Here is the text of the scholarly paper that I presented at the Fourth International Auto/biography Association Conference, which was held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in March 2004.  The IABA Conference home page is at this URL:  http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/eng/conference/Index.htm

 

Survival in Multiple Worlds:  Narratives by World War II Survivors

PART I.   Memory and Memoir: Representations and/of Experience

In his essay, "Backtalk: Notes toward an Essay on Memoir," Richard Hoffman defines the nature and purpose of memoir in this way: "Ultimately, a memoir must be about the myriad ways the past and present conjugate to produce the future. This commingling includes the dead as well as the living, our forbears as well as our children. The memoirist's disciplined practice must include an openness to grief, regret, and remorse in order to see reality clearly. This extrication from lies, shame, and silence, this liberation, is the result of many individual acts of truth-telling performed by choosing this word or phrase over that, by honoring the integrity of each event as opposed to modifying its contours to fit, by the quest to understand how time, along with place, class, and culture, has unfolded character and determined history."

As a scholar, teacher, and writer of memoir, I share Richard Hoffman’s concern with the central interrelated questions of the relationship between the past and the present of the writer's life and the ways in which a memoir’s structure depends upon moving between past and present.  I am interested in exploring decisions made by the memoirist about what is emphasized and what is deleted, about how the passage of time is presented, and about ways in which the writer’s style and tone are interwoven with subject matter.  In addition, I am concerned with consequences of self-narration, in particular what Paul John Eakin has defined as “transgressions.” [i]

Contemporary theorists, Eakin among them, have assessed the limitations of Roy Pascal’s definition of autobiography.[ii]   Theorists and practitioners continue to explore the ways in which diverse forms of autobiographical writing represent diverse experiences.  Central investigative questions include the following: What happens when the established rules and principles of life writing are breached, when a text does not adhere to the traditional definition of an autobiography as the carefully polished story of a completed life?   What happens when not only generic boundaries but also cultural lines are crossed, resulting in a life story rife with ambiguity and paradox that cannot be easily categorized or interpreted?   What happens when one attempts to interpret representations of a disaster as profound and unimaginable as World War II in general and the Holocaust in particular?  Who can and/or should lay claim to having the agency, authority, and ownership to answer these and related questions?

When analyzing the consequences of World War II, we need to pay special attention to the stories of those individuals who have survived, for their discourses of trauma evolve into discourses of endurance and survival–both in physical and psychological terms.  Implicit in disaster is the survival of those who live to tell the tale.  For this reason, a rhetorical and/or semiotic analysis of survivors’ stories offers rich theoretical possibilities; adding a historical, contextual analysis of survivors’ stories contributes still richer possibilities – particularly when such texts are examined as collective testimonies that offer blueprints for cultural change.

Over the past two years, I have been reading narratives (published and unpublished) by individuals who survived World War II and have used narrative to recount and reflect on their experiences.[iii]  I have done research at the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam; the National Museum of Military History in Diekirch, Luxembourg; the National Archives in Luxembourg City; and the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Overland Park, Kansas.  I have talked with survivors now living in European countries and the United States.  The survivors’ narratives that form the basis of my analysis include many written and published in the decades directing following World War II as well as many published more recently.  The narratives include memoirs written by survivors who remained in Europe as well as by survivors who emigrated during or after the war. 

The interaction of memory and imagination, reconstruction and re-invention of the past, implications of the past for the present and future, privacy vs. telling of secrets, the role of dreams and memories in memoir writing, real time vs. virtual time, versions of the truth, fluidity of identity, self-consciousness in narrative, the role of lies and confession in memoir writing--all of these are pertinent issues in the study of narratives written by survivors.  I wish to explore issues raised by Daniel R. Schwarz who, in his introduction to Imagining the Holocaust, discusses the “inextricably related issues of aesthetics, ethics, and politics” in the study of one specific form of life writing, namely, that of the Holocaust narrative.  Professor Schwarz writes, “We need to think about the ethics of reading Holocaust narratives; how do we suspend our daily selves and enter into the world of the unspeakable, how do we as scholar-critics write about that world? (6).

Furthermore, I wish to explore Michael Rothberg’s  analysis of “fundamental demands on representation” as outlined in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Rothberg explains how the Holocaust as a traumatic event makes three fundamental demands on representation: a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the limits of representation, and a demand for engagement with the public.  As Rothberg implies, the study of survivors’ narratives involves an exploration of the concept of memory as it is related to the representation of experience in the form of memoir. 

