The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (review)

Every student of the Holocaust knows the crucial importance of survivors' testimonies in reconstructing the crime. Most such accounts, however, were recorded years or even decades after the end of World War II. There are exceptions, however. In 1946, Latvian-born American psychologist David P. Boder interviewed more than 100 victims of Nazi persecution—the majority of them Jews—in "Displaced Persons" camps across Europe. Eighty of the interviews were eventually transcribed into English, most included in his self-published manuscripts of more than 3,100 pages in sixteen volumes under the title Topical Autobiographies of Displaced Persons. Boder published two other major contributions based on the interviews: the book I Did Not Interview the Dead (1949), and "The Impact of Catastrophe" (1954), a lengthy article.

Boder's interviews encompass survivors from Poland, Lithuania, Germany, France, Slovakia, and Hungary, the subjects ranging in age from their early teens to their seventies. Their stories shed light on controversial subjects such as relations between Jews and Gentiles who extended or withheld aid, opportunities for and obstacles to Jewish resistance, victims' knowledge—or lack of knowledge— about the fate that awaited them in Nazi hands, survival strategies, women's experience of the Holocaust, the Nazi practice of placing prisoners in charge of their fellow inmates, and the liberators' treatment of freed camp inmates.

During his lifetime Boder was not able to translate, publish, and analyze the entire collection, which also included songs and religious services. The technology was primitive, and retrieval subsequently presented formidable obstacles, as did Boder's idiosyncratic method of organizing the material. In 1994 the Library of Congress made the first general inventory of the interviews. Then in 2002 the oral history program of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum produced the first list devoted exclusively to indexing interviews. Three years later a researcher at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the same museum returned to the recordings themselves and compiled an expanded list, which included songs and religious services as well as the interviews.¹ Today the interviews and other material are increasingly seen as a monumental piece of postwar documentation of wartime life.

In Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (1998), Donald Niewyk gathered a group of the interviews and used them to examine Boder's extraordinary interviewing project writ large. He traces the overwhelming obstacles Boder faced in finding an audience for the survivor narratives. The thirty-six accounts pulled together by Niewyk showcase experiences that might otherwise be questioned or ignored in memoirs written long after the events they detail.

Alan Rosen's 2010 volume, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, reintroduces the world to David Boder's pioneering work and illuminates its full story. Rosen investigates the project in the context of the postwar response to the displaced persons in Europe, the understanding of which has become more rather than less complicated to narrate. Did survivors speak publicly—or privately—about their Holocaust stories? Were people in the United States interested in hearing their stories? Historians and others have argued these questions for decades. One recent polemic emerges from the work of two American historians: Beth B. Cohen's Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (2007) argues that during that early postwar period health care workers in the United States contributed to a culture of silence about the Holocaust; Hasia Diner's We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence 1945-1962 (2009) points to active remembrance during that era as well as to survivors speaking about the atrocities, not only privately but also in public.

Boder's interviews present the words of the victims and survivors themselves, animating individuals who for historians otherwise remain "populations." Speaking to David Boder was the very first time many of the interviewees ever told their story to someone who had not been there. The landscape of...