“These include exchanges caught between takes, as the camera continues to roll but the interviewer is unaware of that fact. And it ex- tends to the sighs and screams that are withheld from the transcript for fear of suggesting emotion at the expense of sobriety.”(Shenker, 2)
Both of my father’s parents were Holocaust survivors and he himself immigrated to New York from Germany shortly after the conclusion of the war. I thought the video was a really cool way of extending the horrific realities of the times to later generations. This is a time where I think that individuals experience may outweigh facts about the events themselves. Such tragic things occurred that it is hard for even me to imagine and putting a face and individuals’ stories told by them holds more significance than reading about statistics, regardless of scale. There are still Holocaust deniers, in the face of empirical evidence. I would love to have those people have a face to face dialog with a survivor and attempt to call them liars. My grandfather died when I was very young, but my grandmother is 100 now and still a has a vibrant personality. I think that resilience is such a defining trait of people who survived through those events. I remember interviewing her for school projects and such, and thinking about how important it is to formally record her story in some way. I think my family did take initiative to archive her and our history. This is why I think I would fight the notion that people should hold back emotion to preserve dignity or credibility. The facts are available and I think the emotion and trauma is such a valuable tool to raise awareness. I also think the fact that there is such a short window for survivors to tell their stories, and so many stories have already been forgotten, it is essential that we take steps to archive the ones we do have access.
Question: Do people that lived through extremely traumatic times like the holocaust have a responsibility to tell their story or should they have a right to privacy?
“Not only are testimonies molded by institutional and technical interventions at the moments of their recording, but they are also shaped as they migrate across various media platforms and as archivists develop new forms of digital preservation” (Shenker 1).
I found Shenker’s comment on digital preservation to tie directly in with the video we watched on Eva Schloss. It seems like digital preservation is synonymous with immortality. So it was interesting to me to hear Eva Schloss comment on Anne Frank in saying, “Anne Frank says in her diary, when she dies she wants to live on, meaning she wants to become immortal, and she has succeeded.”
There’s nothing digital about Anne Frank or her story or the way it has been told. And there’s certainly something to be said about her immortality: the line is always around the corner at her hiding space-turned-museum in Amsterdam; there is more than one “Anne Frank Elementary School” in the U.S.; her book is widely read; and she’s almost an untouchable figure. Yet people remember her positive attitude or her inspirational sayings when in fact original, unedited versions of the diary contain a multitude of extremely depressing and harrowing passages where Anne confronts her imminent capture. [I took two classes on this last year & got into it so spare me this rant!]
I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of digital preservation (in this case by way of virtual reality) as somehow immortalizing Holocaust victims or survivors. I’m uncomfortable with it because of the ways this history has to exist within a positive-thinking American culture. Our takeaway from testimonies is often “never again!” or “look how they persevered!” or, in the case of Anne Frank, “see, she still believes that in spite of everything people are good at heart!”
Can testimony–digitized or not–stand up to this culture of making even the worst of circumstances into positive outlooks? Is it the responsibility of a single digitized Holocaust survivor to carry out testimony to educate the masses on behalf of millions of slaughtered people? I have my own doubts about Holocaust testimony standing up to the ways in which the Holocaust has been Americanized (read: simplified/pared down/used to think positively about the good that exists), regardless of whether or not its digitized, and I’d be interested to hear what others think.
“I remember the shocked surprise of many historians and anthropologists at a 1994 conference on Nazi massacres in Europe when they discovered the “divided memory” of Civitella Val di Chiana and other communities. If only they had read what conservative and moderate media had been writing for years, or listened to the conversations of common people in bars and barbershops and trains, they would have been better prepared. Unfortunately, these levels of discourse had apparently been considered below the dignity of politics, historians, and anthropologists” (Portelli 5).
Blah. I thought this was sort of like being called out, and I agree that there is a huge divide between academia and not-academia, but it also gets frustrating (for me personally) to feel like a lot of that work is put onto the people within the intellectual elite: i.e. they should listen, they should inform, they should work harder. I wish conversations like this urged people outside of the intellectual elite to trust it and to want to learn more. I also find that this can be kind of superficial—we have problems much more deeply rooted than just, “people don’t trust academics.” It involves interpretation of authority, geographic location and assumption, politicization of history, and other issues. For such a wide schism, we’ve come up with a relatively narrow idea of what will fix it.
