Someone, broom in hand, still recalls how it was.
Wisława Szymborska
As our consciousness is drawn [in]… events … assume a triple reality: they happened, they were remembered, and they were heard. My own conviction is that our ability to gain access to these monologues of personal fortune and misfortune depends on what we are prepared to forsake in order to listen to them.
Lawrence Langer
HOW FAMILIES REMEMBER
Families produce memories. Each person is their own autobiographer, their own family historian. One reaches a point in life at which this moves from being a selfcentered contemplation of identity and personal identification to an urgent need to remember loved ones and to transfer the value of their lives to oneself and a new generation. But how does a family which has experienced profound tragedy conduct this essentially lifeaffirming exercise? This paper investigates
„DZIĘKI TEMU, JA JESTEM”:
MEMORIES AND NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
ELIZABETH MORROW CLARK
ELIZABETH MORROW CLARK – historian, assistant professor at West Texas A&M University.
Email: eclark@wtamu.edu.
Holocaust studies as a vector for understanding postwar trauma and tragedy within and about family groups. The vocabulary of generational memory and postmemory has been shaped by Holocaust research. Thus, any scholar wishing to investigate family relationships, memory, and tragedy where they intersect should first look to Holocaust scholarship.
Families have a wealth of resources for strategizing and implementing their histories. These histories are part of both personal and public memory. Burgeon
ing venues for producing, archiving, and sharing family stories have emerged.
The article outlines examples from the United States and Great Britain. Dove
tailing Holocaust studies theory and popular memory implementation, this article addresses the complex relationship between parents and children in the wake of cultural upheaval and specific to postwar generational interviews. Ultimately, a trauma experienced in one generation will and should find its way into the legacy of stories told in the second and third generations.
When family members pass away or lose their memories, they also leave behind their pasts. Spouses, siblings, and the next generation have the respon
sibility to tell their stories in order to retain some sense of generational continu
ity, some family relevance, some connection to the past and future. Surely the loss of a generation accelerates the urgency with which families and societies record their life stories. Few images are more powerful than that of a frail grandfather leading over a tiny child, spinning a tale of fishing, farming, the Dust Bowl, a life’s stories. Or a reticent and ailing uncle, ready on his deathbed to tell his concerned fortysomething nephew of his days as a soldier. Or a Hol
ocaust survivor, looking at the generations that fate, courage, or wit have gifted them, with a story few could avoid finding compelling. One justification for the study of the Holocaust is to alleviate future tragedies. Historians and sociologists now have the opportunity to actualize the concept of „never again” by recording and analyzing multiple generations and their family dynamics, through the highly personalized and yet profoundly universal exercise of telling family stories.
POPULAR MEDIA AND GENERATIONAL MEMORY
American values and myths reinforce the concept that anyone can be a hero, anyone can succeed and triumph, that the individual ought to be lauded and appreciated. Mythology about the post World War Two era also emphasizes a time full of stereotypes and presumptions – that the rise to superpower status was through those who had proven themselves „real men” in the crucible of war, and that these men were not loquacious or whiners. The myth also presumes that women gratefully stepped back from active roles in work to shape families and home life. Both elements reinforced the idea that postwar life consisted of
focusing on the future, on progress, on victory, not discussing the trauma or struggles, or personal defeats of the past. This myth did not go unrecognized.
Popular culture even produced pushback. This is demonstrated in the film The Best Years of our Lives, which tells a stark tale of three veterans who return from World War Two and face their families and the American dream headon.
Memory studies and secondgeneration writing seeks to understand parents and tragic experiences as they are communicated to the children of survivors.
The Best Years of our Lives demonstrates that soon after the war the generational conversation was going both ways in the United States – since for many young veterans the first relationships to be navigated were with their parents. In one scene in Best Years, Homer Parrish, a young sailor and former star athlete who has lost his hands in the war, gets this advice from his uncle, „give ‘em time, kid; they’ll catch on. You know your folks’ll get used to you, and you’ll get used to them. Then everything’ll settle down nicely. Unless we have another war.
Then none of us have to worry because we’ll all the blown to bits the first day.
So cheer up, huh?” (Wyler 1946). The part of Homer was played by Harold Russell, who was himself a wounded veteran.1 Exposing the raw feelings about work, loss, love, and family, The Best Years of our Lives is still an exception, rather than a rule, in American culture. Truthtelling between generations about the trials of war was not common. My parents, uncles, and aunts remember their older relatives telling war tales, but at the same time wonder aloud “why didn’t they talk about what they really saw?” (Morrow 2009).
This question haunts the American postwar generation, the Baby Boomers.
Faced with the dual tragedy of losing parents and also a connection with a redeeming heroic past, this group is poised to preserve and enshrine genera
tional memory. Efforts to collect stories serve multiple purposes, as multiple as the venues for preserving them. One such, the “Veterans History Project,” has as its goal the preservation of memory and the engagement of American citizens in history. The Project, sponsored by Congress, is part of the American Folklife Center and has been in effect since 2000. Its object has been to collect, preserve and „make accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.” (About the Project). The project does not just focus on World War Two veterans, but collects stories from World War I, the Korean War, the
1 Russell was injured in a training accident while serving as a paratrooper with the United States 13th Airborne Division in 1944. Russell was in two films – the first, Diary of a Sergeant, was made by the Army and the other was Best Years, for which he won an Academy Award.
