Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony 9780300235531

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ECOLOGIES OF WITNESSING

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ecologies of witnessing Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony

Hannah Pollin-Galay

New Haven & London

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Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale .edu (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Galliard Old Style and Copperplate 33 types by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960441 ISBN 978-0-300-22604-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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FOR ASAF

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 Bad Testimony: Making and Breaking the Rules of Witnessing 14 2 Solidarity: Kin, Party, Neighborhood 3 The Victim-Perpetrator Encounter

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4 Accent as Archive: Yiddish and Language Biographies 5 Places and Non-Places Conclusion

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Appendix 1. Witness and Testimony List

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Appendix 2. General Timeline of the Holocaust in Lithuania 275 Appendix 3. Timelines of Vilna, Kovna, and Shavl Ghettos Notes

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Illustration Credits Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is about narrative ecologies—webs of images, words, places, ideas, and people that house and shape life stories. In working on this project for more than a decade, I have moved through several ecologies of my own, traveling between literature and history and back again, to multiple cities in the United States, Lithuania, and Israel. Here is my chance to recognize those who have inspired this journey. First, I thank all of the people who shared their memories with me, either directly, over tea and tape recorders in Lithuania, or indirectly, through larger testimony projects. It was Dovid Katz who in 2004 first suggested that I set aside print literature for a while and try studying oral interviews. That was a daring bit of advice. This book is its outcome. Next, I am deeply indebted to my two mentors, Igal Halfin and David Roskies. Each word I’ve written contains years of conversation with you, Igal. David, thank you for opening up Yiddishkayt to me as an undergraduate student. This is a tradition that never stops opening and reopening. Beyond my two official advisers, stellar scholars from different universities have generously taken me under their wings at various moments. They include James Young, Hana Wirth-Nesher, Debórah Dwork, Carol Kidron, Christoph Dieckmann, and, outside of academia, the poet Rivkah Basman Ben-Chaim. I have received crucial input from colleagues, who wrap the globe with insight and solidarity: Jeff Wallen, Scott Ury, Anika Walke, Justin Cammy,

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Marc Kaplan, Ylva Sjöstrand, Paul Nahme, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum, Amos Goldberg, Kierra Crago-Schneider, Fabien Théofilakis, Jared McBride, Itamar Haritan, Elia Etkin, Ofri Ilany, Raz Segal, Mara Benjamin, and Miriam Udel are among them. I thank Sarah Miller, editor at Yale University Press, for taking a chance with this manuscript. Deborah Chasman, coeditor of my favorite journal, Boston Review, made a big difference with a few small comments. Simon and Julijus Gurevicˇius, young activists in the Jewish Community of Lithuania, have helped me stay connected to the people I interviewed there, long after my visit ended. Their dedication to this community is matched only by their patience and generosity toward me. A number of people have helped me to reaccess archives from afar, to fill in nagging blanks, and to cross-check texts. They include Alicija Zukauskaite˙, Paul Thomas, Kim Weinstein, and Benjamin Rangell. To fund research in the humanities today is not a rote procedure but an act of principle. The following institutions have meaningfully shaped my research through material support: the Fulbright Foundation for Scholarly Exchange and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, which funded my initial trip to Lithuania; the Nathan Rotenstreich Fellowship for Excellence in the Humanities; the Lessing Fellowship in European History; the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture; the USC Shoah Foundation; Beit Leyvik, The Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Israel; the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem—all of which supported some phase of my graduate studies; as well as the Rothschild Foundation, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was fortunate to hold postdoctoral fellowships. My research would not have been possible without help from professionals at all three testimonial institutions included in this study: Joanne Rudof at the Fortunoff Archive; Havi Dreifuss and Liat Ben Habib at Yad Vashem; and Crispin Brooks, Stephen Smith, Douglas Ballman, Wolf Gruner, and Dan Leshem at the USC Shoah Foundation. Ilya Lempertas, who organized the Shoah Foundation interviews in Lithuania, was espe-

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cially forthcoming. These are individuals who have not only dedicated their time and talents to preserving Holocaust memory, but also to enabling free and open inquiry into the fruits of their labor. This is a truly admirable combination of commitments. The Tel Aviv University humanities faculty, mostly the School of Historical Studies, provided a lively and supportive environment for me as a graduate student from 2007 to 2014. I write these words while on my way back to Tel Aviv University, as an incoming faculty member in the Literature Department. Teaching Yiddish Studies at an Israeli university promises to be a rich intellectual adventure. I thank the department for honoring me with this appointment and for entrusting me with so great a responsibility— one that extends both deep inside and far beyond the classroom. I hope to demonstrate what I mean by this in the years to come. I live and write in a house that is wall-to-wall human. I thank my extended family circle, including Emma Pollin, Irene Pollin, Daniel Galay, and Hana Ne’eman Galay. My parents, Robert Pollin and Sigrid Miller Pollin, give (yes, present tense) tirelessly of their time, their love, and their intellect. My two daughters were born at very different moments of this project, Ruti at the beginning, and Leah at the end. They light up my every day. Lastly, I dedicate this book to Asaf Galay, who is my husband and my best friend. Earlier, partial versions of chapters 3 and 4 appeared in the following articles: “Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 506 –531; “The History of My Voice: Yiddish at the Seams of Holocaust Video Testimony,” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 58 –97. I thank Oxford University Press and Indiana University Press for permission to develop and reprint this material. This book was published with assistance from the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This book was also made possible (in part) by funds granted to the author through a Phyllis Greenberg Heideman and Richard D. Heideman Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for

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Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made and views expressed, however, are solely the author’s responsibility. The author is also grateful to the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for its support in the preparation of the manuscript and the book proposal.

