Holocaust Testimonies Beyond History: Voices from Cracow, Berlin, Kassel, Frankfurt, Tehran, and Jerusalem

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

One of the only ways in which historians have sanctioned the use of Holocaust testimonies, in light of the fragility of human memory, traumatized or otherwise, is as corroboration of historical documentation. Each of the papers featured in “Holocaust Testimonies Beyond History” transcends strictly historical considerations and emphasizes the phenomenology of Holocaust testimonies. Focusing on the voices of survivors in a number of different media and from a number of different periods, the testimonies addressed on this panel include wartime correspondence, immediate post-war oral histories, and video testimonies gathered at the end of the twentieth century.

Hannah Holtschneider draws attention to the role of written correspondence, or family letters in her research on the Oppenheim family’s emigration from Germany. Sheila Jelen proposes that Israeli women’s Holocaust testimonies gathered in 1987 to corroborate the details of a published wartime journal be given an alternative reading within an Israeli, gendered, post-Holocaust context. Benjamin Lapp presents the interviews of five German women who survived the war side by side, exploring the historical and psychological intersections and divergences recorded therein. Finally, Mikhal Dekel looks at the line of questioning presented to Polish survivors in Tehran by interviewers in Palestine immediately after the war, and reflects on the institutional nuances reflected in those questions.

All together, these papers represent the newest work on Holocaust testimonies as they illuminate not only the history of the Holocaust, but cultural, historiographical and textual studies as well. Comprised of two historians and two scholars of Comparative Literature, two men and three women, two associate professors, one assistant professor, one senior lecturer at a European University, and chaired by a full professor, this panel nicely fulfills the diversity requirements stipulated in the call for papers.

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Chair

• Diane L. Wolf, University of California Davis

Individual Presentations

• Israeli Women Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Own Story: Hela Rupfenheiser and Shifra Lustgarten on The Cracow Ghetto Resistance - Sheila Elana Jelen, University of Kentucky

• “Palestyńskie Protokoły”: Polish-Jewish Children Testifying Before the Polish Information Center, Jerusalem, 1943 - Mikhal Dekel, The City College of New York, CUNY

• “We were five children without parents”: The testimony of Ilse K., Elizabeth S., Engele B. Friedl W. and Traude S. - Benjamin Lapp, Montclair State University

Respondent

• Diane L. Wolf, University of California Davis