role as a camp policewoman there, have hitherto been unclear. Based on surviving archival documents, this paper attempts to untangle the evidence to establish some of the facts behind this ‘grey zone’ survivor of the Holocaust. It examines Julia’s path towards Ravensbrück and the ways in which her pre-camp and camp experiences impacted the ways in which she narrated her story between 1945 and 1965. Whether she was a non-Jewish resistance heroine or a Jewish perpetrator who lied about her wartime activities, this paper argues that in the end, such judgments are simplistic and mask the complexity of survivor stories. Instead, seeking to understand changes in testimony over time based on the audience as well as pre-camp and camp experiences offers a more fruitful path of analysis.
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  • 2
    Article
    Article
    A plagiarized testimony? : Authorship, legacy, and the Holocaust art of Henryk Beck and Zinovii Tolkachev. (2022)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 37,2 (2023) 213-236
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2022
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 37,2 (2023) 213-236
    Keywords: Beck, Henryk, ; Tolkachev, Zinovii, ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in art ; Plagiarism ; Jewish artists Biography ; Holocaust survivors Biography ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives ; Artists Biography ; World War, 1939-1945 Personal narratives
    Abstract: This article explores the case of an alleged plagiarism of Holocaust staple artistic images by two different artists on opposite sides of the WWII frontlines. From 1941–1944, Zinovii Tolkachev (1904–1977), a Soviet artist on a military mission, and Henryk Beck (1896–1946), a Holocaust survivor and artist in hiding, had created at least two pairs of identical works. Tolkachev’s images, included in his 1944 series ‘Majdanek’ became known as the earliest artistic representation of the Holocaust in East European art. Identical images created by Henryk Beck three years prior to those of Tolkachev remained unbeknownst to the general public until recently. By providing a comparative analysis of Tolkachev’s and Beck’s personal biographies, war-time itineraries, and artistic language, this essay seeks to reenact the historical circumstances for a possible encounter between the two artists, to identify the genuine author, and to understand the underlying personal motifs for this plagiarism. Bringing my analysis beyond the images’ iconography and visual semantics, I conceptualize these works of art as complex Holocaust texts bridging personal testimony, material culture, military history, Holocaust resistance, cultural geography, and art studies. A story of a migrating Holocaust image, the case of Beck-Tolkachev challenges our knowledge of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish artists’ relations during the war and reveals methodological uncertainties in dealing with the artistic legacy of the Holocaust.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2206290
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  • 3
    Article
    Article
    Between memory and history. (2023)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 37,1 (2023) 45-49
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2023
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 37,1 (2023) 45-49
    Keywords: Friedländer, Saul, Criticism and interpretation ; Friedländer, Saul, ; Friedländer, Saul, ; Friedländer, Saul, ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
    Abstract: A relationship between Saul Friedländer’s autobiographical text When Memory Comes and his historical magnus opus Nazi Germany and the Jews has been suggested by Stéphane Bou. This article develops this suggestion, focusing on the narrative choices Friedländer made in his major historical work. An analysis of the use of estrangement and fragmentary evidence unveils their cognitive implications.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2159125
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  • 4
    Article
    Article
    When memory comes, where memory leads. (2023)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 37,1 (2023) 38-44
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2023
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 37,1 (2023) 38-44
    Keywords: Friedländer, Saul, Criticism and interpretation ; Friedländer, Saul, ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
    Abstract: The following essay titled ‘When Memory Comes, Where Memory Leads’ is included in the first section of the Festschrift collected in honor of Saul Friedländer upon his 90th birthday. It is an attempt to present his two autobiographic volumes, published in 1978 when he was 46 years old and in 2016 when he was 85 years old. Friedländer tells his life story in an open, candid manner, sharing with the reader a deep discrepancy between two seemingly contradicting levels. On one level, he reflects on the evolution of his academic work and the circumstances that gave birth to his best-known books after years of distancing himself from any possible connection to the history of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. Eventually, he became a world-renowned scholar of these two vast issues, and his books were translated into a host of languages upon publication, with numerous prizes bestowed upon him. On the other level – the personal one – he mercilessly details his lifelong, deep-seated fear of being abandoned, the loss of his parents, wandering among Catholic institutions, constant changes of his first name as an obstacle on his way to building a solid identity, personal crises, and years-long treatment, operations, and medications. Alongside being a francophone and an atheist, the deep-down core of his identity, as he defines it, is being a Jew bearing the indelible mark left by the Holocaust. Despite this, the books he authored became milestones, especially his magnum opus, the two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews, a masterpiece combining personal testimonies with documentation, depicting the full picture of German-occupied and controlled countries during World War II while offering insights that help understand the innermost feelings of Jews at the time.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2159145
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  • 5
    Article
    Article
    Revisiting "Two Jewish Historians in Extremis" : Elias Tcherikower and Marc Bloch. (2023)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 37,1 (2023) 95-101