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ECOLOGIES OF WITNESSING

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INTRODUCTION

Gita Taitz and Liuba Feldman were both born in Kovna (Kaunas), Lithuania, in 1921.1 Both were imprisoned in the Kovna ghetto and in the Stutthof concentration camp and subsequently testified about these horrors on film for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archives— in 1995 and in 1996, respectively. Despite the similarity of their personal histories, these two witnesses offer highly contrasting testimonies. Gita Taitz presents a broad, reflective narrative, organized around ideas of morality and decency, rich with emotional language and sensual detail. She has several titles for what took place—“the calamity,” “the Holocaust,” and concludes her interview by declaring, “To be a Jew is not easy. But I am proud to be a Jew. This is the way I was born and this is the way I will die.” Liuba Feldman, by contrast, shares a string of small, darkly humorous episodes about her cunning intrigues during the war. She shows pride in recalling her ability to slip through walls, bribe guards, and find holes in the most restrictive situations. As for the title of this event, she calls it simply “the war.” Liuba’s testimony does not build up to a conclusion. After four hours, the interviewer unceremoniously thanks Liuba for her time, which causes her to chuckle until the camera is turned off. The testimonies of Gita Taitz and Liuba Feldman ask us to consider how contemporary language and context shape the witnessing process: Gita testifies in English, in a well-appointed apartment in Manhattan, and Liuba testifies in Yiddish, in Kovna, Lithuania. In deciding what should happen when the camera starts rolling, Gita and Liuba draw from 1

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different ethical concerns, tools of expression, physical cues, and sources of knowledge in their environments. They seem to mean different things when they say “I,” and especially when they say “we.” That is, despite their solo appearances in front of the camera, Gita and Liuba do not face the task of remembering alone, but incorporate the conversations and textual conventions around them. Surely, a wide number of factors contribute to the conspicuous differences between Gita’s and Liuba’s Holocaust testimonies. Personality, educational background, family life, economic status, political and religious leanings (and in other cases, gender) could all be taken up as axes of comparison. This book concerns itself with two elements of difference: those of the language and the location of testimony. I do not approach these two elements as totalizing determinants of narrative, but as windows onto the complex ecologies that surround these truth-telling scenes. The natural metaphor of “ecology” appropriately suggests a messy, imprecise, and yet powerful web of sensibilities, with which the individual must interact in order to make sense. Ecologies include ideology, poetic tendencies, ethos, mythology, material landscape, bodily practice, and the very mechanisms that allow people to organize and connect all these.2 The word “ecology” aptly carries the echo of its classical Greek root oikos, which means both “house” and “household,” at once the container and the substance of social life. I use the term in a way that encompasses what Charles Taylor calls a “social imaginary,” which he explains to be “the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”3 Yet, an ecological approach also heeds the spatial, aural, and material spheres that support the imagination. If we look carefully at the testimonies of Gita and Liuba—which, when we include their respective peers, is a task that will require all of the chapters ahead—we see that their differences do not call into question how the Holocaust destroyed Jewish lives, but if and how it destroyed Jewish paradigms of living. Thinking of “catastrophe” in the way that it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, as “an event that produces the subversion of the order or system of things,” “a change and revolution”4—then we might say that the testimonial groups diverge regarding

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the Holocaust’s catastrophic nature: They disagree as to which meanings became unhinged, what order was subverted, and how. The idea of rift and rebuilding organizes Gita’s manner of testifying throughout. This very sense of transformation so permeates her narrative that she feels impelled, in its final moments, to declare its limits: “This is the way I was born and this is the way I will die” is the statement of someone in conversation, perhaps in struggle, with an overriding belief that the world has been overturned in her lifetime. Liuba, on the other hand, finds no need to insist that she is the same person as she was before the war. Through her vocabulary, her references, her tone, and her chronological structuring, Liuba gives the impression that she witnessed horror through a fixed lens. When we add a third group to the comparison—witnesses testifying in Hebrew in Israel, who will compose another major source for our study—the question becomes even more complicated. Consider the words of Yosef Ben-Ya’akov, who declares that he “became a new person” after having survived the Holocaust and moved to Israel.5 “What happened there, happened there,” he states, defining the spatial boundary between Eastern Europe and Israel as one that divides his identity and history as well. Yosef ’s life story almost parallels a conversion narrative in its bold transformational path and clear point of fracture. But while telling us outright that he has become a new man after the Holocaust, he also claims to fashion this new self according to old principles, materialized in ancestral language and ancestral land. In this ecology, the witness should recover from catastrophe by deriving a revolutionary vision from Jewish tradition. Scholars have debated the question of continuity and rift through broad theological, political, and philosophical lenses. The idea that extreme violence kills something in addition to people was at the heart of Raphael Lemkin’s writings on genocide in the 1940s. In addition to the ecumenism for which he is famous, Lemkin was in search of a theoretical concept adequate to describe the tear in culture, politics, and lifestyle that Hitler inflicted upon his victims.6 Among Jewish historians, Jacob Katz was an early proponent of seeing the Holocaust as a historical meaning break, “an absolute novum lacking accountability in any rational terms

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at the disposal of the generation that experienced it.”7 In the thirty years since Katz wrote those words, trauma theorists have explored this largescale unhinging of meaning on an individual cognitive and (anti-) narrative level. Among them, Dori Laub asserts that the Holocaust rendered eyewitness cognition impossible. This gap in the individual’s understanding of the event, according to Laub, accumulated into a worldwide break in meaning. A collapse of old values systems, a “transvaluation,” resulted from this massive decimation of people’s horizons of expectation.8 A similar assertion underlies Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, in which he uses individual voices to convey “the sense of disbelief ” in a wide range of settings and perspectives during the Second World War.9 If “disbelief ” not only characterized reactions to the Holocaust as it happened but also remains an ethical requirement of those wishing to study the event today, then Friedländer’s conception of the Holocaust is indeed catastrophist at its core. Alon Confino adds that the Holocaust “is considered the rupture in contemporary historiographical time, morality, representation and experience.”10 Confino draws attention to the importance of perception and interpretation in this matter: Empirical uncertainties aside, the Holocaust has the power of a civilization break because it is widely “considered” as such. On the other side of the debate, scholars have argued that we need to be more mindful of Jewish conceptual continuity in and around the Holocaust. Foremost among them, David Engel has characterized his own research on Jewish institutions during World War II as driven by a “desire to examine the political resources that the system placed at the Jews’ disposal at the height of its development and the ways in which Jews deployed them at a time of grave collective existential danger.”11 While Engel focuses on the deployment of extant political systems, literary scholars like Alan Mintz and David Roskies have argued that prewar systems of writing, reading, and self-expression remained at Jews’ disposal during and after the war.12 Similarly, in arguing that survivors emerged from the war with commemorative paradigms in hand, scholars of the postwar era, like Laura Jockush, Hasia Diner, Dina Porat, and David Cesarini, also foreground conceptual continuity throughout the period.13 Lastly, scholars critical of trauma theory, like Carol Kidron and Ruth Leys, argue that

