CHAPTER FOUR

MEMORY, NARRATIVE, AND IDENTITY:

THE DIALECTIC BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

I have argued that in order to understand the resilience of Holocaust survivors, one must place special emphasis on their lived experience, and to do this, one must look deeply at their words and listen deeply to their voices. Once the labels are put aside and the post-traumatic symptoms are acknowledged as perhaps present but only one piece of the picture, one is left with a clearer vision of these individuals. When I achieved this vision, I began to realize that the deeper perspective I was striving for is attainable through a focus on the life narratives of the survivors.

Indeed, the life narrative is the window through which all humans are able to understand and be understood by others. It is also the most direct route—if one knows what to look for and how to find it—to a greater awareness of the teller’s identity, systems of meaning, self-perceptions, and worldview. Above all else, the life narrative is absolutely dependent on the memory of the narrator. It is made of memories, it discloses memories, it creates memories, and it brings back memories. The life narrative is, in all facets, the organizing story of one’s life. I will argue here and in successive chapters that an exploration of the intricate interplay between memory, narrative, and identity can illuminate a great deal about an individual and his or her resilience.

First and foremost, it should be recognized that without the ability to remember one’s past experiences, there is no life story to be created. Humans use memory to relate their present to their past, to understand the world around them, and to create an interpretation of both themselves and others that utilizes this experience and knowledge. Herbert Hirsch, author of Genocide and the Politics of Memory, writes, “As an individual reconstructs his or her biography through memory, that biography becomes the basis for identity.”[1] Indeed, he asserts, “The connection between memory and identity is dialectical because memory both shapes the content of what is communicated by the socialization process and is formed by that process. Ultimately, the self does not develop in a vacuum.”[2] In essence, memory is the fundamental force behind identity formation and self-understanding. Without childhood memories, one would not know how one came to be, what one likes or dislikes, or why one thinks and feels a certain way in response to a certain situation. Without the memory of specific life events and circumstances such as a marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a parent, there is no cohesive understanding of the life course. Personal identity is essentially created out of personal memories, and both reciprocally influence each other as well as the life narrative itself.

For individuals who have experienced trauma, the construction of a cohesive memorial narrative brings increased difficulty and pain. Dominick LaCapra, in his book History and Memory After Auschwitz, notes, “Especially for victims, trauma brings about a lapse or rupture in memory that breaks continuity with the past, thereby placing identity in question to the point of shattering it.”[3] Holocaust survivors, specifically, are faced with the arduous task of integrating into their identities and narratives memories that resist, by their very definition, comprehension and cohesion. The Holocaust caused a dramatic disruption in the lives of those who lived through it, and left memories that were fundamentally opposed to anything before them and anything after them.

Aaron Hass asserts, “How survivors have felt about their postwar lives has been influenced by reminders of a life which vanished when the Fascists reigned… The survivor was disconnected from a personal and generational history. An identity was dismembered.”[4] Because the central task in identity formation is creating an organized and unified life narrative, and because this is extremely difficult for individuals who have experienced such tremendous trauma, Holocaust survivors often appear to have fragmented, discontinuous narratives and disjointed processes of identity formation. Their identity is thus “dismembered” on a number of different levels.

In the struggle to create cohesion and integrate traumatic memories into their lives, many survivors tend toward extremes. As Hass writes, “Some survivors attempt to avoid recollections of the Holocaust and the years preceding it,” while “Other researchers report that the vast majority of survivors have vivid and intrusive memories of their Holocaust experiences almost daily. Over the years, many have waged a continuous battle to keep the past at bay.”[5] Thus, survivors often do not know how to cope with their memories; some attempt total avoidance while others, whether consciously or intentionally or not, immerse themselves in them.

Some survivors of the Holocaust even create what many authors have referred to as a “double life” or a separation between past memories and present daily functioning. Hass asserts, “In order to derive pleasure from their ongoing circumstances, some survivors ‘split’ or compartmentalize themselves. The past is kept at bay so that it does not commingle and interfere with the present.”[6] This method of dealing with past traumas causes obvious obstacles to the development of an integrated bank of memories and continually thwarts the assimilation of past experience with present interpretation.

Indeed, this interpretation and evaluation of the past is a key ingredient in a cohesive life narrative, one that Holocaust survivors are again left without. Many of the day-to-day difficulties that plague these survivors stem from the nature of their memories and the painful task of attempting to form an identity from such traumatic, disjointed, and chaotic pasts. Langer discusses these obstacles:

The faculty of memory functions in the present to recall a personal history vexed by traumas that thwart smooth-flowing chronicles. Simultaneously, however, straining against what we might call disruptive memory is an effort to reconstruct a semblance of continuity in a life that began as, and now resumes what we would consider, a normal existence. ‘Cotemporality’ becomes the controlling principle of these testimonies, as witnesses struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections of the camp experience coalesce with the rest of their lives. If one theme links their narratives more than any other, it is the unintended, unexpected, but invariably unavoidable failure of such efforts.[7]

Below is a discussion of the salient characteristics of the Holocaust-related memories of my subjects. While these attributes are certainly not limited to Holocaust memory, they are especially important to consider in this context. It is indeed essential to view survivors’ memories of the Holocaust—and in reality, all human memory—through a lens that recognizes both the strengths and limitations of the mind.

