On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, and: The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (review)

Oral history testimony continues to be an integral part of Holocaust research. The depth, scope, and insight provided by each interview creates a layer with others, which when taken collectively creates an immense tapestry of historical data. This is augmented by the fact that such large numbers of interviews exist, conducted by a wide range of Holocaust institutions and organizations, each of which have attempted to document in some way the survivors in their community or region.

In the context of such a vast undertaking, it is not surprising that Henry Greenspan would devote a book to the actual process of talking to survivors, as he does with On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony. It serves as both a guide as well as a reflection of the work he has done and makes a number of substantially important arguments on how we should be approaching the subject.

During his analysis of interviews, Greenspan pulls together a collection of observations that serve as a guide for not only what to expect from the process of interviewing Holocaust survivors but also how knowing the manner in which the narrator constructs these narratives plays an important role in understanding their stories. Within the first section—"Voices and Unfinished Sentences"—he highlights the basic concepts that he uses throughout the book and gives the reader an idea of what they might expect from a survivor narrative.

The crucial pieces from these chapters, which we see demonstrated in nearly all of our testimonies, are that each survivor not only struggles to bear witness to the atrocities he or she experienced but also frequently constructs narrations around the events that are never articulated. While this is not a new idea (Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub referred to these spaces as "black holes"), Greenspan uses their presence to show how narrators construct the stories of survival and death around these gaps.

In the section entitled "Context of Recounting," Greenspan discusses the process survivors go through as they attempt to retell their story. The familiar issues of guilt and horror are ever-present during these discussions, but he asserts that the driving force is a desire to recount what they experienced.

He briefly examines the history of survivor testimony and describes how the period after the Holocaust, until the 1970s, was largely a time of silence, where victims were not frequently asked to share their stories and often attempted to hide the fact that they were witnesses to this piece of history. As the history of World War II was becoming commonplace in the classroom, and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl was becoming part of the literary canon for middle school, the attempted extermination of European Jewry became a topic that was discussed by more people. As publishers and filmmakers started envisioning the lives and experiences of survivors, testimony took on a new identity as each narration was becoming a heroic tale of survival and resilience.

From this heroic theme, the process of giving testimony became an imperative for many survivors who felt the need to "bear witness." Greenspan argues that they become fixated on telling their story coupled with the stress they feel about whether they have done so in a sufficiently authoritative way. From this, he advocates for sustained conversations over a longer period of time. With each new conversation, the survivor is given the opportunity to reconstruct his or her narrative, filling in the gaps and clarifying the story from one session to another. By doing so, a more complete narrative structure becomes apparent.

The last two sections are particularly helpful for anyone who might be in the process of collecting testimony. As with the other sections of the book, practitioners can use them not only as a guide for understanding the process of interviewing a...