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“disbelief,” silences, and meaning gaps have become fetishized objects of study, which mask more than they reveal.14 I hand the question over to survivors of the event, asking how they narrate the life and death of paradigms through their own stories. Using Lithuanian Jewry as a case study, I compare testimonies from the survivors of this community delivered in Israel, North America, and contemporary Lithuania, in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish. In these three ecologies, differences over the question of transvaluation emerge in conjunction with a network of formal, thematic, and ethical distinctions. We can think of the body of testimony produced in each ecology as its own genre, with an unspoken set of expectations and rules of praxis: 1. The most prominent mode of testimony that emerges from the English-language American ecology is personal-allegorical. That is, one important way that Gita Taitz draws truth from the events she has witnessed is through recreating personal experience in narrative. It is through individual perception that she offers pictures of prewar life, wartime, and recovery. Her testimony is also openly allegorical in that she enables the distant listener to derive lessons from her memories, applicable anywhere. 2. Conversations in the Hebrew-language Israeli setting revolve around an ideal of communal-monumental testimony. When Yosef BenYa’akov becomes a new man, he does so as part of a polity, which moves through the march of history together with him. The kind of transformation that he cares to impart to his listener relates to official communal activity, not his own sensory world. His testimony is monumental in that it offers a way of making greatness out of suffering and invests in articulating a program for the Jewish future. 3. Lastly, witnesses in the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology testify through a collective-forensic framework. Liuba Feldman incorporates a wide cast of characters into her narrative throughout. This assembly of people is not connected through a political program but through the circumstances of ethnicity, workplace, and geographic origin. The names and place details that Liuba shares all convey an ongoing investment in the local microcosm. Lithuania is as real in 1995 as in 1941. The city

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that Liuba calls home has not changed much, nor have its inhabitants, the good or the wicked. In fact, scores have yet to be settled for the wrongs of World War II, as other witnesses in Liuba’s environment are eager to point out. Liuba cares to single out those who helped her, and her friends engage in similar name-work, identifying local assailers in a forensic manner. These witnesses aim to accuse and to vindicate. Their testimonies do not sound like moral instruction or programmatic planning for the people. The vast scope and scale of contemporary Holocaust testimony collections invite comparative analysis. I examine testimonies drawn from four sources: (1) a set of forty-six audio testimonies I recorded in Lithuania in 2004 –2005. These testimonies were given in Yiddish in the witnesses’ homes; (2) the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, which began gathering testimonies in 1979 and now includes forty-four hundred testimonies, mostly recorded in English in North America, with additional testimonies from Israel, South America, and Europe; (3) the USC Shoah Foundation’s Institute for Visual History and Education, which includes roughly fifty-two thousand Holocaust testimonies in thirty-one different languages from fifty-six different countries. Testimonies from this collection were gathered from 1994 to the present, though most of their work with Jewish Holocaust survivors was completed by 1999;15 and (4) Yad Vashem Archives video testimonies, which the institution began collecting in 1989 and continues to collect to the present. Their video collection currently consists of approximately ten thousand testimonies. The vast majority of this footage was taken in Israel in a studio setting. Though there are important differences between these four collections—the scale of the projects, interviewing techniques, and the recording technology employed—they nonetheless constitute a coherent-enough enterprise, one aimed at concretizing Holocaust memory through individual speech. Beyond teaching us about the Holocaust and transvaluation, these testimonies raise questions about the conditions of remembering at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first—the period that Annette Wieviorka has called “the era of the witness.”16 The timing of these recordings is crucial: The recent explosion of testimony

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reached its peak of activity in the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The global scope of these projects expresses an ambition to make Holocaust memory borderless, and conveys an implicit faith that ideas about memory and suffering will travel easily, once given sufficient political freedom and technological means.17 Methodologically, this project learns from Maurice Halbwachs, who argued as early as 1926 that remembering is a collective enterprise.18 While “collective memory” was once thought to be the domain of public ceremonies, political rhetoric, museums, and textbooks, theorists of memory have suggested that even private conversation and recall take part in a shared forum.19 Though a prominent object of scholarship in other fields, the witness’s social ecology has not been taken seriously enough in the realm of personal Holocaust narrative, the study of contemporary oral and audiovisual Holocaust testimony especially.20 Instead, two other kinds of reading have prevailed: one that is interested in facts—what happened—and the other in the psyche, the impact of what happened to the individual human soul.21 But we cannot access either of these research objects without considering the ecology in which the witness testifies, nor should we strive to. Social imagining is the vital process through which facts become meaningful, worth uttering and studying. Its presence in the source is not a hindrance but a benefit, something we cannot afford to ignore. In a similar manner, we cannot study the person in the Holocaust without investigating the specific notions of subjectivity operative in a given setting. When we attempt to look straight into the soul of a victim of atrocity, without regard for language and discourse, we often project our own (Western, American) models of pain.22 The testimonies themselves, when studied fully and closely, reveal the specific assumptions that enable people to say both what happened and why it hurt. That is, this is not a book about the problems with oral and audiovisual Holocaust testimony. In fact, contemporary Holocaust testimonies are far richer sources than we often credit them to be, enclosing many topics and layers of expression into one text: Witnesses not only attempt to reconstruct the most harrowing wartime scenes but also to emplace them in a life narrative that includes description of the mundane and even the good. Speakers make claims about the past not only through their verbal

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statements but through the sound of their voices, personal appearances, body language, and facial expressions. Since the interviewers’ questions are captured on the recordings, we see how institutions have a hand in memory-making. But we also see that there are conversational and narrative habits that are implicit, internalized, and thus more powerful than institutional guidelines. The footage captures affective responses to history, but also scenarios in which affect is absent or deemed irrelevant.23 Testimonies often imitate other Holocaust texts—literature, monuments, ceremonies, trials, textbooks—but then constellate them in ways not recorded elsewhere. Viewing testimonies comparatively helps us to animate all of these layers of text. Once we see how “things can be done differently,” we can appreciate testimony as a highly flexible, almost theatrical medium, whose very untidiness can produce insight. Working with a comparison among three bodies of testimony, rather than two, steepens the challenge in analysis but also expands the potential for insight. The number three takes the analysis beyond binaries of East versus West, Jewish collectivity versus individual integration, minority versus majority languages. At times, the Hebrew and Yiddish testimonies seem similar, since in both cases, witnesses speak in a Jewish-particular tongue. In other respects, the shared diasporic element of Lithuania and North America brings these two clusters of testimony closer together. The reasons for choosing the English-language–North-American and Hebrew-Israeli testimonies are perhaps self-evident. Israel and the United States are the two major contemporary centers of Jewish life, and English and Hebrew are the predominant languages of Jewish memory discourse in today’s world. The third corpus, Holocaust testimonies delivered in the Yiddish language and in Lithuania, are numerically small and discursively off the beaten path. Testimonies from this ecology demand our attention for different reasons. As stories relayed in the language of experience and on the scene of the crime, they raise questions about how contextual continuity frames atrocity. In contradistinction, they show how narratives of emigration typically shape what we know about the Holocaust. Furthermore, as contemporary spoken Yiddish sources, they also offer a new chapter, an epilogue, if you will, to the long-standing tradition of Yiddish orality, which has had a major influence on the Jewish literary tradition.24 Binding the Ho-