Wyler wanted to pick up Russell’s story from the Army film which shows the initial stages of rehabilitation, with his homecoming (See: William Wyler…).
Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the present Afghanistan and Iraq con
flicts. It also includes interviews with people involved in the war effort outside military service, which broadens the story of wartime experience, especially as it relates to gender.
Tom Brokaw’s nowcelebrated turn of phrase “The Greatest Generation” is part of an American trend toward memorykeeping and World War Two. This memorykeeping is on the brink of being handed off from the second to the third generation. That generations and communication between them would play a key role in public memory is a given. The first line of Brokaw’s book makes this explicit, “The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century … Looking back, I can recall that the grownups all seemed to have a sense of purpose that was evident even to someone as young as four, five, or six. Whatever else was happening in our family or neighborhood, there was something greater connecting all of us, in large ways and small.”
(Brokaw 1998). Often and justly accused of lacking historical sensitivities, Americans seek to correct this defect by participating in sharing history from the ground up.
Another nationwide ongoing effort to preserve memory using interviews and the groundup approach is National Public Radio’s “Story Corps” project. The mission of this project is “to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.” (Story Corps). Like the Veteran’s History Project, the stories collected by this effort are intended for public use and preservation in the United States Library of Congress. It is to share stories and to remember and memorialize loved ones. It is, by its very nature, a place of exchange, of truth, a portrait of the American nation, and a conversation among generations. It addresses needs of families, and needs of the larger national family. While Story Corps is certainly intended to be a grassroots movement, the mode of collection relies on highly standardized procedures, relying on booths and mobile units as recording studios.
If one does not live near a scheduled route or booth, there is a process for applying to request trained staff to assist with projects ranging from door to door community efforts to small family venues for which a kit is available for a fee.
The purpose of these booths, mobile units, and kits is to maintain a unified mode of recording and creating a CD.2 Unlike the BBC WW2 People’s War or Veter
an’s History project, Story Corps is a broad effort, looking for a variety of stories which, together, form a mosaic of memory that forms American identity, not specifically about a single generation. Nevertheless, stories of the family are powerful in the edited volume of Story Corps interviews, Listening is an Act of
2 This author is sorry to report that the economic trials.
Love. Most are just a few pages long, but in each succinct portrait is a glimpse of American life and society. Many stories reference the Great Depression, World War Two, and one is an interview with the child of an Auschwitz survivor. Debra Fisher’s experience follows the pattern of many secondgeneration stories, as her father feared to “open the door” to “the room,” the nightmare. When he fell gravely ill, she pressed him harder than she ever had, and, as he told her the unvarnished story, she recounts, “I felt a part of me die. And slowly I realized that he was right. Once you enter that room, you cannot leave. I am in that room when I sleep and when I wake. It’s always with me.” (Fisher 2007, 176).3 In such venues, the mythmaking narrative of heroics and nobility in war is sub
verted.
It’s not just the United States which has fullfledged memoir projects going on, either, as the British Broadcasting Corporation (henceforth: BBC) has “WW2 People’s War: An archive of World War Two memories – written by the public, gathered by the BBC.” (WW2 People’s War )4. The archive has collected tens of thousands of stories, divided into dozens of categories reflecting various aspects of life during World War Two, from the Blitz to the Armed Forces, the home front, and working life. Some of the materials have been submitted by individuals in written form, and these individuals continue to hold the copyright to the material, which differs from the American standard reflected at Indiana University’s Oral History Center and the Veteran’s History Project, both of which follow a pattern which asks interviewed subjects to agree to a “deed of gift” giving the researcher or institution the right to use the materials.5 This difference is most likely the result of the difference between the BBC creating an online media archive to which individuals voluntarily submit material, and more traditional research and archival practices involving actual inperson interviews. The stories collected by the BBC between 2003 and 2006 were intended to be firstperson/firstgeneration stories. The “About” page for the project noted that despite the fact that partici
pants were at least 60, most often 75 and older, over 47,000 stories and 14,000
3 “Debra A. Fisher, 45, interviewed by facilitator Karen Dimattia, 30, Recorded in New York City,” Listening is an Act of Love; A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project, Dave Isay, Editor, New York: Penguin Books, 2007. p 176.
4 When citing material from this archive, the BBC requests that scholars use the follow
ing statement: ‚WW2 People’s War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/
ww2peopleswar.
5 See the Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, http://www.
indiana.edu/~cshm/. Accessed June 12, 2009. Additional standards and advice which reflect American research practices can be found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum site: http://www.ushmm.org/archives/oralhist.pdf.
images came in via the Internet. (WW2 People’s War ). The BBC project set up disparate centers that brought veterans and seniors into contact with the technol
ogy and assistance for sharing their stories in written format, whereas Story Corps is an audio repository of stories shared verbally. The Veteran’s History Project is a blend of the two, welcoming recorded and written interviews. Like the Veteran’s History Project and Story Corps, local organizations like libraries and museums, not to mention local BBC radio stations, facilitated the process in the United Kingdom. Although the population interviewed consisted of those who lived and participated in events related to World War Two, the original purpose of the project is to follow generations. During the initial design, Chris Warren, who was the executive editor at BBC Interactive Factual and Learning, put forward the idea that the project is „a place where the children and grandchildren of war veterans would research their family history and tell their family’s wartime sto
ries.” (The original idea). There was a distinct feeling that the loss of a generation meant that it would be the second and third generations which needed the records and stories provided by the site. Veterans came forward in droves to share their stories, proving that the desire to connect intergenerationally went both ways.
