A teacher and his students: child Holocaust testimonies from early postwar Polish Bytom

ABSTRACT

The document presented here was created in 1945 in Bytom, Poland. It contains testimonies by Holocaust survivor children collected and put down in a notebook by their survivor teacher, Shlomo Tsam, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The testimonies shed light on Jewish children's experience in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, describing oppression, flight, and survival in the words of the weakest segment of Jewish communities – children. The testimonies provide raw data on the encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the territories in which the “Final Solution” was carried out. It is thus an important source contributing to the burgeoning research on the involvement of local populations in the murder of the Jews, on one hand, and in saving Jews, on the other. The creation of this document, one of several collections of Jewish survivor children's testimonies produced in the immediate postwar years, is also indicative of post-Holocaust Jewish sensibilities and concerns regarding surviving children.     

Holocaust child survivors and child sexual abuse

This study utilized a qualitative analysis of child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during World War II. The research study aimed to give this specific group of survivors a voice and to explore the impact of multiple extreme traumas, the Holocaust and childhood sexual abuse, on the survivors. Twenty-two child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during the war completed open-ended interviews. The data was qualitatively analyzed according to Tutty, Rothery, and Grinnell's (1996) guidelines. Three major themes were found: issues relating to the sexual abuse trauma, survivors' perceptions of the abuse, and survivors' general perspectives towards life. The identity of the offenders, Jewish or non-Jewish, determined the survivors' feelings towards themselves, the perpetrators, and about the worth of life.     

Holocaust Child Survivors and Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

This study utilized a qualitative analysis of child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during World War II. The research study aimed to give this specific group of survivors a voice and to explore the impact of multiple extreme traumas, the Holocaust and childhood sexual abuse, on the survivors. Twenty-two child survivors of the Holocaust who were sexually abused during the war completed open-ended interviews. The data was qualitatively analyzed according to Tutty, Rothery, and Grinnell's (1996) guidelines. Three major themes were found: issues relating to the sexual abuse trauma, survivors' perceptions of the abuse, and survivors' general perspectives towards life. The identity of the offenders, Jewish or non-Jewish, determined the survivors' feelings towards themselves, the perpetrators, and about the worth of life.     

The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post-colonial and post-traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland

The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East-Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post-communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post-communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re-composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non-Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non-Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.     

“As Far as They Knew I Came from France”: Stigma,Passing, and Not Speaking about the Holocaust

Today we recognize that storytelling plays an important role in helping survivors of traumatic episodes such as sexual abuse, military combat, or genocide refashion a sense of self and “work through” their traumatic experiences. But before the Holocaust was named and widely acknowledged and the diagnosis of post‐traumatic stress had emerged, survivors of Hitler's genocidal policies struggled to tell their stories in a world that did not particularly wish to hear them. While most accounts of Holocaust survivors’ postwar experiences focus on themes of redemption, adjustment, and integration, my analysis of interviews with Holocaust survivors suggests during their first two decades living in the United States they were often silenced by individuals they encountered. I use Goffman's analysis of stigma to document how and why this silencing occurred, and with what consequences, providing an account of the interactions survivors had with family members, neighbors and acquaintances, and the strategies of identity management that survivors devised.     

GERMAN BY VIRTUE OF OTHERS: THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN THREE DEBATES

This paper argues that German identity is primarily constructed in opposition to a negative ‘other’, with ‘the Jew’ as prototypical other. The general trajectory of German identity construction throughout the 1980s and 1990s was towards the normalization of German identity, a mending in response to the radical break in German history by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. This development will be traced through three debates that crosscut the realms of professional scholarship and the public – the Historians' Debate of 1985/86, the German unification debate of 1989 and the Goldhagen debate of 1996 – with focus on the contributions by professional scholars. The basic dichotomous structure of self-other is complicated by recurring themes in the construction of contemporary German identity. Three central themes or problems are identified in the debates: efforts at exclusively positive definitions of German identity, the definition of German identity in relation to a negative other and the location of the Holocaust in German history. The focus in the interpretation of these themes is on the subtle changes of identity over time, conceptualized in terms of repetition with change. The essay closes with a plea for a more open and inclusive definition of German identity and some thoughts on the role of the public intellectual in German society.     

"Victims" and "Survivors": Emerging Vocabularies of Motive for "Battered Women Who Stay"*

This paper reviews the literature providing reasons for why battered women "stay" in abusive relationships and examines the emergence of images of battered women as "survivors" in early and contemporary activists' discourses, drawing on ideas from social constructionist approaches to social problems, identity, and deviance to explore this phenomenon. Most of the early representations of battered women I analyze emphasize their emotionality and their victimization, while the more recent constructions of this collective identity discussed here emphasize their rationality and their agency. Both "victim" and "survivor" typifications provide accounts for why battered women stay in violent relationships, thus providing a vocabulary of motive for this oft-imputed "deviance." Constructing battered women as survivors, however, may also remediate some of the stigma that can attach to victimization more generally. After situating victim and survivor discourses and considering how the image of a survivor may meet normative expectations that a victim image perhaps violates, I briefly discuss some implications of these alternate collective identities.     

