Volume 2, Issue 1 - Thematic Section: Oral History and the Holocaust; Guest Editors: Malin Thor Tureby and Yurii Kaparulin

This article focuses on the analysis and interpretation of 15 testimonies collected immediately after the war by David Boder and by the Polish Historical Institute in Sweden with women deported to Auschwitz, evacuated to Ravensbrück in its last two phases and then to Malchow. The study of their statements can provide both a historical overview of Ravensbrück and its sub camps in 1944 and 1945, and help identify the effects of the camp, an overthrown social context, on individuals, women in this case, and groups. The comparative exam of the interviews allows to identify the crucial events and experiences which constitute the core of the interviewees’narration and representation of the events. The situations and episodes they chose to recall may explain their perception of the events and reveals a gendered perspective which affected their memories in terms of the selection of the events and their focus on specific issues. The memories were recalled in relation to social frames, which were different from those the survivors were previously used to and pertained to the context of the camp. These coordinates constitute a net which can provide an insight into the mechanism of memory construction and early representation of the Holocaust.

This paper addresses the use of oral history sources in my practice of documentary filmmaking as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. It examines how the filmic documentation of oral history sources can reflect aspects of testimony, memory, and postmemory, as they are theorized in the field of Holocaust Studies. In my film “Past Forward: Journeys to Transnistria,” I document the challenge of relating an intergenerational and cross-cultural story while preserving historical accuracy. Filmed in Ukraine in 2002, it tells the story of my mother, a child-survivor of the Romanian Holocaust. Through oral testimony, the film captures my mother’s survival story as she tells it to me and later to her granddaughter who documents it for a history school project. It then retraces my mother’s journey between 1941 and 1944 from her hometown of Dorohoi, Romania to Transnistria as it was called then under German-allied Romanian occupation. Survivor’s testimony combined with onsite witness interviews, and an archival military map, were used to trace the story of a little Jewish Romanian girl who survived the journey to Transnistria. Recently available archival sources have further validated her story. It has also contributed to locating the film within the broader context of the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Survivor oral histories have helped determine research questions in Holocaust studies and propelled the field’s largest archival efforts. With those storytellers now passing at an ever-quickening pace, however, some oral historians are turning to descendants as the faces of memory. These researchers work with descendants to individualize the enormity of Holocaust history in classrooms and for wider audiences. Historians recognize that succeeding generations are not eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, though they can give voice to the lived legacies of genocide. I seek to bring these experiences into my teaching in a way that also produces indelible sources for future research. To this end, I recently began teaching a course called “Holocaust Legacies and Oral History.” Students in this class each conduct a recorded interview with a descendant of survivors. Students and professor work as a team to define the historical purposes of our interviews, draft questions, and prepare. This article the results of this class in terms of pedagogies, successes, areas for improvement, and connections created between classroom and community. The methods employed in this class are affordable and usable at virtually any interested institution.

French students in the third and final year from the Humanities and Social Sciences license A license is the first national university degree and it is completed in six terms. degree course traveled to Ukraine and Belorussia between 2017 and 2020, in order to carry out surveys of eyewitnesses to the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The subject-matter stands out in the French scholarly scene, as the Holocaust usually attracts little attention at this level of studies. Students registered in the course hail from license degrees in History, Social Sciences or Geography, and have chosen to attend the course labeled “European Historical Heritage and Citizens’ Thoughts” as a complement to a more classical curriculum, and as a way of enhancing their own university curriculum. The research professors involved have also volunteered to participate as authors of the aforementioned multidisciplinary program, with the aim to raise awareness to research practices on the Holocaust. University professors and teams from the Yahad-in-Unum Since its foundation in 2004 by Father Patrick Desbois (2007), having researched Soviet and Nazi Second World War records, the organization has been tirelessly surveying all Eastern European locations associated with the Holocaust by Bullets. It has been collecting villagers’ testimonies supporting the evidence of a genocide, documenting the locations of mass graves, and at times identifying victims. The results of such meticulous research have been made public on an interactive online map displaying the locations of all the mass graves recorded – over 2000 to date – and making the information and testimony relevant to each of the sites available to web users. See [online] https://www.yahadmap.org/%20-%20map/#map/ NGO take turns leading the two-hour weekly sessions. The professors help establish theoretical focus and provide methodological tools, develop lines of investigation on various areas of interest (e.g., mode of operation used in the shootings, collaboration and rescue operations, and neighbors of the crime scene), as well as the context (anti-Semitism, racism, local geopolitics, regional history, culture and society, etc.), while Yahad-in-Unum participants describe actual cases based on records, maps and filmed testimonies. They had the task to provide documents from Soviet and Nazi archives translated from Russian, or from German, and act as translators during fieldwork. Students are encouraged to participate as often as possible and have to prepare analytical reports and presentations following each session, while adopting the position of a researcher.