There is also an essential national idea inherent in these countrywide projects like the WW2 People’s War, Veterans History Project and Story Corps, an idea that preserving the past is important to national identity. The duration of these projects is also relevant, as, for instance, the BBC agreed to host the online archive in perpetuity, while Story Corps and the Veteran’s History project are directly linked to the Library of Congress.6
Each of these virtual memory sites includes advice and materials for inter
viewing. Story Corps is very explicit about the format of interviews in order to keep them technologically uniform, while the VHP emphasizes the legal require
ments which also release the information for archiving and research. Some questions are very specific, aimed at gathering information which can link information for veterans and their families, not to mention scholars and other third parties. This includes name, birth date, war, the branch of service, rank or role played. Sites also include guides aimed at teachers and students, thus reinforcing the intergenerational role of the media. Story Corps suggests includ
6 Certainly, sites and efforts at collecting oral history specific to the Holocaust are also well represented in the Englishspeaking world. Two prominent examples being the Univer
sity of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute (Steven Spielberg’s project) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has both its own Oral History Branch and also offers reference materials and links to other collections. My intent in this essay is to address the dynamic between Holocaust studies and memory theory, and application to other postwar memory projects, as they relate to and reflect generational relationships.
ing questions are broad, reminding this author of questions posed by the popular 1970s family communications tool The Ungame: “What are you most proud of?”
“How would you like to be remembered?”
When conducting interviews for a specific purpose or project, for instance, about the Holocaust, one must remain both focused on the subject at hand, but also willing to broaden the questions and wait for complete answers. Such questions are still useful in interviewing Holocaust survivors and generations after. Using them demonstrates a willingness to consider the identity of the person outside they are of a research subject, and also allows for a complete and even creative answer.
For instance, in one interview with a secondgeneration Pole whose family was forced out of the region around Lviv/Lwów during World War Two, I asked what part of her story she might want Americans to know, and she launched into a mon
ologue about her family’s relationship with Jews in her neighborhood and her concern that Americans would consider Poles antiSemitic or think that Auschwitz was a Polish invention. This occurred after no discussion of the Holocaust through
out the interview, nor had there been any reference to ethnic relations or Jewish history between us in the past. Interviewers should be open to diversions. This can reveal the richness of the person and improve content.
The generational element is important in the projects described above, not just in theory and goals, but in the application and the interview stage. When the BBC launched its program, associate centers like schools, museums, libraries and archives mobilized, and events publicized the efforts, events that encouraged veterans and their families to participate. It is also important to the public that the sites include learning exercises and community building ideas, bringing the learning out of the static readorview category and into the application, imple
mentation, and identification. The BBC site, in particular, recognizes the differ
ences between school projects and family projects. Examples of activities for families which would be useful to those engaged in multigenerational interviews about the Holocaust include having children consider what life was like for evacuees, and how they felt upon returning home. Another asks children to think about monuments and memories, and to respond to the statement, „The gener
ation who lived through World War Two and those born in the aftermath can never forget it. The memories are only made bearable by the improved living conditions subsequent generations have experienced.” (Learning Zone). Thus, new media, made all the more accessible with online archives and ease of dig
ital recording blurs the line between academic and selfconscious critiques from secondgeneration authors and scholars.
For European historians, the vocabulary of memory and generations has been defined by the immensity of the Holocaust, of Holocaust testimonies, and by institutions committed to studying and commemorating the Shoah. On a very
personal level, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Lawrence Langer and Eva Hoffman have shaped the conversation about that most intimate of relationships – that of parent and child. What are the terms they use most comfortably? Which terms give them pause? Where does history meet the family? Hirsch and Spitzer are very clear about their personal motivations for their academic pursuits, while Ewa Hoffman’s memoir Lost in Translation and essay collection After Such Knowledge explicitly take on the experience of secondgeneration Holocaust memory and remembrance. Hirsch believes that the term “memory” can be used in connection to subsequent generations, while Hoffman resists the urge to carry her parents’ memories as her own. Instead, she uses terms like “transmitted,”
“primal information,” “internalized,” and “elision,” when referring to the ways in which she carries or understands the past. She accepts the term “postgener
ation” but not the idea of “postmemory” if it means crediting those who did not experience an event with the recollection of it. (Hoffman 2004, 6). Langer also coins terms in order to categorize and understand Holocaust testimony and generational relationships.
THE PERSONAL AND THE ACADEMIC
It is not just popular culture bridging the personal and the scholarly. High culture also has Ewa Hoffman addresses storytelling another way. She depicts it as being communicated on a primal level, in daily family habits and stories, in the exposed fragility and strengths of her parents’ psyches. Hoffman prefers the straightforward “second generation” vocabulary. As a survivor who herself struggled through the trauma of transition and emigration, she identifies with her parents as they tried to adjust to a new world, one with little interest in understanding the historical context of the Holocaust, much less of antiSem
itism in Communist Poland. Marianne Hirsch uses poststructuralist vocabulary to dissect generational memories. She faces headon the question of whether
„postmemory” can mean the transmission of memories to another generation, or whether those memories are nothing more than a shadow of reality. Lawrence Langer critically analyses the memories of others, cataloguing them with precision and insight. Each of these scholars uses a writing style that brings the reader into the material, laying bare the thought processes behind the content.