Third, I wish to examine ways in which the remembered self and the remembering self intersect.  Like Susan Engel, I wish to analyze the "relational question" in the context of psychology of memory.  Engel writes: "Most moments of remembering are not done alone in the process of self‑understanding or self‑contemplation. Many personal recollections that contribute to one's identity unfold in highly motivated and charged situations‑‑where there are other people. You are trying to justify yourself, impress another person, show how you are the same, or different, from others. These situations then end up sharing one's life story as it emerges across time and place. In this way context plays a huge role in determining the self one knows through one's studies about the past" (87).

Finally, I wish to analyze survivors’ narratives as testimonio.  The concept of testimonio is often applied to narratives of disaster and survival in which witnessing is recounted and represented.  Doris Sommer defines testimonio as “the story of a group as told by one member.  The testimonial "I" does not invite us to identify with it and has no pretense to universal or essential human experience” (108).  Sommer links the rise of the testimonio to political changes in the world and to the rising belief that there can be no objective history, that "no one version of history can be ultimately authoritative" (117).[iv]

Scholar and memoirist Helen M. Buss defines memoir in the broader context of the creative act of writing:  “ . . . memoir does not claim to be a ‘complete history,’ but rather the testimony of a writer who has ‘personal knowledge’ of the events, the era, or the people that are its subject.  As a result, in terms of historical studies, the memoir serves as a historical resource rather than a historical discourse” (2).  Buss continues: “Through its blending of styles–dramatic, narrative, essayistic, descriptive, and imagistic–and its practice of combining factually based testimony and fictive anecdote, the memoir form bridges the typical strategies of historical and literary discourses in order to establish necessary connections between the public and the private, the personal and the political” (186).[v]

Many contemporary memoirists foreground the multiple perspectives and belief systems from which personal and historical stories unfold, thereby reflecting a desire to acknowledge and affirm the fluid (and sometimes contradictory) nature of “truth” and “facticity” when writing about one's own life as well as in describing one's relationships with others.  Often, writers shape their autobiographical narratives in specific ways to help readers understand the ways in which memory and imagination can interact to reconstruct and recreate historical settings, events, and characters.  Beyond that, in many contemporary memoirs, the reader gets to "see" the author at work.  This kind of reflexivity (that is, the author’s addressing readers and himself or herself about how his or her autobiographical writing evolves) is crucial to the reader's understanding of how the author views one’s subject and, consequently, how one’s story is told.  In my view, when a writer steps outside the text to comment on what he/she has just written, this reflexivity sharpens the writer’s focus and leads readers to ponder not only the writer’s memories but also their own.

Laurel Richardson asks, "How do we write ourselves into our texts with intellectual and spiritual integrity?" (7).  This question lies at the heart of one’s work as a writer of memoir.  It is, of course, an issue linked to that of "good faith"‑‑that nebulous quality essential to what Philippe Lejeune once defined as the autobiographical pact; that is, the contract or agreement between writer and reader‑‑a concept that Lejeune has explored in his discussion of authorship, authority, and their underlying ambiguities (1989, 3‑30).[vi]  The theory’s complication rests on its basic premise: the implication that the reader can identify the author with the narrator and the character in the narrative, as evidenced by what Lejeune has called the “honored signature” on the book’s cover.  Over the decades Philippe Lejeune has revisited and revised his theory; most recently, he speaks of the "autobiographical pact" as a "promise of sincerity" rather than as a guarantee (1998, 125).  

 PART II.   Reflection and Reflexion

By examining diverse narratives written by survivors, we can better appreciate the complex ways in which memoirists represent particular (and disparate) experiences of survival in multiple works: 1) the historical world of the past; 2) the historical world of the present; and 3) the textual world in which memory and imagination interact to produce the crafted narrative.  Add to these three worlds a fourth: the world in which each reader encounters and responds to the crafted narrative.  In her memoir All But My Life (1957), Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust, speaks of the challenges she faced in attempting to represent her experiences in the form of memoir:

                Survival is both an exalted privilege and a painful burden.  I shall take a few random incidents that have become important in my life and try to make some sense of them.  At the same time, I realize that it is impossible to do justice to fifty years of memory.  The acuteness of those recollections often penetrates the calm of my daily life, forcing me to confront painful truths but clarifying much through the very act of evocation.  I have learned, for the most part, to deal with those truths, knowing well that a painful memory brought into focus by a current incident still hurts, but also that the pain will recede–as it has–and ultimately fade away” (247).

Just as important, Klein claims a new identity as a witness whose writing functions as testimonio:  "As I finish the last chapter of my book, I feel at peace, at last. I have discharged a burden, and paid a debt to many nameless heroes, resting in their unmarked graves. For I am haunted by the thought that I might be the only one left to tell their story” (from the author’s preface). 

