The Fate of Holocaust Memories: Transmission and Family Dialogues (review)

Hiding with her family in the south of France in 1942, eight-year-old Chaya Roth promised herself she would someday write about what she saw happening. Nearly sixty years passed before she began to see her childhood promise fulfilled.

As Holocaust survivors, the author, her sister Gitta, and their mother Hannah each made a commitment to pass their family's survival stories along to future generations. Now a grandmother, Chaya Roth writes, "I still ache with the throbbing of my painful past and am impelled to wonder, 'What have I passed on to our children about the Holocaust?' and 'What will our children remember to pass on to theirs?'" (1).

The introduction to The Fate of Holocaust Memories is critical if the reader is to understand the perspective Roth assumes as she tells her family's story. It includes five sections: (1) a rationale for the book's existence, (2) a discussion of how memory functions and evolves over time, (3) a brief consideration of transmission, (4) a description of the interviews on which the book is based, and (5) an examination of how various Holocaust victim/survivor generations may be identified. This final section is of special importance if the reader is to understand the context into which Roth places her story.

Roth divides the remaining text into three sections: Part 1, "Hannah and Her Family," draws from handwritten notes and family memorabilia supplied by the author's mother; Part 2, "Transmission Summer of 1982," details Roth's and her husband's specific efforts to transmit family Holocaust survivor stories to their own children following a trip to Europe; Part 3, "Family Dialogues," explores generational Holocaust survivor interviews conducted as part of the Steven Spielberg Holocaust Project. Roth employs photographs, primary sources, chronological organization, and autobiographical technique to weave together riveting narratives. Each section of the text examines issues relevant to survivors' lives during interwar years and subsequent decades.

Scholarly literature on Holocaust survivors places all survivors—adults and children—in one category. Throughout their childhood and young adulthood years, Roth and Gitta each perceived their Holocaust survivor story as being qualitatively different from their mother's survivor narrative. "[O]ur mother's teachings and . . . experiences as parent-teacher were separate from ours. . . . To combine these generational functions (i.e., parent versus child, teacher versus student) into one conceptual category—that is, as one survivor generation" does not, Roth believes, represent her "experienced reality" as either a child survivor or an adult who, as a child, lived through the Holocaust (8). In this regard, Roth makes a conscious departure from past scholarly tradition in The Fate of Holocaust Memories.

Sometimes each generation's memories differ. For example, during the Italian Occupation when Hannah and her children escaped across the mountains, Hannah remembers a kind woman named Andreina who helped hide them. "Once a month," Hannah recalls, "Andreina slaughtered a little lamb or a calf. She hung the carcass high up, but naturally in front of our eyes. . . . I remember we became sick from looking at the meat, in particular you children." Gitta recalls less distress over the slaughtered animal than over her own humiliating experience: "I remember that before we left for Turin we were in another place . . . [with] about twenty or twenty-five people. We stayed there for about two days. I will never forget that," Gitta recalls. "That's when I got my period. And I had no sanitary napkins. I had nothing" (70-71).

The family interviews located near the end of the book provide an interesting psychological exegesis as each individual provides his/her unique perspective of the family's history. Hannah, Gitta, and Chaya relate their experiences through a lens defined by time and location, and the other family members then try to place their lives within the context of what their relatives endured and, in the cases of the sisters, continue to endure as they come to terms with...