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2023
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 37,1 (2023) 95-101
    Keywords: Cherikover, I. M., ; Bloch, Marc, ; Jewish historians Biography ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
    Abstract: Saul Friedländer’s ‘Two Jewish Historians in Extremis: Ernst Kantorowicz and Marc Bloch in the Face of Nazism and Collaboration,’ served as an inspiration for this essay, which sets the wartime musings of two Jewish historians in France – the Ukrainian-born Elias Tcherikower and the French-born Bloch against one another. Though different in nature, Tcherikower’s personal diary in Yiddish (still in manuscript) and Bloch's Strange Defeat, published posthumously, discussed in the essay, touch on the ways in which the inner being of individuals translates the dramatic moments of the period into their lives and responds to them; the so-called ‘ego-documents’ provide discrete moments of reflection and narration that enable the historian to consider a variety of historical insights that cannot be reduced to simple ‘objective facts’ alone – as emotions, musings, dreams, nightmares, and character, and how one came to make certain decisions are enmeshed in these texts. The ways in which an East-European Jew relates to the German occupation as opposed to those of a native French Jew are at the heart of this essay.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2153429
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  • 6
    Article
    Article
    "Because they were Jews!" : The postwar artworks of David Friedmann as eyewitness testimonies. (2023)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 37,4 (2023) 458-469
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2023
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 37,4 (2023) 458-469
    Keywords: Friedmann, David, ; Auschwitz (Concentration camp) In art ; Jewish artists Biography ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives ; Holocaust survivors Biography ; Drawing, Czech ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in art ; Exhibitions ; Exhibitions ; Litzmannstadt-Getto (Łódź, Poland) In art ; Kraslice (Czech Republic)
    Abstract: This essay presents the work of David Friedman(n) (1893–1980), a renowned Berlin artist whose successful prewar career abruptly ended when Hitler came to power. He was banned from his profession, chased from his home, and his first wife and daughter were murdered. The Nazis looted his work and destroyed his promising career. Friedmann survived the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz to paint again. First shown in Český Dub, Czechoslovakia on January 27, 1946, then in Western Bohemia, Prague, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, this cycle was one of the first exhibitions of Holocaust art in the world. Friedmann's exhibitions at former Sudetenland towns in Western Bohemia were utilized as a ‘denazification’ tool by local education councils. Announcements and posters invited Slav nationals to a celebratory opening and viewing of the exhibition – with compulsory attendance for ethnic-Germans over the age of fifteen years. Every visitor paid admission. Germans failing to appear did not receive their ration cards. Town officials gladly offered the necessary exhibition halls, for it was in their own interest to show to the Germans still living there, scenes from the ghetto and the concentration camps, by the hand of an artist as witness. When asked, David Friedmann explained his paintings to Sudeten Germans unwilling to believe their countrymen had perpetrated such atrocities against the Jews. Friedman translated his haunting memories into more than 100 works and titled his series, ‘Because They Were Jews!’ Personalized descriptions supplement his artwork creating a singularly detailed pictorial and written record of the Holocaust. Friedman continued to fight antisemitism and racial prejudice by educating the public with his Holocaust art exhibitions.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2197736
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  • 7
    Article
    Article
    Rachel Auerbach and the Eichmann trial : a new conception of victims' testimonies. (2022)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 36,2-3 (2022) 327-345
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2022
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 36,2-3 (2022) 327-345
    Keywords: Auerbach, Rachel ; Eichmann trial, Jerusalem, 1961 ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives ; Holocaust survivors Biography
    Abstract: Since the 1990s, international criminal law has struggled to find the proper role for victims in mass-atrocities trials. Notwithstanding the rise of the victim-centered trial, victims still participate in these trials mainly as witnesses for the prosecution, but not as full and proactive participants. In this article, I return to the forgotten contribution of Rachel Auerbach (1903-1976), a Jewish-Polish journalist, historian, and Holocaust survivor, and explore her important contribution to the Eichmann Trial, where she helped shape a new paradigm of a victim-centered atrocity trial in the wake of World War II. Auerbach's vision for the trial, as I shall present in this article, can be understood as an early precursor of later developments in both international criminal law and, more broadly, in the field of transitional justice.The contribution of women to the development of international criminal law has been marginalized for many years. Similarly, Auerbach's contribution to the Eichmann Trial has long been viewed as merely technical, limited to finding relevant witnesses for the trial as part of her work as the director of the Testimony Collection Department of Yad Vashem. I show that Auerbach had a groundbreaking vision of the Eichmann Trial and of the way law should perceive victims' testimonies in such trials, based on her “translation” of the legacy of the clandestine Oyneg Shabes archive enterprise in the Warsaw ghetto into a legal setting. In her view, the trial would become victim-centered, not only due to the survivors' testimonies, but also because it would recognize their initiative and agency in promoting a new conception of testimony. I argue that her approach to victims' testimonies and its connection to the crime of cultural genocide are still highly relevant to the ongoing legal and historical discussion about atrocity trials.
