UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES The Awakening of Memory Survivor Testimony in the First Years after the Holocaust, and Today Henry Greenspan W A S H I N G T O N , D. C. The Awakening of Memory Survivor Testimony in the First Years after the Holocaust, and Today Henry Greenspan MONNA AND OTTO WEINMANN LECTURE SERIES 17 MAY 2000 The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Second printing, March 2004 Copyright © 2001 by Henry Greenspan, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum THE MONNA AND OTTO WEINMANN ANNUAL LECTURE focuses on Holocaust survivors who came to America, and on their families. Born in Poland and raised in Austria, Monna Steinbach Weinmann (1906–1991) fled to England from Vienna in the autumn of 1938. Otto Weinmann (1903–1993) was born in Vienna and raised in Czechoslovakia. He served in the Czech, French, and British armies, was injured in the D-Day invasion at Normandy, and received the Croix de Guerre for his valiant contributions during the war. Monna Steinbach and Otto Weinmann married in London in 1941 and immigrated to the United States in 1948. Funding for this program is made possible by a generous grant from their daughter Janice Weinman Shorenstein. The Monna and Otto Weinmann Annual Lecture is organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The need to tell our story to “the rest,” to make “the rest” participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. — Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz I had my first doubts in 1948, while passing through Germany on a train. — Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits Introduction This lecture grows out of twenty years of interviews and, more essentially, re- interviews with Holocaust survivors. In contrast with work based on one-time “testimonies” or single “oral histories,” my interest has been in the ways survivors’ recounting evolves over time and within sustained conversation. And so I have talked with the same survivors more than 1 once, and with some survivors many times, over the years. 2 • THE AWAKENING OF MEMORY Still, I should note that this approach was not all planned from the start. When I began interviewing in the late 1970s, I assumed—perhaps naively—that the process would, in important respects, define itself. That is, I assumed that my own and survivors’ experience in the interviews would suggest, clearly enough, how to proceed and how many meetings would be desirable and productive. And, in fact, the cue often did come from survivors themselves. Certainly not always but often, at the end of an interview, people said in effect: “So, we’ll meet again! You’ll come back next week. We’ll talk some more.” And so we did; in a few cases, our conversation continues today. I should also say that my questions themselves dictated not imposing too much structure at the start. My interest was not only in survivors’ experiences during the destruction, but also in how survivors talk about those experiences, how they retell them: through what kinds of narratives, in what order (chronological or otherwise), and in what sort of relationship with a listener to the extent that survivors were free to structure that relationship. And so I assumed that the kind of relationship and way of retelling that survivors were inclined to create with me would shed light on those issues more generally. At the very least, there would be a basis for comparison: how their recounting in our interviews was like, or not like, their recounting elsewhere. Here too, then, was a reason to keep the process at least relatively open—so that the form it took could itself be informative. Now, of course, this interest in form and process along with content is very much the approach of a psychologist. Unlike my colleagues, the historians, who generally like to get directly to the facts—who? when? where? what?—we psychologists like to hang back: “What did he mean by that?”—the classic psychologist’s question. “Why did she say it in just that way and at just that moment? How does what he said here relate to what he said there?” And so on. And so on. Although I am a clinician, a therapist, I should emphasize that none of my interviews with survivors were part of any kind of counseling or psychotherapy. Still, one draws on one’s training and habits, which include the central assumption that some important communications take more than one conversation to convey. They may require the opportunity, on both sides, to think about what has already been said. They may require the trust that, hopefully, develops within sustained acquaintance. They may require the experience, for both interviewer and 2 interviewee, of working specifically with each other. For all of these reasons, then, relying on single “testimony” interviews, as we usually understand those today, has not been my own method. Henry Greenspan • 3 There was one other important reason as well. What probably influenced the course of my work more than anything was learning how little survivors had talked about their experiences—at least outside the circle of other survivors and, in some cases, their own families. This period of public silence is now well known. But to me, in 1978, it was news; and it was implicating news. To be told such memories, and then to be told that they had rarely been told before, created a commitment to the process of listening that I frankly had not anticipated when I began. Now there is a kind of paradox here, one that brings us to the heart of the topic of this lecture: survivors’ recounting immediately after the war, along with their later memories of that early recounting. It happens that the period of silence following the war was a lot less uniform than we often assume—and as I also initially assumed. And, indeed, one of the striking things about the survivors whom I have gotten to know well is that almost all of them recall a time, shortly after liberation, when they did try to write or talk about their experiences. This does not mean it was easy; it almost never was. Still, recounting went on. For some survivors this was in the context of D.P. newspaper articles or short personal memoirs. For others it was in less formal contexts such as a conversation with a liberating soldier or relief worker. But in whatever form, such instances suggest that the notion that survivors were not ready to “talk about it” so soon after liberation needs, at least, serious qualification. There was, in fact, a significant amount of survivor testimony in the immediate aftermath, although this is a part of the history of recounting that is not often discussed—and so one reason to discuss it here. What is of additional interest is that it may not be discussed, or even initially remembered, by survivors themselves. That is, even survivors who first report that they had not attempted to “talk about it” may recall, in a later interview, that this was not entirely the case (and here one specific example of the advantages of having more than one interview). Further, the very act of remembering early recounting has its own repercussions: most essentially, on survivors’ self-understandings—the ways they think about their own efforts and purposes early on. Additionally, I will suggest, the early testimony bears on how we understand the nature and purposes of testimony in general. In this lecture, then, along with describing aspects of the earliest recounting—its overall scope and the experiences of some particular recounters—I will try to evoke some of its continuing echoes and implications. Early Recounting