48 Hours of Kristallnacht: Night of Destruction/Dawn of the Holocaust, and: This is Home now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak (review)

While the use of oral histories in academic research varies widely depending on the discipline, it has long been seen as a useful source for studying the Holocaust. The earliest testimonies were collected by David Boder, a psychology professor with the Illinois Institute of Technology. By visiting displaced persons camps in Europe at the end of World War II, he was able to interview recently liberated survivors in what is believed to be the first recordings of Holocaust survivors. Since Boder's first interviews, the practice of recording survivor testimony has become a standard practice for Holocaust museums, Jewish archives, historical societies, and community centers.

The usefulness of oral history collections in examining the scope of the Holocaust is evident in the two books presented here. Even though each follows a different method in presenting oral testimony, they both use the experiences of survivors to provide a richer text to historic events.

In the case of 48 Hours of Kristallnacht, Mitchell Bard uses interviews, primarily from the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, to develop a comprehensive picture of November 1938. He breaks the text into sections with each focusing on a particular theme; in dividing the book up this way, Bard is able to discuss a specific aspect of Kristallnacht through the interviews he selects.

The process of taking quotes from survivors and using them to augment a larger narrative may be a classic academic approach, but Bard moves beyond mere annotations by supplying a simple expository narrative to create a framework that allows the testimony to speak for itself. This utilization of personal experience lends weight beyond the documentary record. Take, for example, a synagogue official who found "All the windows were smashed with wooden hand grenades, as used in army training, all the chandeliers were torn down, the benches were chopped up, the women's gallery demolished, the Rabbi's seat and the warden's box hacked to pieces, the curtains torn down, the Scrolls of the Law ripped into shreds, the great Menorah used as a battering ram" (151). Allowing the witnesses to speak in such an unedited format gives the event a personal viewpoint. Further, by taking testimony and teasing out the details, Bard produces what could best be described as a textual montage. While he does not present any of the testimony in its entirety, each personal segment is wrapped around a thematic structure. In this way, 48 Hours of Kristallnacht provides a sense of emotional scope to the physical destruction illustrated through each of its witnesses.

In contrast, This Is Home Now uses a holistic approach to presenting oral history. By providing edited transcripts, collected as part of a 2005 exhibit at the Lexington Historical Museum in Lexington, Kentucky, the entire interview process becomes part of the history. As part of an effort to document a population that was previously overlooked, Arwen Donahue, a former program coordinator for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Post-Holocaust Interview Project, conducted interviews with nine survivors who settled in Kentucky. Donahue questions each of her narrators about their experiences before and during the Holocaust, giving the reader an idea of who they are, before focusing on the post-war years. It is during this stage of the interview that she delves into the issue of family, faith, and life in Kentucky. As This is Home Now demonstrates, this last point becomes important since survivors who settled in rural America have been underrepresented. Through the exhibit and this subsequent book, she attempts to address how living in Kentucky has impacted their lives and how they see themselves today.

When exploring this topic, one of the issues that surfaces repeatedly...