(Re)Placing the Past: Spatial Strategies of Retelling Difficult Stories

This article explores the ways that space and place operate in Holocaust survivor oral histories, in particular as ways to position self and others when retelling difficult stories. Drawing on a range of oral history interviews, I examine how place functions in oral history narratives in complex ways. On the most obvious level, the events being described not only occurred in a different time but also a different place with distance and disjuncture in both time and space significant as the then and there is narrated in the here and now. But what is more striking are the ways in which microgeographies function as ways of meditating difficult events. In the cases discussed, Holocaust survivors (and others close to them) go places in their memory that they never went in reality and went places in reality where they are not willing to go in their memory. Taken together, it appears that survivors adopt a range of spatial strategies of memory as they physically place themselves vis-à-vis others in Holocaust landscapes as a way of narrating familial separation and violence. (Re)placing self and others in the past is one way of telling (and choosing not to tell) difficult stories.