This article aims to discuss the Dimensions in Testimony project, designed and launched by the USC Shoah Foundation to establish a novel approach to collecting oral testimony. The Foundation’s project was initially presented to a wide audience, especially by the U.S. press and researchers, as involving the creation of witness holograms. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Misdescribed by media outlets as based around holograms, this USC Shoah Foundation initiative looks, at least for the moment, to create two-dimensional images based on a long recording process and hours of in-depth interviews. Nevertheless, the project is bound to shape the future of Holocaust testimony and oral history itself. The key challenge for its authors remains to explain what the project actually is and to develop the concept of interactive biography, a name proposed by Stephen Smith, but not fleshed out enough in any academic articles in the author’s opinion. Consequently, this paper aims to discuss the USC Shoah Dimensions in Testimony project as a collection of interactive biographies, with particular emphasis on what an interactive biography is, as well as formulate a definition and propose alternative terms. For this purpose, the author proposes an interdisciplinary approach. To define interactive biography, this article will necessarily describe the mechanisms governing the project, the technique for displaying two-dimensional recordings of survivors, and how this aforementioned interactivity operates in the encounter of two-dimensional images of survivors and the recipients of their testimony. Finally, this paper will also look to answer attendant questions, including whether the project works as a post-memory tool for sharing survivor stories, and how are the survivors expressed in a digital tool.

Oral history constitutes one of the pivotal source categories through which we investigate the Holocaust. The more diverse the source base, the more accurately we can reconstruct the events that transpired. Initially, the study of Holocaust history heavily relied on German documents – essentially, viewing the events through the lens of sources produced by the perpetrators. These sources presented the perspective of the Holocaust’s orchestrators and executors.

The events of the Holocaust are reflected in the numerous memoirs of rescued victims and witnesses of Nazi crimes. Collections of testimonies, memories and oral history on the Holocaust include thousands of early testimonies and life stories archived in for example the Yad Vashem and audio-visual collections initiated in later years such as the Institute for Visual History and Education USC Shoah Foundation, The Fortunoff Video Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yahad-In Unum and others. In this open forum we how the knowledge from collecting and using oral history and testimonies in Holocaust research can inform current collecting initiatives in relation to for example the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.

The text contains answers to 5 questions concerning the use of Oral History in Holocaust research in Slovakia and the author’s opinions and experiences with the use of this method.

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.

The article gives a brief overview of the historiography of post-war justice in Lithuania. It begins with an introduction to post-Holocaust justice, outlining the functioning of the post-war war crimes trials in Soviet Lithuania, including the institutional framework, the retribution law, the nature of legal proceedings, and the procedural changes that took place over time. The article then presents the historiographical approaches historians have used to investigate these trials and depicts the current developments in this field of study. It shows that following the fall of the Soviet Union, the first works on post-war justice lacked an in-depth analysis and instead concentrated on how the Soviet regime had utilized these legal proceedings for political purposes. The article presents not only the micro-historical studies that historians have conducted on selected court cases in recent years, but also explores the ways in which the relationship between the Holocaust and the Soviet war crimes trials, as well as the visual representation and mediation of these trials, have been investigated. It then briefly discusses the missing categories of analysis that need to be integrated into the study of post-war justice in the case of Lithuania. The article finishes by presenting the debates and controversies surrounding this historical topic. It shows that the Soviet campaign of post-war retribution is embedded in the “narratives of doubt.” The credibility and reliability of the legal records compiled by KGB officials are constantly questioned not only by the legal and political authorities, but also by historians.

The role of Jewish functionaries during the Holocaust has fueled heated debates internationally, as well as in Israel since the 1940s. For decades, however, the topic was marginalized in Israeli cinema. The documentary, Kapo (Tor Ben-Mayor and Dan Setton 1999) was the first to include filmed testimonies of former Jewish female functionaries in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The documentary, We Wept Without Tears (Itai Lev and Gideon Greif 2021) is the first to include testimonies by members of the Sonderkommando (“the special squad”) i.e., prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, primarily Jews, who were forced to work in the killing installations. This article analyzes the ways these documentaries deliberately suspend judgment to provide a more complex perspective on these individuals. Kapo and We Wept Without Tears are examined in the context of how Holocaust memory has changed in Israeli society and cinema. The discussion centers on the ways these films generate a non-judgmental narrative, and the similarities and differences between them in approaching this sensitive topic. It shows that Kapo endeavors to maintain cinematic ambivalence, whereas We Wept Without Tears deliberately highlights the protagonists’ lack of agency and avoids rendering judgment.

This article deals with the religious dimension of the violence against the Jews in Eastern Galicia at the start of Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941), in June–July 1941. It examines the context of the various attacks, such as the burning of synagogues, the public persecutions of devout Jews, in addition to the verbal insults, especially by priests instigating the local population against their Jewish neighbors. The paper looks at the political use of these narratives, as well as their consequences and justifications.

This source publication contains three categories of documents related to the Nazi German occupation of Poland, specifically the city of Lwów (Lemberg) in District Galicia of the General Government, which have been translated from German to English. The documents were selected for their relevance to ongoing debates and research questions evoked by the “third phase” of the Holocaust characterized by both widespread police searches for Jews and help offered by non-Jews to the fugitives, here set in the multi-ethnic context of Eastern Galicia between September 1943 and June 1944. Documents 1 to 4 are the German laws that formed the legal basis of decrees limiting Jewish residence and sanctioning punishment for their violation. Documents 5 to 7 are verdicts handed down by the Special Court in Lemberg (Sondergericht im Lemberg) on the basis of these decrees, in which the judges imposed the death penalty on the accused for giving refuge to Jews. Documents 8 to 11 are final reports regarding the arrests of Poles and Ukrainians, and the Jews whom they were sheltering, written by members of the Third Commissariat of the Lemberg Polish Criminal Police (PPK), which were sent to their supervisors in the German Criminal Police (Kripo).