Langer’s treatise on memory and testimony won the National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism in 1991. So trumpets the cover. The cover illustration
for the paperback edition is El Mole Rahamim7, which depicts a single wall, draped in a burnt and tattered prayer shawl, arms and hands of bricks support an unseen head, bent in prayer, in grief. The title itself invites analysis into his theory of memory: Holocaust testimonies: the ruins of memory. (Langer 1991).
How can the word “testimony” not conjure up legal processes and the Nurem
berg Trials? At the same time, a “testimony” has value and stands alone, given the same credence it would in a court case. He takes the title as well from the title of the collection which forms the foundation of his work—the hundreds of interviews at his disposal in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In Langer’s case, most of the interviews upon which his analysis rests were not conducted by him, nor were the questions created by him. He approaches the interviews as one approaches archival documents, as alreadyexisting texts with their own internal contradictions and values, but not touched by the interviewer’s intervening hand or voice. Thus, Langer also has the responsibility and opportunity to question and analyze the interviewers, their intent, their interference, the ways in which they facilitate, interpret, guide, interrupt, value or reject the subjects. The value of Langer’s work is that, through the hours he spent reviewing the testimonies, he identifies five categories of memory and assesses them, not just for their historical or narrative value, but also for the ways in which memories and the recounting of trauma draw in or alienate the listener, the intended audience. This investigation of testimony raises is to the level of theater, or at least drama, if not melodrama.
It is useful to the historian, the documentarian, to anyone who relies on oral sources. Langer effectively compares written with spoken accounts, critiquing the filters used even in autobiographies while also identifying the modes used to convey the story which might also prevent a full understanding, by the next generation, interviewers, or bystanders, by anyone who participates as a witness to the trauma, to the testimony. Drawing on philosophy and theory, from Nietzsche to Hayden White, Langer ponders what it means to be a historian, to value history, and to write it. This vocabulary of testimony has entered the lexicon of memory studies on many levels, as Dominick LaCapra notes, „So great has been the preoccupation with testimony and witnessing that they have in some quarters almost displaced or been equated with history itself.” (LaCa
pra 1998, 11).
Langer offers his analysis of interviewed testimony and coins terms for the types of memory he identified. He begins with Deep Memory, defining this as the “buried self.” (Langer 1991, 1). Deep memory returns to the original
7 This is the name of a memorial prayer for Jews killed in the Shoah.
experience. Common memory, on the other hand, relies on contemporary perspective, on hearing other accounts, and uses the filter of universalized presumptions about trauma, about the Holocaust, about family. Common memory relies on truisms. Deep memory is authentic but also forces the interview subject to separate themselves from their present situation, even their present understanding of their past. He uses the term „Anguished memory” to describe the experience of sharing a memory but not being liberated by that sharing. We in the twentyfirst century expect talking through a tragedy to be a sort of therapy. Recently, a Polish friend of mine pled with her husband to encourage his mother to grant me an interview about her family’s expulsion, saying „It would be good for her to talk about it.” She turned to me and explained, „she doesn’t like to talk about herself, or even to complain about her health.” But in Langer’s „Anguished memory,” we see that testimony can bind people rather than liberate them. In retelling their experiences, survivors relive their inability to determine their own fates, their loss of liberty. Despite the desire of secondary witnesses, of the hearers, to imbue a survivor or the Holocaust with nobility or with some clue they can share, some explanation about their special ability to survive. I have witnessed students asking a sur
vivor how he did it. His reply, like that of so many, was „luck.” (Readership…).
But „luck” is not empowering. It cannot be distilled into a lesson on how to evade trauma or tragedy. Such anguish affects the second and third generations as well. Oneself is gone, but still present, a dead self. Langer offers one testi
monial, from a certain Bessie K, „I had a child, I had a family, I had a life. But in order to survive, I think I had to die first. That’s what I told our two daugh
ters, and I didn’t know the damage I was doing to them, and to my husband, and to myself.” (Langer 1991, 50). The survivor recognizes that her own inability to reconcile her past self and present selfaffected and continues to affect the next generation. While my friend’s motherinlaw may be reluctant to talk about her past trauma, it may not be because she wants to forget it. She may fear driving off the very audience she would want to draw closer to hear, that she will alienate or damage her own children and grandchildren. This is, according to Langer, „Alienated Memory.” „Tainted memory,” according to Langer, is a form of selfjustification. Decisions affecting survival or the death of another were impromptu in this mode of description. Some „witnesses” as Langer describes those who offer „testimony,” choose as a theme of ignored or negated value to explain behavior. (Langer 1991, 124). Returning to the theme of family and trauma, descriptions of familiar relationships become ghoulish in tainted memories. A brother is refused bread and dies by next morning. A mother keeps the corpse of her little child under the mattress for 5 weeks in order to collect extra rations. (Langer 1991, 124 – 125). Tainted
memory also affects subsequent generations. One sixtyyearold regretted the effect of his depression on his family, „I feel I have no more fight left in me, and of course my family feels it and they suffer from it.” He cannot bring himself to fight even things he knows are wrong, „Something good or bad … is not as bad even if it is very bad.” (Langer 1991, 145). Why, we wonder, does
„tainted memory” include so many examples from family groups? It does because this mode of remembering relies not on describing humiliations to the self, but on the action or inaction of the narrator. It also reveals how both spontaneity and caprice exercised great power over victims. They were in the hands of Fate, even if they took action to survive. They saw another fail, and could not explain a difference, except for luck.
