Tormented Memories: The Individual and the Collective

This article sets out to probe the public debate that evolved in Israel over the dedication of a forest to the memory of King Boris III of Bulgaria. It will also address the image of Bulgaria in Israel's collective memory in relation to the rescue of Bulgarian Jews and to the deportation of the Macedonian and Thracian Jews to the death camps. This particular case study sheds light on the ways by which individuals and subgroups attempt to shape the Holocaust's historical consciousness. This effort is a consequence of contested memories of experiences during the Second World War, which furthermore demonstrates the existing tensions between individual memory and the construction of collective memory.¹ More importantly, it also reveals how subgroups form their identity and how they present themselves in the national arena, where the construction of collective memory is negotiated and shaped.

While the number of survivors is naturally declining, the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli society has not abated. Indeed, the impact of survivors' personal narratives on Israel's historical culture and consciousness has in fact deepened over time. The history of the Jews during World War II and the memory of the Holocaust occupy a central place within the Israeli discourse and self-identity. It is a multi-vocal discourse, which represents the variegated memory of the Holocaust and the different experiences of Jewish survivors during those years.²

Although the number of Holocaust survivors in Israel (and in the world in general) is declining due to aging, their personal narratives continue to have a great impact on the historical culture and in the consciousness of Israeli society.³ Psychologists suggest that there is a process of transference between parent and children, and often between grandparents and their grandchildren, of the individual wartime experiences of survivors. This process, thereby, enables the "second" and "third" generations to internalize the memory of their parents and grandparents as well as formulate their own meaning of the Holocaust. Therefore, in addition to internalizing the previous generation's memories, the new generations of children and grandchildren desire to express their individualities by way of their own discourses and narratives. The process of working through both survivors' memories and of their offspring's recollections of their parents' talks or silences about the Holocaust is carried out via dialogue within the public discourse on the Holocaust.⁴ However, an examination of the writers, scholars, and intellectuals who have been struggling with the history of the Holocaust, shows that its meaning and representation extend beyond the people who were directly or indirectly involved with the horrors of those years.⁵

This repertoire of symbols and images formulates an important part of Israeli self-understanding, and it has become a criterion for reviewing the existential situation of Jews in the State of Israel and throughout the world.

The history of the memory of the Holocaust in Israel demonstrates the shift in emphasis from heroic underground imagery and Resistance activities to the glorification of the image of the surviving Jew. This image corresponds more directly with most survivors' individual experiences. The surviving Jew was linked more directly to the Jewish victim, whose image has slowly lost the negative notion of passivity. This transition of Jewish imagery within the public discourse reflects the Israeli confrontation with the history of the Holocaust and its (collective) memory, which have been shaped by a number of formative experiences, such as the Eichmann Trial and the country's wars.⁶

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of survivors' contested memories. Claims have been made that some experiences of the Holocaust were excluded from the master narrative. Only in recent years has the voice of the child survivor entered into the narrative of the Holocaust; the same can be said about the voice of women. The survivors of Western Europe and the post-Soviet Union both complain that the tragedy of Polish Jewry dominates the narrative of the Holocaust. For example, the survivors of Transnistria are beginning to talk about their forgotten tragedy.

This phenomenon demonstrates the dynamics in the construction of Holocaust memory and...