Memory Perceived: Recalling the Holocaust (review)

Robert Kraft's Memory Perceived: Recalling the Holocaust is an important contribution to the psychology of Holocaust memory and the memory of trauma more generally. Drawing on 200 hours of testimony from 129 Holocaust survivors who recorded their oral histories for Yale University's Fortunoff Video Archive, Kraft builds on Lawrence Langer's seminal work to help us understand how witnesses recollect and understand the trauma they experienced.¹ Like Langer, Kraft views memory as consisting of an inherent duality between the "deep memory" of atrocity and the "common memory" of normal times (p. 22).

In his study Kraft takes the "episode" as his primary unit of analysis, exploring the perceptual images, emotions, and physiological responses associated with these discrete events (p. 17). He then contrasts this "original phenomenal experience," or "core memory," with the "interpreted, narrative construction of events" that constitutes an additional layer of recollection (pp. 24-5). In this way Kraft accounts for the apparent paradox between witnesses' remarkable capacities to remember the past and their difficulties communicating these memories through language.

This observation is of course not new, for we have often been reminded by Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and others of the limitations of language to convey the horrific experience of atrocity during the Holocaust. What is new and particularly useful about Kraft's book is the way he connects the psychological literature on the memory of trauma to the specific testimonies. This provides Kraft with a set of empirically grounded theoretical constructs with which to explain the psychological complexities of Holocaust memory.

Kraft's witness sample includes survivors from ten European countries. At the start of World War II they ranged in age from infancy to forty-three. In an especially poignant chapter he presents the testimonies of those who were eight years old or younger. These children endured traumatic separations from their parents and "hid with adopted families or in orphanages and convents" (p. 57). Some assumed alternative identities and religious affiliations, and some hid "in cramped, dark spaces— sewers or attics or holes—rarely breathing fresh air" or were "concealed in [camp] barracks during the day while the adults went off to slave labor" (p. 57). The youngest lacked any "coherent concept of self in childhood" (p. 59), and they all mourned "the loss of childhood" that resulted from "the painful abscess early in life" (p. 63).

Kraft offers interesting witness accounts of the personal agency that survivors displayed to maximize their chances of living. Typically, both survivors and analysts refer to the randomness of survival—it was a matter of good luck or bad, of being in the right place or the wrong place at the right or wrong time. However, Kraft and others have shown that survivors often emerged from an initial period of shock, despair, and disbelief—from a state of numbness where all semblance of reflective thought disappeared—to an adaptive focus on survival accompanied by "the reemergence of cognitive initiative" (p. 93). While witness accounts often emphasize the "all-against-all" atmosphere, they also include reports of those able to hold onto their humanity and to offer help to others.² As one of Kraft's subjects observed, "Side by side with these atrocities, I saw love, courage, fortitude....I saw sisters fighting over a piece of bread, but I saw sisters dying for each other....Beast or angel, we have a choice" (p. 171).

In the concluding chapter of the book, Kraft considers "the lessons of Holocaust memory," as understood by the witnesses themselves, the most important lesson being "the fundamental necessity of remembering itself" (p. 165). Many survivors stated that they wanted to "leave a legacy" for their family, but they also believed that their testimony would "be of value to a broader audience" and provide a record of resistance to Holocaust deniers (pp. 172-73).

The need to bear witness also has a social context and is in part the result of the life stage in which witnesses today find themselves. As Kraft notes...