On another level, it just gets tiring, I think, to keep explaining things to people who quite clearly don’t care or don’t believe you. In my experience, trying to bridge that gap or listen to other people has been like hearing an oral history you know is wrong, but it has helped whoever is saying it understand themselves and their world to a point where they can’t accept anything contrary to that.
How can you engage with oral history when you know it’s untrue? How do you find the truth of some experience in a narrative that is factually flawed?
“The Warsaw ghetto, after the famous insurrection in the spring of 1943, was razed to the ground; but thanks to superhuman concern of a number of fighter historians (historians of themselves!) in the rubble, often many meters deep, or smuggled beyond the wall, other historians would later rediscover the testimony of how the ghetto lived day by day.” (Levi, 13)
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is probably one of the best examples of a David vs. Goliath struggle in recent history. A small band of Jewish fighters stood up to the Nazi machine and showed them that they would not go like sheep to the slaughter. When I was studying abroad in Israel the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was something that I encountered at multiple museums I visited. For example, at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum of Israel, there is the actual records that this piece is describing. When I looked at the articles, not to sound too cliche, all I could think about was how they people probably thought that they might be amongst the last of the Jews of Europe. And after thousands of years of history the community was going to be destroyed. But yet, what I find to be very interesting, is with all the awfulness and tragedy going on they still decided to leave behind a record. I wonder who they thought was going to end up reading that record, but they still left it anyway. I think this really highlights and shows the power of records, its natural for humans to want to leave behind a legacy of existence and the best way to do that is to leave behind some kind of record. I also think the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, maybe more so than other Holocaust stories, plays a big role in shaping the modern Israeli. Its a story of resistance and after living in Israel, a state founded and shaped by many Holocaust survivors, I can see how a story like this would play a big role.
Question- why is that some records/ stories end up taking a larger role in shaping the story for future generations?
“The past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for things done or suffered and tend to replace them with others. The substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored, but less painful than the real one…” (Levi 27).
In raising awareness for the different progressions of those who have lived through the Holocaust, Levi raises some interesting questions. Relating to the oppressors, they have dealt with their actions during the Holocaust by making excuses that are nowhere near explanatory to the magnitude of the situation. On the other hand, the oppressed have had to deal with the trauma from their past by putting up certain emotional blockers or by changing the story into something their mind could comprehend. The trauma has had a significant impact on the stories that originate from the survivors of the Holocaust, and this raises questions considering whether or not a survivor will unknowingly change their story in a way that makes it unreliable. In reading this document, I constantly kept questioning how we can even rely on any of their stories considering they have most likely blocked out most of their experiences. However, this question feels wrong considering these are the people who went through the actual experience of the Holocaust and have firsthand memories.
Therefore, when a survivor changes the story without knowing, is this action in and of itself not a more representative and descriptive form of the Holocaust in opposed to detached facts?
“This more inclusive position would develop strategies to “triangulate” memories—to examine testimonies, for instance, alongside other sources such as historical commentary and original documents.” (Shenker, pg. 10)
I think that the author really establishes an insightful analytical lens at this point. It’s common for interviewers to treat their subjects as retailers of an objective story, ignoring their subjectivity. This is to mean that interviews can err on the side of “trying to figure out what happened” as opposed to that of uncovering subjective memories. In particular, I like the triangulation metaphor. It’s my understanding that he uses this term so as to refer to the act of finding median truths–things that multiple independent memories and archives have in common.
Shenker cites an argument whereby “testimonies cannot be interpreted as homogenous expressions of collective experience, but rather must be seen as more fragmented collections of frequently conflicting personal accounts.” (Shenker, pg. 10) It is given this information that the triangulation strategy gains special relevance: Because an event like the Holocaust is a notion that is not only socially charged but is recalled primarily orally, accepting difference between accounts of a single event is acceptable (even necessary, from an academic standpoint) inasmuch as one can use these disparities to actually gain more insight into the narrative.
Question: What are the limits of this methodology? Surely, noting the differences and independent origins of each testimony works if there is a nuanced and arguable distinction between two accounts. However, at what point does it become necessary to recognize diametric opposition (which would render the “triangulation” method useless) and move onto other analyses of bias?
Quotes: Levi, Preface
“ ‘… the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you’”
– Wiesenthal
“this same thought (‘even if we were to tell it, we would not be believed’) arose in the form of nocturnal dreams produced by the prisoners’ despair.”
