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    Title:  “Children’s  Erratic  Memories  of  the  Holocaust:  On  Cross‐Cutting  Exchanges  in 

    Exhibitions and Visual Projects about Child Survivors and Children of Survivors” 

    Author: 

    Dana 

    Mihă

    ilescu 

    How  to  cite  this article: Mihăilescu, Dana. 2013. “Children’s Erratic Memories of  the Holocaust: On Cross‐

    Cutting Exchanges in Exhibitions and Visual Projects about Child Survivors and Children of Survivors”.  Martor 18: 

    93‐108. 

    Published  by: Editura  MARTOR  (MARTOR Publishing House),  Muzeul  Ță ranului Român  (The 

    Museum of the Romanian Peasant) 

    URL:  http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista‐martor‐nr‐18‐din‐2013/ 

     Martor   (The  Museum  of  the  Romanian  Peasant  Anthropology  Review)  is  a  peer‐reviewed  academic  journal 

    established in 1996, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology, museum studies and the dialogue 

    among  these  disciplines.   Martor   review  is  published  by  the  Museum  of  the  Romanian  Peasant.  Its  aim  is  to 

    provide,  as  widely  as  possible,  a  rich  content  at  the  highest  academic  and  editorial  standards  for  scientific, 

    educational and (in)formational goals. Any use aside from these purposes and without mentioning the source of 

    the article(s) is prohibited and will  be considered an infringement of copyright. 

     Martor  (Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain) est un  journal académique en système  peer‐review 

    fondé  en  1996,  qui  se  concentre  sur  l’anthropologie  visuelle  et  culturelle,  l’ethnologie,  la muséologie  et  sur  le 

    dialogue entre ces disciplines. La revue  Martor  est publiée par le Musée du Paysan Roumain. Son aspiration est de 

    généraliser  l’accès vers un riche contenu au plus haut niveau du point de vue académique et éditorial pour des 

    objectifs  scientifiques,  éducatifs  et  informationnels. Toute utilisation  au‐delà de  ces  buts  et  sans mentionner  la 

    source des articles est interdite et sera considérée une violation des droits de l’auteur. 

     Martor  is indexed  by EBSCO and CEEOL. 

    http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista-martor-nr-18-din-2013/

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    cholars have recently delved into the pre-

    cious insights offered by children’s per-spectives on the Holocaust and many 

    museum exhibitions which foreground childsurvivors’ written and visual testimonies havelately been organized. My paper analyzes tworecent French exhibitions dedicated to Holo-caust child survivors and two visual projectsby children of Holocaust survivors fromPoland and the U.S. My intention is to tracethe specifics of intergenerational encounters

    involving children’s memories in visual proj-ects, whether the featured memories belong topeople who were children during the Holo-caust or people who had a problematic child-hood as the offspring of Shoah survivors. Tothat endeavor, the exhibitions I consider are:C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetagedes enfants juifs à Paris/They were children.The Deportation and Salvation of Jewish Chil-dren in Paris, organized by the Paris City-Hallbetween 26 June and 27 October 2012, and AuCoeur du Génocide. Les enfants dans la

    Shoah/At the Heart of the Genocide. Children

    during the Holocaust, organized by Mémorialde la Shoah, Paris, between 19 June and 30 De-cember 2012. The visual projects involvingchildren of survivors are Golda Tencer’s And IStill See Their Faces. Images of Polish Jews(1998) and Jeffrey Wolin’s Written in Memory:Portraits of the Holocaust (1997). I argue thatthese projects involving child survivors’ andchildren of survivors’ cross-generational visualand verbal transmission of Holocaust traumas

    identify the task of exhibition halls dealingwith Holocaust memories as similar to that of postmemorial artists, one which was recently explained by memory studies scholar Mari-anne Hirsch. Its aim is “to allow the spectatorto enter the image, to imagine the disaster ‘inone’s own body,’ yet to evade the transpositionthat erases distance” (Hirsch 2012, 98), a formof pro-social, cognitive, vicarious traumatiza-tion.

    My main contention from analyzing theabove visual projects is that the generations of 

    Children’s Erratic Memories of the Holocaust

    93

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    Da(a M$"ă$&e0c4, U($5e/0$38 *f B4c"a/e03Dana Mihăilescu is Assistant Professor of English/American Studies, at theUniversity of Bucharest, Romania.

      STR CT

    My paper analyzes two recent French exhibitions dedicated to Holocaust childsurvivors and two visual projects by children of Holocaust survivors fromPoland and the U.S. I argue that the generations of child survivors and childrenof survivors share a form of memory which I call erratic memory, one which isfragmented, limited, evanescent, fleeting, and erring at times. The function of such projects is to use the model of erratic memories as structuring blocs of their albums and exhibitions which have a unique potential to foster new gener-ations’ questions as queries that constantly acknowledge and confront the hard-to-reconcile contradictory meanings associated to increasingly more distantHolocaust experiences.

    KEYWORDS

    Holocaust experiences, child sur- vivors, children of survivors, erraticmemories, vicarious traumatization

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    child survivors and children of survivors share vicarious traumatization which is related to aform of memory that I call erratic memory, andwhose main features include fragmentation,limitation, the dominance of evanescent, fleet-

    ing flashbacks, and erring configurations. Thetask of foregrounding this type of memory un-dertaken by recent memorial visual projects of-fers a significant direction for the future of Holocaust and memory studies: it proposes ahistoriography sensitive to traumatic affect, in-congruities, and mediations, one which notonly acknowledges but bears the imprint of life’s pulse in its construction as well as an acuteawareness of temporal distances, dislocations

    and ambiguous positionings. I will first explainthe concept of vicarious trauma before my ac-tual examination of the exhibitions and proj-ects.

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    In her seminal study on degrees in which

     viewers of media can be traumatized eitherunder the form of “empty empathy” (i.e. viasentimentalized attachments that turn viewersaway from the suffering of others) or as poten-tially pro-social agents, Ann Kaplan brings intodiscussion the relevant concept of vicarioustrauma initially developed by McCann andPearlman (1990) and Pearlman and Saakvitne(1995). These psychologists defined vicarioustrauma as the disruptive psychological effectsof patients’ trauma on therapists especially inthe sense of arousing the latter’s empathic dis-tress. Kaplan’s study extends the scope of vicar-ious trauma to also include a secondary,indirect access to it that can be felt by non-spe-cialists exposed to others’ pain: she concen-trates on viewers of trauma-related media orpeople exposed to another’s trauma. I believethat Kaplan’s ideas can be further associatedwith two other categories of people. Morespecifically, I consider vicarious trauma as the

    most important linking bloc between child sur- vivors and children of survivors, one whose

    specific characteristics I want to delineate andexplain in what follows in relation to four vi-sual projects.

