Twenty-five Years Later: Revisiting Testimonies of Holocaust Survivors

Abstract

The article presents researchers revisiting a group of interviewees – Holocaust survivors – who were interviewed for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, one of the most important archives of such testimonies – after 25 years. The authors compare the narratives of the same people presented 25 years apart, exposing and analysing both stable patterns of biographical memory and narrative, as well as inconsistencies, differences and blank spots. Translation after: D. Laub, J. Bodenstab, “Twenty-five Years Later: Revisiting Testimonies of Holocaust Survivors”, [in:] Hitler’s Slaves. Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe, A. Plato, A. Leh, Ch. Thonfeld (eds.), New York–Oxford 2010, p. 426–440. The permission to publish the translated version of the article has been granted by Bergham Books publishing house. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. (editor’s note).

Keywords

• holocaust
• second world war
• oral history