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(Download PDF) Holocaust Memory in The Digital Age Survivorsa Stories and New Media Practices Jeffrey Shandler Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
(Download PDF) Holocaust Memory in The Digital Age Survivorsa Stories and New Media Practices Jeffrey Shandler Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
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HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE
Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein
HOLOCAUST
MEMORY
IN T HE
DIGITA L AGE
Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices
JEFFREY SHANDLER
Acknowledgments vii
Author’s Note ix
Introduction 1
1 An Archive in Contexts 9
2 Narrative: Tales Retold 43
3 Language: In Other Words 87
4 Spectacle: Seeing as Believing 125
Conclusion 167
Notes 183
Index 205
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began exploring the Visual History Archive (VHA) at Rutgers in 2010, when,
thanks to the initiative of Douglas Greenberg, the university first gained online
access to the Archive. I am indebted to Doug not only for his sparking of my
interest in the VHA but also for his continued encouragement of my work.
Conversations with Rutgers colleagues Ethel Brooks, Michael Levine, Karen
Small, and Yael Zerubavel have also stimulated my thinking about the VHA,
and I am particularly grateful to Yael for prompting me to write my first paper
on the topic for a conference at Rutgers in 2011. In addition, I thank the School
of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers for providing me with a sabbatical and a fel-
lowship leave, which were essential to the research and writing of this book,
and Department of Jewish Studies staff members Sherry Endick and Arlene
Goldstein for their help in bringing this book to fruition. During the final year
of work on the manuscript, I benefited greatly from the assistance of Valerie
Mayzelshteyn, my Aresty Research Assistant at Rutgers, who diligently and
thoughtfully examined dozens of segments of VHA interviews and compiled
the information in the appendix.
The USC Shoah Foundation provided invaluable assistance to my research,
including the opportunity to spend several months in 2013 at the University of
Southern California as a visiting fellow. This visit enabled me to learn about the
workings of the VHA from its dedicated staff and to discuss my work in prog-
ress with them. I am deeply grateful for the generosity with which the Foun-
dation’s staff—especially Douglas Ballman, Crispin Brooks, Renée Firestone,
Georgiana Gomez, Ita Gordon, Kia Hayes, Karen Jungblut, Dan Leshem, Kim
Simon, Stephen Smith, Anne-Marie Stein, Kori Street, and Ari Zev—shared
their advice and expertise. During my stay at USC, I also benefited from the
counsel of faculty members Wolf Gruner, Tara McPherson, and Michael Renov,
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All transcriptions from VHA interviews are mine, except where indicated.
Transcriptions of English-language interviews preserve speakers’ grammatical
irregularities. Ellipses indicate abridgements made by me. Translations from
interviews in languages other than English, except where indicated, are mine
as well. Names of people are spelled per the listing in the VHA, except where
indicated.
❙ ❙ ❙
On any given day, individuals around the world sit before computer screens
to watch and listen to videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors. More
than seven decades after the end of World War II, many people approach this
resource with some expectation of what they will encounter, reflecting their
various intents: Descendants of deceased Holocaust survivors view these re-
cordings to learn about their ancestors’ prewar lives and wartime experiences
as well as about relatives killed during the war. High school students are ex-
horted to listen to survivors’ narratives as morally galvanizing exemplars. His-
torians screen these videos to research instances of Nazi persecution that are
otherwise undocumented. Psychologists scrutinize survivors’ storytelling for
insights into how people cope with trauma. Victims of more recent genocides
listen to these recordings to discover how, decades after the Holocaust, its sur-
vivors articulate their memories.