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locaust and Soviet periods into one life story, these testimonies also help us place these two often-disconnected histories together—and from the perspective of Jewish residents of the “bloodlands.”25 On the whole, witnesses testifying in Lithuania and in the Yiddish language offer a counterperspective to the testimonies from North America and Israel, whose narratives have structured our expectations of Holocaust memory thus far. They allow us to peer into the wide margins of late modernity, showing us what it is like to be a subject on the Jewish and global periphery.26 In fact, it was this small, marginalized Jewish community who challenged me to begin this project. In 2004 –2005, I spent a year in Lithuania interviewing aging Jews who still lived in or near the places where they were born roughly eighty years prior, and thus also near the very sites where most of their communities had been annihilated during World War II. Locating Jewish names in the phone book, or approaching elderly people waiting in line to fill prescriptions at the Jewish Community Center pharmacy, I made contact with about fifty such individuals, who invited me into their homes to talk. They tolerated my non-native Yiddish and had plenty to say— especially about the war years. About midway through my research in Lithuania, I realized I did not understand what I was hearing. This had nothing to do with literal word comprehension or with historical knowledge. I had learned about the events central to their stories—the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in 1940, the invasion of the German army in June 1941, attacks by people considered neighbors or friends, flight eastward or imprisonment in ghettos, hiding in forests or partisan encampments, deportation to concentration and labor camps, liberation, return to Lithuania under Soviet rule—and yet I, as a researcher of American Jewish background, could not recognize these events as told to me in this manner. In short, these aging Lithuanian Jews narrated the Holocaust in a way that did not sound like the Holocaust. This book tries to shed light on the reasons for this narrative nonrecognition, working through one point of difference at a time. I start from a procedural, formal level in chapter 1—where I define what “testimony” means and how an authoritative witness ought to speak in each setting. In chapter 2, I explore how these different genres of testimony shape notions of belonging and family life. Just as the testimony groups differ in how they define social bonds, so too do they diverge on definitions of the

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enemy, the topic of chapter 3. Disagreements over which party should bear more blame—local collaborators or uniformed Germans—reveal deeper splits over ideas of justice and what should be done with memories of wrongdoing. Having explored portrayals of people, the last two chapters of the book examine witnesses’ perceptions of the world around them, the languages they have spoken and places they have lived: Chapter 4 focuses on how witnesses include or exclude the Yiddish language in their testimonies, as a way to define their stance toward prewar Jewish society. The fifth and final chapter explores how survivors animate geography. Sites that they chart in narrative include Lithuania, concentration camps, America, and Israel. While geographic movement parallels historical progress in Israeli and American testimonies, this equation erodes in testimonies from Lithuania. Each chapter also includes rule-bending testimonies, showing how each genre clears space for its own violation. Taken as a whole, these thematic chapters reveal the contours of a narrative gestalt, or “landscape of memory,”27 in each setting. Each theme also offers a different inroad into our question about the Holocaust as transvaluation.

Lithuanian Jewry as a Case Study It is helpful to enter these chapters with some appreciation of the revered name that Lithuanian Jews—Litvaks— earned long before the Holocaust, as well as the severity of violence that led to this community’s near annihilation. Jewish life in the multiethnic region of Lithuania dates at least as far back as 1171, the year inscribed on the earliest Jewish gravestone in the town of Eyshishok (Eišiške˙s).28 By the seventeenth century, the Lithuanian capital, Vilna (Vilnius), earned the title “The Jerusalem of Lithuania,” reflecting a widespread perception of this region as a center of Jewish religious and cultural life.29 The teachings of Lithuanian Jewish sages continue to be studied in yeshives and institutions of rabbinic learning today; Jewish writers and artists of Litvak origin—including Avraham Mapu, Marc Chagall, and Avrom Sutzkever—have a notable presence in the annals of secular Jewish cultural history. The testimonies studied here relate to this rich Litvak legacy in a wide variety of ways—adapting, ignoring, or reinterpreting it within the languages of late Jewish modernity.

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Lithuanian Jews stand out in the pages of Jewish history, not only thanks to their cultural and religious achievements but also in a very different way, because of the expedient, vicious, and almost total annihilation that this community faced during the Holocaust.30 Over 90 percent of Lithuanian Jews, who numbered 240,000 in 1940, were killed under Nazi occupation. Relating closely to the theme of place and home, central to this book, many of these Jewish victims perished locally, within the territory of Lithuania itself. As historian Yitzhak Arad put it, the massacre of Lithuanian Jewry was in large part carried out “openly and in the vicinity of the localities in which the Jews lived, and was witnessed by the local population.”31 This adds further weight to the geographic setting of Lithuania, rendering it the site not only of prewar life, but also of wartime atrocity. Likewise, this means that local non-Jewish neighbors, along with German Wehrmacht troops and Einsatzgruppen (order police), played a decisive role in carrying out the massacres— especially in the period just after the German invasion of Lithuania on June 22, 1941.32 (Timelines at the back of this book provide a more comprehensive chronological overview.) This local, street-level violence has proven both difficult to document and difficult to confront in the public sphere.33 The testimonies studied here offer firsthand impressions of the most controversial elements of this history: mass shootings, neighborly attacks, and pogroms in the streets, as well as memories of trust and covenants across ethnic lines. They do not resolve disputes about culpability on an empirical level, but help explain why they exist and to whom they matter. After the liberation of Lithuania and the end of World War II, the remnants of Lithuanian Jewry began spreading across the globe. Emigration was a legal possibility for those Litvaks who found themselves in the American Zone after liberation, along with those from the Vilna area who had been repatriated as Polish citizens in 1946. These legal émigrés were joined by Lithuanian Jews who had ended the war in Soviet territory but then found illegal means of crossing the border, many with the help of the Brichah (Zionist emigration underground) movement. Though there is no precise way to track the emigration choices of Lithuanian Jewry at this postwar juncture, the overall proportions of Jewish survivor migration likely apply to these Litvaks as well: two-thirds of all Jewish displaced persons moved to Israel, nearly one-third to the United States and Canada