    Unlike scholars like Cathy Caruth and Su-sannah Radstone who have overstressed disso-

    ciation or the unconscious character of trauma,Kaplan proposes a more complex, malleabletheoretical approach, starting from identifyingthree kinds of possible brain functions in thecase of first-hand trauma. Most often, asstrongly suggested by Cathy Caruth, the directexperience of trauma implies a dissociationfunction in which the trauma is not accessibleto cognition or memory, the event does nothave a meaning, it is only perceived through af-

    fect–through feelings of terror, fear, shock, lossof comfort (Kaplan 2005, 38). In this case, only the sensation factor of the brain–the amyg-dala–is active during the traumatizing actwhile rational factors and cognitive processingby the cerebral cortex are shut down. A secondpossible form of brain function in the case of first-hand trauma is circuitry or temporary re-pression: this involves living through trauma

     via temporary dissociation followed by regis-tration of the event in the cortex, allowing the

    trauma to be in conscious memory (Kaplan2005, 38, 89). Thirdly, a victim of trauma in-

     volving perpetrators can partially identify withthe aggressor and is hence implicated in thetraumatic situation, which usually triggers ear-lier memories and unconscious fantasies thatbecome mixed with those of the new event(Kaplan 2005, 38, 89). In comparison to these

     various forms of direct trauma, Kaplan notesthat vicarious trauma probably always involves

    the cortex, triggering empathy for the other’ssuffering and “arousing mechanisms interact-ing with their [the observers’] own traumaticexperiences” (Kaplan 2005, 90), which canhave a pro-social result, the need to help andact. Therefore, cognition, awareness, and ac-tivist social responsibilities are important com-ponents for those suffering from vicarioustrauma. I would further add that the prevalentsense of despair usually fostered by first-handtrauma because of the traumatic situation’s as-sociation with a context of helplessness and

    Dana Mihăilescu

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    95 

    hopelessness is usually counterbalanced by asense of indignation and an action-triggeringstance for those experiencing vicarious trauma.

    Why do child survivors and children of survivors qualify as categories undergoing vi-

    carious trauma? Why is it important that thesetwo distinct World War II categories share thischaracteristic? To what extent is there a differ-ence in degree in point of their experiences? Aspointed out by Amy Williams, Heather Helmand Elysia Clemens, CSDT (the constructivistself-development theory) is at the basis of vi-carious trauma. CSDT postulates that we con-struct, recreate and restructure “our personalrealities based on the complex cognitive

    schemas used to interpret and make sense of life experiences,” which especially occur by theinteraction of one’s frame of reference to others’stories of trauma (Williams et al 2012, 135). Inthis sense, child survivors and children of sur-

     vivors are particularly prone to develop vicar-ious traumatization given their close contactwith the first-hand traumas of adult survivors,most often their parents. As a consequence,their awareness of the potential impact of theirtrauma-marked history can enable them to en-

    gage in personal wellness activities that medi-ate traumatic effects on personal andprofessional functioning (Williams et al 2012,147). My contention is that the trigger for theshared vicarious trauma position of child sur-

     vivors and children of survivors is representedby their specific erratic memories that favor si-multaneously empathetic and critical re-sponses. I will show in what follows how thisidea has been foregrounded by recent exhibi-

    tions and visual projects about children and theHolocaust.

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    In 2012, two exhibitions were organized inParis in memory of children of the Holocaust

    (C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetage

    des enfants juifs à Paris, organized by the ParisCity-Hall between 26 June and 27 October2012, and Au Coeur du Génocide. Les enfantsdans la Shoah, organized by Mémorial de laShoah between 19 June and 30 December

    2012). Both of these exhibitions were didacti-cally constructed in view of fostering viewers’

     vicarious traumatization rather than empty empathy, featuring texts explaining the chrono-logical development of events for childrenfrom the 1930s until the post-Holocaust mo-ments and sustained by official documents, tes-timonies, photos and artifacts. Thus, theexhibition C’étaient des enfants was straight-forwardly organized in four parts that elabo-

    rated on the chronological fate of Jewishchildren living in Paris from the beginning of World War II till the post-war period, sugges-tively titled “Identification et exclusion”/“Iden-tification and Exclusion,” “Arrestation etdeportation”/“Arrest and Deportation,” “Sauverles enfants”/“Save the Children!,” “Survivre, etaprès?”/“Survive, and Then What?.” Similarly,the exhibition Au Coeur du Génocide followeda pedagogical, chronological structure, beingmade up of 21 sections that spanned from pre-

    Holocaust times until the post-World War IIperiod. The exhibition items were displayed onwooden boards, the information thus givencombining general historical texts with ex-cerpts from children’s diaries, photos, Jewish orNazi documents. As such, the exhibition halllooked like a giant classroom in which visitorsfound themselves in the position of studentsthat were being introduced to the complex sit-uation of children during the Shoah by being

    offered the initial critical and historical appara-tus without which it would be almost impossi-ble to undertake serious independent research.

    The sections first explained the generalcontext of life in which Jewish discriminationstarted in Europe. They continued with the ac-tual deportation of children to various ghettos,and followed the crescendo of a changedlifestyle for the worse, from the initial difficulty to continue learning and playing, to children’sneed to start working in order to escape hungerand death. They subsequently highlighted chil-

    Children’s Erratic Memories of the Holocaust: On Cross-Cutting Exchanges in Exhibitions and Visual Projects about ChildSurvivors and Children of Survivors

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    dren’s and grown-ups’ creative and savvy waysby which they managed to maintain some nor-mal ways of being as well as the ever-presentrisk of death if Nazis found out about theirschemes. The final sections documented some

    children’s active role in the anti-Nazi move-ment and the difficult fate awaiting the chil-dren who were alone at the war’s end, withoutparents or relatives, and who were beingmoved from one institution to another.