Comment: I think here Levi articulates history’s importance in its most personal terms: the importance of history to the people who lived in it. The importance that their story be told, that they not be so dehumanized by other people that the truth of their suffering never be heard, and their existence as an individual so completely demolished that it is erased. This is a very close view on history. The personal importance of history (by this I mean the idea that stories will be passed on, that people or at least even one other person will care—actually, Beyoncé’s “I Was Here”) is not often mentioned in the academic evaluations of history we’ve been reading. But that importance is absolutely recognizable. Relating to this idea as well: the 1860 Slave Schedule (no names, no familial connections); the different sized folders in the Colby archives, and the archivists’ statement that we’ve got folders too.
Question: How does different ways of thinking about history (like written/oral) change the way people relate to life?
“The challenge remains for archivists, scholars, and users of testimonies to
avoid reducing witnesses to particular archival expectations. Langer’s perspectives on testimony tend to emphasize its anti-redemptive nature, working against cathartic interpersonal exchanges by presenting “frozen moments of anguish.”
There is a fine line that must be tight roped as an archivist. It is important to try to collect and present a collection of documents that represent a time period, often doing so through the accounts of individuals who lived through it. However, a good point is made here in that archivists cannot allow emotions to run too hot in this exercise. At the same time, it is also important to not strip away the human element that made whatever happen, happen. This poses a very real dilemma for many archivists.
Question: Just how important are emotions in the sense of trying to keep them intact in our archives? Are they a true representation of what happened, or a chance for a misconstrual of truth.
Quote: “Surrounded by death, the deportee was often in no position to evaluate the extent of the slaughter unfolding before his eyes”
Comment: I was considering this quote in light of yesterday’s discussion about how we should not necessarily evaluate documents by their “objectivity” but rather by the amount of historical value they yield. Documents from victims of the Lager probably contain lots of factual errors; after all, these victims endured emotional and psychological torture. Furthermore, as Levi notes, many victims of the Lagers did not live long enough to tell their stories. In addition, many of the survivors who are alive now have “blurred and stylized memories.” With these archival issues in mind, it’s important to critically read documents from Holocaust survivors. However, just because the stories of Lager survivors cannot be taken at face-value does not mean they are not worthy of study. In fact, historians have been studying them for years and continue to yield valuable information from these documents
Question: To what degree do historians/archivists consider memories to be credible? Are memories still valuable after many years has passed between when the event actually happened?
I think you raise a really important question. This seems important to consider, particularly given that these memories are stemming from extremely traumatic experiences. Trauma can affect what we remember and how we remember it, so how do historians/archivists take that into account (in addition to, of course, it taking survivors a long time/distance to be able to share their memories).
Quote: “He had an affinity with the book; it substantiated by its contents his love for freedom and justice, translating it was a way to continue his daring and silent struggle against his misled country.”
Comment: For me, this quote signifies the power and significance of human will, especially in the context of social justice. I admire how Primo Levi, the author of this article, recognizes the subjectivity of human memory in the context of the Holocaust, yet eloquently and diligently affirms its existents. He explores the ways the Holocaust has been silenced in our world, dismantles those rationales and presents an example of a German citizen who was unique in his courage to fight against an overwhelming force to pursue what he believed was true and just. Furthermore, certain stories from Holocaust survivors have always inspired me in their courage to unsilence unbelievably painful memories. This article from Primo Levi strikes me as particularly courageous in his recognition of subjectivity, rejection of alternative narratives and affirmation of the truth of the Holocaust he believes in.
Question: How can archival research help us sort through the subjectivity of human memory? How have archival researchers done this with the Holocaust? In what ways can we create justice through this type of research?
“The past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for things done or suffered and tend to replace them with others. The substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored, but less painful than the real one; they repeat the description to others but also to themselves, and the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours, and man ends by fully believing the story he has told so many times and continues to tell, polishing and retouching here and there the details which are least credible or incongruous or incompatible with the acquired picture of historically accepted events: initial bad father has become good faith.” pg. 24
In modern times, a large part of the circle of poverty is the presence of gangs. Those who are born into lives of destitution are more susceptible to lives of crime through gangs. When the world that one lives in is ruled by gangs, it can be easier to simply survive with an affiliation to one. Though the crimes that they commit is immoral, is their alliance unjust. Similarly, how do those that were affiliated with the Nazis appear? To what extent are all relative members deemed guilty? Are the survivors that were in alliance with Hitler obliged to tell their story, as well?
