Holocaust testimony has coincided with dramatic changes in digital technology and in the way we think of museums, archives and technology. Writes David Herman
Last month saw the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Yom Hashoah, the Hebrew for Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was also just after the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. So the conference at Lancaster House on 19-20 April on “Remembering and Thinking: The International Forum on Collecting, Preserving, and Disseminating Holocaust Testimonies” could not have been more timely.
The conference was organised by Dr. Bea Lewkowicz, the Director and co-founder of the AJR (Association of Jewish Refugees) Testimony Archive, which she created together with Dr. Anthony Grenville for the AJR in 2003. So far Refugee Voices have conducted 280 filmed interviews with Jewish survivors and refugees from Nazi Europe, including well-known figures such as Judith Kerr, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Lord Claus Moser and Norbert Brainin from the Amadeus Quartet. It is an extraordinary collection of testimonies which can be accessed online. A dozen of the earliest interviews were recently published as Émigré Voices, co-edited by Bea Lewkowicz and Anthony Grenville.
During the 1980s and 1990s there was a wave of interest in the Holocaust. sMuseums were opened, most famously the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (1993), The Holocaust Exhibition at The Imperial War Museum (2000) and the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001). There were countless novels about the Holocaust, including The White Hotel (1981), Schindler’s Ark (1982) and Everything is Illuminated (2002), and films such as Sophie’s Choice (1982), Shoah (1985) and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).
At the same time a number of major video archives were founded on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the best known are The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (1987) at Yale which contains more than 4,400 recorded testimonies, and the USC Shoah Foundation (originally the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) which recorded over 50,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994.
These dates are crucial. First, the Émigré Voices interviews in 2001-2 and the AJR’s Refugee Voices project began at the highpoint of this new interest in the Holocaust and in the testimony of refugees and Holocaust survivors.
Second, the growing interest in the testimony of survivors came as survivors grew older and started to die. It became increasingly urgent to record their accounts while there was still time. All twelve of the interviewees in Émigré Voices are sadly no longer alive.
Third, this interest in Holocaust testimony has coincided with dramatic changes in digital technology and in the way we think of museums, archives and technology. There are now huge quantities of testimonies, over 100,000 gathered by 39 institutions in 21 countries. On the one hand, people are worrying about how to engage younger audiences by using new technology. On the other hand, more disturbing are issues of new kinds of digital manipulation.
The AJR’s conference addressed many of these issues. Panellists included leading historians such as Dan Stone and Tony Kushner, museum curators from the Imperial War Museum, Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the British Library, speakers on Curating Holocaust testimonies in the Digital Age, interviewers and interviewees and historians of the early history of testimonies.
The conference was full of surprises and insights. In his opening address Lord Pickles, Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust issues, quoted one survivor who said, “Don’t believe all that about birds not singing in Auschwitz. Birds sang.”
Holocaust Testimony, as Bea Lewkowicz said in her opening address, is not new. It has a long and fascinating history, going back to Yiddish Memorial Books compiled during the war and David Boder’s interviews with 130 displaced persons in 1946, which he recorded on a state-of-the-art wire recorder (this later became a key moment in Elliot Perlman’s brilliant novel, The Street Sweeper). Then there was the pioneering work of Eva Reichmann at the Wiener Library’s research department and Rachel Auerbach, herself a Holocaust survivor, who was the founder of the Oral Testimonies Department at Yad Vashem.
Some of the insights were more unexpected. Rosalyn Livshin is an experienced interviewer of Holocaust survivors. In a session on Producing Holocaust Testimonies she pointed out how few Orthodox Jews had been interviewed when she started out. In a private conversation, James Gilmore, from the US Holocaust Museum, agreed that this had been a worrying gap in their collection. Was this, I wondered, because of a secular bias among liberal, college-educated curators? He disagreed. The Orthodox community, he replied, was not always easy to break into.
Listening to survivors like Jackie Young and Kurt Marx and interviewers like Livshin and Natasha Kaplinsky, I wondered about the importance of language. How important is it to interview survivors in their own languages and how many interviewers speak fluent Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish or any of the languages from what Timothy Snyder famously called “The Bloodlands”? Even fluent speakers can miss subtle nuances.
And, of course, the Iron Curtain played a crucial role in preventing western historians or interviewers gaining access to archives and to survivors. This has only begun to change since 1989/1991.The result has been a dramatic transformation in our understanding of Holocaust history.
In an interesting paper, Christine Schmidt from the Wiener Holocaust Library said that Eva Reichmann at the Wiener Library hired Holocaust survivors to interview other Holocaust survivors. Were they an asset or a liability? Might they have allowed their own traumatic experiences to influence the way they heard other people’s narratives? Were men like Boder open to asking women about their terrible experiences of rape and abortions in the camps?
Andrea Hammel quoted a German historian who said: “The eyewitness is the enemy of the historian.” In a recent book, After the Annex, on Anne Frank’s family and the others who hid with them in the annex in Amsterdam, Bas von Benda-Beckmann points out that the testimony of eyewitnesses who met his subjects is sometimes contradictory and not always reliable.
“People’s memories are both fallible and subjective,” he writes. One witness recalled that at Westerbork the Franks “stood around my table quietly and controlled.” Another, however, thought they seemed lost and bewildered. Did eyewitnesses who met the Franks in various camps feel obliged to have some kind of memory of them when they became so famous?
In his acclaimed book, The Final Solution, the historian David Cesarani writes that survivors “could only have experienced the Nazi years as children, teenagers or young adults. They observed the dilemmas of adults and can report on how things were for their mothers, fathers, grandparents and older relatives, but they cannot testify to what it felt like to be a middle-aged [or elderly] person confronted by persecution and unnatural death. …
They witnessed but did not feel the emotions of adults trying to protect children and loved ones, the despair and rage that accompanied helplessness and, ultimately, loss.” We should remember this when we read famous survivor-writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel.
These are just some of the intriguing questions raised by this important conference. We are indebted to the speakers and especially to Bea Lewkowicz and her colleagues at the AJR.
David Herman is a regular contributor to the AJR Journal and chaired a session at the AJR Conference.