In the author’s acknowledgments to his memoir, Leap into Darkness (1998), Leo Bretholz explains that the urgings of others led him to write his narrative of disaster and survival:

                 There was much encouragement by friends and relatives for me to write my memoirs. It bespeaks many concerns––a period of my life which bears remembering, retelling, and reminiscing. It is based on profound reflection and introspection, and it needs to be told if for no other reason than to learn a lesson from it.

                 It is offered as a message to those who are willing and eager to apply eternal vigilance, lest our freedoms be lost. . . . (unpaginated)

Like Klein, Bretholz views himself as a witness to the reality of the Holocaust, yet he makes clear that it is the message, not the messenger, that is foremost.  In the epilogue to his memoir, Bretholz concludes, “I am a tiny footnote to all of this history, but such footnotes are the secrets which make the story real” (248).

One of the best-known Holocaust survivors as well as one of the most prolific writers of fiction and non-fiction, Elie Wiesel – perhaps best known for his memoirs Night and Dawn – has written of his experience of disaster and survival over the past forty-five years.  In his essay, “And Yet,” published in his autobiographical collection, And the Sea is Never Full (1999), Wiesel strives to explain the force that drives him to remember the past and to use his writing to represent his experiences:

            “Remember,” the Book commands us.  In my tradition, memory does not set people apart.  On the contrary, it binds them one to the other and all to the origins of our common history.  It is because I remember where I come from that I feel close to those I meet on the way . . . Like most survivors, I tried to invent reasons to live, and a new concept of man in this insane world, and a new language.  It is a primary language whose only purpose is to describe all that eludes writing, to cry without opening ours mouths, to speak to the dead since they can no longer speak to us  (407).

Henry Oertelt, who grew up in wartime Berlin, worked under forced labor conditions, and survived five concentration camps, begins his memoir, An Unbroken Chain: My Journey Through the Nazi Holocaust (2000), by declaring, “I am a survivor of the Holocaust, one who has been destined to bear witness for its millions of murdered victims” (12).  Oertelt, who views educational outreach as a crucial aspect of bearing witness, travels throughout Minnesota, speaking to school and community groups about his dedication to “pass on my story so that the world will never forget and will be able to recognize what can happen if hatred and bigotry are allowed to go on unchallenged and unopposed” (14).

Sabina S. Zimering’s memoir, Hiding in the Open: A Holocaust Memoir ((2001), recounts her and her sister Helka’s experience of escaping the Holocaust by passing as Polish Catholic girls and posing as hotel workers in Regensburg, Germany, during World War II.  In addition, Zimering’s narrative traces her experience in medical school in Munich following the war, her engagement to Ruben Zimering, their immigration to the United States, their marriage, and their life together  in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Following the birth of her first child, she wrote:  “To me, giving life to a human being seemed the biggest achievement possible . . . The Holocaust catastrophe, which many had begun to forget, remained deeply embedded in me.  I wanted a child, eventually more than one, to give them the names of our loves ones gone.  Our children should help to fill the gap, the colossal gap in the number of the remaining Jews”  (206).

Hana Greenfield, a native of Kolin, Czechoslovakia, who survived incarceration in Terezin, concludes her memoir, Fragments of Memory (1998), by observing  the power of witnessing: “While travelling and speaking to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, I saw how important it was to bear witness.  Meeting many survivors from various countries and different camps, I learned that every story was different, that the Holocaust had many faces, many of them still unknown.  As much as we already knew, so much more was still untold.  And the survivors are the last people that can tell” (109).

Resiliency is perhaps the defining characteristic of survivors’ narratives.  The term has been defined by Roberta Greene and others as “an innate self-righting mechanism that assists people in redirecting their lives onto an adaptive path following disadvantageous or stressful circumstances,” is central to survivors’ narratives.  What gives survivors the power to persist and survive?  Remembering, recounting, and reflecting on one’s own story.  Giving testimony helps one develop resiliency.

My preliminary analysis of narratives by survivors of World War II who are not Holocaust survivors indicates that, like Holocaust survivors, many other survivors, particularly those writing during the past two decades, interweave reflection with reflexion in their works.  Not only do they reflect upon the past by recounting specific memories; they also step outside their texts to speak directly about the interaction of memory and imagination.  Let us consider two such memoirs: David Michell’s A Boy’s War ( 1988) and Agate Nesaule’s A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile (1995).

