The text contains answers to 5 questions concerning the use of Oral History in Holocaust research in Eastern Europe and the author’s opinions and experiences with the use of this method.
Zusammenfassung
In dem Artikel werden Lebenswege jüdischer
Überlebender, ihrer biologischen Eltern und derjenigen,
die ihnen während des Holocausts geholfen
hatten, im Nachkriegspolen nachgezeichnet.
...Anhand mehrerer Fallstudien über Beziehungen
und Ehen aus der Kriegszeit werden die häufig
fragmentarischen und auch widersprüchlichen
Erzählungen über die Trennungserfahrungen
analysiert. Die Berichte der leiblichen Eltern
und ihrer Kinder, der Adoptiveltern und Helfer
geben Aufschluss über die schwierigen Entscheidungen,
vor denen sie standen. Dazu gehörten
individuelle Entscheidungen über das Weggehen
oder Verbleiben, die von und im Namen von
jüdischen Kindern getroffen wurden, die während
des Holocausts gerettet worden waren, von
jüdischen Kindern, die im Verlauf des Krieges
volljährig wurden, sowie von nach dem Krieg geborenen
Kindern, die Partnerschaften zwischen
jüdischen Überlebenden und deren Helfern/Helferinnen
entstammten.
Crossing the Line ALEKSIUN, NATALIA
Jewish history,
03/2020, Letnik:
33, Številka:
1/2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article examines anti-Jewish violence in the Second Polish Republic through the lens of gender. By focusing on verbal and physical attacks against female Jewish students at Polish universities ...in the 1930s, it highlights the radicalization of the antisemitic movement among Poland’s future elite. Jewish women experienced discrimination and increasingly also violence at Polish universities as Jews and as women. The assaults suggest the need to examine both gender and Jewish differences. Although all Jewish students were targets of violent antisemitic attacks, women were especially vulnerable when they dared transgress gender boundaries by acting in “unfeminine ways” and signifying their intellectual empowerment—talking back, resisting, or defending Jewish men under attack. Indeed, Jewish women who stood up to their attackers transgressed the norms of both gender and Jewishness, and were thus doubly exposed to aggression and violence. Using the contemporary Jewish press, university archives, memoirs and testimonies, the female Jewish experience and the response of male Jewish students and community activists are reconstructed. Understanding these assaults as a window into gender politics in Jewish student associations, the Jewish press and Jewish communal institutions, the author examines their place in the public discourse of the Second Polish Republic.
Autobiographies frequently feature the author’s understanding of home as an anchoring ground for the creation of the self. While home in such texts often invokes childhood and family, in the context ...of Jewish life in twentieth-century Eastern Europe, home became a complex site with a double function. Because the German authorities targeted Jewish material culture early in World War II, the destruction of communal buildings and family dwellings was unavoidable; for many, it was the first encounter with what would become the Nazi project to murder the Jews of Europe. We argue that home in Jewish wartime autobiographical texts is made to signify both a nostalgic longing for the place and objects that represent intimacy, shelter, and belonging, and at the same time, a marker of profound losses. We trace this double meaning of home by analyzing a range of Polish-Jewish ego-documents from the 1940s. Through this analysis, we show that home’s double function allowed the authors to inhabit (textually) a place of memory, asserting a claim to a prewar life with its own specific material culture, while also depicting a haunted emptiness that stands in for other losses that the writer cannot represent through language. To develop this elaboration of home’s function in the texts, we draw on and expand the concept of domicide, which identifies the loss of home as a specific type of violence. We conclude that the impact of anti-Jewish violence on the self is expressed through memory and uncanny hauntings of material culture.
This introduction highlights the analytical potential of “belonging” for those studying the social processes of Jewish exclusion in the Holocaust. It does so by proposing a tripartite definition of ...“belonging,” one that bridges emotions, everyday practices, and generational memory. Offering a close reading of diaries, memoirs, memorial books, testimonies, trial records, oral interviews, and individual and group chronicles, articles included in this special section capture the experiences of those who have been rejected from historically multiethnic and multireligious communities and the ways in which this process took place at the time and was narrated later. By examining physical and symbolic encounters between individuals and groups, we show how those at the margins negotiated and expressed their changing place in the broader community, how they interpreted and appropriated social engineering by the regime, and how they responded to their categorization by neighbors and the authorities which ultimately marked them for murder. The advantage of this approach lies in inviting and enabling comparison, and in its relevance for individuals and groups that were either included in or excluded from the locally redrawn categories of “national communities.”
This multi-disciplinary volume is about social change in various cases of mass violence. In life under persecution, social relations and social structures were not absent or replaced by an ...ethno-racial order. The studies in this book show the influence of social structures like gender, age and class on life under persecution. Exploring practices in family and labor relations and collective action, they counter claims of an atomization of society.
Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded ...within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
"What we need is a history of the Jewish people during the period of Nazi rule, in which the central role is to be played by the Jewish People, not only as the victim of a tragedy, but also as the ...bearer of a communal existence with all the manifold and numerous aspects involved," argued in 1959 historian and Holocaust survivor Philip Friedman. With his background as a scholar interested in the social and economic history of the Jews in Polish lands, emancipation, and local history, he now advocated for a "Judeo-centric" study of the Holocaust. His approach echoed the practices of scholars and community activists who, already during the Holocaust, had struggled to document the individual, familial, and communal responses to the German genocidal project as part of the modern Jewish experience. After the war, this mission was reinstated and carried forward by survivor-scholars such as Friedman, Szymon Datner, Rachela Auerbach, Michal Borwicz, and others. Although the Jewish experience was at the center of their attention, they sought to contextualize it with questions about the role of the local population, the attitudes of neighbors, and the scope of collaboration and assistance.
Abstract
This paper examines the experience of Galician-Jewish survivors who were fluent in German and who had developed close ties to German culture before the Second World War. It suggests that ...looking through the German linguistic lens highlights the multilayered nature of Jewish cultural identity in Galicia and offers an important critical tool with which to understand the distinct ways in which Galician Jews experienced the Holocaust. Using personal accounts, this article analyzes the ways in which complex cultural biographies of Galician Jews shaped their identities as eastern European Jews, Polish citizens, and Holocaust survivors. On the basis of testimonies included in early accounts for the Jewish historical commissions, statements by Jewish witnesses in post-war trials, oral interviews, and memoirs, this article discusses the ways in which Galician Jews remembered their relationship with German culture and how their complex cultural identity shaped their personal trajectories after the liberation.
