Preliminary Programme

In this paper I analyze how German Jewish immigrants who fled Germany between 1933 and 1941, and resettled in New York City by 1945, understood the Holocaust and represented that understanding to themselves and to various other groups. First and 1.5 generation immigrants had a complex understanding of the Holocaust, usually derived from direct experiences of increasing racial exclusion, harassment, and brutality, and indirect knowledge of the Final Solution. I focus on this group in part because they refuse the label of “refugee” or its successor term “Holocaust survivor”, insisting instead they were immigrants. This distinction raises a set of questions about meanings of immigrant and Holocaust survivor as distinct phenomena, and the scholarly practices that continue to hold these bodies of knowledge in separate domains. Analyzing 23 oral histories and 62 largely unpublished memoirs, I argue that these autobiographical narratives are socially structured. Comparative interpretation of these oral histories and memoirs enables me to identify a set of themes that structure these narratives and specify the ways these immigrants distance themselves from, avoid, or suppress the Holocaust, while simultaneously recalling its legacy. (Show less)

As part of the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project been organisazed by the the Institut fuer Konfliktforschung and the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte of the Vienna University there were held twenty interviews in Greece 2002.
The most of the interviewees (17) can be divided in two groups according to the following criteria: the gender, the social, national / ethnical or cultural characteristics, and the psychological and ideological process of formation of their commemoration. All these had influenced essentially not only what the survivors witnessed about their experiences from the period of the Second World War but also how they had reacted before and during our discussions preparing their interviews. The conclusions coming out from the comparison between these two groups and the comparative approach of their testimonies had shown up some crucial aspects (substantial and methodological as well) of holding and using an interview as a source for the social and life story history.
The group A of our interviewees was composed by ten and the group B by seven persons. The group A was including exclusively Greek men of Christian origin, peasants and shepherds (in the ‘40s) who had been arrested and deported to Mauthausen Camp because of their resistance activities against the German occupation of their island, Crete, during the World War II. Although they had suffered a lot during their live in the Camp, they were actually very proud considering their terrible “experience” as a kind of “reward” for their resistance activities given by the German conquers, and their survival as a proof for their manhood and their bravery. Therefore they all were very willing from the first approach to cooperate with us for their interviews. Only one of the survivors of this category (ex- resistance fighters) found in Crete had refused to meet us.
The group B was consisted exclusively by women of Jewish origin, who were coming mainly from petit-bourgeois social strata of various little cities of the Greek countryside and were arrested and imprisoned in various camps due to the Nazi racial laws. They had all reacted very emotionally from the beginning of our approach and five from the twelve Jewish survivors of the Mauthausen Camp found refused strictly to meet us for an interview.
Comparing the attitude and the testimonies of the “witnesses” we had to solve, among others, a big problem and to answer a difficult question: Why the members of the group A were feeling nowadays more like “heroes” and the members of the group B more like “victims”, although they had all experienced almost the same situation of the Mauthausen Camp. The first thing we had to do was to take in consideration not only the testimonies of the survivors concerning their imprisonment but also the survivors’ life story and its relation to the Greek political history especially after the Second World War, because we had to do with memories been “worked” and influenced by later experiences for more than an half a century.
By comparing the testimonies of the two groups while we were trying to answer our above question, we had assumed that the main reasons of the differences in the attitude of our two groups were not only that the Jews had been treated much worse than the other prisoners in the Camp, but also that the “sample” of our group B were exclusively women. These women were ashamed, even nowadays, feeling that not only their human but also their gender dignity was extremely insulted mainly because of their arrest and persecution by the Germans, but also due to their treatment during their liberation (it had been mentioned that they some of them had been raped by Russian soldiers) and after the War.
When the ex-prisoners (no matter of which ethnical or religious origin) of the Nazi concentration camps came back to Greece they were accepted by the state’s authorities with a great distrust. That has happened because the main part of the Greek State’s services was controlled by the ex-collaborators with the German occupying forces. Besides under the circumstances of the Greek Civil War (1945-1949) everyone who had been persecuted by the Germans during the Second World War was more or less suspected as a leftist because the strongest organization of the Greek resistance (1941-1944) had been led by the communists. This attitude had been essentially extended to the Greek Jewish survivors of the Second World War. When the Greek government had recognized the participation in the resistance movement as a “national heroic activity” at the beginning or the 80’s, the Jewish ex-prisoners of the German camps were not officially rehabilitated and honored by the state’s authorities making them feel neglected and discriminated by the Greek society. (Show less)