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combined, and smaller numbers to other countries.34 Some of those Litvaks who left became active in organizations dedicated to commemorating Lithuanian Jewish heritage from abroad, such as the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel or Nusach Vilne in New York. These organizations provided Litvak newcomers with social and welfare resources, while also sponsoring research and writing about the life and death of Lithuanian Jewry.35 While these formal Litvak organizations were clearly very active in the postwar period, they receive only scant mention in the testimonies from Israel and North America discussed in the text to come. Instead, witnesses from these groups tend to stress their integration into the broader fabric of Israeli and American Jewish life—through avenues such as family building, synagogue membership, army service, and professional connections. At the same time that these Litvaks sought out their places in Israel and in North America, a community of Jews about whom less is known remained in Lithuania. By 1946, roughly 20,000 Lithuanian Jews had regathered on Lithuanian soil. This included Litvaks who had survived the war in the unoccupied Soviet Union as well as those who had survived in ghettos, camps, partisan units, or in hiding. The postwar Jewish presence was enlarged at this time by the arrival of 10,000 non-Lithuanian Jews who had moved there from other Soviet territories.36 From all of these different clusters, roughly 6,000 Jews left Lithuania within the first postwar decade, and 24,000 stayed for the long term. Those who rebuilt their lives in this Soviet country lived through various phases of Jewish life: While Stalinist repressions crushed all efforts to establish Jewish welfare and educational institutions in the initial postwar years, restrictions on so-called “Jewish nationalist” activity were relaxed after Stalin’s death in 1953.37 By many accounts, the period from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s was one of lively, informal Jewish life in Lithuania. Regarding these years, witnesses recall Jewish vacation spots, professional connections, social events, and, significantly, continuous use of the Yiddish language.38 When emigration restrictions eased in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, almost half of the 25,000 Jews living in Lithuania at the time emigrated, and even more did so following Lithuanian independence in 1990.39 As of 2001—seven years after the Shoah Foundation began filming testimonies there and three years before

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I arrived—there were approximately 5,000 Jews living in Lithuania, the majority in Vilna, Kovna, and Klaipeda. Along with Jewish Community of Lithuania branches in these cities, there were also functioning synagogues in Kovna and Vilna that received very small but regular attendance at the time.40 However, as with the Israeli and American testimonies, witnesses here do not recall these formal organizations as having been especially central to their postwar Jewish lives. The connection between the pre-Holocaust Litvak legacy and the testimonies of witnesses like Gita Taitz, Liuba Feldman, and Yosef BenYa’akov is not self-evident. Indeed, the stark contrast between the revered status of the Litvaks as a religious and cultural community, and their scattered post-Holocaust condition, presses us toward the question of Jewish transvaluation. Witnesses address this question on tape, not through explicit declarations of stability or change, but through the very fabric of their narration and presentation on screen. As such, the testimonies reveal a range of conduits through which survivors bring their pre-Holocaust history into the present day: as an image, a legal complaint, a political lesson, a sensation, an accent, a personality trait, a list of names, or as a word. The three-way comparison of this book affirms that, indeed, the Holocaust as an event carried the potential to rewrite Jewish norms and values. But this is a potential that acquired meaning only within certain ecologies of postwar and contemporary Jewish life. Changes in language and geographic setting support memories of the Holocaust as catastrophe, while witnesses who remember on a stable landscape challenge this equation. They frame this atrocity as one that killed more lives than ways of life. This book explores how three contemporary ecologies give people the resources to define the transformations they have witnessed, as well as the global endeavor that brought these three ecologies under one archival roof—by way of audio and visual recording.

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1 BAD TESTIMONY: MAKING AND BREAKING THE RULES OF WITNESSING

This chapter has two purposes. One is to ask what Holocaust testimony is, or rather, how it is understood in the specific contexts at hand. The other is to explore the testimony process in terms of a social scene, to illuminate the manner in which witnesses work with others to make meaning out of their memory. Regarding the definition of “testimony,” Shoshana Felman has offered a strong starting point: “To testify—to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement [emphasis in the original].”1 Felman’s focus on testimony as action—a process of doing that connects a person’s body and voice to a notion of truth— does indeed strike a chord with all the testimonies under examination here. Without making some connection between the witness’s person and the enunciation of truth, the initiation, participation, and preservation of these recordings would make little sense. This baseline assumption of a person vowing to veracity in speech is important: It helps differentiate testimony from fiction, as well as from authorless— that is, vowless —assertions regarding the same topic. Rather than defining “testimony” through a deep-truth structure, we could also attempt a definition that starts from the outside. In this case, testimony is, first of all, something that a group of people identifies as such, within a given discourse or historical context. The inclusion of an utterance, text, or conversation in this category depends, then, on its ability to look, feel, and sound like testimony. As a very basic starting 14

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point for the study of recent audio and video Holocaust testimony, we could say that an aging person talking about his or her life and thoughts surrounding the Holocaust in the presence of a recording device, and at least one younger person, is what delineates the category. In fact, the two definitional levels are never distinct, and if we examine the circumstantial, poetic, and choreographic trappings of testimony carefully enough, we can see that they articulate specific and differing notions of truth-telling. History has produced a wide variety of acts that are considered testimony. In Jewish tradition, witnesses testify not only in order to resolve community legal matters but to ensure that a ceremony, such as a wedding or the recital of a prayer, has taken place.2 In certain Christian paradigms of witnessing, the truth sought is a moral or spiritual one and is revealed by a statement of faith, covenant (testamentum), or an act of martyrdom.3 Amid the modern conventions of legal testimony, Lawrence Douglas has pointed out the multiple types of courtroom testimony that have been created in Holocaust-related trials—ranging from more-orthodox evidentiary, descriptive genres to didactic testimony that instructs the public on new justice standards and readings of history.4 As Douglas suggests, testimony can reach well into political discourse, prescribing civic action in the way that one describes past events.5 Going beyond the legal and political modes, the field of journalism also relies on witness testimony. Rhetoric of “witnessing” has become even more abundant since the advent of television media—as in “eyewitness news”—in which the reporter and the camera serve as witnesses alongside those who participate in events.6 Since testifying is not only an act of truth-telling but also of selfpresentation, various notions of autobiography also inform contemporary witness testimony.7 In his classic definition, Philippe Lejeune conceived of autobiography as “Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.’’8 Scholars have subsequently shown how far autobiographical texts can range from Lejuene’s original proposition, challenging in particular his assumed focus on an “individual life” and a story of a “personality.”9 People may locate themselves and their stories in the lives of others, in their bodies, in their environments, as well as through aspects of the past.10