The Nature of Holocaust Memory

For Holocaust survivors, the memories of the trauma they experienced is an absolutely essential element of their identities and narratives. Because these traumas occurred over 55 years ago, however, survivors of the Holocaust have a number of obstacles to overcome in the process of constructing meaning and a coherent life story from these memories. The particular group of individuals under study here showed a range of ages, from 65 to 83. Thus, all the participants were somewhere between five and 25 years old when they experienced what ultimately became the most traumatic events of their lives. To be more specific, the majority of my subjects were between the ages of ten and fifteen during the greater part of the Holocaust. Therefore, not only have these individuals been maintaining their memories for a tremendous period of time, but some of these memories were also created during the very early periods of their lives. Indeed, most of the memories that tend to be accessed are childhood memories, and traumatic childhood memories at that.

With so many Holocaust survivors today re-accessing their memories and telling their stories both in public and in private, the question emerges: how accurate can these memories and these stories be? They are all old, some having been actively pushed out of daily consciousness for many years. And all of a sudden, large numbers of survivors have decided, in the past ten or twenty years, to retrieve these memories and tell them to the world. Langer articulates this question, and his answer, powerfully:

One…issue remains, and that is the reliability of the memory on which these testimonies must draw for the accuracy and intensity of their details. How credible can a reawakened memory be that tries to revive events so many decades after they occurred? I think the terminology itself is at fault here. There is no need to revive what has never died. Moreover, though slumbering memories may crave reawakening, nothing is clearer in these narratives than that Holocaust memory is an insomniac faculty, whose mental eyes have never slept. In addition, since testimonies are human documents rather than merely historical ones, the troubled interaction between past and present achieves a gravity that surpasses the concern with accuracy. Factual errors do occur from time to time, as do simple lapses; but they seem trivial in comparison to the complex layers of memory that give birth to the versions of the self…[8]

Indeed, Holocaust memory has both strengths and weaknesses. In each of my subjects, their discrete stories as well as overall life narratives exhibit attributes of up to six different types of memories, sometimes simultaneously: 1) traumatic memories; 2) childhood memories; 3) old memories; 4) rehearsed memories; 5) reconstructed memories; and 6) filtered memories. All of these types must be discussed and defined, and the narratives of these individuals must be viewed in light of the types of memories they represent. However, there should be no implication that any of these categories of memory are more or less reliable or more or less prone to inaccuracy. Each characteristic of memory has particular merits and particular limitations, and each should be examined only as a descriptive tool, not as a weapon of judgment or cause for suspicion.

Traumatic Memories

The nature of memory is such that specific attention is often paid to those events that are more significant for some reason or another; whether they are more emotional, more meaningful, more exciting, or especially traumatic. The events that have the most impact on an individual are thus most often and most likely the ones that are remembered with the most clarity and longevity. Roger Brown and James Kulik have coined the term “flashbulb memories” to refer to these types of “extremely vivid and essentially permanent” memories that are produced by “certain unexpected and emotionally important events.”[9] They assert that these memories are often almost photographic in nature, acting to preserve an especially meaningful event in the mind as a flashbulb captures a photograph. Of course, there is some dispute about the actual brain mechanisms involved as well as about the accuracy of the memories themselves. However, it is clear that traumatic events, if they are not repressed (and thus, not recalled consciously at all), do tend to be remembered with what appears to the rememberer as powerful clarity and an unusual degree of vividness.

Because traumatic memories are encoded in this different fashion and context, the retrieval of traumatic memories also occurs in an atypical manner. The very act of remembering these events can be difficult and painful, simply because of the strong sensory and visual content. Judith Herman describes this process:

Long after the danger is past, traumatized people relive the event as though it were continually recurring in the present. They cannot resume the normal course of their lives, for the trauma repeatedly interrupts. It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma. The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event.[10]

Traumatic memories do not always need retrieval cues, or at least, related retrieval cues. They tend to intrude into the survivor’s daily consciousness without warning or invitation. Hass notes, “Survivors try to block it out, but there are too many potential links to their personal Holocaust which are encountered in their ongoing world. The associations are idiosyncratic and would not be anticipated by those who had not experienced that other reality.”[11]

All of these specific characteristics of traumatic memory create problems for the development and organization of a cohesive life narrative from a coherent set of memories. Because, as Herman notes, these types of memories “are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story,” trauma survivors tend to have increased difficulty integrating traumatic memories with their other memories, and with the rest of their lives.[12]

Mary Harvey asserts, “Simply stated, traumatic events wreak havoc with the individual’s ability to recall and make use of the past. Trauma survivors are often plagued both by the absence of salient information about their experience and by traumatic intrusions which disable and terrify even as they elude meaningful appraisal.”[13] This relative absence of informational memory, coupled with the unwelcome intrusions of the more vivid, traumatic memory, is both emotionally exhausting and mentally frustrating for the rememberer. Indeed, this painful combination leaves the trauma survivor with only the unpleasant side effects of powerful memories that are not retrievable.