MARIANNE HIRSCH AND THE DECONSTRUCTIONIST AS IT TOUCHES
ON MEMORY STUDIES
Looking for some instant theory? Just put the prefix “post” in front of any term and there you have it, deconstruction finds its way into your analysis. This is a reduction, of course, but nevertheless, Marianne Hirsch uses the term
“postmemory” consciously and conscientiously, evoking the sense of absence and presence, theory and truth, solidity and transience that such critiques nat
urally elicit. She grapples palpably with the vocabulary of generations and memory in her own writing, and, like Hoffman does not shy away from the personal element. It seems almost impossible for a “third generation” historian to question the authenticity of vocabulary chosen by “second generation”
memoiristscholars. This adds another layer of interpretation and function to the question of how to construct and present memory, memoirs, interviews or
“testimony.”
In using the selfconsciously postmodern term “generation of postmemory,”
Marianne Hirsch offers interviewers the idea that memories can actually be transmitted to another generation, and that the family is the space of that trans
mission. While Langer emerges as almost clinical in his analysis of his interview subjects, Hirsch, like Hoffman and Hinger (French Lessons) revels in the personal element of her story. Hirsch refuses to remain unemotional, and demands that generations owe something to victims, through transforming remembrance into
“action and resistance.” (Hirsch 1998, 104).
IMPLICATIONS FOR ORAL HISTORY RESEARCH
What motivates those who actively seek to listen to witness testimonies?
This distinguishes the interviewer or audience from the family member. Does
this person seek a hero? Examples of moral perfidy and human triumph?
Theorists advise interviewers not to layer their own expectations or value judgments onto the existing story. This is difficult, as this is a standard mode of interpretation, especially in the West. The triumph of the individual, owing to their faith, ingenuity, or courage, is a much more inspiring story than one which reveals the role of selfishness or luck or fate. Langer takes on the ques
tion of expectations in his work. He criticizes interviewers for layering over difficult stories their own heroic interpretations. He rejects the search for value, the “lifepromoting” impulse. (Langer 1991, 78). The futility of memory is difficult to accept, but the interviewer must remember that despite the vocab
ulary of „testimony” and „witness” listening to traumatic memories has a dif
ferent purpose. There is no verdict of guilty or innocent, of hero or victim. The act of listening to testimony, the act of interviewing, is like the role of an audience or a reader. In conducting or using interviews with victims and gen
erations, a journalist seeks a story, a historian seeks a true picture of the past, a psychologist seeks to understand the nature of the trauma, a sociologist seeks categories of human behavior, but it takes a true humanist to strike a balance between scholar and participant, to recognize the importance of absorbing the testimony and at the same time, the inability to actually alleviate the pain it reflects or inflicts. “Oral testimony is a form of endless remembering, a direct challenge to us to convert our ignorance of the unknown into some appreciation of the disparate, halfarticulated tensions that inhabit the former victims’ nar
ratives.” (Langer 1991, 158 – 159).
Langer offers and analyses the value of testimonies, or experience them as well as using them in research. One comes away from his work wondering if his point is that reading a memoir or history is insufficient if one wishes to participate in the act of remembrance or function as a witness, that one must also listen, and if possible, observe, the act of remembrance. This is crucial for scholars, for artists, and also for families. In offering advice to his readers, to historians, Langer reminds us that „[o]ne aim of history is inclusion, in two senses: it assembles the important data of experience, and it makes them accessible to an audience, the awareness of whose consciousness is a premise of the historians’ efforts.” (Langer 1991, 108). Certainly, Langer is not the only person to consider memory as a trope for categorizing traumatic experience, but his work is critical for those who seek to practice the analysis or at least the experience of memory through the use of interviews and testimony.
What do we call those who receive the memories of others, then? The first people who come into contact with those memories, of course, are the children and families of survivors/victims. Who else? Friends and neighbors. Students.
Historians. Sociologists. Poets, novelists, musicians and playwrights all absorb
and disburse meaning related to the Holocaust, to trauma, to memory, to the meaning of being human. Do these memories belong to everyone, or just to the survivor? Those who did not witness the crime, witness the effects, are witnesses, or at least secondary witnesses, to the memory.
