Preliminary Programme

I interviewed Arkady Waiszpapir, one of the last survivors of the revolt of Sobibor (october 1943) still alife, in Kiev in 2010.
I was committed and I expected to listen to the story of a witness of the revolt and to learn about the daily routines in Sobibor. I did not want to interview exclusively about the violent and miserable time in the camp, I wanted to know about ‘before’and ‘after’. According to me stories of trauma are always more understandable in the context of a whole life story.
Soon it became clear Arkady wanted to convey to me there was another history which had disturbed his life in a more fundamental way than his suffering in Sobibor. He wanted to break a silence that had been with him for all these years.
For him the worst that happened to him was the persecution of his family during the Stalinist times. In the late thirties his father had been accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism and therefore Arkady had become the child of what was called an “enemy of the people”, the usual name for the persecuted and their family. He had also been stigmatized as a Jew. He had never talked about what had happened at that time and its consequences. He said : I am saying to Olga (his wife) : :”before my death I am speaking”
I had the fascinating opportunity that besides my own interview with Arkady two more interviews turned up. They were made at different political moments. And as I assumed I could immediately see how the different interviewers get diverse information. It was as I expected, the content was hardly comparable. I suggest it had to do with the political climate in the Ukraine. The first interview was made in 2008 by Tetania Pastushenko and Maryna Loboda. The transcript was kindly sent to me from the Jewish Archive in Kiev. It is an edited interview. My own interview was made in 2010 and I have the video and the transcript. In 2012 Zhania Kovba and Anna Pokharova, both from Kiev, also interviewed Arkady. Anna gave me the edited version of the transcript. It is not possible to compare the three life interviews. They have a different focus; they are part of separate collections with their own objectives and they follow different methodologies.
In 2010 The Ukraine was a special place to visit: Change was in the air while the country was still governed by the old communist regime, which included a by Stalinism imposed vision of the past that supressed any attention for the special fate of Jews. A few years later a popular uprising would end decades of communist rule (2013, Majdan Square), and a new cultural climate became dominant.
When I came to the Ukraine (2012) the population had already started to ventilate what had been silenced about the past and new ideas and memories were coming up. They escaped from an imposed vision of the past that belonged to an historical image that did not seem to fit. I compare the change of memory and historical perception of that moment in the Ukraine with what I had witnessed in 1988 at the first oral history conference in Russia in Moscow . At that time of early glasnost in Moscow we listened to stories never told before to a sizzling audience who came from everywhere in the large territory of the than still existing Soviet Union. They talked and talked.
Indeed, before a large political transformation the language about the past and memories slowly change and the same is true for stories about the experiences of past individual life . The past was no longer a closed chapter but a cesspit from which sad stories of suffering and resistance escaped.
Even if the stories look like “real truth” there are many layers covering what has happened. There is no real truth, but there is an ever changing template that transforms over the years. Memories are never static but memory is a construction embedded in changing personal, social and temporal settings. Also, memory is never neutral, it reflects the interaction between personal memory and the dominant collective memory, in this case the Stalinist story. The reconstruction of the past is also helped by our mental images of the present. (Show less)

In the twentieth century hundreds of thousands of American children grew up outside their natal families. In situations where parents were dead, absent, unable, or unwilling to take care of their offspring, children were typically placed in orphanage or foster care. As public charges, these children encountered the American welfare system and its changing policies across the century, and their experiences therefore offer important information about the impact of social policies.

Yet scholars interested in capturing the experiences of these children through oral history interviews, encounter a number of problems. First, identifying such individuals can be difficult. Secondly, if identified, many former orphanage or foster care children are unwilling to speak about their past. And finally, even individuals willing to be interviewed, typically have powerful agendas when telling their life story. Most importantly, they are keenly aware of having had a non-normative, or, as they see it, a ‘wrong’ kind of childhood. Equally aware of the significance ascribed in twentieth-century culture to the significance of childhood experience for adult development, their recollections are typically filtered through defensive layers of reasons and reasoning.

This paper takes its point of departure in more than 200 oral history interviews with former orphanage and foster care children, exploring the methodological challenges in using oral history interviews to investigate their experiences. (Show less)

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), “people living in marginal lands have long been exposed to many kinds of environmental changes and have developed strategies for coping with these phenomena.” This paper will highlight how the Bedouin of the Wadi Rum in southern Jordan responded to an extended drought that began in the late 1950s. It will demonstrate how oral histories exposed the unanticipated side effects of reduced precipitation which ultimately led to the eradication of many traditions including nomadic pastoralism and female facial tattooing, the adoption of new livelihood strategies, and the creation of a national protected area. Lastly, this paper will demonstrate how oral histories can be used in the fight against climate change. (Show less)