At the same time that screening these videos addresses an array of estab-
lished objectives, the accounts survivors offer are full of surprises. For as much
as these interviews are shaped by the protocols of the projects that produced
them and by decades of accumulating tropes of Holocaust remembrance, each
video documents a singular encounter with an individual who takes a distinct
approach to the task of recalling the past. What, then, are viewers of these v ideos
to make of moments when, in the course of describing his or her experience of
the genocide, a survivor bursts into song, starts speaking in another language,
2 INTRODUCTION
❙ ❙ ❙
Super 8 mm film as the preference for making home movies, given the newer
medium’s increased flexibility for recording and facility of viewing. The ease
with which videos could be taped and watched greatly expanded amateur film-
making, especially in the “home mode” of recording family life 1—only to be
surpassed in the early twenty-first century by the advent of digital video cam-
eras and smart phones, which have made recording, viewing, and especially
disseminating moving pictures even easier. In addition to individual recordings
of survivors’ memories, typically made by their family members for private use,
a number of organized efforts were undertaken to record collections of video-
taped interviews with Holocaust survivors. From the mid-1970s to the mid-
1990s, more than a score of these archives were established in the Americas,
Europe, Israel, and Australia; some recording continues to this day.2
In 1994 the project that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Founda-
tion’s Visual History Archive (VHA) was initiated. Within a few years, it became
the largest and most widely available collection of video recordings of Holocaust
survivors’ life stories. The beginning of the VHA coincided with an unprec-
edented level of attention to Holocaust remembrance in the American public
sphere, in the form of official days of remembrance, widely seen feature and doc-
umentary films, the inauguration of high-profile museums and memorials, a pro-
liferation of education programs, and increased scholarly attention to memory
practices centered on the Holocaust. At the same time, the Holocaust loomed
large as a paradigm for other genocides as well as an array of large-scale atrocities,
even as some works of Holocaust remembrance provoked public controversy.
Though the VHA set out to use state-of-the-art technology to preserve the
memories of survivors as this cohort’s passing approached, the Archive is itself
evidence of how mutable memory practices are and how quickly the media
they employ have changed. The VHA was initiated shortly before analog video
tape yielded to digital media as the choice for recording moving pictures. The
Archive’s goal of preserving memories was also challenged by the growing re-
alization that newer media are less stable than older ones. At the same time,
the advent of the Internet marked the start of a new era in media practices,
transforming the ways in which information could be stored, inventoried, dis-
seminated, and engaged. Digital and online technologies soon became central
to the Archive’s agenda, facilitating the preservation, indexing, and access of its
collection of videos. Thus, as it straddles the temporal boundary marked by the
4 INTRODUCTION
loss of living witnesses to the Holocaust, the VHA also bestrides the transition
from the “video age” to the “digital age.”
The VHA’s conjoining of new media and Holocaust memory practices at
this convergence of threshold moments exemplifies the new possibilities and
challenges now being addressed in the digital humanities, even as the issues at
hand are often specific to the concerns of Holocaust remembrance. Examining
the Archive as a subject of interest in its own right engages multiple, intercon-
nected issues: What are the implications of using video to document someone’s
life history? What impact does using digital media to catalog, index, and dis-
seminate these videos have on the ways they can be engaged? From watching
and listening to Holocaust survivors tell their life stories, what can be learned
about memory practices, both old (telling stories) and new (screening videos,
searching digital databases), as well as their interrelation? How is each video
simultaneously a singular account of an individual’s personal history and part
of a large-scale effort to preserve Holocaust memory? What are the implica-
tions of recording these life histories at the turn of the millennium, centered
on an event that took place a half century earlier and that has been extensively
documented in a variety of media for decades?
❙ ❙ ❙
Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age addresses these and other questions by
exploring the VHA’s holdings and scrutinizing the Archive as itself a work of
Holocaust remembrance. The first chapter, “An Archive in Contexts,” provides
an overview of the VHA’s conceptualization and situates the Archive within a
set of historical trajectories and contemporary contexts that inform its content,
form, and agenda: Jewish ethnographic projects, dating from the late nine-
teenth century; the efflorescence in the final years of the twentieth century of
public memory projects and new thinking about memory practices, especially
those concerning the Holocaust; and the interrelation of media and memory, as
shaped by the cascade of new communications technologies of the post–World
War II era.
The subsequent chapters present a series of case studies that read the Archive
“against the grain”—that is, they use the VHA’s rubrics for searching its holdings
to examine issues of Holocaust remembrance other than those that are central
to the Shoah Foundation’s mission. Doing so reveals the Archive’s potential as a
16 AN ARCHIVE IN CONTEXTS
Vaitiolo.
— Ei, ei, täytyy ryhtyä yhteen ja toiseen, kun ahdistaa. Jos te ette
nyt anna tyttöä minulle, niin —
— Tässä on maitoa.
