Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Greece

Memory, Testimony and Subjectivity

Pothiti Hantzaroula

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367627768
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429018961
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A historical investigation of children's memory of the Holocaust in Greece illustrates that age, generation and geographical background shaped postwar Jewish identities. The examination of children's narratives deposited in the era of digital archives enables an understanding of the age-specific construction of the memory of genocide, which shakes established assumptions about the memory of the Holocaust.

In the context of a global Holocaust memory established through testimony archives, the present research constructs a genealogy of the testimonial culture in Greece by framing the rich source of written and oral testimonies in the political discourses and public memory of the aftermath of the Second World War. The testimonies of former hidden children and child survivors of concentration camps illuminate the questions that haunted postwar attempts to reconstruct communities, related to the specific evolution of genocide in Greece and to the rising anti-Semitism of postwar Greece.

As an oral history of child survivors of the Holocaust, the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of the history of childhood, Jewish studies, memory studies and Holocaust and genocide studies.

1
Meaning, memory and archive

The politics of the creation of archival material on the Holocaust

Introducing the archive fever

The emergence of archives of audiovisual testimonies has become a new genre of testimony even though collecting testimonies in the immediate post-Holocaust era was a quite extensive endeavour that Jewish organisations and individuals undertook. A great part of them consisted of children’s testimonies, as institutions that cared for children without parents gathered them and considered that children’s testimonies could serve to transfer to the world the truth about genocide. Besides, there was a positive evaluation of what was viewed as the therapeutic and educational value of children’s testifying. Two organisations, the Central Historical Commission in the American Zone in Germany (CHC) based in Munich and the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland (CJHC) based in Warsaw now part of the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, collected almost 900 child survivors’ testimonies.¹ Another big project, yielding about 1,000 children’s “autobiographies” from children’s homes in Poland and Germany, was organised privately in Poland and the displaced persons’ (DP) camps by Benjamin Tenenbaum, a Polish-born Jew who had migrated to Palestine in 1937 and returned to Poland in 1946.² Besides, testimonies of 42 pupils collected by the principal of the Hebrew School in Bytom reflected not only the interest in the psychological and physical state of young survivors but also the desire to keep a record of their suffering and of the community’s destruction. The manuscript was sent to the CJHC and analysed by Boaz Cohen. Testimonies of children in Bergen Belsen were collected by Hela Wrobel-Kagan, survivor of Bergen Belsen, who started a school at the camp in late 1945.

These early endeavours to document the catastrophe are distinct from the later projects of audiovisual archives, especially with respect to their outcomes in the shaping of collective memory and functioning as a shared narrative facilitating survivors’ confrontation with their traumas.³ As children’s suffering epitomised the enormity of the German evil, their testimonies were an effective resource in communicating Nazism’s deepest insult on human society.⁴ They provided material that could convince the world for the need to eliminate fascism. In addition, testimonies were a tool in understanding the traumas children had undergone.

It was historians during the last two decades who acknowledged the usefulness of these early testimonies as historical evidence. The first collectors (zamlers) of the early testimonies were ambiguous as to whether children’s testimonies were equally valuable as “evidentiary material” as adults’ testimonies.⁵ There was also criticism of the interviewing method, which was based on a questionnaire. The interviewer would then compose the testimony in the first person, and then the witness would approve and sign it. Rachel Auerbach, a leading figure in the CJHC, complained about the reformulation of the testimony by the interviewer and its summarisation, which deprived the testimony of its personal “characteristics of style” and “language.”⁶ Auerbach became founder and director of the Department for the Collection of Testimonies at Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem Archives established one of the earliest collections of testimonies in the late 1950s.

Early collections of testimony focused on the process of the “Final Solution” and the atrocities on Jews. Some interviewees had a vague knowledge of the geography of the “Final Solution” and the location of the death camps. David Boder’s expression of astonishment and disbelief while listening to survivors’ recounting of mass murder and the experiences in the universe of the camp system is typical of early testimonies collected by non-survivors. Boder’s “Voices Project” consisted of voice recordings of 130 survivor testimonies conducted in DP camps. Boder, an American psychologist, arrived in Paris in July 1946 and recorded the interviews on a wire recorder in a two-month period in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Boder’s project produced the first audio testimonies.

The multiplication of archives of Holocaust testimonies and the cross-interviewing of survivors produced a networking of memories and, as Aleida Assmann argued, “intimate remembering communities.”⁷ Interrogation on the position of testimony in the archive and the archive’s role in structuring testimony occupy an accumulated volume of research, even though such research still remains marginal. VHA/USC Shoah Foundation with around 54,000 testimonies of survivors of genocides was a landmark as a project of collecting survivors’ testimonies.⁸ Before the VHA/USC Shoah Foundation collection, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University had already started a community project for the production of testimonies on the Shoah. These testimonies, although individual, were “collected together as an archival whole.”⁹ The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (USHMM’s) Department of Oral History collected 9,000 interviews in audio and video formats. The museum’s oral history department was formalised in 1988 with the hiring of Dr Lind Kuzmack as its first director.¹⁰ Most of these collections centred on the Holocaust, and their structure differed from the oral history life-story paradigm.¹¹ The Spielberg project was the first to introduce the life-story perspective, even though the scheme of life “before, during and after” suggests the structuring role of the process of the “Final Solution.”

