Tracking Holocaust Memory: 1946-2010

Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor and The Wonder of Their Voices both make important and unique contributions to Holocaust and trauma studies. They are also fascinating reads. Alan Rosen, professor of literature at the International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem, Israel, gives a captivating historical account of the pathbreaking work of psychologist David Boder, who in 1946 lugged what then was a state-of-the-art portable wire recorder and dozens of carbon-wire spools to France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, to interview concentration camp survivors and other "displaced persons." Boder was likely the first to record the voices of the war survivors, just one year after their liberation. While many other journalists and scholars conducted interviews with survivors, no audio recordings are known to exist prior to Boder's collection. The recordings in themselves constitute a unique human and scholarly legacy, having only resurfaced in the 1990s. Boder also left transcripts, translations, and some publications, which are not well known even among experts. In uncovering his work for the broader audience, Rosen interweaves several dramatic tales: Boder's life, his recording expeditions, and the difficulties he faced in trying to publish and archive this unique legacy.

Jürgen Matthaus, director of Holocaust Studies at the National Holocaust Museum, offers another unique contribution to Holocaust studies: a "first attempt at a multilayered analysis of a single body of survivor testimony by different scholars" (1). The subject is the testimony of a single survivor, Mrs. Helen "Zippi" Tichauer. Interestingly, Mrs. Tichauer also links the two books: Boder first interviewed her in 1946, and the five scholars in this volume explore her narrative from biographical, historical, sociological, pedagogical, and testimonial perspectives over many years. Both books are hard to put down, not only because of the poignancy of their subject matter and smooth writing but also because of the vivid and dramatic accounts of the challenges involved in working with Holocaust survivor testimony. In a sense, these books represent bookends in the field, one focused on survivor testimonies very close in time to the event and the other remembering, retelling, receiving, and making sense of these traumatic narratives five and six decades later.

The wonder of their voices

The story of David Boder's expedition to gather the accounts and record the voices of the displaced survivors is a riveting one. In two months, he interviewed 130 people (the appendix enumerates 122), in nine different languages. Although he also interviewed non-Jewish prisoners and people who lived or worked in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps, most of his interviews were with Jewish survivors, establishing the benchmark for Holocaust testimony. Rosen provides a detailed historical account of the relationship between Boder's life and his work, his academic antecedents, his training in psychology and linguistics, his interest in language and voice, the relationship between orality and writing, and the role of technology in recording, preserving, and disseminating the DP testimonies.

Rosen makes a strong case for the relevance of Boder's life to his work: his Latvian Jewish origins, difficult family life, experience of war, his name change from Mendel to Boder, multiple migrations to Germany, Mexico, and the U.S., combined backgrounds in linguistics and psychology, and his skill at multiple languages are reflected in the project he designed and undertook and for which he is best known. For example, his own multilingualism (his fluency in Yiddish, Russian, and German and command of Polish, Spanish, and English) allowed him to understand that narratives of trauma must be told in the language of "feeling." Thus, Boder encouraged his narrators to choose their "language of feeling" to recount their horrific stories.

Taking the autobiographical approach one step further than his Chicago mentors Gordon Allport and Robert Redfield, Boder generated oral texts in which he could study the exact places where language gives evidence of trauma: places in...