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  • 8
    Article
    Article
    The female "Muselmann" in Nazi concentration camp discourse. (2020)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 34,3 (2020) 198-219
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2020
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 34,3 (2020) 198-219
    Keywords: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives ; Nazi concentration camps ; Women internment camp inmates Social conditions ; Women internment camp inmates Psychology
    Abstract: A study of the ‘female Muselmann’ is long overdue. Here I question the male figure of the Muselmann as a universal trope of concentration camp debasement, by examining it through a gendered lens. The term Muselmänner refers to those closest to death by starvation and abuse; at the bottom of the camp hierarchy; those ‘selected’ for the gas chambers; and routinely described as the ‘living dead.’ According to Levi's profoundly influential account, scholars take the term to denote a silent, emaciated concentration camp prisoner, not just about to die but fated to do so. Scholars have accepted the Muselmann as the embodied product of the Lager, an archetype of mass suffering, mass murder, and ‘living death.’ Yet this version of the Muselmann conceals crucial aspects of women's stories. Critical Holocaust studies, I argue, can benefit intellectually and ethically from decentering the ‘miraculous,’ paradoxical Muselmann as a logical point of reference. Narratives by female concentration camp survivors, I show, figure the Muselmann to construct narratives of female agency, but they also recount female figures that deserve attention: Goldstücke and Schmuckstücke, similar to the Muselmann, except for the presumed fatalism. These terms capture the unique ways Nazis tortured women, especially mothers. Rereading these figures together and considering the fact that many women were killed immediately upon arrival to death camps illuminates the sexually violent forms of torture to which Nazis subjected women, and their fundamental genocidal attack on (Jewish) women's reproducing bodies. This, in turn, reveals the complexity of narratives of prisoner agency in the Nazi concentration camp system.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1779502
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  • 9
    Article
    Article
    "Disrupted narratives" : Lawrence Langer’s explorations of deep memory in Holocaust testimonies. (2020)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 34,4 (2020) 336-349
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2020
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 34,4 (2020) 336-349
    Keywords: Langer, Lawrence L. ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Moral and ethical aspects
    Abstract: Lawrence Langer has played a foundational role in foregrounding the importance of examining Holocaust testimonies in their own right, as singularly textured personal remembrances, not only as historical sources to be read for their transcripts by historians and other scholars of the Holocaust. At its centre, Langer’s body of work over five decades emphasizes the anti-redemptive experiences and ‘choiceless choices’ of those who survived the Holocaust. He underscores how testimony can begin to reveal what life was like for witnesses under circumstances that systematically undermined moral and ethical values. Rather than imposing heroic or healing narratives on testimonies, his analytical approach is directed towards training our eyes and ears to how witnesses express the anguished, humiliated, and shattered aspects of their experiences. While it is impossible for anyone other than a survivor to fully comprehend what he or she went through, Langer makes the compelling case that interviewers and audiences are nonetheless obliged to try to understand survivors, all the while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. In that sense, Langer foregrounds the paradoxical nature of giving and receiving testimonies. He advocates for modes of intimately conducting and interpreting testimonies with witnesses without being appropriative of their experiences; while deeply invested in receiving the testimonies of others, he nonetheless recognizes the experiential rift that separates witnesses from those who bear witness to their recollections. This essay foregrounds the importance of Langer’s explorations of the lacunae and tensions that mark testimonies, particularly as they manifest in the interplay between ‘common memory’ and ‘deep memory.’ Langer’s analysis of that dynamic profoundly shapes not only the ways we document and interpret testimonies of the Holocaust, but also those of other genocides.
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1822624
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  • 10
    Article
    Article
    "I was a tape recorder. I was a mailing box" : Jan Karski’s interviews. (2020)
    In:  The Journal of Holocaust Research 34,4 (2020) 350-369
    Details
    ISSN: 2578-5648
    Language: English
    Year of publication: 2020
    Titel der Quelle: The Journal of Holocaust Research
    Angaben zur Quelle: 34,4 (2020) 350-369
    Keywords: Karski, Jan, Interviews ; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
    Abstract: Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government in exile, secretly entered the Warsaw ghetto and transit camp Izbica to observe the suffering there. Making a careful record of his visit, he traveled the world to tell its leaders what he had witnessed. Karski is one of the most significant witnesses of the Holocaust, whose experiences have been documented innumerable times. To date, however, no comparative study exists of Karski’s interviews. To what extent do Karski’s versions of his heroic story differ? Does it matter? What does this case teach us about Holocaust ‘celebrity witnessing’? In this article, we trace shifts in a well-known Holocaust narrative to illustrate how even a very well-established story, divided into three well-established smaller stories, changes significantly depending on the archiving institution that collects the account and the interviewers who conduct each interview. Our investigation demonstrates the effects of the archive on oral testimony and narrative history. These effects are always part of the oral testimony setting, but in the case of well-known interviewees such as Karski, who have testified a number of times in different contexts, they are especially evident. Conducted over a seventeen-year period in very different institutional and generic settings, Karski’s testimonies illustrate both internal heterogeneity, integral to his own development as a person, an intellectual, and a witness, and ‘external’ heterogeneity, shaped by the interviewing institution and the interviewer’s methodology. We study the production of Karski’s interviews from ‘the contact zone’ of Holocaust testimony to identify how the details of his story shift in relation to his listener. Although it has been suggested that Karski’s ‘performances’ become more wooden over time, we find the opposite: that he becomes more animated, sure of himself, and, by the time of his last interview, ready to fully inhabit the role of the ‘celebrity witness.’
    DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1820133
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