Holocaust Testimony and "Twelve Years a Slave"

• In Event: Holocaust Memory and Memorialization through the Prisms of Race, Apartheid, and Expressionism

Abstract

There is intriguing common ground between testimony of the Shoah that foregrounds questions of the change of identity caused by trauma, and slave narratives such as Solomon Northrup’s “Twelve Years a Slave.” Shoah studies on testimony have long noted the phenomenon of changed identity among Holocaust survivors. These changes often caused extreme difficulties in regaining normal life after the war and have had long range consequences in the form of second and third generation inherited trauma, as well as affecting the lives of the survivors themselves. Dehumanization suffered in the camps is a clear causal factor in this change of identity; testimonies can indeed be seen as conversion narratives that chart the dissolution of the former, free self as the prisoners become increasingly dehumanized through the experiences they suffer.

Many similar effects can be noted in Solomon Northrup’s compelling narrative of the time he spent as a slave in the southern United States in the years before the Civil War. A free man before being kidnapped, the emphasis at the beginning of the film is on his identity as a musician and as a family man before he is sold into slavery, where his racial identity becomes the only identity that is important. Northrup’s testimony emphasizes the differences between the old identity of a free man and the new identity of a slave.

My talk will focus on teaching the testimony and film of the Northrup story within the context of Holocaust testimony. Albeit found in radically different political and historical contexts, the commonalities of identity issues in relation to dehumanization are striking and allow students access to these crucial themes within Shoah studies from a different perspective, one that allows them a broader humanistic and empathetic understanding of the consequences of bigotry.

author

• Nancy A. Harrowitz, Boston University