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In setting out to testify, witnesses do not negotiate this polyphony of generic options in a vacuum, but do so with the help of narrative habits learned over the decades, implicit ethical and political goals, expectations about their eventual audiences, and—in the most immediate sense— intervention from the interviewer. In traditional historical treatments of Holocaust testimony, the interviewer is deemed irrelevant or at least uninteresting. His or her role is to glean information from the witness, to enable an accurate reconstruction of events to emerge.11 In the past decades, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and the role of the interviewer has become the object of extensive analysis, heated dispute, and—for the organizations collecting testimonies—institutional investment.12 Dori Laub writes about the “empathic listener,” who helps the survivor restore her subjectivity and acts as a witness to the process of witnessing.13 According to Henry Greenspan, the interviewer is less of an aid in self-restoration than an inevitable filter to the survivor’s true memories, someone who most often forces the witness to speak in “compromised constructions.”14 While all of these scholars are right to frame testimony as dialogue rather than monologue, it seems that this dialogic energy begins much earlier and encompasses a much wider assembly of interlocutors than just the person fielding questions at the moment of recording.15 The interviewer is not a puppet master, but one important member of a larger ecological network. Context mediates what the witness says, not just in the late stage of hearing and responding to questions, but in the witness’s own private process of remembering. Karyn Ball writes that survivors’ memory images are “differentially determined by unconscious patterns of censorship that extend the rules for retaining membership in various groups.”16 Avoiding the condemning term of “censorship,” transcultural psychologist Laurence Kirmayer uses the metaphor of a memory “landscape.” People draw on “implicit models of memory which influence what can be recalled and cited as veridical.”17 In the testimonies examined here, witnesses seem to internalize the expectations and possibilities of truth-telling in their environments and do much work on their own to make their testimonies socially relevant.18 This does not necessarily demand, as Greenspan suggests, a “simplifying” of memory or a sanitization of the suffering. Various contexts wield a range of expectations on the witness, sometimes

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requiring complexity and horror for the witness to be believed, and other times, indeed, pressing for brevity, optimism, or clarity. That is, the individual interviewer is indeed critical in that he or she initiates the testimony process, gives shape to the survivor’s speech, manages the testimonial protocol on a practical level, and—no less crucially— determines when the act has been completed. But all the while, he or she works within a range of allowable possibilities. By this, I do not have in mind merely the formal protocol provided by the particular institution sponsoring the testimony, though these are important and will be discussed briefly in this chapter. Rather than abiding by a top-down, restrictive set of guidelines, interviewers and witnesses negotiate meaning as they go along, based on a fluid cluster of shared expectations— regarding facial gesture, body language, speech, thematic emphases, ethics, knowledge, and textual models—that we can call testimonial genres. “Genre,” in this book’s lexicon, refers to the common “horizon of expectations”19 that enables the witness and interviewer to sit in the same room together for several hours, to understand one another’s words—at least well enough to remain engaged in this challenging project. While important scholars of Holocaust testimony emphasize the individuality of every witness and every interviewer, this approach seems to overlook how autonomy and uniqueness of expression are priorities of specific memory ecologies, but not others. To read all testimonies against this standard impoverishes our understanding of how people create conditions for truthful memory in other various settings. To think about testimonies in terms of genre helps us to both denaturalize and localize our terms of study. Rather than setting out rigid requirements, these genres describe strong possibilities and modes of conversation that grow out of each ecology:20 (1) Testimony in the English-language American context should be personal, in the way that the witness’s voice sounds, and allegorical, in its possible rhetorical outcome; (2) a communal witness voice, an “I” that incorporates political and national institutions, is more prominent among Hebrew-Israeli witnesses, and monumentality, the greatness or dignity of the narrator, is the ideal product of the process; (3) witnesses in the Yiddish-Lithuanian cluster gravitate toward an informal collective perspective and point toward forensic accusation as an ethical result of testifying.

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I base these genre titles on two central points of interest: One is the expected scope of the witness’s perspective, which is conveyed in the first term I offer for each genre (personal, communal, collective). These descriptors address the following questions: Whom is the story supposed to be about? Whose observations, sensations, and memories are considered valuable and truthful, and What kind of a narrative voice might best relay them? Put differently, these terms describe the type of human archive in which survivor memory has been stored and how it is expected to circulate further. The second term in each pair (allegorical, monumental, forensic) refers to the ideal rhetorical outcome of each genre, a normative result that is somehow articulated or placed on the horizon. If there is a “therefore,” to the testimony, what would it be, and how would it relate to the witness’s narrative? Even when not achieved, this potential rhetorical outcome shapes the testimonial conversation. Since the power of these frameworks remains invisible when they are consensually applied, their presence becomes clearest, in fact, when participants run into conflict—in what we might call moments of “bad testimony.” There are overall harmonious or polite testimonies that include palpable moments of tension between the interviewer and interviewee. There are others with an ongoing confrontational edge as well as open declarations of hostility. Most of this book shows moments of cooperation and implicit understanding between participants on both sides of the camera—leading me to emphasize the results of their recording rather than the negotiation process. Yet this first chapter will be different, focusing on moments of acute friction and misunderstanding. While rare, such tension-ridden moments provide an especially instructive starting point, since they force participants to articulate their expectations out loud, putting the paradigms of a given context on trial, so to speak.

Personal Experience and Allegory, English-Language American Testimony Two of the most prominent American testimonial institutions, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and the Shoah Foundation, approached the task of interviewing differently—a topic

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that other scholars have dwelt upon at length: The Fortunoff project started recording testimonies over a decade before the Shoah Foundation, employed a much smaller team of volunteers as interviewers who worked without a set questionnaire, and did not require the witnesses to narrate in chronological order.21 Fortunoff training materials emphasize that the witness should lead the process, and volunteers should consider themselves “empathic listeners” rather than “interviewers.”22 The Shoah Foundation employed an exponentially larger and more professionally diverse team of interviewers, to whom it did offer a written questionnaire as a starting guideline. Among these written guidelines, the Shoah Foundation instructs, “Ask questions in chronological order,” and “Do not skip any wartime period.”23 As another well-known point of difference, Joanne Rudof, head archivist of the Fortunoff project, discourages volunteers from seeking “redemption and happy endings.”24 By contrast, the Shoah Foundation questionnaire suggests ending the recording with “messages for the future”— often an invitation to optimism. Despite these important differences of approach, both of these leading testimonial institutions share at least one core concept in common— an interest in capturing “personal experience.” This phrase, ubiquitous in the training material and public messages from both institutions, deserves to be opened up. From the Fortunoff side, archivist Joanne Rudof explained one distinction between information that is relevant or irrelevant to the testimony as follows: “We did not want to waste the resources of the video tape on explaining things we know. We wanted information you can’t get elsewhere, and that’s personal experience. Whether or not Anialewicz committed suicide—you don’t need to hear that fact from these testimonies. But what was the impact of that on the person?”25 The Fortunoff interviewing philosophy, according to one observer, Irene Kacandes, defines witnesses as “experts only of the self,” and interviewers are therefore likely to intervene when survivors “extensively recount historical fact, in order to lead them back to their own experiences.”26 Conveyed through different means, the Shoah Foundation similarly relied upon an idea of personal experience as a distinct and desirable entity that should be created through testimony. The questionnaire instructs interviewers to “Focus on the interviewee’s personal experience and