THE "BANALITY OF EVIL" REFRAMED: The Social Construction of the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem"

Research on the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews has arguably been dominated by historians. Yet many historians remain confounded by the Holocaust's major paradox: the "banality of evil" that occurred during the Nazi regime. In this article I argue that understanding of the "banality of evil" paradox can be advanced by reframing previously unsynthesized research in terms of a constructionist theory of social problems. I view the "Jewish problem" and its "final solution" as having a "natural history" that is characterized by the development and unfolding of claims about problems and the formulation and implementation of solutions to problems. I trace the construction of the "Jew" throughout history and as it was identified, acknowledged, and applied in a particular sociocultural and political context. By providing the first application of constructionism to a genocidal event, I show that the social processes that construct genocide parallel those that construct other social problems, and that it is precisely this correspondence that makes the construction of the "Jewish problem" and its "final solution" banal.     

Contested memories: efforts of the powerful to silence former inmates' histories of life in an institution for 'mental defectives'

This paper discusses the barriers encountered in undertaking an oral history project with survivors of a total institution for 'mental defectives' in the province of Alberta, Canada. Powerful social actors were able to bar access to survivors through legal guardianship orders, and to make access to the institution and its grounds and to publicly archived materials quite prohibitive to the researcher. In addition to overt efforts on the part of powerful social actors to block the project, concerns about the potential to discredit survivor narratives led to changes in the research design. Specifically, research and literature about the 'acquiescence' of intellectuals with intellectual impairments led the researcher to broaden the sources for this history as a preemptive strategy. Despite these barriers, survivors of the institution provided a rich and powerful testimony to the brutality of institutionalization, and provide us with an emancipatory history from the perspectives of those most oppressed by disability policies and practices.     

The Representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Press, 1941–1945

Abstract

The article presents the first in-depth examination of the representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet press during the period of its perpetration, 1941–1945. The article illustrates that alongside growing anti-Semitism, both among the population and the regime, Soviet journalists, primarily Il'ya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman, reported on the suffering and murder of European Jewry. The article examines the Soviet presentation of Nazi racial theory and compares it to the representation of Nazi racial theory in the American and British press during the war. The article looks at the reasons behind Soviet press coverage of the Holocaust, such as the use of atrocities to motivate the people to fight. It also examines the way in which the Soviet press used the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population as a means of distinguishing the fascist and socialist systems and highlighting the equality of all peoples, which it claimed existed in the Soviet Union. The article examines the Soviet representation of the behaviour of the Jews under occupation, focusing on the three main attributes — resistance, dignity and the brotherhood of the peoples. In general, the article strives to illustrate that the Soviet press reported on the Holocaust during the war and recognized the racial nature of the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry.     

Secondary traumatic stress, psychological distress, sharing of traumatic reminiscences, and marital quality among spouses of Holocaust child survivors

In this study, we examined the issue of secondary traumatic stress (STS) among spouses of Holocaust survivors who were children during the World War II. STS is defined as comprising the same components as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), except that the person evidencing the symptoms has not actually been exposed to the traumatic event(s), but has developed them as a result of caring for someone with PTSD. Participants were 90 couples who completed self-report questionnaires regarding posttraumatic symptoms, psychological distress, and marital quality. The results showed that about one-third of the spouses suffered from some degree of STS symptoms. Secondary traumatic stress symptoms and psychological distress among spouses were significantly related to hostility, anger, paranoia, and interpersonal sensitivity in the survivor, but unrelated to whether the survivor had shared his/her reminiscences with the spouse. Female spouses were found to suffer more distress than male spouses, especially when their partner suffered high levels of PTSD. The results suggest that STS is, to a large degree, related to the demands of living with a symptomatic survivor, possibly more than to the empathic element thought to be central to this syndrome.     

Social Work Students Cope with Terror

This study examines the responses of social work students to the wave of terror of the Second Intifada, focusing on issues of professional identity raised by the terror. The study, based on statements of students who lost meaningful persons in the terror and on class discussions, identifies four key issues involving the formation of the students' professional identity that were accentuated by the terror. These are: (1) the conflict between personal needs and professional needs; (2) doubts about professional competence; (3) the conflict between carving out personal space and meeting professional responsibilities, and (4) the difficulties of doing fieldwork under terror. The study also observes the discomfort of the Arab students in the situation.     