Thus, when one is examining the narratives—both of the traumatic event or period and of the life surrounding it—of survivors, it is crucial to remember the vast differences between normal memory and traumatic memory. Although these disparities exist in most trauma contexts, they are constantly manifested in different ways and through different behaviors. The clearest illustration of this distinction can be seen in the life narrative itself and how it is told. Pierre Janet, in 1919, discussed the explicit differences between the operation of the mechanisms of normal memory and traumatic memory, and how these differences can be exhibited in the rehearsal of the life narrative:

[Normal memory,] like all psychological phenomena, is an action; essentially it is the action of telling a story… A situation has not been satisfactorily liquidated…until we have achieved, not merely an outward reaction through our movements, but also an inward reaction through the words we address to ourselves, through the organization of the recital of the event to others and to ourselves, and through the putting of this recital in its place as one of the chapters in our personal history… Strictly speaking, then, one who retains a fixed idea of a happening cannot be said to have a ‘memory’…it is only for convenience that we speak of it as a ‘traumatic memory.’[14]

In this sense, Janet sees traumatic memories as nearly incompatible with the concept of “normal” memory, and certainly less capable of integration with an overall life narrative filled with “normal” memories arranged in a coherent and linear fashion. Traumatic memories, in this conception, stand alone and are destined to exist outside the scope of normalcy and of the cohesively remembered and recited narrative. Whether or not this is actually the case is debatable, but it is nevertheless clear that traumatic memory is decidedly not the same as traditional, day-to-day event memory. To the extent that this is supported in each individual context and narrative, one must view these types of memories in a different framework and with an understanding of the unique issues involved.

Childhood Memories

Childhood memories tend generally to be more emotional and more black-and-white (extreme) in nature. Because adults are usually left with only fragmentary recollections of certain early circumstances or “flashbulb” event memories, their view of their childhood tends to be more polar, depending on how many of these event memories are positive or negative. When a traumatic event or series of events has occurred in childhood or directly after it, the period before the trauma is often looked upon from a drastically altered perspective. Because trauma causes such a disruption in all facets of the victim’s life, as I have mentioned before, memories tend to become categorized into “before trauma” events and “after trauma” events. Everything before an unexpected and unrelated trauma is looked upon as better than anything afterwards, almost by definition.

In this vein, Holocaust survivors often show a tendency to romanticize and idealize their lives before the war, and seem unable or unwilling to think back to this time period without looking through the lens of having experienced the Holocaust. Thus, “childhood” memories become “before the war” memories, and little negative information is remembered about a life stage that, in retrospect, seems idyllic when compared to what came after it. Hass writes, “Ongoing disconsolateness after liberation was exacerbated for many survivors by their tendency to idealize their prewar life, a life of innocence. We may attribute some of this pre-disposition to young eyes seeing more simply and young hearts feeling more purely.”[15] In this sense, the trauma of the Holocaust can be seen to have caused a disruption not only in all implicated memory, but also in the mechanisms through which it is created. The disruption itself thus causes a reinterpretation of all events and memories surrounding it.

Old Memories versus Rehearsed Memories

As I have already mentioned, all present memories of the Holocaust are over fifty years old. The issues surrounding old memories, however, are again certainly not specific to Holocaust survivors. Any individual who attempts to recall memories from a period of time that is so significantly distinct from his or her present reality faces a variety of obstacles. Human memory is, by its very nature, always subject to both decay and interference. The older one becomes, the farther away an early memory is—and the more likely one is to forget, or at least be unable to retrieve fine details and specifics. There are a variety of mechanisms that have been hypothesized to cause this decrease in ability to remember. Gleitman notes, “The most venerable theory of forgetting holds that memory traces gradually decay as time passes, like mountains that are eroded by wind and water. The erosion of memories is presumably caused by normal metabolic processes that wear down the memory trace until it fades and finally disintegrates.”[16] This is generally presumed to be true of the “average” memory. Traumatic memories, or memories of unusually emotional or significant events, however, tend to be much more tenacious and permanent.

Because this is the case, one must examine personal narratives that begin with old memories and pay close attention to how they appear to be remembered and how they are communicated. Holocaust survivors, specifically, have been called upon collectively to tell their stories repeatedly and publicly within the relatively recent past. Thus, they have had to recall rapidly aging memories and reconstruct some facets of their childhood narratives rather late in their lives. Indeed, when a Holocaust survivor tells his or her “story,” he or she is generally repeating a narrative that was created at some point, often very long after the trauma occurred. The concept of rehearsed memories is therefore an important one here. Because memory is so susceptible to decay and interference, it is theorized that what is not rehearsed to some degree directly or very soon after an event takes place is most likely lost. What is rehearsed, on the other hand, becomes further reinforced with each passing repetition. What would normally be considered an old memory, therefore, becomes stronger and more consistently retrievable through the continuing process of rehearsal.