“These include exchanges caught between takes, as the camera continues to roll but the interviewer is unaware of that fact. And it ex- tends to the sighs and screams that are withheld from the transcript for fear of suggesting emotion at the expense of sobriety.”(Shenker, 2)
Both of my father’s parents were Holocaust survivors and he himself immigrated to New York from Germany shortly after the conclusion of the war. I thought the video was a really cool way of extending the horrific realities of the times to later generations. This is a time where I think that individuals experience may outweigh facts about the events themselves. Such tragic things occurred that it is hard for even me to imagine and putting a face and individuals’ stories told by them holds more significance than reading about statistics, regardless of scale. There are still Holocaust deniers, in the face of empirical evidence. I would love to have those people have a face to face dialog with a survivor and attempt to call them liars. My grandfather died when I was very young, but my grandmother is 100 now and still a has a vibrant personality. I think that resilience is such a defining trait of people who survived through those events. I remember interviewing her for school projects and such, and thinking about how important it is to formally record her story in some way. I think my family did take initiative to archive her and our history. This is why I think I would fight the notion that people should hold back emotion to preserve dignity or credibility. The facts are available and I think the emotion and trauma is such a valuable tool to raise awareness. I also think the fact that there is such a short window for survivors to tell their stories, and so many stories have already been forgotten, it is essential that we take steps to archive the ones we do have access.
Question: Do people that lived through extremely traumatic times like the holocaust have a responsibility to tell their story or should they have a right to privacy?
“Not only are testimonies molded by institutional and technical interventions at the moments of their recording, but they are also shaped as they migrate across various media platforms and as archivists develop new forms of digital preservation” (Shenker 1).
I found Shenker’s comment on digital preservation to tie directly in with the video we watched on Eva Schloss. It seems like digital preservation is synonymous with immortality. So it was interesting to me to hear Eva Schloss comment on Anne Frank in saying, “Anne Frank says in her diary, when she dies she wants to live on, meaning she wants to become immortal, and she has succeeded.”
There’s nothing digital about Anne Frank or her story or the way it has been told. And there’s certainly something to be said about her immortality: the line is always around the corner at her hiding space-turned-museum in Amsterdam; there is more than one “Anne Frank Elementary School” in the U.S.; her book is widely read; and she’s almost an untouchable figure. Yet people remember her positive attitude or her inspirational sayings when in fact original, unedited versions of the diary contain a multitude of extremely depressing and harrowing passages where Anne confronts her imminent capture. [I took two classes on this last year & got into it so spare me this rant!]
I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of digital preservation (in this case by way of virtual reality) as somehow immortalizing Holocaust victims or survivors. I’m uncomfortable with it because of the ways this history has to exist within a positive-thinking American culture. Our takeaway from testimonies is often “never again!” or “look how they persevered!” or, in the case of Anne Frank, “see, she still believes that in spite of everything people are good at heart!”
Can testimony–digitized or not–stand up to this culture of making even the worst of circumstances into positive outlooks? Is it the responsibility of a single digitized Holocaust survivor to carry out testimony to educate the masses on behalf of millions of slaughtered people? I have my own doubts about Holocaust testimony standing up to the ways in which the Holocaust has been Americanized (read: simplified/pared down/used to think positively about the good that exists), regardless of whether or not its digitized, and I’d be interested to hear what others think.
“I remember the shocked surprise of many historians and anthropologists at a 1994 conference on Nazi massacres in Europe when they discovered the “divided memory” of Civitella Val di Chiana and other communities. If only they had read what conservative and moderate media had been writing for years, or listened to the conversations of common people in bars and barbershops and trains, they would have been better prepared. Unfortunately, these levels of discourse had apparently been considered below the dignity of politics, historians, and anthropologists” (Portelli 5).
Blah. I thought this was sort of like being called out, and I agree that there is a huge divide between academia and not-academia, but it also gets frustrating (for me personally) to feel like a lot of that work is put onto the people within the intellectual elite: i.e. they should listen, they should inform, they should work harder. I wish conversations like this urged people outside of the intellectual elite to trust it and to want to learn more. I also find that this can be kind of superficial—we have problems much more deeply rooted than just, “people don’t trust academics.” It involves interpretation of authority, geographic location and assumption, politicization of history, and other issues. For such a wide schism, we’ve come up with a relatively narrow idea of what will fix it.