Hirsch and Hoffman both recognize the unavoidably personal element to postgenerational memory. Neither accepts the idea that memories cannot be held by a generation after. To dispute the effects, both psychological and historical, of trauma on subsequent generations, on family stories, family histories, or society, is to refuse the power of oral transmission of identity. If we accept the idea however that generational and postgenerational memories exist in family groups, what do we do with those who are outside of family groups? Langer’s long hours with videotape might have been inspired by personal experiences but can he carry those memories forward in some way? Hirsch asks this as well, wondering if memory and postmemory are „limited the intimate embodied space of the family, or can it extend to the more distant adoptive witnesses?” (Hirsch 1998, 107). This resonates with many „third generation” scholars, those who were introduced to the Holocaust or another trauma event in the course of their educa
tions or travels, rather than through family inheritance. There is more weight to this, perhaps, when discussing the Shoah, with its inherent implications that survival had for generations and families, with the incredible power of family and inheritance in Jewish history and experience. Nevertheless, as I prepare Texas students to see Auschwitz, I confront them repeatedly with the question „Why are we studying this? Do we have a right to participate in grief at Auschwitz?”
I ask myself the same thing. I am not Polish. I am not Jewish. I didn’t even lose immediate family members in World War Two. What right have I to immerse myself in what is often a profoundly personal and emotional process of grief?
Am I a thirdgeneration inheritor of midtwentieth century trauma, or simply a historian in her forties, looking for drama? Have I succumbed to romanticisation or to Alain Finkielkraut’s „imaginary Jewishness” as described by LaCapra?
(LaCapra 1998, 178). Too far along this line, and one begins to doubt the univer
sality Holocaust studies or by association, any recognizable memory project. It is wise to be selfaware, but unwise to shy away from selfcritical research on genocide or trauma. This is as true for the „disinterested” scholar as it is for the
„interested” party interviewing family members and seeking identity through understanding the past. In her own work on generations, Hirsch presents to scholars the debates about whether trauma and memory are actually transmitted.
I disagree with those who claim that even the generations which are directly linked to trauma cannot claim memory of it, as I believe we appropriate communal memory for higher social purposes. Ask any student in a history class why they are studying a certain topic, in my case, most obviously the Holocaust, and they
will invariably declare „to keep it from happening again.” Whatever we may think about the practicalities of that, or its potential for cliché or abuse, or the implica
tions of considering the Shoah a single unique phenomenon, having this urge requires remembrance, not just by individuals and families, but by societies and nations. Despite doubts, at some point, historians and cultural scholars must mine memories for authentic narrative.
One cannot pursue this “post” vocabulary without the requisite references to dissolution, to symbols and signs, or to the fractialization of truth, and Hirsch does not disappoint. Rather than argue about whether a subsequent generation can actually claim to have absorbed memory in a meaningful way, she argues that post memory serves a purpose: it endows distant memories with a sense of being individual or familial, and encourages others to engage. (Hirsch 1998, 111). Once again, teaching professors respond to this idea by recognizing that this is a reason young people study history, to identify in some way with the past. Hirsch is right when she argues that memory culture reflects a need for
“inclusion in a collective membrane forged by a shared inheritance of multiple traumatic histories and the individual and social responsibility we feel toward a persistent and traumatic past.” (Hirsch 1998, 111). As an example of bringing others into this experience, Hirsch cites the Tower of Faces in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. One can say the same thing of the photography exhibits and family stories reconstructed in the „Canada” warehouse exhibit at Auschwitz IIBirkenau at the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in Poland. Hirsch values the concept that others can „adopt .. traumatic experiences … as experiences that we might ourselves have lived through if we inscribe them into our own life story.” (Hirsch 1998, 114). The power of this exercise is borne out in a student presentation created by a student who participated in a study abroad experience to Poland in March 2008. Eva Harder is a promising Communications major, poised, and selfaware, even cynical, in the way only smart nineteenyearolds can be when they seek to be worldly wise. During our two days at the Auschwitz memorial, she approached the tours and workshops with a distant air. She seemed frustrated by the crowds, and by the emotionality of the experience. While other students sought one another out, prayed openly, or used their emotions to connect with one another, Eva withdrew. Upon our return, all students were required to make public presentations to the community about their experience. One of the first of these was made to the International Club in Amarillo, by Eva and one of her classmates. It was there that I learned the source of her distress. The Canada exhibit gnawed at her throughout the trip. She identified with the photographs of people pursuing everyday activities, but especially the ones of young women.
These photos, she said in her presentation, could be of me and my friends – at the beach, at a wedding, celebrating life. Eva, who is neither Jewish nor has any
direct familial connection to the Holocaust, responded to that exhibit in exactly the way Hirsch describes – by receiving transmitted memories – shared by an archivist, a museum director, and the pure chance survival of individual pic
tures – and by appropriating them. (Hirsch, Spitzer 2006, 229 – 252).8
Authenticity, like culpability, is an everpresent shadow on interviewbased studies and writing. Even more than with documents, the historian must evalu
ate the extent to which her own participation in the act of collecting information influences the content she receives. Even the term “receives” indicates the relationship between the scholar and the subject – one petitions, another gives.
And yet, it is the subject who often expresses concern regarding the usefulness of the interview, the testimony.
For the interviewer, the subject, the person, is a historical artifact. They may represent one story among thousands. The person may actually know dozens or hundreds of others who experienced similar events, by name, but this does not diminish the value of the interview collected. Each interview stands alone for its poetry, for its effect on a family, for the heritage it represents/passes on.
A diamond is not less beautiful because other diamonds exist. A meal is not less tasty because meals precede and follow. The opposite not true, however. A dia
mond is beautiful because it is rare. A meal will taste more special if it follows a fast, or if it can never be repeated. Link this to family, and the intrinsic value increases. A diamond worn by a greatgrandmother is more rare and meaningful.