    As marked in the introduction to the cata-logue of C’étaient des enfants, the organizationof these events in 2012 France was not coinci-dental. These exhibitions actually marked thecommemoration of 70 years from the round-

    up affecting the lives of some of the 320,000Jews living in France at the start of World WarII, of which only a third had been born inFrance while two thirds were immigrants fromEastern Europe or Germany. More precisely, on16-17 July 1942, all the Jews of Paris who wereconsidered foreigners had to assemble at Paris’sVélodrome d’Hiver, almost 14,000 people in all.This was the first action that directly involvedthe amassing of children alongside adults,problematic in itself because the majority of the

    youngsters were born in France but, because of their parents’ lack of French citizenship, wereconsidered “foreigners.” Soon afterwards, some11,400 Jewish children were deported fromFrance, over half of whom were coming fromParis, and no more than 200 returned alive.Most of France’s deported children were firsttaken to the temporary camp of Drancy andthen to Auschwitz, where the majority of themwere immediately killed. Most disturbingly, a

    third of these French Jewish children actually came from Vél d’Hiv, where they had beenbrought over the course of very few days(Gensburger 2012, 8). In light of this, the de-clared aim of the exhibition C’étaient des en-fants was to honor the memory of thesechildren and to also present the stories of the80% of French Jewish child survivors, the thou-sands of hidden children who were savedthanks to the actions undertaken by the organ-ized networks functioning around France dur-ing the war.1 The activities of people working

    on their own or within organizations markedWorld War II Paris as an ambiguous site whoseactions oscillated between deportation and sal-

     vation (Gensburger 2012, 8, etc.). In compari-son, given the already-presented structure of 

    Au Coeur du Génocide, this latter exhibitionoffered a broader outlook on children duringthe Holocaust, presenting images from all overEurope, not only France. Otherwise, Au Coeurdu Génocide favored a similar complex look onchildren’s lot which commended their extraor-dinary capacity for resistance and adaptationto new situations in which they were forced tolive at very young ages.

    Both exhibitions were introduced as fol-

    lowing in the footsteps of the pioneering work carried out by Serge Klarsfeld, the Romanian-born French Jewish historian, lawyer and ac-tivist2 who has dedicated his life to rescuingthe memory of those who were children duringthe Holocaust. Klarsfeld is one of the first his-torians to recuperate the voices and memoriesof France’s deported children, especially of the11,385 girls and boys who died during theShoah. His work to that effect began with hisfounding the Association of Sons and Daugh-

    ters of Jews Deported from France in 1979,perhaps the earliest step towards gaining thepublic and professional recognition of the childsurvivor category.

    The 2012 exhibitions by the Paris City Halland Mémorial de la Shoah undertake the task of continuing Klarsfeld’s monumental work and complementing it with the recuperation of the voices and memories of child survivorswho were saved thanks to associations for hid-

    ing children, the members of Resistancegroups, or individuals who worked on theirown in order to ensure the children’s survival(Gensburger 2012, 9; Le Point 2012, 3-5). LikeKlarsfeld, their hope is to thereby gain publicrecognition of children’s due place in the his-tory of the Holocaust, as subjects and notmerely passive objects in those events. Both ex-hibitions suggest that the way to achieve thisinvolves the coupling of historical explanatory texts with a high number of fragmentary doc-uments reflecting children’s points of view and

    Dana Mihăilescu

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    experiences, their fears and pain, but also theirgames and on-going friendships in spite of all(Gensburger 2012, 9). These latter necessary documents significantly represent typicalstrategies of discourse construction aimed at

    fostering viewers’ vicarious trauma rather thanempty empathy.

    Children’s own writings and drawingsfrom the time of the Holocaust become thetwo exhibitions’ main strategies to render thetraumatic dimension of these children’s expe-riences. In this sense, 15-year-old Clara Gar-nek’s letter written at Vél d’Hiv on 18 July 1942, and addressed to her aunt, uncle, andcousins is particularly relevant. The girl writes

    matter-of-factly and records the internees’ pes-simistic situation in simple but extremely telling terms. She writes, “Nous sommes trèsmalheureux. À chaque instant il y a de nou-

     veaux malades, il y a des femmes enceintes, ily a des aveugles… nous couchons parterre.”/“Our situation is unfortunate. New peo-ple turn ill every moment, we are surroundedby pregnant women and blind persons... wehave to sleep on the floor” (document fromMémorial de la Shoah reprinted in Gens-

    burger 2012, 44). In a way, by identifying thepeople rounded up at Vél d’Hiv as women,children and people with disabilities, the girlunconsciously draws viewers’ attention to why only the most vulnerable members of Paris’sJewish community would be amassed at thattime. This happened because the first Parisround-ups had already taken place startingwith 14 May 1941, when only men were sum-moned to the police and were soon deported,

    those actions representing a first stage in theseparation of Jewish families (Gensburger2012, 39). Most importantly, in indicating thepresence of pregnant women, Clara alsosensed the terrible fate awaiting not-yet-bornbabies who would have to come to a world inwhich life conditions were terrible, just as all of Clara’s family had to sleep on the floor and nolonger have any sense of comfort.

    In similar terms, one counts some draw-ings made at the OSE-run House of Cha-bannes, and belonging to two twin brothers

    who had found refuge there, 10-year-oldAbraham Marcel and Benjamin Cukier. Bornin Warsaw, Poland, in 1930, the twins ad-dressed some words and drawings to their par-ents from whom they had been separated by 

    the war. In their letters, both siblings first drew a genealogy of their parents’ lives, suggestingthe poverty and early work they had under-taken in Eastern Europe, and their immigra-tion to France. Their emphasis was slightly different, though. Abraham mentioned the“happy” family they used to be as long as they were all together (included in Gensburger2012, 104-105). Instead, Benjamin focused onhis father’s no longer having a place to work as

    they were writing this, in 1939-1940, and hishope that he would be able to return to work,a situation he associated with the peacefulfamily life before parents and children wereseparated and forced into hiding (included inGensburger 2012, 109). Significantly, Ben-

     jamin went on to present the house of Cha-banne where the siblings were living as a coldplace which could not represent a real home,despite the care and teaching offered to them.Both children’s words actually betrayed a deep

    sense of lack, and the similar images by whichthey ended–their drawings of transportationmeans such as a car, a bus or a train–under-scored their hopes and dreams for the family’sreunification. Abraham suggested this by means of a train ride that took the children toa home-like place imagined under the form of a glass of wine and food being cooked on a gasstove. Benjamin pointed to the family reunionby drawing two children happily running with

    open arms to meet their serious-looking,stooped, returning parents. Undoubtedly, thetwins’ acts of writing and drawing were impor-tant means attenuating the pangs of separa-tion; they represented ways by which thechildren maintained at least an imaginary feel-ing that they managed to keep in touch withtheir parents. Yet, the fact that the elements of pain represented the building-blocs withintheir messages to their parents are also proof of how much these children were affected by Holocaust events, and were themselves play-

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    Children’s Erratic Memories of the Holocaust: On Cross-Cutting Exchanges in Exhibitions and Visual Projects about ChildSurvivors and Children of Survivors