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emotions rather than generalizations or hearsay.”27 Elsewhere, the guidelines recommend that the interviewer strike a balance between “historical information” and “personality and individual narrative.”28 While the interviewer is at liberty to determine what that “balance” should entail precisely, the partitions surrounding and protecting personal experience are treated as a given. According to these interviewing instructions, personal experience includes interior reflection (cued as “emotions” in the instructions), a first-person singular voice (“individual”), storytelling (“narration”), and is somehow distinct from externally observable or chronologically expansive facts (“historical information”), impressions gained from other people (“hearsay”), or descriptions that cluster events or people together (“generalization”). Arguably, the truth-value placed on personal experience aligns with audio, and especially audiovisual technologies, which highlight the witness’s individuality in sight and in sound. Media scholar Amit Pinchevski points out a formal connection between live recording and psychoanalysis, since both emphasize a person’s “halts, parapraxes, and stutters—which are rendered at least as meaningful as the intended meanings.”29 While there may be inherent, formal connections between video testimony and psychoanalysis, as Pinchevski suggests, there are also historical connections between Holocaust testimony and various strains of psychotherapy within the American ecology. As early as 1948, an American professor of psychology named David Boder, who had also worked as a clinician, used wire technology to record some of the first audio testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Highlighting his psychotherapeutic framework, he proposed a “traumatic index” through which readers could decipher the stories when he published select transcripts in 1949.30 Around Boder’s time, there was a cohort of social-work professionals who recorded and studied Jewish refugee stories out of a concern for mental health. For example, Carol Meyer, a social-work student at Columbia University, conducted an extensive study on the mental and social well-being of Holocaust survivors in New York.31 Though rigorous, none of these efforts were especially influential in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the time, a concern for Holocaust survivors (as they were not yet called) took the form of independent cultural and philanthropic efforts, which were numerous but sporadic and diffuse both institutionally and geographically.32

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Outside of professional psychiatric and therapeutic milieus, personal experience has also served as a narrative model in more popular venues of American Holocaust discourse, both in its early postwar expressions and within the Era of the Witness. Postwar American cinema, journalism, and literature, such as Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 Hollywood film The Search, LIFE magazine’s photographs of displaced children, or John Hersey’s 1950 best-selling novel The Wall, crafted up-close portraits of individual victims and survivors, a method deemed most effective for bringing early news of atrocity to the American public (fig. 1). As the book jacket of Hersey’s work claims, the novel “probes events in terms of individual responsibility, human values and personal decisions.”33 Similarly, a 1953 episode of the popular television show This is Your Life featured Holocaust survivor Hanna Bloch Kohner, who unveiled each chapter of her Holocaust story through the appearance of a different guest visitor.34 While diverse in many respects, these early narrative venues all presented the destruction of European Jewry through individual self-disclosure, personal memory recovery, and intimate relationships. If the connection between personal experience and Holocaust memory was seeded in early postwar American culture, its prominence grew in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. American psychiatric professionals produced an increasingly large volume of research on Holocaust survivors, such as William Niederland’s studies of “survivor syndrome,” which he published first in 1961 and continued to develop throughout the 1970s.35 Much of this work was based on patient interviews and endorsed talk-therapy as a way to work through the effects of the Holocaust.36 The work of Dori Laub, one of the founders of the Fortunoff Archive at Yale, grew out of this scholarly conversation.37 In some of the testimonies studied here, the attempt to work through traumatic memories serves as an end in and of itself. In others, participants bridge from personal experience narration into allegory. I invoke the term in the way that literary critic Angus Fletcher does: “Allegories are based on parallels between two levels of being that correspond to each other, the one supposed by the reader [listener], the other literally presented in the fable [testimony].”38 In this context, the first “level of being” comprises the events of the Nazi era in Lithuania. The second level, the corresponding context of meaning or object of comparison,

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Fig. 1. Modeling trauma in American media: On December 27, 1948, LIFE magazine featured this photograph of a young war refugee, Tereska, with the explanation, “Children’s wounds are not all outward. Those made in the mind by years of sorrow will take years to heal.” Photograph by David Seymour-Chim.

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may include other historical sites of violence, present-day domestic life, or a contemporary outlook on tolerance and civility more generally. While it is always possible to draw parallels from Holocaust testimony, participants in the American ecology leave extra room for this rhetorical outcome.39 Regarding allegory, we can also cite prominent historic precedents. For example, Hasia Diner writes about how, in the late 1940s and 1950s, “American Jews described, explained, and twinned their involvement with civil rights in reference to the European tragedy.”40 To twin a present-day concern with the Holocaust, to connect two events based on conceptual rather than causal grounds, is to activate the two levels of meaning that comprise allegory. In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter presented the bill proposing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the Congress, his comments, which now appear on the building’s outer wall, took on a similarly allegorical shape: “Out of our memory . . . of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent.” The debates around the virtues of such allegorical rhetoric do not interest me here.41 Rather, I ask how an allegorical truth is enabled through the fabric of personal experience narration, and how allegory supports a specific notion of Jewish transvaluation. In many cases, interviewers and witnesses in the English-language American ecology negotiate the range of personal-allegorical options available fairly easily— cooperatively deciding what “personal” narration entails and what to do with it. Consider, for instance, the amicable way in which Ellen Zitkin and her Shoah Foundation interviewer negotiate the genre below. As Ellen describes her family’s transfer to the Kovna ghetto, the interviewer asks: i n t : What was your feeling when you left Kaunas to go to Slobodke? e l l e n : I guess very sad because our whole life was upside down.42 When the interviewer inquires about Ellen’s “feeling,” Ellen understands and complies. Then the interviewer veers away from personal experience slightly:

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i n t : Do you have any idea how many people were in the ghetto? e l l e n : No, there’s a book on the subject. My brother was trying to give me the book, and I said, “Oh, never mind” [laughs]. I don’t want it. i n t : What was it like in the ghetto? e l l e n : Well, my father worked for this Jewish committee. You know, the Germans wanted things to look good. And my mother was going out every day working. When questioned about numbers, Ellen signals that the interviewer has strayed too far from the personal. Referring her to a history book, Ellen marks the topic as distinct from her individual memory and inappropriate for the conversation. The interviewer accepts Ellen’s distinction and returns to a more experiential line of discussion. The unmistakably personal question “What was it like?” inspires Ellen to depict daily life from within her family—referencing German political force as it pertains to her memories of home life. In this instance, it is the witness who safeguards the centrality of personal experience. The interviewer can also take such measures. For example, Charles Anolik from Kovna has the following exchange about the outbreak of war with his Shoah Foundation interviewer: i n t : Tell me about the days the Germans came in. c h a r l e s : Okay, um. June. Suddenly our airport got bombarded. They were dropping bombs— i n t : [interrupting] How old were you then? c h a r l e s : I was already, I think twenty. I was already grown up. I was in the military. But because of the Russians they let us go, so I was at home.43 Here, it is the interviewer who boldly cuts Charles off midsentence when he begins to narrate in a distanced, third-person voice, directing the witness back toward a traditional autobiographical detail (think Lejeune). Charles, who otherwise testifies in a very personal idiom, accepts the hint and returns immediately to the specifics of his individual situation that day. In these congenial exchanges, the distinctions between the “personal” and the “external” or between “experience” and “knowledge” emerge so