Projective techniques for social science and business research

This paper examines various websites based in the Shetland Islands, on Britain’s northern periphery. These sites focus on local life and culture and, by enabling interactive contribution, provide an extension of the social networks existing in the physical locations of the Islands. So rather than emphasising the separation of the virtual and physical realms, they enable a hybrid space, in which interactions within the virtual space enhance and accentuate the appreciation of physical locations within Shetland, and the social relationships based there. Therefore they focus users’ attention on the Islands as a specific and distinctive community. However, they are also embedded within the wider virtual landscape of the internet. Thus, through the use of these sites, perceptions of the local and peripheral continually oscillate with ideas of the globally connected. They enable users to perceive Shetland as a place that exists at many points on an axis of peripherality and connectedness. Ultimately, they enable a continuation, but also complication of an historical process, in which communal narratives of cultural identity and collective memory have been continually informed and reformed by the dialogue between Shetland communities and the wider world through the structures of mass communication.     

Social media dialogues in a crisis: A mixed-methods approach to identifying publics on social media

Despite the promise of social media to engender dialogue, the common approach to studying social media may prioritize monologue, whereby research considers the strategies organizations use in targeting publics, particularly in a crisis. This study uses a mixed-method approach to analyze dialogue in a crisis—semantic network analysis and content analysis. Specifically, this study examines the emotional expression and crisis coping behaviors on social media during two separate terror attacks: the Paris terror attacks in 2015 and the Barcelona terror attacks in 2017. Results demonstrate how publics may be identified and understood through semantic network analysis and content analysis. This study also shows the connection between emotions and coping, expanding the crisis communication literature in public relations, and suggests the need to consider agenda-setting and resilience in crisis communication research. Finally, we discuss this study’s implications for assuming a dialogic orientation in public relations.     

Contesting Formosa: Tragic Remembrance,Urban Space,and National Identity in Taipak

Throughout the world, national identities are inscribed on communities through the construction of social space. Although the identity of Taiwan-as Chinese versus Formosan-has been contested for the past fifty years, the struggles over space and memory have become increasingly visible since the lifting of martial law in 1987. This article, a product of five years of field research in Taiwan, is an attempt to read some ways in which so-called Native Taiwanese have begun to inscribe a non-Chinese identity on social space in Taipak and beyond. In particular, I focus on how struggles for control over social memory have played out in the transformation of Taipak's New Park into a memorial for the Massacre of February 28. Although it is only one social field on which the struggle for Taiwanese identity is fought, New Park has become one of the major points of contention between ethnic groups on the island.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

AGENCY, STRUCTURE, AND JEWISH SURVIVAL OF THE HOLOCAUST:

In this article I use a life history of two brothers who survived the Holocaust to bring survivor research into the mainstream of sociological inquiry and to explore one of the central problems of general social theory: the relationship between human agency and social structure. A theory of agency and structure offers a distinctly sociological alternative in a literature that has been dominated by psychological theorizing and that has often characterized Jews in overly negative or overly heroic terms. Survivors' accounts are permeated with "epiphanies," including "crucial moments" involving the ability to make difficult choices and quick decisions that were the difference between life and death. These situations illuminate the relationship between agency and structure in instances where the tension between them is heightened. Survivors' life histories suggest ways in which Jews' ability to exercise agency to survive structural conditions of extremity was influenced by their pre-war exposure to cultural schemas and resources that they were able to transpose to the war-occupation context. Successful agency, however, was in large part a collective accomplishment and dependent on factors beyond individuals' control.     

Images of Jewish identities in Lithuanian literature of the twentieth century: Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris

This paper deals with the identity concept of two Lithuanian Jewish writers, Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris. Kanovich, as a member of the Holocaust generation, writing in Russian, depicts his protagonists as spiritual and hardworking people with strong self‐confidence, resting on religion and custom. By means of the narrative technique of memory, Kanovich creates a literary resurrection of the Lithuanian Jews as a people which was almost completely exterminated during the Holocaust. Omnipresent pictures of cemetery and grave transform the Lithuanian space into a metonymy of death and, grotesquely, to the only place of home, being the “shelter” for the killed bodies of the Lithuanian Jewry. Markas Zingeris, growing up in post‐war Soviet Lithuania, represents the concept of open identities, changeable in time and place. Calling himself a Lithuanian writer who has been raised within a Lithuanian, Jewish, and, not least, Soviet milieu, Zingeris depicts his protagonists in in‐between situations. Writing in Lithuanian, speaking several languages fluently and working as translator, Zingeris embodies the cosmopolite. At the same time, though, he is a writer of collective memory. He comments on the apparent loss of the great utopia of an autonomous identity with ironic melancholy, pointing instead to the rich variety of hybrid identities.