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ABSTRACT
This Forum is a discussion among six contributors deeply familiar with the challenges of analyzing survivor testimony, each with a distinct methodological approach to the topic of sexual violence and the Holocaust. Topics addressed in the discussion include the challenges posed by studying survivor testimonies to learn about sexual violence, the theme of silence and how scholars can mitigate the role they play in reinforcing it, how gender as a category of analysis intersects with other approaches, considerations related to age and memory, and the role of the audience in shaping how survivors communicate their experiences. The Forum discussion grew out of a scholarly conference held in Toronto in October 2018, titled Buried Words: A Workshop on Sexuality, Violence and Holocaust Testimonies. The workshop was organized by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program and was inspired by its publication of several memoirs detailing experiences of sexual abuse and violence and other sexual encounters during the Holocaust, including Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum. This Forum features several of the participating scholars in conversation, addressing important questions that arose during the workshop.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Krystal, Massive Psychic Trauma, 87.
2 See Kluger, Still Alive, 94.
3 This was a central point in Greenspan’s presentation for “Buried Words: A Workshop on Sexuality, Violence and Holocaust Testimonies.”
4 Greenspan, “The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, The Unbearable, and the Irretrievable.”
5 Shtibel, The Violin.
6 Bergen, “Sexual Violence,” 180.
7 Gertjejanssen, “Victims, Heroes, Survivors.”
8 See Dwork’s article in this volume.
9 Applebaum, Buried Words; and Binford, Diamonds in the Snow.
10 Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust, 2.
11 Shtibel, The Violin, 55.
12 Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, 103 (emphasis in original).
13 Leipciger, The Weight of Freedom.
14 Applebaum, Buried Words.
15 Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, 30–1.
16 Gutter, Interview 534. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.
17 Personal communication (email exchange) with Stephen D. Smith, March 11, 2019.
18 Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor.
19 Theidon, “A Greater Measure of Justice,” 191–210.
20 David, “Aging Survivors of the Holocaust.”
21 David, “A Mother and her Daughter: Two Separate Poems.”
22 David, “My Pain.”
23 David, Collective Poems, 7.
24 Mann, A Drastic Turn of Destiny, 43–4.
25 Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State”; and Westermann, “Drinking Rituals, Masculinity.”
26 Heberer, “‘Exitus heute in Hadamar’”; and Knittel, “Autobiography, Moral Witnessing.”
27 Claasen, Ich, die Steri.
28 Hájková, “Queer Desire, Sexual Barter.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Doris L. Bergen
Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, including War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (in its 3rd edition) and Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Bergen serves on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Sara E. Brown
Sara E. Brown is the Executive Director of Chhange, the Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education. She holds the first PhD in Comparative Genocide Studies from Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Prior to coming to Chhange, she developed and managed post-secondary education programming for USC Shoah Foundation. She has designed and taught courses on human rights, mass violence, and history. Brown is the author of Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Perpetrators and Rescuers and the co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Religion and Genocide.
Stephanie Corazza
Stephanie Corazza is Manager of Academic Initiatives at the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. She received her PhD in History and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto in 2017. She has taught in the History Department at the University of Toronto and for the Genocide and Human Rights University Program, and has served as an educator and historical consultant for Facing History and Ourselves. In her current position, Dr. Corazza organizes academic conferences to support scholarly discussion of Holocaust testimony and works with teachers across Canada to help them integrate survivor testimony into their classrooms.
Paula David
Paula David is founder of the Holocaust Resource Program at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, directing this program for more than fifteen years. She has lectured in gerontology and social work at both Ryerson University (since 2013) and the University of Toronto (since 2008). Dr. David produced the definitive reference Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors: A Practice Manual (2003) and has published several articles on the topic. Her interests lie in the intersection of a phenomenological methodology with the expressive arts, and her focus is on enhancing the understanding of how early life trauma affects aging and elderly Holocaust survivors. Dr. David continues to teach and provide professional development internationally for organizations, frontline staff and families caring for aging Holocaust survivors.
Henry Greenspan
Henry Greenspan, PhD, is a psychologist, oral historian, and playwright at the University of Michigan who has been interviewing, teaching about, and writing about Holocaust survivors since the early 1970s. He is the author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (1998, 2010), now in an expanded edition, and many related articles. He co-led the Hess Seminar for Professors of Holocaust Courses at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has been a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal. His play, REMNANTS, also based on his work with survivors, has been staged at more than 300 venues worldwide.
Sara R. Horowitz
Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and served as the senior founding editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs – Canada (Series 1 and 2). She publishes extensively on contemporary Holocaust literature, gender and Holocaust memory, survivors, and Jewish North American fiction. She sits on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Academic Advisory Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.