Whether verbal or simply mental, rehearsal is indeed a powerful tool for the enhancement of both retrieval ability and memories themselves. Verbal rehearsal in the form of a life narrative thus holds a strong influence over both the memories that are involved and the structure of the telling itself. Indeed, as Langer has asserted, “Testimony is a form of remembering.”[17] What comes across in the “story” of a Holocaust survivor, then, is essentially the memories that have stayed. Whether these are the most traumatic or emotional, or simply the most rehearsed, what the survivor tells his audience is only what has remained after fifty years.

Indeed, as Langer contended, the act of telling one’s story is a rehearsal in itself. In a pattern of circular influence, each telling is affected by the individual, affects all future tellings, and affects the individual himself. Each version builds upon the one before it, and a rehearsal of a memory becomes a rehearsal of a rehearsal. Langer writes that “an ‘axiom of the narrative mode, from which survivor memoirs are not exempt, is that all telling modifies what is being told.’ ”[18] If this is the assumption, a narrative of an event that took place fifty years ago could be subject to a great deal of reinterpretation and even embellishment. As each rehearsal of a memory (and a story) is constructed, the likelihood increases for some details to get lost, some to be exaggerated, and others to be fabricated altogether. Each telling of a story, therefore, has the potential to shift the construction of the account further and further away from the original event memory.

The possibility for enhancement of memory and retrieval capability, however, is also present with each reiteration. One of my subjects, Annie, told me at one point, “I must say, certain things as I talk about it, or as I think about it, come back.”[19] In fact, many of my subjects spoke of memories “coming back” to them as they spoke, and acknowledged that each speech they gave allowed for different memories to be retrieved and expressed. At the very beginning of our interview, Annie cautioned me, “Well, to start with, I can tell you I can talk endlessly. Really true. And I am talking, and each and every time or many times, the new segments pop up to my head, to my memory. We never can cover everything.”[20] Almost as if she was excusing the narrative to come, she was implying that what I was about to hear would not necessarily be the “whole story.” She might leave sections out that she often mentions, and she might insert stories about which she does not always talk. She acknowledged that each telling of her narrative is dramatically influenced by the flow of conversation, the environment surrounding her, and her audience. In this sense, it is clear that her narrative and the way in which she presents it often changes with each rehearsal. The concept of memory reconstruction, discussed below, offers a further extension of this idea.

Reconstructed Memories

Perhaps the most central issue in any discussion of memory is that the tendency toward reconstruction is natural, often necessary, and almost unconscious. With up to fifty years of possible repression, denial, disbelief, mourning, and reflection surrounding them, memories of Holocaust experiences specifically can undergo a variety of changes. In illustrating these mechanisms, Hirsch adopts William Brewer’s proposal of a “partially reconstructive view”:

This perspective suggests that even if personal memories retain a relatively large amount of specific information about the original event, such as time and location, the events are, over time, reconstructed to ‘produce a new nonveridical personal memory that retains most of the phenomenal characteristics of other personal memories,’ such as strong visual imagery and beliefs, but that may not be completely, or even partially, accurate.[21]

Thus, Hirsch argues, there is often a distinct difference between the personal, experiential memory of one’s place in a specific historical event and the supposedly objective description of the historical event in and of itself. Any given experience, when remembered by the individual who experienced it, undergoes a continual mental process of reconstruction. Through this process, it becomes a personal memory that is composed less of historical specifics and “facts” and more of the individual’s interpretation and shaping of it.

It is through this lens that many Holocaust narratives can be viewed and understood. At this point in our society’s level of knowledge about the Holocaust, a great deal is generally known about the precise events that occurred and the nearly exact details of certain facets of the Final Solution. For instance, it is not unlikely to meet a survivor who knows the exact location, date, and even time of day that his or her parents may have perished. There are countless records of specific liquidations, deportations, and exterminations. This has created, in effect, a Holocaust schema. If an individual was in, say, the Lodz ghetto during the years 1939 to 1941, he could go to the library, pick up a book on Lodz, and find out precisely what occurred there during those years, the dates of specific events, and the numbers and names of a great many of the individuals who were there with him. Historical records and individual memory thus coalesce to further build the cognitive schema.

Because many Holocaust survivors today are well-read and relatively curious, it is likely that they have engaged in exactly this type of exploration of the historical events that affected their lives during the war. In fact, many survivors go out of their way to do this added research in an attempt to make their “stories” more historically accurate and more based in what they perceive as unarguable facts. All of my subjects have spoken to groups of children as well as adults, and many of them expressed the desire to ground their personal stories in historical context and “teach” their audience while they impart their own individual narratives. Thus, what usually occurs in these narrative presentations is the mixing of personal memory with chronological fact, and a transfusion of historiographical research into the sometimes-blurry framework of individual memory.