Remembering the biscuits she made is an act of love. Retelling a story is like wearing the diamond, or baking biscuits. Its repetition is part of an act of hom
age, and this one, repeated in family after family, is left to historians, sociologists, journalists, and artists, to recount, to depict, and in the depiction, to honor, share, and touch others. Historians collect information in order to determine objective truth, or, at least, to tell a story which is not false. It is our task not just to pos
tulate on theory of memory, then, but also to implement methods of collecting interviews and assimilating information in ways most useful to the field of history, to our own project, and potentially for future historians. It is time to broaden the context of memory transmission and generational memory. This is oral history and oral tradition.
A challenge faced by Holocaust researchers today is the loss of a generation.
Research conducted using firstperson interviews with Holocaust victims is becoming more difficult to pursue. Instead, as in Langer’s case, scholars must rely upon recorded or videotaped testimonies. They also expand their interview
8 For more from Hirsch about the power of photographs and archives in memory, see”
Hirsch, Spitzer 2006, 229 – 252.
subjects to include the second and third generations, analyzing as they proceed the impact of historical trauma on these people as well. Holocaust scholars freely recognize that their techniques for understanding profound trauma and its his
torical and generational implications, but let us take a moment to consider the methodological implications of the Holocaust studies. First, one must take on directly the question of whether the Holocaust was a unique event in history, or whether it reflects one example of human depravity that can be translated in many cultures and times. Next, one wonders about the generational expectations of Jews, Europeans, Israelis and Westerners. Finally, one must take into consid
eration the historical presuppositions held by both the interviewer and the subject.
This said I posit that the methods and application discussed in this essay would be useful if researching Japanese war crimes in Korea, postwar population transfers in Europe, Soviet prison camps, the division of India and Pakistan, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, or religious oppression in Tibet.
If the second generation is the “hinge” as Hoffman has claimed, what is the third generation? It is a cliché to say that children and grandparents are natural allies, against parents, but how do we consider this in trauma interviews? Does the third generation wish to preserve the memories of the grandparents who survived trauma? Are they more willing to criticize the parent generation, the second generation, and if so, why? One considers, for instance, the enthusiastic reception which Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners received among those of this third generation in Germany. My own German peers in university were more critical of their parents for not dwelling on the crimes of the first generation than they were of that first generation itself. As Hoffman so eloquently describes in Lost in Translation, the second generation must live with the consequences of firstgeneration trauma. The third generation has the luxury of time and distance, of viewing events from another historical epoch. When considering European history, second generation writers about the Holocaust, resettlement, or the GULAG also have the Communist era to contend with. The third generation can bridge this era and the next, as After the Wall notes, but only for a short time. Generation X is a small one, in Europe and in the United States, and it is followed by a generation not known for its historical introspection.
Ewa Hoffman was born and raised in Cracow until she was a young teen.
The power of the Cracovian identity is too strong to ignore. In Lost in Transla
tion she conjures up all those images any dedicated citizen or admirer of that intellectual city would recognize, the hub of life at the Rynek, café culture, buildings steeped in age and history, the presumption that cities themselves are always old, always wise, always present, which contradicts her own family’s very homelessness, placelessness, which precede and follow – the loss of the
past, and the loss of place, both parents’ place and personal place, with emigra
tion. “No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be,” she writes, “And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love.” (Hoffman 1989, 74).
EWA HOFFMAN AND THE GENERATIONS
When Hoffman introduces the reader to her parents, she describes her father as a risktaker, seeking thrills and breaking rules, but all within the bounds of respectability. Her parents want the best for her, but in postwar Poland, the question is: how to get it? What is required? Her mother maintains a “pleasantly bustling” life,” but her parents never “quite buy into the work ethic.” Why should they, she wonders? In Socialist Poland, “[i]t’s clear enough to everybody that you don’t get anywhere by trying.” (Hoffman 1989, 15).
One of the most profound messages in Lost is the message of identity through family. Hoffman learns to be Jewish, to be Polish, to be feminine: „But aside from responding to their immediate conditions, my parents have inherited the ancient notion – which came from centuries of hard, involuntary labor – that the ideal state of life is getting enough rest. My mother has a notsohidden respect for lazy women. Laziness shows a certain luxuriance of character, the eroticism of valuing your pleasure…. Such egotism is at the heart of feminine power, which consists in the ability to make others do things for you, to be pampered. (Hoffman 1989, 16).
DEFINING LOSS AMONG WOMEN
Like Hoffman, Langer encountered the repercussions of loss through lone
liness when he describes in an interview, the individual, who found his sister after losing his parents and other siblings, realized he could not separate the sense of loss from his profound joy. Finding her reminded him of all that was gone. “He speaks of loneliness beginning after their arrival in America.” (Langer 1991, 96).
