Inspired by Holly Werner-Thomas’ February 2021 OMHA workshop Changing the Narrative on Gun Violence: Survivors Want You to ‘Sit Down and Listen,’ Emily R. Kahn explores her own experiences sitting down and listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors, refugees, and their descendants. She deconstructs her conflicting feelings and sense of responsibility about telling these stories as a non-survivor.
I am not a survivor.
To the best of my knowledge, I am not directly related to a survivor. Yet, as a Jew and an interviewer of people that the Holocaust directly affected, I carry the stories of survivorhood wherever I go.
Who classifies as a survivor varies greatly, even within the ouevre of Holocaust commemoration and scholarship. Some scholars and organizations only consider people who lived through World War II (1939-1945) in Nazi-occupied Europe or Axis territories as survivors, while others include people who fled these areas and spent the war in Allied or neutral countries. Two of the major Holocaust remembrance organizations, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and Yad Vashem, differentiate Jews who experienced the trauma firsthand but acknowledge that, from a technical standpoint, any Jew who was alive anywhere in the world at the end of World War II survived the Holocaust. Indirectly, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are classified as survivors in their own right, labeled the second and third generation. Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch coined the term “postmemory” to reflect how the second generation “bears the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before— to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”
In a conversation about the 40% Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America, Holly Werner-Thomas cemented the fact that “survivor” is a word without a singular definition. She considers survivors of gun violence to be both people who were shot and their loved ones who also experienced the psychological, physical, financial, and legal aftermath of this trauma. Regardless of differences in the definitions of survivors of the Holocaust and of gun violence, a common theme emerges: the family members of direct survivors also carry the responsibility of living with and remembering this trauma. All of these stories combine to form a chain of survivorhood.
Yet memory, as well as postmemory, fades as we move farther away from the traumatic event. Younger family members may never have known the people who directly survived. The chain begins to break. In this audio clip, Steven Sayer, the son of Holocaust refugees whom I interviewed in December 2020, discusses how the memory of his family’s story dilutes with each generation:
It's all up here (pointing to head). It’s probably been transferred to my wife. My children know about it. Do they feel it the same way I do? No, probably not. Certainly my grandchildren won't. And I think you're just dealing with the realities of this is life, and generations go on and you can–when we're gone, when my wife and I have gone, particularly me, who's going to carry on the story in my family? I don't know.
What then is the role of the non-survivor, oral historian in carrying on this story? Yes, we sit and listen, but what next? Why do I feel the physical weight of carrying the intangible memories of my narrators? To explore these questions, I completed something called destructive testing on printed transcripts of oral histories I conducted with first- and second-generation Holocaust survivors and refugees. Destructive testing is utilized to examine the failure mechanisms of a material, providing a contradiction of using loss to advocate for future preservation (Did I mention I am a historic preservationist?). For the transcripts, these “tests” included:
Soaking pages of transcripts in a tea and coffee solution, a process that reverse aged the oral histories of first- versus second-generation survivors. Transcripts of second-generation narrators spent more time in the liquid to reflect the decay of memory as the historical event becomes more aged;
Letting pages blow around, scatter in the wind, and accumulate dirt and debris;
Creating a physical chain of the aged transcripts, linking them in order of narrators’ birth years;
Putting a single transcript page and the full chain through a paper shredder.
Testing the strength of memory and postmemory (Created by Emily R. Kahn)
Alt Text: Destructive testing of oral history transcripts, leading to tearing, decay, and disintegration
Destroying these transcripts felt almost sacrilegious, although logically I know they are not the only copies. As I picked up pages out of the tea and coffee solution, I could feel the paper disintegrating and tearing in my hands. I tried to neatly arrange the soaked pages in chronological order, but to my great frustration they kept flying away. Then, assembling the chain, the dried pages kept cracking, especially as I linked the more weathered transcripts of second-generation survivors. Days later, I broke out the paper shredder and sat in an all-consuming pile of stories of persecution, murder, emigration, perseverance, and hope.
This process, albeit untraditional, truly encapsulated my own feelings of privilege and discomfort in working with Holocaust survivors and refugees. I am so honored that my narrators trust me with their and their family’s stories. I want to hold onto these stories, to keep them organized, and to prevent them from being lost or destroyed. Oftentimes, however, I feel overwhelmed by this responsibility, worrying that I am exploiting their stories for my own academic or professional benefit or am incapable of holding all the pieces together. I am not a survivor. What am I really doing here?
Yet the strength of memory and postmemory, as well as my role, became evident through my destruction. A single page of transcript shred easily, but a chain of transcripts (even a weathered one) had to be forced into the machine. The more people who share and carry these stories, the stronger and more protected the chain becomes. Furthermore, even after shredding, I could still hold the pieces. They survived. The stories of survivors survived.
I now realize my role as a non-survivor, as someone without personal memory or postmemory of the Holocaust. I am not a link in the chain of survivorhood, but I am its temporary carrier. It is my responsibility as a Jew and an oral historian to transmit these stories to others who can carry them in the future, especially as descendants of survivors feel less connection to their family history over time. The stories I transmit will be incomplete but, with this heightened sense of awareness and responsibility, I am confident they will never be destroyed.
Emily R. Kahn is a public historian who completed a Master of Science in Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation in April 2021. Her thesis explored expanding Holocaust commemoration to include a celebration of the lives of Holocaust survivors and refugees through the lens of Washington Heights, New York City. As part of her methodology, she conducted sixteen life review oral histories with first- and second-generation Holocaust survivors and refugees focusing on how they and their families rebuilt their lives in the United States. She hopes to archive and publicize these oral histories in the future.