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    ing an active and difficult part in the process,one which involved that they accepted the needto temporarily separate from their parents, tochange identity, to quit one place for another,to accept new friends or even families. There-

    fore, children’s particularly emotional cogni-tion and social responsibilities undertaken by those who were a bit older, were importantcomponents characterizing those sufferingfrom vicarious trauma, and which allowedthem to counterbalance the surrounding con-text of helplessness and hopelessness with asense of indignation and an action-triggeringstance for their future lives. By placing thesefragmentary aspects of children’s Holocaust

    memory within a didactically-presented his-torical context of those times, the exhibitionsC’étaient des enfants and Au coeur du génocideprevent the viewers from being subjects of empty empathy (i.e. simply developing senti-mentalized attachments that turn viewers away from the suffering of others). Instead, viewersare placed in the position of potentially pro-so-cial individuals, especially thanks to the exhibi-tions’ strategies to incorporate the vicarioustraumatic experiences of children of the Holo-

    caust.In think that especially the photo chosen

    for the poster of the exhibition C’étaient des en-fants works similarly to the above ideas. Theimage powerfully suggests the important roleplayed by children of the Holocaust in trigger-ing an activist vicarious trauma position in the

    audience. This is a December 1942 photo fromthe Drancy Camp taken by the Nazis for draw-ing up an image-based report for internal use,entitled “Anti-Semitic measures. Drancy con-centration camp, December 3, 1942” (Figure1). It depicts a group of children, some of whom happily carried loaves of bread in theirhands, while others looked straight into thecamera lens in expectation. The caption of thephoto was “Jews receive bread. Their faces be-

    tray how they feel”–it suggested lust as an in-nate negative feature stereotypically associatedwith Jews by the Nazis. In actual fact, the chil-dren were most likely obliged to pose as suchfor the photo, so it was a case of Nazis’ manip-ulation of reality by the means of a framed pic-ture. Most importantly, however, the exhibitionorganizers decided to crop the image, they leftout the smiling youngsters holding bread intheir arms, and focused on another group of children whose expression suggests curiosity,

    expectation, impatience, determination (Fig-ure 2). Stripping the photo away from the Nazi

    Dana Mihăilescu

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    gaze which produced it and from the racistfunction suggested by its original caption, thecropped exhibition poster manages to capturethe erratic character of the memories of thosewho were children during the Holocaust,

    pointing to incongruities, fragmentation,evanescence, ambiguities. In this way, well-in-formed viewers are asked to always keep alertabout the content of what they read or see,since both texts and images are prone tochanges, manipulations, re-contextualizations,to be sorted out on one’s own.

    I will now turn to two visual projects dueto children of survivors who equally fore-ground the importance of vicarious trauma

    and children’s erratic memories, but througha different structure of the projects. In thesecases, the creators replace the clear-cut didac-tic form of organization with one that prima-rily replicates the memory and perspective of a child survivor or a child of survivors.

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    Golda Tencer’s 1998 project, And I StillSee Their Faces. Images of Polish Jews, was de-

     veloped within the Shalom American-Polish-Israeli Foundation, an organization launchedin 1988 at the actress’s initiative. The projectwas started in 1994, when Tencer showed onnational Polish television photos from hermother’s album that had survived World WarII and asked for others to send theirs, withouttoo much initial hope of getting many contri-butions. Within two years people from aroundthe world exceeded all expectations, sendingsome 9000 photos as well as “messages smug-gled from the Ghetto, postcards issued on theoccasion of religious holidays by Jewish print-ers, poems, diaries, and what is more–evenglass plates sought by collectors of early pho-tographic art” (Tencer 1998, “To my brothersthe Polish Jews”). Of these, 454 photos wereincluded in the album and its associated trav-

    elling exhibition. Additionally, a permanentlocation was found for the exhibition, the Jew-

    ish Cultural Center from Warsaw, and it wasalso constructed as an active web site(http://shalom.org.pl/eng/index.php?mid=53.

    The project is important for grasping theinterrelated erratic memories of child sur-

     vivors and children of survivors. This first andforemost happens because it is the product of a child of survivors. Tencer identifies herself from the very beginning as a member of thesecond generation, noting in the introductionto the album/exhibit, that she was born afterthe war but grew up with “the echoes of theHolocaust” given her father’s screams at nightabout his terrible experiences in the Warsaw ghetto and the death camps of Auschwitz,

    Maidanek, Mauthausen. Therefore, it is thememory and perspective of a child of sur- vivors which structures the project, and makesits particular voice heard from the very outset.This becomes obvious thanks to the Openingspeech of the exhibition, from which we learnthat the photos “were drawn from ruins, they came from family albums saved from destruc-tion.” Here, the characteristics of photos over-lap with those of the erratic memories held by children of survivors: both are fragmentary,

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    partial, troubled, at times triggered by contin-gency, oftentimes subject to terrible hazards.

    The photos in the album do not only be-long to children of survivors, since we read thatthe contributors’ ages ranged from 12 years old

    to 90 years old, they came from people bornin the early 1900s and from those born aroundthe early 1980s. This implicates in the projectpeople of the pre-Holocaust, Holocaust andpost-Holocaust generations, therefore issues of trans-generational transmission become para-mount.

    Most importantly, the first one of the sixsections of the project, “Maybe someone some-where will recognize me,” explains the album’s

    structure and mission. Structurally, the albumdoes not mean to offer a coherent story butrepresents a patchwork of “scattered snatchesof memory which clung to old photographs”

     via the juxtaposition of photos and texts sentby various contributors. The written part of theproject brings together “barely legible inscrip-tions on the reverse side of photographs,” “bitsof salvaged correspondence,” while most often“the motionless figures in the frames are de-scribed by people who knew them personally,

    or at least had seen them.”Golda Tencer’s project therefore eschews

    conventional chronology and indulges in pre-senting the complex situation of Polish Jewishlife, in pre-Holocaust, Holocaust, and post-Holocaust contexts by including the humilia-tion and killing of Jews, their acts of resistance,some of their own mishaps, the perspective of the photographic past moment encompassedin the image. To these one adds “barely legible

    inscriptions on the reverse side of photo-graphs” and the hindsight perspective of theyoung generation or of survivors speaking inthe present. As Marianne Hirsch has rightly noted, the actual six sections are organized the-matically and generically, following differenttypes of images (studio portraits, street photos,school and youth group pictures, images of demonstrations, army units, officials, weddingsand anniversaries) (Hirsch 2012, 234). Addi-tionally, Tencer’s statement of the project’s mis-sion capitalizes on the dangerous locations

    traversed by the project’s photos, their functionas mere traces, and especially their intergener-ational, trans-ethnic/transnational role. Sanc-tioning this idea, Hirsch relevantly praises thehistorical corrective function of an exhibit like

