Assessing Holocaust Testimonies

• In Event: “Beyond Individual Recall”: Holocaust Testimonies in the Age of Postmemory

Abstract

The proliferation of videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors over recent decades, many of them done by poorly trained and historically uninformed interviewers, has created a problem, no doubt unintentionally, for educators who plan to use these interviews as instructional tools with their students. Earlier interviews in which witnesses are encouraged to offer a personal narrative following a structure of their own choosing often unfold with a dramatic intensity lacking in more recent ones done after numerous media representations of the event flooded TV and theater screens, influencing questions asked of survivors and the testimony they offer.

The film SCHINDLER'S LIST, for example, has permanently influenced the way in which audiences respond to the phenomenon of gas chambers, especially at Auschwitz. Because of the notorious scene where a group of Jewish women (unnaturally well-nourished) appear in a small dark enclosed room in a state of terror ostensibly because they do not know whether water or gas will issue from the showerheads, survivors themselves, even of Auschwitz, have concluded that gas was sprayed into the chambers through showerheads. Historian Christopher Browning reports that since the appearance of Schindler’s List “no fewer than 20 survivors include in their narratives a reference to their surprise or relief when the showers proved to be real, and water rather than gas came from the showerheads.”

Several of such moments appear in testimonies I have watched from the Shoah Foundation archives, where clueless interviewers make no effort to correct the mistake. In my presentation I plan to show excerpts from various testimonies with questionable descriptions that depart from what we actually know about the events being described and to assess the damage that might be done in the future when anyone using testimonies for instructional purposes present such material without realizing that it may be misleading and frequently simply incorrect. Because survivor testimonies are indisputably a vital source of information for anyone studying the Holocaust, it is imperative that anyone using them bring to that endeavor as thorough a knowledge of the background of the events being described as time and dedication allow.

author

• Lawrence L. Langer, Simmons College