Witnesses and Education

1. Witnesses and Education From Dialogue to Visual History

2. The “Crisis of Witnessing”? • End of “the era of the witness” → how to teach about the Shoah when there are no witnesses anymore? • Are there “substitutes” for personal encounters with witnesses of the Shoah in an educational context? • Testimonies such as written accounts (poems, autobiographies, published diaries or letters), digitalized interviews with survivors (audio, video), documentaries or testimonial films • Require the teacher’s competence in understanding forms and functions of testimonies as well as the interrelation between medial form and content

3. “Inviting witnesses of the Shoah to the classroom is important in order to provoke dismay.” “I switched off the light and let the students gather in a corner of the room. Then I started the video interview with a survivor. The air in the room got very stale.” “There were some mistakes in her testimony. She showed a picture with a certain train that didn’t exist in the time of her childhood, she has mistaken the dates.” “It [the hologram] prepares us for the day when our survivors will not be here.”

4. Testimonies in Education How do we use testimonies in an educational framework? Three main questions are crucial to discuss in order to contextualize testimonies in an educational framework: • Who is a witness/contemporary witness? • What forms of testimonies exist and how does the (technical) form shape the content? • What is the function of testimony, what can be learnt from testimonies? How do we use testimonies in an educational framework?

5. Historical BackgroundEarly Testimonies of the Shoah • Widely unknown, Jewish individuals and committees tried already during the persecution and shortly after the liberation to collect as many testimonies from a Jewish perspective as possible and thus promote Jewish historiography – unrecognized by the academia • “Everyone wrote […] Journalists and professional writers, of course, but also teachers, social workers, youth, even children. For the most part, they composed journals in which the tragic events of the era were grasped through the prism of personal, lived experience.” (Emanuel Ringelblum, Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto) • In spite of those records, the events of the Shoah were mainly reconstructed based on the perpetrators’ sources • Only in the 1960s, more attention was paid to Jewish accounts of the Shoah, then broader popularity of Oral History in the 1980s • Meanwhile, the “Contemporary Witness” became an omnipresent entity

6. Who is a Witness? • Contemporary witnesses = “persons, who can give testimony about a certain historical event, because they lived at the time in question” (Wikipedia) • “Zeitzeugenportal”: “Our collection invites to discover, research and analyze individual narrations about the past.” (from 1914 to today) • Contains testimonies of Germans about the fascination of HJ, BDM, etc. as well as testimonies of German Jews that were discriminated, violated, arrested and deported to concentration camps • Same tendency in German documentary films, creation of a “juxtaposition of consensually possible positions” (Judith Keilbach) • As a result, a moral and factual levelling is promoted • Whowitnessed what from which perspective and with which motivation?

7. Forms of TestimoniesPersonal Experience “Words can be exchanged, experiences cannot.” (John Durham Peters) How are these words exchanged? • Transition from dialogue to digitalized testimony • Personal encounter: talk with a witness of the Shoah • Written testimony: autobiography, report, published diary, letters, prose… • Oral testimony: such as audiotaped/videotaped interviews, testimonial films… • They all have in common that they explicitly incorporate the aspect of personal experience, which distinguishes them from quantifiable sources • But they differ in terms of their specific mediality and context of production

8. Forms of TestimoniesDialogue and Medium • The medium of a digitalized testimony is not just an external “addition”, but is itself an inseparable part of the testimony • Thus, digital testimonies have to be considered as artefacts sui generis • In the case of video testimonies: the attitude and questions of the interviewer, the technical equipment, setting, location, other persons present at the scene, etc. are part of the testimony • Therefore, different medial forms of testimony require different analytic approaches • When was the testimony given, which persons were involved, which questions were asked and how, which was the interest of the parties involved, which technology was used, what was the setting/location …

9. Forms of TestimoniesExamples • Voices of the Holocaust (audio recorded interviews by David Boder with mainly Jewish survivors in DP-Camps in Europe, July-October 1946, 130 interviews) • Visual History Archive (video recorded interviews with mainly Jewish witnesses of the Shoah, 1994-1999 and meanwhile supplemented with interviews with victims of other genocides, 52.000 interviews with witnesses of the Shoah) • Witnesses and Education (testimonial films of YadVashem in cooperation with the Hebrew University, filmed since 2007, so far 14 films with Jewish survivors of the Shoah who all immigrated to Israel) • New Dimensions in Testimony (project of the USC Shoah Foundation started in 2010, so far 15 Holocaust survivors and one survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, 3D-Hologram)

10. Functions of TestimonyHistorical, Moral and Educational Dimensions Testimony as “Counter-Narrative”: “One day you will speak of all this, but your story will fall on deaf ears. Some will mock you, others will try to redeem themselves through you. You will cry out to the heavens and they will refuse to listen or to believe…You will possess the truth, but it will be the truth of a madman.” • Who will write the history of the Shoah? • We need sources of the perpetrators (orders, lists, official letters, photographs), to reconstruct processes, institutions, actors and methods involved • But: are they “objective”? (euphemisms, propaganda, humiliation) • Witnessing as a “form of retroactive resistance” (AleidaAssmann), memory was to be erased by the perpetrators • Without testimonies of survivors, the whole dimension of personal experience would be unknown

11. Functions of TestimonyHistorical, Moral and Educational Dimensions The witness as historian vs. the witness as enemy of the historian? • What can we learn from witnesses of the Shoah, that “traditional sources” can’t tell us? • Objective quantities vs. subjective qualities • Telling “what it was” (political witness) • Telling “how it was” (moral witness) • Telling how surviving the Shoah affected their life after the liberation “They [testimonies of survivors] can be a source for historical information or confirmation, yet their real strength lies in recording the psychological and emotional milieu of the struggle for survival, not only then but also now.” (Geoffrey Hartman)

12. Life after 1945 Continuity and Transmission of the Trauma The example of Avraham Aviel, who was born in Poland and lost his mother and brothers in the Shoah, remembers his father’s words: - “My son, I am an old man, but you will survive, you will have a family and forget everything.” - “I have a wonderful family. But I cannot forget.”