Remembering the Inexplicable: Yugoslav Partisan Doctors and Their Memoirs and Memories

• In Event: Yugoslav Memories II: Remembering after Yugoslavia: Archives, Feelings, and Anachronistic Memories

Abstract

The partisan medical service system was an important and impressively organized aspect of the People liberation struggle in Yugoslavia during World War II. More than 300 women doctors worked in the partisan medical service, and many of them ran entire hospitals. In this paper I look at the archive consisting of memoirs, ego documents and interviews with female partisan doctors. Many of those who survived the war held important positions in the medical institutions of socialist Yugoslavia and had the opportunity to build and develop the country's peacetime medical system while navigating their careers, family lives, and political and social activities. In researching these archives, I am interested in the ways in which the experience of wartime medical work, performed under extremely difficult and extraordinary circumstances, becomes - or fails to become - memory. What has been remembered, retold, reproduced, memorialized, monumentalized, and what remains inexplicable, illegible, impossible to include unproblematically in biographical and collective narratives in which temporal frames are seamlessly structured? How do these possibilities and impossibilities of remembering manifest themselves in times of transitions and multiple aftermaths - in the post-World War II period and in the time that came after the Yugoslav socialist project?

Author

• Tanja Petrovic, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)