Abstract
Narratives of Jewish persecution and extermination have had to contend with the radical otherness of a series of events which cannot fit existing conceptual frameworks. For critics and historians of the Jewish genocide, such as Annette Wieviorka, this was not to negate or invalidate the project to transmit such memories. For survivors not to speak about their individual experiences was to remain locked in a silence which could be used by révisionniste commentators to falsify the past. For historians, the wish to respect the suffering of such survivors did not exonerate them from their duty to investigate a series of events which had shaped the course of the twentieth century.1
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Notes
See Annette Wieviorka, ‘On Testimony’ in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) pp.23–32.
See Lawrence Langer, ‘Remembering Survival’ in Holocaust Remembrance pp.70–80 and Langer’s longer studies on the Holocaust and testimony, particularly, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Cambridge: Yale University Press, 1991).
Charlotte Delbo, La mémoire et les jours (Paris: Berg International Editeurs, 1985) translated as Memory and Days (Marlboro Vt: Marlboro Press, 1990)
A number of British writers, born after the war years, have also begun recently to write about their relationship with parents, originally from Poland, who survived the Holocaust and subsequently settled in London, see Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London: Heinemann, 1996) and
Theo Richmond, Konin: A Quest (London: Vintage, 1996).
Dominique Garnier, Nice pour mémoire (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
Orner Bartov, Trauma and Absence’, in European Memories of the Second World War: New Perspectives on Post-War Literature H. Peitsch, C. Burdett and C. Gorrara (eds) (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998).
In this context of a fantastic reworking of a Jewish parent’s concentration camp experiences, one could cite Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1975) which invents W, a land where a distorted form of the Olympic Games slowly takes on the dimensions of the extermination camps.
Annette Kahn, Robert et Jeanne à Lyon sous l’Occupation (Paris: Payot, 1990), translated as Why my father died: a daughter confronts her family’s past at the trial of Klaus Barbie (Summit Books, 1991). I shall be translating quotations from the French original.
Claude Morhange-Bégué, Chamberet: The True Story of a Jewish Family in Wartime France (London: Peter Owen, 1990), first published in 1987. The latter text is presently only available in English.
Annette Muller, La Petite Fille du Vel d’Hiv (Paris: Denoel, 1991).
Alan Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in Post-Gaullist France (Oxford: Berg, 1992) p.99.
See, for example, James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Cambridge: Yale University Press, 1993).
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 2 ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’ pp.57–74.
Annette Kahn was to continue researching and publishing on the war period after Robert et Jeanne à Lyon sous l’Occupation. She wrote a book on Jewish experiences of the concentration camps, reproducing many women’s testimonies, including that of her mother, entitled Personne ne voudra nous croire (Paris: Payot, 1991). She also published Le Fichier (Paris: Laffont, 1993), an investigation into the list of Jewish names found in November 1991 in the archives of the Sécretariat d’Etat aux anciens combattants. It is thought to be a list, established by French officials, of Jewish inhabitants in the Seine département ordered by the Germans in 1940.
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© 1998 Claire Gorrara
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Gorrara, C. (1998). The Daughters of Persecution: Jewish Children Remember. In: Women’s Representations of the Occupation in Post-’68 France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26461-2_8
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