For me, a person who is not Polish, finding connections to families to inter
view becomes a task which draws on the well of friendship, the kindness of strangers, and those relationships particular among women. Aldona Kostanec
kaMatraszek approached me in 1994, having heard I was on campus at the University of Gdańsk. She helped my husband find a job and welcomed us to her child’s christening. We became like family. When I asked to interview her mother about her family’s trek out of Lwów, she agreed readily. While Aldona
feels herself to be firmly a citizen of the „Tricity,” even posting „How well do you know the TriCity” quizzes to her Facebook account, her mother’s link to the Kresy was stronger. The moment we sat down to chat, I realized how impor
tant it was for her that I understand. She began with a short lecture on the Par
titions, to the dismay of Aldona. „Mama!” she protested, „Ela is a professor, she knows all this already.” This dynamic repeated itself among the mothers and daughters I encountered, as the daughters, the ones who had grown up in the tricity, within the boundaries of today’s Poland, reprimanding their mothers, wanting the mother to stick to the topic, to answer the question at hand, to be more precise, in short, to impress me (the peer/colleague/friend) or give me what they promised (interview/information/hospitality). But the very act of instructing the interviewer is of critical importance. When Aldona’s mother begins her personal story with the Partitions, it is evidence that her identity as a Pole transcends boundaries as her daughters knows them. She needed me to under
stand the context of where she came from before she began her more painful, personal story. (Kostanecka 2009). When I asked her if she still had family in Lwów, her face collapsed, and with a tone of profound sadness, she said “no one is there. No one is left. There is nothing. Just a wall. Just ruins.” As is often true of her generation, she carries a heavy burden. Her family was forced from the Kresy, and she witnessed the toll it took. She is the secondgeneration trauma victim. (Kostanecka 2009).
Professor Annamaria OrlaBukowska, a sociologist at Jagiellonian University, is perhaps the only person I can claim to be related to, and this only through my academic genealogy. Her mother and my advisor, Professor Emerita Anna Cienciala (University of Kansas) were close friends. While in Krakow for a conference, Annamaria OrlaBukowska introduced me to her aunt, who had lived in Sopot after the war. The family dynamic was different, in part because this was nieceaunt and also because OrlaBukowska herself is an experienced interviewer who has an anthropologist’s instincts for being present without disrupting the flow of the conversation. When I asked a friend’s aunt why she and her husband had never visited his native Lwów, she said, “there’s nothing there, it’s just an open grave” (OrlaBukowska 2009).
THE PURPOSE OF INTERVIEWING THE PAST
When one asks a student about the value of the discipline of history, they will invariably answer in the “never again” vein. One studies the Holocaust to prevent its recurrence in the future. One studies the past to plan a better future.
It is a noble idea. Langer references Hayden White in discussing the desire for closure in history, for “moral meaning.” (Langer 1991, 110). But I posit that we
also study history in order to understand the past, for itself. Peter Lowenthal’s phrase “the past is foreign country” reinforces the idea that history is interesting for itself, and that it can be investigated as a thing separate from us. Does an entymologist study ants just to learn more about human societies or himself?
No. They might apply their learning broadly to humanity, but they also study ants because ants are, well, interesting. Studying them reveals something about a hidden world. So, we also study people, in the past, because they reveal something about a hidden world. Sometimes what we learn about that world demonstrates stunning beauty, but when we study Holocaust testimonies, what do we expect to learn? There must be a moral element, otherwise, we are not scholars, but simply voyeurs.
The vocabulary of Holocaust survival resonates with language about family.
When a rescuer is recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, what is the evidence of their heroism? The Generations. Thus, for Jews, for Poles, the existence of a survivor is very palpably linked to the existence of a family, and by extension, a nation. “Dzięki temu,” one secondgeneration survivor says to me of her father’s rescue, “ja jestem” (Kostanecka 2009).
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“DZIĘKI TEMU, JA JESTEM”: MEMORIES AND NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
SUMMARY
This paper analyzes the ways in which postmemory is manifested in these works and compares these to a series of interviews conducted by the author. It begins with a contemplation of Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies and a discussion of the ways in which Holocaust memory as a field can inform other postmemory and oral history studies. I then apply insights from Langer and from Ewa Hoffman’s After Such Know
ledge to the interviews which form the core of my research. These conversations about the experience of emigration and resettlement from the Kresy (“lost” regions of Poland after World War Two) offer insights into women’s identities, personal and national. I also use Ewa Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, a memoir about language, identity, place, and family. The author explores life and identity in postwar Poland and America questioning the larger forces which shaped her family’s lives and revealing the inner forces which compelled her to integrate past generational traumas into her intellectual and social existences. I am particularly interested in how Hoffman addresses personal identity alongside ethnic and linguistic adaptations. In my interviews, I have asked a series of questions in order to determine the family experience of moving from the Kresy to the
“tricity” of Gdańsk/Gdynia/Sopot, what elements of the story are consistent in each generation, and the extent to which each generation selfidentifies as Polish, as Gdańsz
czanin (Gdańsk residents), or as being from Wilno/Vilnius, Lwów/L’viv, or Pinsk, all regions from which families fled in the postwar era. This paper investigates the conflicts and the costs of emigration and expulsion, not just in immediate suffering, but in the playingout of national, cultural, regional ethnic and personal identities. All the cases studied involve generational and postmemory elements. I am interested in exploring how families remain Polish, even after having to adopt a new, potentially nonPolish, regional home while losing the former home under traumatic circumstances. The under
current of the stories told by mothers and daughters, whether autobiographical or fictio
nal, reveals the important role women play in maintaining family history and, by extension, national history and identity.
Keywords: the modern history of Poland, postmemory, identity, national history, emigration, women’s.