    I Can Still See Their Faces: “Through Tencer’sactivist mediation, we find a counter-history tothe traditional understanding of Polish collab-oration, of pogroms perpetrated by neighborsthat continued after the war, and of contempo-rary anti-Semitism. This album does not deny that history, but it supplements it with evidenceof neighbors and friends who act as keepers of each other’s memory” (Hirsch 2012, 246). Thishappens because most of the photos featured

    in the project are pre-war images of domesticand outside scenes whose engagement with ourpost-Holocaust knowledge can provide a cor-rective to received history, which includes var-ious types of contacts and interactions, forexample the emergence of Poles as not justanti-Semitic voices but also rescuers, witnessesand carriers of Jewish memory. That is so be-cause the texts accompanying these images fallinto two categories: some of them identify fam-ily members in the photos (oneself or, most

    often, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts),others speak about neighbors and friends of the contributor or of his/her ancestors; in thisway blood and affiliative attachments acrossgenerations work together to reflect back upona traumatic past. The most important contri-bution of such an album/exhibit for Holocaust,genocide and memory studies has beenpointed out by Hirsch. It consists in its en-deavor to bring forth an engagement with

    “structures of affiliation and transmission thatexceed the family” and also involve “intergroupand transnational structures of contact and at-tachment, revealing the work of postmemorialpractices in vastly different historical contexts”(Hirsch 2012, 246). This work is done by theconjoining of various perspectives from family members and friends, and by the coupling of images with texts, since the photos alone canonly offer partial, distant and unclear informa-tion, while the accompanying text shows theconnection one could try to establish between

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    past and present.The trigger for the above postmemorial

    practices of vicarious trauma at work inTencer’s project is represented by its beingstructured according to child survivors’ and

    children of survivors’ shared erratic memoriesthat simultaneously highlight blurry, partial,empathetic and critical responses which favorcross-generational, transnational transmis-sions. In this sense, one can only considersome of the first featured photos in the project,photos 2 and 33. Both of them depict peoplewho were not family members but friends of the second generation senders’ adult families.Photo 2 is sent by Andrzej Taczynski from

    Lodz, and presents three Yeshiva students en-grossed in studying a book, and who used tobe good friends with Andrzej’s mother in pre-war times. We then learn that photo 3 wastaken around 1914 and was found by RomvaldJaskiwicz from Koscian in his wife’s family album, while she knew nothing about the peo-ple and why it had been included by her par-ents therein. The image features three skinny,poorly-dressed old Jews from Brzesc, where alot of Jews used to live prior to the Holocaust:

    these were two women and a man reading thenewspaper Berliner Tageblatt. In both cases,the texts make it clear that lack of clear knowl-edge about the depicted people and their pres-ence in other families’ albums predominateover what the photo-holders know aboutthem. In the case of photo 2, Andrzej Taczyn-ski notes how he is aware of nothing else apartfrom the fact that the youths were his mother’sfriends. Similarly, Ewa and Romvald Jaskiwicz

    write: “We can’t explain who had taken thephotograph or why it was in the album. See-ing the tragedy of this nation and livingthrough the Nazi occupation, we kept this pic-ture.” These two early entries inaugurate apractice that will be further developed by sub-sequent images and texts within the projectand which goes into two directions. Firstly, theentries highlight the strong cross-generationalcharacter in transmitting Holocaust memory given the contributors who were not directly acquainted with the people in the photo but

    who are the children of the actual people whoknew them and become the transmitters of anindirect memory held in their families. Sec-ondly, they put forth the transnational func-tion of Holocaust memory since both of the

    above contributors and their parents werePoles who integrated within their family al-bums photos of Jewish neighbors and friendswho only fleetingly came in contact withthem, yet who became a permanent fixture of their personal lives by a parent’s simple act of keeping their images alongside those of closeblood relations. This particular gesture of fam-ily albums coupling images of blood relationswith images of strangers associated to the fam-

    ily by affiliations–one which becomes multi-plied throughout Tencer’s project (e.g.photo-entries 90, 91, 92, 107, 109, 313,397)–extends the function of family albumsfrom simple holders of blood ties over time.Family albums, especially when created inconjunction with the Holocaust, become thesimultaneous holders of blood and affiliateties, which reconfigure the notion of the fam-ily to include outsiders that can be only par-tially grasped over time by the new 

    generations. Nevertheless, we see how the new generations accept the role of carriers of an-other’s existence across time, even though theother was just encountered briefly by some-body in the family, and the second generationmember acknowledges her highly limited de-gree of understanding the distant past. Thisstance belongs to children of survivors, chil-dren of Pole neighbors and friends of PolishJews during the Holocaust, who have kept

    contacts and found ways to help one another.The same blurred memories characterizephotos presenting the case of child survivors,especially those from the section entitled“They were seven children” and dealing with“Sons and daughters.” Photo 1244, in particu-lar, talks about young infants’ experiences of alife in hiding and the problem of family sepa-ration which becomes extremely troublesomeafter the war’s end, as the children grow upand start to understand what has happened.The text due to a friend of the affected family,

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    Zofia Olszakowska-Glazerowa, is particularly poignant:

    Our friend Cypora Zonsztajn (née Jabion)and her daughter Rachela, born in Siedlce inSeptember of 1941. On August 22, 1942, the

    whole family, including the Jablon grandpar-ents, were shut up in the Siedlce Ghetto. TheGermans gradually took the Jews to the exter-mination camp in Treblinka. When it was Cy-pora's turn, she handed over 11-month-oldRachela to Sabina Zawadzka. From there in1943 I took Rachela to Zakrzwek, near Lublin,where she was raised with my sister's son underthe name Marianna Tyminska. After the War,Cypora's brother Szymon, who was living in

    Palestine, came for her. Rachela grew up in theMaabarot kibbutz. Today Rachela Hen Shaulworks in New York as a representative of an Is-raeli export firm, has two sons, and is a grand-mother. Zofia Olszakowska-Glazerowa,Warsaw 

    Marianne Hirsch found out more aboutCypora’s lot from her cousin Judith Greenberg.The scholar learnt how Cypora committed sui-cide rather than be deported, after she en-trusted her girl to Sabina Zawadzka. On

    leaving, she also sent a brief diary and threephotos to the girl, each one bearing a hand-message on the reverse which read: “This isyour mother who could not raise you. I wishyou would never feel that I am not with youand that you will not feel abandoned by me. Iwish that life brings you happiness as you areon your own and for you to be proud of your-self. That is what I wish for you. Your poormother” (qtd. in Hirsch 2012, 245). Hirsch

    rightly concludes how these slight insights intochild survivors’ experiences “cannot begin togive a sense of layers of loss and interrelationthat enabled the images to be included in thecollection” (Hirsch 2012, 245). Put differently,with child survivors, we are back to a world of lack of knowledge, partial stories, transnationaland cross-generational attachments.