The incorporation of the aural and the visual in historiography due to the modern media has transformed the way in which history is done. A broader scope on archival collection by researchers was employed to investigate the relationship between time and testimony examining the extent to which the changing context of the interview shapes the narratives.¹² Sharon Kangisser Cohen examined testimonies that had been given by the same individual from different time perspectives. She employed a comparative perspective on testimonies by examining the situation of the interviewees at the time of the interview.¹³ These accounts come from survivors from a variety of geographical and generational backgrounds as well as experiences. Joanna Michlic’s work examined interviews of one specific geographical and generational background.¹⁴ Michlic’s goal was to explore both the convergences and divergences in earlier and later recollections of wartime experiences of Polish child survivors. Few studies have acknowledged the transformations of memory in child survivors’ testimonies as an important contribution to understanding how children made sense of the reality and responded to their persecution during the Shoah. Besides, there are no studies for children in Southern Europe, a void the book aims at filling.

In order to investigate the relationship between public memory, commemoration, family memory and the shaping of testimony, the chapter pursues a genealogy of the testimonial genre in Greece since 1946. Trying to provide a broader context to the exploration of the testimonial genre, it focuses on testimonies gathered in various forms and archival collections as well as memoirs and written testimonies in order to set a comparative context for the investigation of child survivors’ testimonies in the next chapter.

Before the 1980s, a divided society and memory shaped by the civil war did not allow space to Holocaust memory. The 1285 Act on the Recognition of National Resistance in 1982 was a landmark in the divided cold war atmosphere of the Greek postwar state, which is described as a “kratos ton ethnikofronon” (a “state of nation-minded citizens,” which was, in fact, a state characterised by jingoism).¹⁵ In the 1980s, novel emerging memories of the occupation reshaped the divisive identities and memories of the immediate postwar period. A shared narrative of wartime resistance was inserted into the public sphere, named as “National Resistance,” imaginatively embracing all Greek people. This newly shaped narrative required an important degree of amnesia, which was marked by but also achieved with the ceremonial burning of police files.¹⁶ Survivors’ experiences were buried under the master narrative of a “national” resistance against the Germans and age-long peaceful cohabitation between the Christian and Jewish populations. The concept of “holocaust” was not saved for the Jewish genocide but was used as a generic term of Greek suffering under the German forces during the occupation.

With the Shoah Foundation’s project, survivors’ voices entered the public realm in Greece. Their appearance preceded state initiatives to commemorate the events that led to the perishing of the Jewish population. They also preceded the shift in mentalities of the gentile population from oblivion and silence to awareness. In what ways did the projects of interviewing Greek survivors (among other nationalities) change the public discourse on the Holocaust and contribute to the exhortation of initiatives by state and local authorities as late as the second decade of the 21st century to commemorate the deportations, the dead, the destruction of the biggest necropolis of Europe and the building of the Aristotle University of Salonika on its remnants?

In what ways did the aim of giving a voice and allowing the survivors’ experience to be heard in the framework of an archive which enjoyed worldwide fame and esteem shape a new collective identity and open a space for the articulation of diversities among the survivors? Although there were conflicting political views and accusations between the survivors after the war, uttering social conflict was avoided. Class conflict and social hierarchy were covered under the general destitution and need of rehabilitation.

Genocide, testimony and archive

The multiplication of archives and testimonies on genocidal events engendered concern over the effect of the archive on testimony as well as capacity of the witness to transmit testimony of traumatic experiences. Besides, as survivor testimonies accumulated, questions about their role in producing empirical evidence and the distance between what has been witnessed and what can be transmitted through testimony have been the object of research. Does the search for factual accuracy replicate the rationality of the Final Solution in trying to wipe out not only the Jewish people but also their memory and the accuracy of their testimony disclaiming their reliability as witnesses? The examination of the relationship between testimony, archive and genocide seeks to unravel the complexity of the historical investigation of the Holocaust that places testimony at its centre.

Genocide, as a phenomenon of the 20th century, defined in most of the cases by a state’s intention and plan to exterminate a people through a bureaucratically organised enterprise, was intrinsically linked to the erasure of any evidence that could reveal its plan of destruction. Not only was any trace of evidence erased but also an extensive enterprise of forging documents took place in order for authorities to conceal their genocidal policies and actions. An unprecedented level of violence exerted on the Jewish population was accompanied by the forging of documents, which under the Nazi system took mythic dimensions. The Nazis exploited the status of objectivity with which the archive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• About the author
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Meaning, memory and archive: the politics of the creation of archival material on the Holocaust
• 2 The war became real
• 3 Trajectories of escape from the German persecution of the population of Salonika and Athens
• 4 Hidden children in Volos: trajectories and identities
• 5 Life and memory of concentration camps: the Bergen Belsen experience
• 6 The beginning of an unknown era: the role of anti-Semitism in the construction of postwar identities
• 7 Remaking the meaning of living entre mozotros: postwar reconstruction of Jewish communities
• 8 Family legacies: memory, postmemory and transgenerational haunting
• Epilogue: the legacy of the Holocaust and beyond
• Interview catalogue
• Bibliography
• Index