On another level, it just gets tiring, I think, to keep explaining things to people who quite clearly don’t care or don’t believe you. In my experience, trying to bridge that gap or listen to other people has been like hearing an oral history you know is wrong, but it has helped whoever is saying it understand themselves and their world to a point where they can’t accept anything contrary to that.
How can you engage with oral history when you know it’s untrue? How do you find the truth of some experience in a narrative that is factually flawed?
“The Warsaw ghetto, after the famous insurrection in the spring of 1943, was razed to the ground; but thanks to superhuman concern of a number of fighter historians (historians of themselves!) in the rubble, often many meters deep, or smuggled beyond the wall, other historians would later rediscover the testimony of how the ghetto lived day by day.” (Levi, 13)
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is probably one of the best examples of a David vs. Goliath struggle in recent history. A small band of Jewish fighters stood up to the Nazi machine and showed them that they would not go like sheep to the slaughter. When I was studying abroad in Israel the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was something that I encountered at multiple museums I visited. For example, at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum of Israel, there is the actual records that this piece is describing. When I looked at the articles, not to sound too cliche, all I could think about was how they people probably thought that they might be amongst the last of the Jews of Europe. And after thousands of years of history the community was going to be destroyed. But yet, what I find to be very interesting, is with all the awfulness and tragedy going on they still decided to leave behind a record. I wonder who they thought was going to end up reading that record, but they still left it anyway. I think this really highlights and shows the power of records, its natural for humans to want to leave behind a legacy of existence and the best way to do that is to leave behind some kind of record. I also think the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, maybe more so than other Holocaust stories, plays a big role in shaping the modern Israeli. Its a story of resistance and after living in Israel, a state founded and shaped by many Holocaust survivors, I can see how a story like this would play a big role.
Question- why is that some records/ stories end up taking a larger role in shaping the story for future generations?
“The past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for things done or suffered and tend to replace them with others. The substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored, but less painful than the real one…” (Levi 27).
In raising awareness for the different progressions of those who have lived through the Holocaust, Levi raises some interesting questions. Relating to the oppressors, they have dealt with their actions during the Holocaust by making excuses that are nowhere near explanatory to the magnitude of the situation. On the other hand, the oppressed have had to deal with the trauma from their past by putting up certain emotional blockers or by changing the story into something their mind could comprehend. The trauma has had a significant impact on the stories that originate from the survivors of the Holocaust, and this raises questions considering whether or not a survivor will unknowingly change their story in a way that makes it unreliable. In reading this document, I constantly kept questioning how we can even rely on any of their stories considering they have most likely blocked out most of their experiences. However, this question feels wrong considering these are the people who went through the actual experience of the Holocaust and have firsthand memories.
Therefore, when a survivor changes the story without knowing, is this action in and of itself not a more representative and descriptive form of the Holocaust in opposed to detached facts?
“This more inclusive position would develop strategies to “triangulate” memories—to examine testimonies, for instance, alongside other sources such as historical commentary and original documents.” (Shenker, pg. 10)
I think that the author really establishes an insightful analytical lens at this point. It’s common for interviewers to treat their subjects as retailers of an objective story, ignoring their subjectivity. This is to mean that interviews can err on the side of “trying to figure out what happened” as opposed to that of uncovering subjective memories. In particular, I like the triangulation metaphor. It’s my understanding that he uses this term so as to refer to the act of finding median truths–things that multiple independent memories and archives have in common.
Shenker cites an argument whereby “testimonies cannot be interpreted as homogenous expressions of collective experience, but rather must be seen as more fragmented collections of frequently conflicting personal accounts.” (Shenker, pg. 10) It is given this information that the triangulation strategy gains special relevance: Because an event like the Holocaust is a notion that is not only socially charged but is recalled primarily orally, accepting difference between accounts of a single event is acceptable (even necessary, from an academic standpoint) inasmuch as one can use these disparities to actually gain more insight into the narrative.
Question: What are the limits of this methodology? Surely, noting the differences and independent origins of each testimony works if there is a nuanced and arguable distinction between two accounts. However, at what point does it become necessary to recognize diametric opposition (which would render the “triangulation” method useless) and move onto other analyses of bias?
Quotes: Levi, Preface
“ ‘… the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you’”
– Wiesenthal
“this same thought (‘even if we were to tell it, we would not be believed’) arose in the form of nocturnal dreams produced by the prisoners’ despair.”