    Finally, three photos add another interest-ing dimension to Tencer’s project. Part of thelast section, entitled “For everyone to see” andmostly featuring views of ghetto life in point of 

    landscape, round-ups, women, men and chil-dren, these three photos stand out from the restof the 451 photos in the album. These are thephotos of three classmates from 1935 Zloczw,for which the Star of David is used as a frame-

    within-a-frame. As such, they raise a series of fascinating questions about historical practicesand memory: Was the use of Stars of David asphoto frame-within-frames regular around1930s? How, when, where did it originate? How widespread was its use and was it specific tocertain families on account of class, religiouspiety, etc.? Could it be the practice of certainJewish schools around Poland, since these arephotos of classmates? Were such framed pho-

    tos used in any way by the Nazis duringWWII? These questions behind the photosshow how exhibitions about children and theHolocaust additionally open up uncharted re-search paths to follow while they attest to theinterrelated erratic memories of child survivorsand children of survivors.

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    Jeffrey A. Wolin’s 1997 album Portraits of the Holocaust shares many characteristics withGolda Tencer’s project in point of the transna-tional function of Holocaust memory, the cou-pling of blood and affiliate ties, and the erraticcharacter of memories. Yet, Wolin’s approachto these issues complements Tencer’s aims withdifferent, equally important emphases.

    Like Tencer, Wolin is part of the postwargeneration, since he was born in 1951 and hisgrandparents had been born in Poland andLithuania, leaving for the United States beforeWorld War II and sharing with their grand-child their memories of a pre-Holocaust cul-ture in distant lands and times. A professor of photography at Indiana University, Wolinstarted his Holocaust project in 1988 with justone entry, the one that serves as cover andfrontispiece to his album. This consisted of “a

    photograph which inscribed text of Miso

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    Vogel, an Auschwitz survivor living in Indi-ana” who was born in Slovakia in 1922, had tosearch the belongings of incoming prisonersin Auschwitz and joined the U.S. army after hisescape in 1945 (Wolin 1997, 95). Later on, in

    1991-1992, Wolin decided to construct awhole series of other texts-and-images aroundMiso’s. His method was to first videotape sur-

     vivors prior to making their portraits with hisstill camera. Then, rather than rewrite sur-

     vivors’ accounts in his own words, as in thecase of the earliest pieces, he decided to usehandwritten text that “excerpt[ed] wholechunks of testimonies, letting the individualsspeak for themselves” in their own European

    accents and speech ways (Wolin 1997, 95).These handwritten texts were added in thelarge areas within the final images that hadbeen intentionally left void. The function of the texts was to complement the limited na-ture of photos by anchoring them within his-torical accounts consisting of survivors’ acute,

     vivid memories in which personal bodily-in-flicted memories as well as reflective memo-ries were combined. Nevertheless, in contrastto Tencer’s project where the photos and texts

    are structured by the various titled sub-sec-tions of the album, or in contrast to the Parisexhibitions that follow a chronological, didac-tic structure, Wolin merely juxtaposes onephoto-and-text entry after another, withoutproviding any signposts.

    Significantly, Wolin identifies three im-portant elements that represent the ground-work for all the entries he uses for his Portraitsof the Holocaust and which supplement

    Tencer’s ways of imbricating memories of child survivors and children of survivors witha more attentive portrayal of the complex andambiguous paths of remembrance. Firstly, hehighlights the importance of notes that actu-ally reproduce the interviewees’ own voices,offering bits of testimonies that allow us amore accurate interpretation of past eventsbased upon actual episodes that have left adeep mark on people’s memory. Secondly, hisuse of visual images to show tattoos or otherbodily marks left upon survivors by the expe-

    rience of the Holocaust are meant to convey the un-representable but forever hauntingcharacter of these people’s experiences.Thirdly, the choice to include another artifactin the image, by usually making photographed

    people hold the photos of other family mem-bers who died in the Holocaust, represents amnemonic associative technique as that iden-tified by French-Jewish author Marcel Proust.For Proust, an everyday object, when infusedwith a powerful emotive force, becomes thetrigger for reawakening a buried experience.Unlike Proust, though, who favored the returnto pleasant memories such as the famous sceneof the madeleine soaked into tea from Re-

    membrance of Things Past, the Shoah experi-ences unburied by Wolin privilege unpleasant,traumatic memories that come back to theforeground and remain a haunting presence inthe survivors’ current lives.

    Wolin’s project sustains the transnationalfunction of Holocaust memory in a differentdirection than that offered by Tencer’s project,who emphasized the preservation of Jewishmemories and photos in albums of Gentilesfrom Poland. In the case of Wolin’s project, the

    transnational dimension is associated to the various locations survivors inhabited beforeand after the Holocaust, as suggested by thetechnique of coupling one past photo of pre-Holocaust experiences or immediate post-lib-eration times in Europe or the U.S. on theleft-hand-side page, with a photo from theirlocation in America depicted within the pres-ent-day photo on the opposite right-hand-sidepage. These photos function as visual testi-

    monies depicting how enforced dislocation inthe wake of the Shoah became a fundamentalfeature of many survivors’ lives both at thetime of World War II and after. More precisely,the past photos can be grouped into three cat-egories.

    There are 9 photos from pre-Holocausttimes, from 1933 till 1938, of which 3 weretaken in Poland, 3 in Germany, 1 in Slovakia,and 2 in Hungary. The common denominatorfor these photos is a sense of comfortable,hopeful trajectories of well-integrated individ-

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    uals in various European countries as to eco-nomic status, military service, educationalprospects, leisure time and religious piety. Thisis primarily sustained by their smiling and styl-ish, elegant postures in the pictures. Yet, dislo-

    cation of normal life frames already becomesimbricated in some of these photos. Such is thecase, for instance, with the photo of studiousGerman-Jewish Liselotte Klopstock from 1938Berlin, which is taken soon before the girl’s de-parture for the U.S in 1940. Liselette’s experi-ence suggests how growing up in America as arefugee from Germany becomes problematicduring World War II, since class mates atschool associate her with the Nazis, beating her

    up and calling her “Hitler’s daughter” on ac-count of her German accent (Wolin 1997, 71).These prejudiced, uninformed views of aver-age Americans merely replicate Liselotte’s ex-perience in pre-World War II Germany, whenone day after school members of Hitler Youthbeat her up and called her “Juden Weib–Dirty Jew Broad” (Wolin 1997, 71). Her on-going ex-periences of racist talk both on the part of Nazi-sympathizers and what would normally be termed as democratic, liberating Americans,

    prove how deeply-seated and uninformed prej-udices can be, irrespective of the regimes of state in which people live. Thanks to such pho-tos lined up alongside pre-Holocaust ones, asense of erring, understood as permanent wan-dering and no sense of belonging to one par-ticular place seems to have become a conditionof post-war life especially for those who usedto be children during the Holocaust.

