Autobiografia Literatura Kultura Media


ISSN: 2353-8694     eISSN: 2719-4361    OAI    DOI: 10.18276/au.2020.1.14-02
CC BY-SA   Open Access   DOAJ  ERIH PLUS

Issue archive / nr 1 (14) 2020
Holocaust Testimony, Autobiography, and the Effaced Self

Authors: JANINE HOLC
Loyola University, Baltimore
Keywords: Holocaust autobiography testimony trauma slave labor
Data publikacji całości:2020
Page range:19 (15-33)
Cited-by (Crossref) ?:

Abstract

Autobiography is often writing about how a “self” forms over time as it is affected by the conditions it encounters. This definition can be problematic for Holocaust autobiography, because hiding one’s self from others and repressing one’s desires and impulses became crucial to survival. This essay traces the processes by which a “self” emerges for one Holocaust writer and survivor, Helen S., through archival documents, testimonies and memoirs over time. Helen S.’s example demonstrates how an effaced self can have a textual presence before the writer can allow herself to fully inhabit a traumatic personal history.
Download file

Article file

Bibliography

1.Felman, Shoshana, Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York–London: Routledge, 1992.
2.Fineman, Joel. “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction.” In: Harold Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, 65–92. New York: Routledge, 2013.
3.Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
4.Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
5.Laub, Dori, Andreas Hamburger, eds. Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma. New York: Routledge, 2017.
6.Müller, Beate. “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the CJHC’s Early Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies.” History & Memory 24 (2012), 2: 157–195.
7.Pollin-Galay, Hannah. Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
8.Sendyk, Helen. The End of Days: A Memoir of the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992.
9.Sendyk, Helen. New Dawn: The Triumph of Life After the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
10.Shandler, Jeffrey. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.
11.Shenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
12.Steinbacher, Sybille. “Musterstadt” Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostober¬schlesien. München: K.G. Saur, 2000.
13.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gratz Collection, Oral History Interview with Helen Sendyk.
14.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USC Shoah Foundation Collection, Interview with Helen Sendyk, interview code 8745.