Indeed, it is often unclear where one begins and the other ends. Some of the individuals whom I interviewed had a clear understanding of this boundary, while others seemed to have begun a process of reconstruction so long ago that the melding of “facts” with personal experience had become, or seemed to be becoming, seamless. One theory of memory reconstruction points to “accommodative distortions,” or “retrospective alterations of memory” that seem to change early memories in order to fit in with subsequent interpretations, “as if the past were rewritten and updated to fit into the current view.”[22] As each survivor told me his or her story, I attempted to analyze what was more likely to be organic, personal memory and what appeared to be additions to the narrative “after the fact.” What was most fascinating, however, was when the individual was able to make this discrimination him or herself, and when he or she made that acknowledgment part of the story.

Eva, for instance, while describing her family’s deportation to Riga, mentioned, “And there were other transports who had left before us, but I really, I mean I know that now. But I really consciously don’t remember that. I mean, I’ve been told.”[23] Here, she not only clearly knows the difference between what she remembers and what she has been told afterwards, but she also feels compelled to tell me that these two types of accounts are present in the story and should be kept separate. Indeed, Eva seems to recognize the need to include historical information to augment her personal memories, while also acknowledging that there is a distinction between the two and that that distinction should be clear.

Annie showed a similar capability to differentiate between her actual memories of the Holocaust and other sources of information on the same events she experienced. In her narrative of the Krakow ghetto liquidation, one can clearly see her struggle to be historically accurate and to recognize her strengths as well as limitations in that realm. She recounts:

That was in February of ‘43, middle of February, something like that. Now I wouldn’t know if it was the 13^th or 14^th, you know, but middle of February it was. And then I was four weeks in Krakow ghetto, when they liquidated the Krakow ghetto… And when they liquidated the ghetto—and here it comes. I do remember it very vividly, almost to the—I think I have written here about it. Even so, that was before ‘Schindler’s List.’ But then ‘Schindler’s List’ came out. And of course, I read the book, and I saw the film. It did show [the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto]. Very vividly. The fact was, [Schindler] lived in Krakow. He had his factory outside of Krakow. I always make a comment [about this], but I’m pretty sure that was before ‘Schindler’s List.’ I do remember it. And maybe certain points [became] sharper a little bit.[24]

Annie clearly seems to understand where her memories stand in relation to the movie. She can distinctly differentiate between the two, and she can comment on the validity and realism in the movie portrayals of events that she can compare to her personal mental images.

It is obvious that seeing “Schindler’s List” had an impact on Annie. It is also understandable that seeing a visual re-enactment of traumas that she actually experienced could significantly aid in the retrieval of organic memories that may not have been accessible before. The movie itself may have acted as a retrieval cue, or could have created a context in which she was able to remember more. Or, as Annie states, the movie may simply have “sharpened” her personal memories. This could suggest an addition of detail, a clarification of a possible confusion, or a complement to a previously vague or blurry memory. For the most part, however, Annie declares adamantly that the foundation, and the majority, of her narrative is her own memory.

While Eva and Annie clearly seem to know where their memories end and the outside influences on their stories begin, Ellen is not so convinced. She tells the following story, with a number of key evaluative statements peppered throughout:

I also remember Kristallnacht…when we were not permitted to go to the public school anymore, we went to a Jewish school, for which we had to take some public transportation or other. And I remember arriving there on the 9^th of November of 1938, and seeing the synagogue, and the school, which was attached, in flames, and people laughing. That impressed me, negatively, but it—I remember it. At least I think I remember it. You never—sometimes you think you remember something that you’ve been told, or that you’ve read about so often, but I do remember… My mother would, you know, if my mother told me something, then I will think that is something that I remember when it’s not necessarily so. (emphasis added)[25]

Ellen’s repeated references here to the reconstructive nature of her memory, shown in italics, are striking. While at times she seems to understand the difference between remembering a detail of her own and reciting a memory told to her by her mother, she also shows significant doubts about her overall ability to make this distinction. Her use of habitual phrasing in the last sentence (as in “My mother would…” and “I will think…”) points to the likelihood that she has confused the memory sources before. Ellen also makes a specific point to tell me every memory that she is positive she owns, as marked by the four separate statements to the effect of, “I do remember this…” Ultimately, she represents an interesting position in the discussion of reconstructive memory, as she appears to be halfway between recognizing the reconstructions that unintentionally take place from time to time and not being aware of them at times.

Henry also represents a notable case of possible reconstructive influences. First and foremost, he believed his memories were strong, persistent, and organic. In fact, he demonstrated throughout our interview a remarkable capacity to remember the often-minute daily events and specific details from his Holocaust experiences. At one point, he began telling me about a selection at which he was present in Auschwitz:

And, maybe from here to that wall there, I don’t know, fifteen meters, there was an SS man standing there. I’ll never forget that. The rank of a captain…with white leather breeches. Because at this time I knew, deer leather, when it’s new, it’s white. And black shiny boots, the uniform—that was part of the uniform, and his black top, this SS thing. That was Dr. Mengele.[26]

Here, Henry was able to recall meticulous details of this event. However, one must wonder, did he know it was Dr. Mengele at the time? Did he even know who “Dr. Mengele” was? What did that name mean to a prisoner of Auschwitz in 1943? Indeed, is this an example of retrospective reconstruction, or did Henry, in fact, know at the time that this man was Dr. Mengele, and that he was unique among the hundreds of SS guards who were present in Auschwitz?