Hän asetti suuren tuopin pöydälle.
Hän hymyili, mutta kun hän katsoi isäänsä, tuli hän pelokkaaksi.
— Pentti!
*****
— Sellainen silmukka!
— Ettekö Te kuule!
Silloin räjähti…
Pentin huuto kuului ulkoa, hän huusi kuin hullu. Hän hyökkäsi
tupaan ja viskasi oven jälkeensä.
Pentti itki.
— Kuinka ankara hän oli! Kun hän pauhasi, piti pää painaa kirkon
penkkiin. Kuinka ihminen silloin tunsi kutistuvansa!
— Niin, kyllä hän oli ankara. Että kieltää tanssin ja viulunsoiton! Ja
jos me kuitenkin hiivimme hiukan keskikesän kunniaksi pyörimään —
eikö hän heti seisonut seassamme huutamassa: Ettekö te näe,
kuinka pienet pirut tanssivat edestakaisin keskellänne!
— Tyhjääpä kuulee.
— Mennään kaikki.
— Kaikkiko?
— Minä en saanut sinua hänen tähdensä. Mutta nyt siitä tulee tosi.
Sinun pitää antaa mulle muisku tässä ruumiin ääressä.
— Eikä näe.
— Hän liikkui…
— Ha ha, kuinka arka sinä olet! Eikö mitä, hän makaa hiljaa kuin
turska. Kerta vielä!
— Ei, ei ruumishuoneessa.
— Se on hänen onnensa.
— Ja meidän.
Vanha laivuri.
Kalastajatuvan ovi on auki. Siellä istuu sisällä kesäillan hämyssä
joukko saaristolaisia, ukkoja ja eukkoja, joiden kasvot on karkeat
kuin kalliot, ja nuorisoa molempaa sukupuolta, ruskein heloittavin
kasvoin.
— Kuten sanottu, nyt voin minä sanoa sinulle hyvää yötä, Lassi
Juhana!
— Minä unhotin sen, minä unhotin sen. Siitä on tullut loppu, Lassi
Juhana.
Kajavia.
— Ka-ka-ka-
Ääni kuului käheältä ja suruvoittoiselta. Hänen huudollaan ei ollut
enään entistä sointua. Kaiku, joka sitä matki, peloitti häntä.
— Kakaa-kakaa-kakaa-
Mutta siellä oli myös koko joukko nuoria kajavia, jotka voimakkailla
siivillään soutelivat sinne tänne ilmassa. Siinä oli uusi kajavapolvi.
Vanha kajava oli saanut sillin ja vaivoin piteli hän sitä nokassaan.
Nuoret kajavat katselivat, olisiko vielä saatavissa useampia, ja
huomatessa… kirkkaan esineen vanhan kajavan suussa,
hyökkäsivät ne yhtaikaa hänen päälleen anastaakseen sen pois.
Suurta sotaa siinä ei tarvinnut syntyä, ennenkuin hän oli luopunut
saaliistaan. Ryövääjä kiiti saaliineen matkoihinsa. Mutta ennenkuin
se kerkesi niellä sillin, olivat toiset kolme myös sen kimpussa, ja
siinä syntyi tavaton hakkailu ja huudon paljous, joka päättyi sillin
paloittamisella neljän kesken, jonka jälkeen kukin poistui uutta
parvea tähystelemään…
Hänen rintansa laajeni, kun hän tunsi meren tuoksun, hän oli
saavuttavinaan taas sen joustavuuden, joka hänet ennen oli
saattanut pitämään itseään näiden vesien hallitsijana. Mutta pian
väsyi hän taas. Hän ei jaksanut enään lentää, hänen piti kotiin.
— Kaa-kaa-kaa-kaa'aa!
Vanhat neidit.
Mutta kas, poika, joka sousi heitä salmen yli, oli niin kaunis ja
iloinen. Hän oli äskettäin alkanut siinä soutaa — sittenkuin entinen
soutaja, liikkaava ja ruma, oli sairauden pakoittamana joutunut
sängyn omaksi.
Tämä olisi niin mielellään nauranut heille, mutta hän siirsi mälliä
hiukan syrjemmäksi suupieleen ja vannoi pysyvänsä vakavana.
— Tietysti.