    The 8 photos covering the time of the

    Holocaust (1938-1945) parallel the same pat-terns of the pre-World War II pictures. That isthe case because, though chronologically situ-ated after the advent of World War II, for all thepeople involved, they refer to the times priorto their being subjected to Nazi persecutions,mirroring the same life conditions as those of pre-Holocaust times. The images were taken inthree locations, 3 in Hungary, 2 in Poland and3 in France. They suggest a similar positive at-mosphere as to economic status, educationalprospects, or leisure times.

    Nevertheless, the greatest number of pho-tos from the past, 31 in all, were taken soonafter liberation within a wider range of loca-tions, namely 10 different states that involvedboth countries of birth to which some sur-

     vivors returned, or new destinations they as-sumed. These included 1 image fromYugoslavia, 6 from Germany, 4 from France, 4from Poland, 4 from Czechoslovakia, 3 fromHungary, 2 from Sweden, 3 from Italy, 1 fromIsrael, 3 from the U.S. These photos most pow-erfully prove how enforced dislocation in thewake of the Shoah became a fundamental fea-ture of many survivors’ lives after World WarII. This happens because only 13 of them still

    present the case of people returning to live inthe country they used to inhabit before beingencamped or going into hiding (the case of Rafael Pinto from Yugoslavia, Hans Finke inGermany, the people from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia). In their case, images usu-ally portray the return to normal life via depic-tion of engagement photos, people engulfed inlife’s ways, or smiling young children whohaven’t lost hope. The rest of the photos,though, 21 in all, depict individuals deciding

    to leave Eastern European countries after theend of the war in fear of new persecutions. Themajority of these people decided to start a new life in countries that used to give them permitsduring the war (the case of Sweden), in statesthat organized Displaced Persons camps to as-sist survivors (e.g. Italy), in the newly-foundedIsrael seen by some as the only land where Jewscould find a home, or in the democratic UnitedStates that had long been seen as an exception-

    alist “city upon a hill” Promised Land, offeringpeople opportunities and freedom. Given allthese intertwined testimonies, we get a sense of transnational Holocaust dislocation as an am-biguous possession for survivors that paradox-ically indicated both the destruction of aperson’s family in point of those who died orchose to leave behind the surviving family members and move to another country and thepotential for starting a new family after meet-ing other survivors that shared a sense of trau-matic understanding of the ways of the world.

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    Pang and hope become inextricably relatedthrough these acts of dislocation specific tosurvivors, especially for child survivors orthose who were young in the war’s aftermath.

    Wolin’s project further suggests the strong

    cross-generational character in transmittingHolocaust memory by two major means.Firstly, the 42 entries making up his album in-clude 32 testimonies by either adults or youthswho were at least 15 years old at the time of their Holocaust ordeal and 8 testimonies of child survivors who were either only a few months old at the start of the war, in 1938, orat most 12 years old; additionally, 2 other childsurvivors were actually born during the Holo-

    caust, Ida Paluch in Sosnowiec in 1939, andGittel Jaskulski in Berlin in 1942. Secondly,Wolin couples blood and affiliate ties for cer-tain entries in which the present-day photo in-cludes not just the image of the survivor butalso of another member of the family (eitherone’s spouse, child, or grandchild) or of otherswho died in the Holocaust. The bitter compli-cations of this process are more obviously sug-gested in Wolin’s project than in Tencer’s. Inthis sense, the first entry of the album, due to

    Rena Grynblat, who was born in Warsaw in1926, visually and textually expresses the fail-ure of cross-generational transmission for herbaby boy, whose photo she carefully holds inthe present, looking at it with regret and con-cern. We learn from the text that at first sheand her husband ran from ghetto to ghetto toprotect this depicted son, Jurek Trajman, butas things got more terrible, when Jurek was 1year and a half, Rena left her baby in the care

    of her sister-in-law, married to a policemanwho was well seen at the time. On her returnto the place, two days later, she could find“Nothing. No baby. No town. No Jews” (Wolin1997, 11), being told they had been taken toTreblinka where the boy most probably per-ished. Meanwhile she has had to live with aterrible burden ever since, the belief that herson might still be alive, perhaps all grown up,or living next door. Given that, Rena Gryn-blat’s story is a heart-wrenching testimony thatforegrounds the lingering trauma and despair

    of those who were parents during the Holo-caust and lost all contact with their children.Her posture in relation to the baby-son’sphoto, one which betrays the mother’s simul-taneous acts of care and fear to touch the

    child’s image, especially suggests a fragility anderratic character of memory on a par with thatof children. This type of memory character-izes Holocaust surviving parents that wereseparated from their children and have neverlearnt for sure the fate undertaken by their off-spring, keeping a feeble and burdensome hopeof “Maybe he’s grown. Maybe he lives nextdoor” (Wolin 1997, 11).

    Otherwise, thanks to Wolin’s project that

    includes memories of survivors of variousages, the erratic character of children’s memo-ries becomes a particular feature distinguish-ing the memories of young child survivorsfrom those of youths and adults. In this sense,the memories of the youngest child survivorswho were born in Holocaust times are of par-ticular relevance. Firstly, the story of GittelJaskulski, who was born in Berlin in 1942, andtaken to Terezienstadt in 1944 by her grand-mother, after her parents had been killed by 

    the Gestapo, does not actually come from Git-tel. Instead, we learn it has been excerptedfrom “a 1949 Berlin newspaper article” trans-lated into English and celebrating Gittel’s sev-enth birthday (Wolin 1997, 73). The textbasically consists of information only providedby the grandmother, while the girl’s voice iscompletely suppressed, sanctioning the early post-Holocaust position to child survivors’memories, which were largely ignored or con-

    sidered of lesser importance. This happens be-cause until the 1980s, average people andpsychoanalysts wrongly believed that, giventheir young age, children didn’t realize thetrauma they had lived through, hence, they were not affected. However, clinical observa-tion ever since the 1980s has shown the con-trary, that “the younger the survivor, thegreater were the potential harmful effects of traumatic experiences” (Valent 1998, 109).Given this, Wolin’s text actually manages toencompass the evolution undertaken by the

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    child survivor category, suggesting the higherdifficulty of dealing with the traumatic past forthose who were very young during the Holo-caust, since at the time they grew up, in thewar’s aftermath, they were not even assimilated

    to survivors by specialists and families. In otherwords, in a first phase child survivors’ memo-ries were erratic in the sense of being ignoredand regarded as non-existent or irrelevant ac-cording to the social conventions of the times.