Henry was a rather unique case in a number of ways, as I have alluded to before, and I will be discussing him and his life narrative in much greater detail in Chapter 7. For my purposes here, it is important to note that he actually published a book recounting his Holocaust experiences, so I have the good fortune of being able to compare our interview to his written account. In his memoir, Why, Henry also discussed this particular meeting with Dr. Mengele at length. In similar narrative form, he wrote, “In the distance, on this platform, stood an S.S. officer—shiny black boots, white leather breeches—flanked by some lower-ranking S.S. guards. He certainly did not introduce himself. Later I found out that it was Dr. Mengele.”[27] Even though some of the phrasing is identical, the differences between the two passages are striking.

Both demonstrate remarkable attention to detail in the descriptions of the officer’s uniform, and both portray an identical visual image, one that must be a vivid one in Henry’s mind. However, in the interview, Henry added that the uniform was made of deer leather, and he noted that he knew this at the time. It is significant, therefore, that he seemed to be able to make a distinction between what he felt or thought during the experience and what he feels and thinks now about the experience. And yet, almost directly after implicitly acknowledging this distinction, he inserted a statement that he could only make retrospectively into a narrative that was firmly grounded in the past. In the book passage, Henry clearly recognizes the difference between past event and present interpretation.

So what occurred between “Later I found out that it was Dr. Mengele,” and “That was Dr. Mengele”? Was the latter statement simply a shortcut to, or an abbreviation of, the former? Was it merely a slip of the tongue? Or was it a memory reconstruction in the making? Perhaps the interview caught Henry at a moment in time during which he was making the mental transition from historical event to personal memory. Indeed, it is fascinating to witness the metamorphosis of memory as it occurs; if this is, in fact, what was occurring. The test of this hypothesis might be to listen to Henry’s description of the same event in five years, or ten. Reconstructive theory would argue that at this time, one would see no distinction between the original event memory and the retrospective interpretation of it. It is even possible that the latter would be transfused into the former, creating a potential fabrication. Thus, the same statement might become, “I knew then that it was Dr. Mengele.”

If this perspective is taken, each of the narratives that I have presented here can be viewed as occupying a position along a continuum of reconstruction. Although it could be assumed that all Holocaust survivors are steadily, but perhaps slowly, moving in the direction of more memory reconstruction rather than less, each individual would be in a unique location on the scale itself. This would depend on variables such as: 1) how long, if at all, their memories were repressed; 2) how clear or vivid their memories were originally; 3) how long they have been speaking, both privately and publicly, about their experiences; 4) how often they speak about their experiences; 5) how much supplemental research they have done; and 6) how they were initially treated upon their arrival in America and how they have been received as Holocaust survivors by the general public.

Utilizing this framework, a number of my subjects could potentially be placed at varying positions on this scale. Eva, who demonstrated above that she could clearly distinguish between what was her own memory and what was not, shows a low level of memory reconstruction. She recalls what she knows, and she freely admits (and is not ashamed) that she has holes in her memory. Annie would be slightly above Eva, as she can make the same distinction, but she acknowledges that outside sources do affect her and do tend to supplement her own memories. Ellen would be just slightly above Annie, because she also shows the ability to differentiate between organic and reconstructed memory. However, as she conceded, there are times when this ability becomes blurred for her; these are the times when her narrative would be most prone to reconstructive influences. Henry, because he appears to be in transition from organic to partially reconstructed memory, would place above Ellen on the scale.

Although this could potentially prove to be a useful method for analyzing Holocaust memory, one must remember that the human memory bank is substantial and varied. While Annie may recognize the impact of “Schindler’s List” on one memory, she may not realize a subtle alteration it may have caused in another. Even though Henry seemed to be mixing past and present in one of his stories, most of his other memories are complete, highly detailed, and appear wholly untouched by either time or decay. Looking at the narrative of one particular event does not imply that an entire Holocaust testimony functions in the same manner or is reflected by that one event memory. Just as each individual is unique, so is each story and each memory. Especially in the case of such extensive and intricate life narratives, generalizations made from a singular case can prove dangerously reductive. These examples, however, provide salient illustrations of the potential reconstructive power of human memory.

Filtered Memories

One of the most fascinating features of the process of conducting interviews with these twenty Holocaust survivors was observing each individual’s continuing process of appraisal of the situation at hand. As I have mentioned before, the majority of my subjects would begin the interview by asking me to explain exactly what I was interested in and why. As I described the project to them, I could almost see their minds at work, mentally flipping through their stories and deciding what to tell me and what not to tell me.

Each individual, in his or her own way, seemed to attempt to frame his or her narrative in terms of what he or she presumed I wanted to hear. At times, when I happened to ask a question they had clearly not expected or had assumed I would not have the interest to ask, visible surprise registered on their faces. They would often have to stop to collect their thoughts, to compose an answer that they had not been prepared to give. Thus, each interview involved a constant process of reshaping and reconstructing in relation to the questions I asked, the non-verbal signals I gave (either intentionally or not), and each individual’s own understanding of the course of the interview.