Comment: I think here Levi articulates history’s importance in its most personal terms: the importance of history to the people who lived in it. The importance that their story be told, that they not be so dehumanized by other people that the truth of their suffering never be heard, and their existence as an individual so completely demolished that it is erased. This is a very close view on history. The personal importance of history (by this I mean the idea that stories will be passed on, that people or at least even one other person will care—actually, Beyoncé’s “I Was Here”) is not often mentioned in the academic evaluations of history we’ve been reading. But that importance is absolutely recognizable. Relating to this idea as well: the 1860 Slave Schedule (no names, no familial connections); the different sized folders in the Colby archives, and the archivists’ statement that we’ve got folders too.
Question: How does different ways of thinking about history (like written/oral) change the way people relate to life?
“The challenge remains for archivists, scholars, and users of testimonies to
avoid reducing witnesses to particular archival expectations. Langer’s perspectives on testimony tend to emphasize its anti-redemptive nature, working against cathartic interpersonal exchanges by presenting “frozen moments of anguish.”
There is a fine line that must be tight roped as an archivist. It is important to try to collect and present a collection of documents that represent a time period, often doing so through the accounts of individuals who lived through it. However, a good point is made here in that archivists cannot allow emotions to run too hot in this exercise. At the same time, it is also important to not strip away the human element that made whatever happen, happen. This poses a very real dilemma for many archivists.
Question: Just how important are emotions in the sense of trying to keep them intact in our archives? Are they a true representation of what happened, or a chance for a misconstrual of truth.
Quote: “Surrounded by death, the deportee was often in no position to evaluate the extent of the slaughter unfolding before his eyes”
Comment: I was considering this quote in light of yesterday’s discussion about how we should not necessarily evaluate documents by their “objectivity” but rather by the amount of historical value they yield. Documents from victims of the Lager probably contain lots of factual errors; after all, these victims endured emotional and psychological torture. Furthermore, as Levi notes, many victims of the Lagers did not live long enough to tell their stories. In addition, many of the survivors who are alive now have “blurred and stylized memories.” With these archival issues in mind, it’s important to critically read documents from Holocaust survivors. However, just because the stories of Lager survivors cannot be taken at face-value does not mean they are not worthy of study. In fact, historians have been studying them for years and continue to yield valuable information from these documents
Question: To what degree do historians/archivists consider memories to be credible? Are memories still valuable after many years has passed between when the event actually happened?
I think you raise a really important question. This seems important to consider, particularly given that these memories are stemming from extremely traumatic experiences. Trauma can affect what we remember and how we remember it, so how do historians/archivists take that into account (in addition to, of course, it taking survivors a long time/distance to be able to share their memories).
Quote: “He had an affinity with the book; it substantiated by its contents his love for freedom and justice, translating it was a way to continue his daring and silent struggle against his misled country.”
Comment: For me, this quote signifies the power and significance of human will, especially in the context of social justice. I admire how Primo Levi, the author of this article, recognizes the subjectivity of human memory in the context of the Holocaust, yet eloquently and diligently affirms its existents. He explores the ways the Holocaust has been silenced in our world, dismantles those rationales and presents an example of a German citizen who was unique in his courage to fight against an overwhelming force to pursue what he believed was true and just. Furthermore, certain stories from Holocaust survivors have always inspired me in their courage to unsilence unbelievably painful memories. This article from Primo Levi strikes me as particularly courageous in his recognition of subjectivity, rejection of alternative narratives and affirmation of the truth of the Holocaust he believes in.
Question: How can archival research help us sort through the subjectivity of human memory? How have archival researchers done this with the Holocaust? In what ways can we create justice through this type of research?
“The past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for things done or suffered and tend to replace them with others. The substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored, but less painful than the real one; they repeat the description to others but also to themselves, and the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours, and man ends by fully believing the story he has told so many times and continues to tell, polishing and retouching here and there the details which are least credible or incongruous or incompatible with the acquired picture of historically accepted events: initial bad father has become good faith.” pg. 24
In modern times, a large part of the circle of poverty is the presence of gangs. Those who are born into lives of destitution are more susceptible to lives of crime through gangs. When the world that one lives in is ruled by gangs, it can be easier to simply survive with an affiliation to one. Though the crimes that they commit is immoral, is their alliance unjust. Similarly, how do those that were affiliated with the Nazis appear? To what extent are all relative members deemed guilty? Are the survivors that were in alliance with Hitler obliged to tell their story, as well?