    Ida Paluch’s memories are also erratic butin another sense. They largely represent merely evanescent, fleeting flashbacks, and they takeup erring configurations in the sense of a prej-udiced, unfair view of others. Born in Sos-

    nowiec in 1939, Ida Paluch was taken intohiding in 1942, at 3 and a half years old, soonafter her family was herded in the ghetto andher mother committed suicide on having toseparate from her children. The woman ran tothe third floor of a nearby building and jumpedout the window, while the children were com-ing after her. Ida recognizes this episode as rep-resenting her earliest memory, when sheassisted to her mother’s death by jumping(Wolin 1997, 47). Ida only relates this accident

    to her mother’s extreme emotions, to her get-ting “upset and panicky.” Otherwise, she simply reports how her aunt took her and entrustedher to the care of a Christian friend, WilliamMaj. The girl’s next scant memories are relatedto her arrival in this new family, and how theman presented the girl to his wife as a “Christ-mas gift” he drew out from under this coat(Wolin 1997, 47). We further learn that whilethe man was killed by Nazis in the neighbor-

    ing villages of his home town, where he was anillegal merchant, the girl learnt “to hate Jewsand be afraid of them,” since children andneighbors living in Czestochowa spoke of Jewsas Christ-killers catching Polish children andkilling them for Passover matzos. As a result,when at the end of the war the foster mothertook Ida to a Jewish school, the girl ran away,afraid of “those terrible Jews,” while shescreamed and yelled “Help, help! Jews are tak-ing me for matzo! Jews are gonna kill me!”(Wolin 1997, 47). Meanwhile, she ended by 

    stating how “All I wanted to do was run, jumpfrom the window–I was afraid of those Jews”(Wolin 1997, 47). Her reaction was imitative of the mother’s suicidal attempt but actually marked the problematic situation of many Jew-

    ish children who survived the war by hiding inChristian foster families. Like Ida, most of these children weren’t even aware of their eth-nicity and were brought up in an anti-Semiticatmosphere in which they internalized anti-Jewish hatred. Their memories were erring inthe sense of including prejudiced views againstJewish identity which then became very hardto reconcile in adult life after they had deeply inculcated racist stereotypes. Ida’s situation

    corresponds to Joanna Michlic’s findings fromthe essay “Jewish Children’s Search for Identity in Post-War Poland 1945-1949,” an excellentstudy focusing on Polish Jewish children whosurvived the Holocaust in hiding, were shel-tered by Poles and cut from their Jewish fami-lies. On one hand, Michlic discusses the caseof older children who had to consciously con-ceal their Jewish identities, and how this influ-enced them after the war. On the other hand,the historian elaborates on the different case of 

    younger children who, like Ida, were broughtup in ignorance of their Jewish identity, a situ-ation that later had important influences ontheir perceptions of identity, in the sense of making many children emerge from the war“with a confused or split self-image of who they were” (Michlic 2007, 99, 100). The most im-portant factor which applies in the case of Idaconsists in how much her life trajectory was in-fluenced by “anti-Jewish prejudices as ex-

    pressed by some sections of the ethnic Polishcommunity” (Michlic 2007, 100) and by thefact that the child had been brought up as aChristian which “inevitably led to the internal-ization, to varying degrees, of the RomanCatholic moral cultural code, rituals, and tradi-tions” (Michlic 2007, 111). No resolutionawaits a child survivor who has been imbuedwith such images. As a consequence, Ida cando nothing else but cry out of despair, just likeher mother, a suicidal attempt that takes anironic twist: the mother jumped from the win-

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    dow to escape anti-Jewish feelings, the girlfeels like jumping from the window becauseshe is afraid of the diabolical image of Jews shehas been brought up with.

    Similarly to Ida Paluch, Irma Morgen-

    sztern, born in 1933 in Warsaw, explains theburden of shifting identities during the Holo-caust for older child survivors. Her situationsanctions Michlic’s ideas about older Jewishchildren who had to conceal their real ethnicidentity primarily because of their need to per-form for a long time that they were someoneelse while remaining in the absence of the bi-ological family (Michlic 2007, 100). In thiscase, the parents not only arranged for Irma to

    leave the Warsaw ghetto and acquire false I.D.papers as a Polish girl, Barbara Nosarzewska.Before her departure, they also made her learnby heart her new name, the catechism andprayers, all this in order to prevent her beingcaught. At the same time, though, they straightforwardly told her of the need to per-form such identity shifts, so that Irma force-fully remembers how “They were telling methat I can tell my name after the war, not be-fore to nobody” (Wolin 1997, 23). As a result,

    while she lived in hiding in Poland and wenton a pasture to mind some cows, a sense of confusion about her real identity took hold of the girl, making her ponder, “that’s me or notme? Because here I have to remember if I sur-

     vive I am Irma Morgensztern–I’m not allowedto say that now–and I was a kid and this wassitting in my head…” (Wolin 1997, 23).

    Considering all this, the 2012 French exhi-bitions and two recent visual projects I have

    considered in this essay complement one an-other as to the importance of vicarious traumaand children’s erratic memories as tools foranalysis in Holocaust studies. The 2012 Parisexhibits emphasize the need for strong criticaland historical knowledge in the new genera-tions’ approach to different Holocaust testi-monies and documents. Tencer’s projectforegrounds the memories and perspectives of child survivors and children of survivors by highlighting blurry, partial, empathetic andcritical responses which favor cross-genera-

    tional, transnational transmissions. Wolin em-phasizes the meaning of erratic memories inthe sense of children’s traumas being ignoredand regarded as non-existent or irrelevant ac-cording to the social conventions of the imme-

    diate post-World War II context or in the senseof including prejudiced views against Jewishidentity for those who had been saved by Christian families. Thanks to these diverse fea-tures of meaning foregrounded by these recentexhibitions and visual projects, the generationof young child survivors in possession of er-ratic memories seems to embrace a similartype of “reparative reading” associated by Hirsch with the postmemory generation, a po-

    sition which does not try the impossible task to fix a past photo’s or memory’s meaning butleaves “ambiguities unresolved, providing anexpanded context for more affective knowing”(Hirsch 2012, 75). The function of such proj-ects is to use the model of the erratic memo-ries characterizing child survivors andchildren of survivors as structuring blocs of their albums and exhibitions. These tech-niques have a unique potential to foster thenew generations’ questions as important

    queries that permanently acknowledge andconfront multiple indeterminacies and hard-to-reconcile contradictory meanings associ-ated to increasingly more distant Holocaustexperiences. In this way, the new generationsmight manage to find viable ways to relate topast situations they never knew.

    Acknowledgment: This work was sup-ported by one grant of the Romanian National

    Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS-UE-FISCDI, for project PN-II-RU-TE no.118/2011 titled Women’s Narratives of Transnational Relocation.”

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    Children’s Erratic Memories of the Holocaust: On Cross-Cutting Exchanges in Exhibitions and Visual Projects about ChildSurvivors and Children of Survivors

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