Although an event itself can only occur one way and one time, the retelling of the event can indeed have many different perspectives and many different forms. This variety can be caused by a number of influences. For instance, if I were asked what I did over the weekend, I would most likely go through a split-second decision making process regarding what to say, how much to say, and how to say it. Although there is only one actual event to describe, the content, tone, emotionality, and duration of the narrative I would disclose would depend entirely on my preferences at the time, as well as on the individual to whom I would be speaking, his or her interest in the subject, and the amount of time that is available to both of us.

It is precisely these types of shaping, changing, and interpreting that create a filter through which versions of life narratives are continually constructed and presented to others. These influences were clearly present in each interview and with each individual. For instance, while I began each interview by asking the subject to describe (in as little or as much detail as he or she preferred) his or her experiences during the war, each subject responded in a unique way. Some gave me a very brief synopsis and waited for me to question them further; others presented a story that seemed to focus on some experiences while leaving others out; and still others spent hours telling me an elaborately detailed description of their lives during the Holocaust. Each of these versions served a unique purpose for the individual, and each was constructed as such for a reason.

In the same fashion, and as I have mentioned before, my interviewing style was slightly different with each subject. With a man who gave me very little specific information about his experiences, I realized quickly that he was testing to see if I was really interested and what interested me most. I thus found myself probing for answers, asking more open-ended questions, and providing more verbal and non-verbal encouragement during his pauses. During interviews with individuals who seemed to have a very streamlined and cohesive presentation of their experiences, I most often simply sat attentively, nodding and asking questions only about details such as their age or the date at specific times. With subjects who told me lengthy stories or perhaps wandered off the topic at hand, there were times that I would insert questions to redirect them or attempt to restate their responses in a more concise form. It is in all these senses that, as Elliot Mishler asserts, “the discourse of the interview is jointly constructed by interviewer and respondent.” Indeed, he writes, “an adequate understanding of interviews depends on recognizing how interviewers reformulate questions and how respondents frame answers in terms of their reciprocal understanding as meanings emerge during the course of an interview.”[28]

Thus, when analyzing these interviews, one must take into account the fact that what I said and how I said it, and what my subjects said and how they said it, was all influenced and shaped by our relationship to each other and the context in which we were together. Some of my subjects saw me as a friend and thus, seemed to disclose more to me because they felt comfortable with me and knew that I was interested in what they were telling me. Others saw me as an audience through which to impart a message to the world. Thus, they tended to tell me less about their emotions and more about where they stood on political issues and their convictions about the Holocaust itself.

Still others just seemed to want to talk. In the perennial obligation “not to forget,” they were just thankful to have someone who would listen to them, and who would perhaps retell their story to others. Indeed, each subject most likely had a motive in agreeing to be interviewed. Whether it was purely altruistic or more politically driven, each individual’s motivation surely colored his or her narrative to some degree, just as my own pre-commitments shaped my behavior. For all these reasons, I have found that it is most helpful and illuminating to view each narrative in the context of the reciprocal interactions between the interviewer, the interviewee, and the interviewing context.

Above all else, it was clear in every interview that I was receiving just a piece of the larger story, and that I was receiving it through each subject’s own perceptions of what I would find most interesting. Even though I was explicitly vague about how much or how little I wanted to hear, simply stating at the beginning of each interview that I wanted to get a “sense of what happened” during the war, it was obvious that this request was interpreted quite differently across subjects. Julius, for example, first asked me if I would be asking him questions or if I wanted him to just talk freely. I replied that I would be asking questions later, but that initially, it would help for him to tell me about his family life before the war and his experiences during the Holocaust. When I then told him that he could take as little or as much time as he needed, he responded:

As far as elaborating is concerned…[When I speak to children in schools], sometimes they will ask me about a specific incident, for instance in a concentration camp, what happened to me personally, and I’ll go over it as quick as I can because I have a short time to be with them, so I would make it very brief. But everything can be elaborated for longer periods of time. We can stretch it out, and we can squeeze it up.[29]

Here, Julius is clearly aware of the different narrative versions he has created and continually creates in response to his audience and environment. He seemed to enter into the interview wanting to know how detailed or how brief I wanted him to be, which is probably how he approaches his talks at schools.