Preceding the text of A Boy’s War (1988) is a preface in which the author explains why he wrote his story of survival as the son of Australian missionaries with the China Inland Mission who were interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Weihsien (Shantung Provice), China, during World War II: “My hope is that this story will not lead the reader to the conclusion that everything turned out well for everyone who was interned during WWII.  Some, I know, still suffer from the effects of the separation and hardships” (unpaginated). 

Couched in the language of faith tested and proven, Michell’s narrative concludes with his 1981 return visit to the site of the camp.  It is during this visit that the author fulfills his need to witness to his personal experience within the historical past while at the same time fulfilling his need to reflect on the past from his present perspective:  “I walked forward and stood among the flowers.  For a few brief moments I was oblivious of those around me, and for yet one more time, I was a boy again, living with my heroes.  I fell to my knees and gave thanks to God—thanks for faith and His abiding faithfulness and for freedom no walls can contain” (166). 

In A Woman in Amber (1995), Agate Nesaule recounts her memories of her family members’ flight from rural Latvia during World War II, their capture and internment by Russian Mongolian forces, their admission to a displaced persons’ camp, and their post-war immigration to the United States.  In her author’s note, Nesaule describes the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding memory and representation:

                  I have uncertainties about this story. I was only seven when some of the events took place, and there is so much that I have forgotten or I never knew or understood. But I have not been able to compare my recollections with others. No one in my family wants to talk about the war; they may have silent images, but they tell no stories. And no matter how hard I try, I cannot force myself to do research. I can only bear to read novels, as if they were safer, not factual accounts of the period. 

                  I know that memory itself is unreliable: it works by selecting, disguising, distorting. Others would recall these events differently. I cannot guarantee historical accuracy; I can only tell what I remember. I have had to speculate and guess, even to invent in order to give the story coherence and shape. I have also changed some names and identifying details to protect the privacy of others. . . . (vii).

Nesaule asks herself (and, by extension, her readers), "Why tell this story now, so many years after World War II?” (viii)    Then she answers her own question: “In all wars the shelling eventually stops, most wounds heal, memories fade. But wartime terror is only the beginning of stories. The small boy with arms raised in the face of guns, the girl forced to witness rape, the emaciated children begging for food, if they survive, all have to learn how to live with their terrible knowledge. For more than forty years, my own life was constricted by shame, anger and guilt. I was saved by the stories of others, by therapy, dreams and love. My story shows healing is possible" (viii).

Part III.  Preliminary Conclusions

My research on survivors’ narratives is in its early stages, and I shall continue this project throughout the coming academic year.  It is not too early, however, to join other theorists in making several observations about the nature of such narratives.  Personal narratives of disaster and survival are made possible by memory; at the same time, such narratives reconstruct memory, with readers playing a central role.  As Henry Greenspan observes, “Survivors’ recounting is not only made of remnants but is itself a kind of remnant.  Whatever the specific motives in retelling–to remember the dead, to warn the living, to indict the killers, to document the crime–every act of recounting, really by definition, is premised on the possibility of responsive listeners” (36).  

Greenspan’s nod to the possibility of “responsive listeners” resonates with Jeremy Popkin’s assertion that memoirs, no matter how persuasive, are not self-validating” and that “even Holocaust memoirs cannot claim “transparent self-evidency”  (24).  Popkin concludes, “In the quest for truth, we must be willing to interpret these texts, ask questions about them, and, in some cases, admit that they may not be reliable.  We must also recognize, however, that they are part of a larger human effort to transmit the truth of the human past, an effort in which first-person literature joins hands with both fiction and history” (25).

Resiliency, the ability not only to survive but also to adapt and persist,  is central to survivors’ narratives.  Remembering, recounting, and reflecting on one’s own story constitutes testimonio not only for writers of narratives but also for readers.  As empathetic and critical readers of survivors’ narratives, we play a crucial role, for our expectations and representations intersect with those of the writer.  Not only do we bring to our process of reading our own understandings of how an autobiographical narrative works; each of us also brings our own expectations concerning the “autobiographical pact” between ourselves and the writer.  These expectations, as disparate as our own experiences, inevitably influence our judgments concerning the validity and reliability of the text as well as the representation of experience therein. 

That is why, when analyzing the consequences of natural and/or man-made catastrophes, we need to pay special attention to the stories of those individuals who have survived such catastrophes.  Discourses of disaster become discourses of trauma, endurance, and survival–both in physical and psychological terms.  Like Ishmael in Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, each survivor says, "I alone am left to tell the tale."   Or, as Imre Kertesz sardonically comments as the end of his memoir, Fateless, “I am here, and I know full well that I have to accept the prize of being allowed to live” (190).