Boris showed a similar need and tendency to tailor his responses to the context. In fact, he told me, he rarely discusses his experiences during the Holocaust in minute detail anymore. He has come to believe that there are more “important” things to talk about, and his Holocaust narrative has become shortened in light of these other focuses. He told me, “I try—I give them very little of my experience. I’d rather impress upon them when I speak that, whether it’s a class or it’s a Yom HaShoah service, what is more important to focus on, we have to reduce prejudices and hatred and how we can do it together collectively and by educating ourselves, by getting together and talking about it.”[30] Indeed, he believes, current events are not only more relevant but more important to discuss with children today. He went further:

It’s more important to impress upon them what’s happening today. Because when I look back at myself, when I was growing up, if my grandparents or my parents had told me about World War I…it was like a million years away. And to young people it doesn’t make any sense. You got to quick get them into what’s today. What they see. And I say, do your presentation in fifteen minutes and then let them ask the questions. Then you’ll see, are they interested? Are they willing to listen? Because what’s coming out of them is more important than what’s coming out of us.[31]

While it is clear that Boris does believe that other issues should be taught alongside the simple presentation of the Holocaust as a historical event, there appears to be another, more personal reason for the different form his narrative has taken. Indeed, “Are they willing to listen?” is a question that many survivors ask, and many frame their narratives around the answer. For most Holocaust survivors, telling their story is an emotionally and physically exhausting experience, an investment that they do not take lightly. In this sense, it is understandable that they want to know beforehand what they’re “getting into.” It is this process of discovery that seemed to lead many of my interviews, and to drive the continual construction and reconstruction of each narrative.

Later, Boris went further into his reasons for shortening his discussions of his own experiences, acknowledging an emotional component. He said, “When I speak to the kids about the Holocaust I give them very little of what happened to me, I don’t want them to feel sorry for me. That’s easy. It’s like I could pull a crying towel out right there and give them the horror story, right? But I want them to understand.” When I then asked him if he thinks that the students to whom he speaks do feel sorry for him, he responded:

Well, they would. Yeah, really, you know, they cry and say, ‘Look how terrible’… I want them to understand how normal I was until that happened, that I went to school, and then I was barred from school and yet while I had gentile friends suddenly I didn’t have any gentile friends [any]more. Everybody shied away. I want them to understand because that’s more relevant to them in school.[32]

Thus, it is Boris’s continual struggle to “make his mark” and to impact people that drives him to speak to children. He wants them to understand what he went through, and he wants them to apply this knowledge to their own lives and to the world. However, as he makes clear in these passages, Boris does not want to be pitied, and he believes that telling his story in its entirety—in its “horror”—would evoke pity in his audience. He therefore leaves out a substantial amount of details with the dual purpose of not wanting to appear needy or “damaged,” and of testing his audience for their level of interest. It is through these lenses that Boris’s story is filtered, and it is with this emotional “baggage” that his narrative is continually reconstructed.

Indeed, all of my subjects carried with them into the interview session their individual histories and personalities. I brought my equally strong personality, experience, and values system into each context. As each subject responded to me, I reacted to him or her, and we worked together to construct a meaningful conversation. In this sense, each interview, and even each response, was filtered through a unique and subjective interpretation of the purpose and structure of our time together. The fact that I was the common denominator in every interview does not lead to the assumption that each session constituted a universal context with a universal set of meanings. Each subject’s distinct perspective actually led to a new construction of the interviewer/interviewee relationship, and the creation of new boundaries and new understandings. This was the overriding filter through which each individual’s narrative was composed, and must be understood.

Where Memory, Identity, and Narrative Meet

As is clear above, the nature of Holocaust memory is multi-faceted and problematic on a number of different dimensions. Holocaust survivors today face fifty years of memories, and reconstructions of memories, and memory holes, and evaluations of their memories. They face the moral and ethical implications of owning their memories, of the manner in which they talk about them, and of how they use them to fulfill the “obligation” to speak. Survivors are often tortured by their memories, but nonetheless choose to continually recall them mentally and verbally. Langer articulates the fundamental dilemma for these survivors:

Anguished memory, in the testimony of surviving Holocaust victims, is inseparably identified with victims who did not survive, dividing the self between conflicting claims—the need and the inability to recover from the loss. Most other disasters seem eventually to encourage conciliatory gestures, balm for the memory, abated pain. This one…does not.[33]

Thus, while many survivors of other types of traumas remember and tell their stories in order to organize their lives and make meaning out of their experiences, Holocaust survivors are not always able to achieve this peace or “recovery” through memory.

Indeed, the very act of giving a Holocaust testimony often causes more pain than healing. Remembering normally leads to the construction of a life narrative that will ultimately integrate the trauma into the context of the larger life history. In survivors of the Holocaust, however, the process of remembering only causes a further separation between the trauma and the life before and after it. Because the memory mechanisms tend to function differently, and because their memories are plagued by so many of the obstacles discussed above, the ability of the “average” Holocaust survivor to construct a cohesive life story is constantly thwarted.

With a fragmented life narrative comes fragmented meaning and fragmented identity. Grossman and her colleagues assert, “Making sense of their histories is a central task for survivors, whether they conclude that there is no sense to be made, that the [trauma] was just a random event in the world,”[34] or even that it was the result of some predestined plan. Because Holocaust survivors often have such a divided sense of their histories, this process of meaning-making can be increasingly difficult. This can, in turn, transfer problems to the development of their senses of self and processes of identity formation. As we will see in the case studies to come, the relative ability and willingness to remember and tell one’s story, and the relative ability to construct a cohesive life narrative, has dramatic implications for one’s understanding of the world and understanding of one’s self. We will also see the interplay between memory, narrative, and identity in action.