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easily, they appear almost natural, an instinctive way to make and recognize testimonial vows. Whatever gaps between witness, interviewer, and institutional instructions do arise, they are resolved quickly. Perhaps this should not surprise us: Those who designed the Fortunoff Archive and Shoah Foundation procedures also lived, worked, and conversed in an American ecology and thus shared conceptual resources with witnesses like Ellen and Charles. Even with this common ground, however, there are instances in which the interviewer and witness in this environment do not agree easily on how to make personal experience, or what to do with it. Examining two such cases at length adds contours to this testimonial genre and reveals more of the stakes behind it. Mira B. and Esther A.: Trouble Personalizing Mira B., born in Vilna sometime in the 1920s (she refuses to give her exact birth date), was interviewed in English as part of the Fortunoff project in Connecticut in 1984 —just five years after this first video project began and a decade before the Shoah Foundation would reach its peak activity.44 Part of the friction that arises in her testimony seems related to this early date, when participants knew less of what to expect from the testimonial process and before the Fortunoff project had developed a system of self-critique.45 A clinical psychologist, Sergio R., conducts the interview along with psychoanalyst, Arnold W. At the start of the interview, Mira describes prewar life in Vilna, her parents’ teaching profession, and the members of her household. After about fifteen minutes dedicated to prewar life, one interviewer asks, in a soft, cautious tone, “Do you remember what came to be known as the Holocaust for you and your family?” His interjection characterizes the Holocaust as a distinct theme, both chronologically and qualitatively. To move on to the Holocaust years is to inaugurate a new kind of topic, one that requires a vocal as well as terminological shift. In stepping into this new conversational realm, he also reasserts the importance of a personal point of view—asking Mira, “Do you remember . . . for you and your family.” At first, Mira seems confident she understands his question and answers, “I sure do. I sure do.” But what she offers up as initial memories of the Holocaust defies the interviewers’ expectation on several levels. First of all, Mira begins to recall the Soviet invasion of Vilna in 1939, rather

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than the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Mira’s turn to this earlier event shows a kind of fluidity in periodization, contradicting the interviewers’ signal to move into a distinctly bound and elevated realm of Holocaust time. But what seems to trouble the interviewers more than Mira’s blurring of chronological boundaries is the manner in which she does not distinguish between herself and a larger historical narrative at this moment. She begins to describe the transfer of Vilna from Polish to Lithuanian rule in September 1939, and the city’s transfer to Soviet rule in the summer of 1940: “Well, the Soviets plundered the city. During one month, the city was emptied of everything. Everything.” One interviewer interjects, “What was it like for you?” But, Mira continues in the register of political power play: “They kept saying that they made a pact. I don’t know if you know or you don’t know. Vilna was the capital city of Lithuania until 1917 when the Polish grabbed it.” Mira’s voice does not sound defiant in the least, but simply explanatory: This broader political narrative about Vilna does seem, in Mira’s mind, to answer the question about what it was like for her. When Mira then continues to narrate the political power struggle over Vilna, the interviewers stage a major intervention. Rather than simply repeating the question “What was it like for you?”—this time they model how she might answer it: m i r a : Of course, little Lithuania was a small country with a total population of three million. Couldn’t say no to Big Brother, so they agreed. We thought we would be free. i n t : Mrs., Mrs., let me just interrupt you for one second. m i r a : [laughs] Please do, because I can get carried away. i n t : I’m very taken by how you described, even before the invasion, some of the antisemitic things that were going on in Lithuania. And also how you were able to surround yourself with the Zionist movement and also within a family that very much prized intellectual values. I get the sense that that’s very important to you. Do you have any feelings about what it was like even before the blitzkrieg to grow up in a family with such strong values, scholarship, integrity, and to grow up poor and to grow up persecuted. Were you mad?

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As the interviewer speaks, Mira sits quietly with her head cocked to the side, puzzled, perhaps inquisitive. Finally she answers, chuckling, “Was I mad? I’m not sure if ‘mad’ is the right description.” Even after the interviewers’ explicit narrative modeling, Mira expands on her political drama, asserting that Poland had always been a temporary home and that, even under the new circumstances, they preferred “the Lithuanians over the Soviets.” Seeming to sense some kind of dissatisfaction in the room, Mira stops herself: m i r a : If you want some funny stories [laughs], I can tell you about it, if you have the time. i n t : I think that the history parts themselves are things that are fairly well documentable or known. What we don’t know is your experience, and that is what we’d like to try to discuss here. [. . .] m i r a : I’ll try to give you just that. What follows in Mira’s testimony are several canonical jokes about Soviet soldiers, found almost verbatim in other testimonies as well.46 It is not that Mira actively rejects “personal experience” in favor of history. Rather, at this point in her testimony at least, she does not distinguish between the two types of knowledge or memory. Against Mira’s resistance, the interviewers are pressured to repeatedly explain and exemplify how to bear witness through personal experience. They guide her toward specific topoi, including family genesis, visual imagery, dialogue reconstruction, and small-scale emotional reflection. Their questions include “Was there a lot of fear?” and “Do you remember what that felt like when you had that behind you?” Such queries train the witness to remember from the inside looking out and infuse the testimony with therapeutic potential, locating wounds and events of psychic import. What emerges is a truth ideal that distinguishes between the self and others through multiple avenues— cognitive, sensual, as well as emotional. “What were you doing at the moment?” is asked repeatedly. “Doing” is something she must have achieved on her own. This focus on physical autonomy also coincides with a certain way of learning about events, as the interviewers request at several points, “How did you know about this?” That which Mira did not see, feel, or hear from her own

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body has become less relevant or truthful—perhaps falling under the outside categories of “hearsay” or “history.” Mira’s conversation partners guide her toward a narrative that is historically and geographically portable. i n t : So, do you remember when they came to take your brother? m i r a : Of course. i n t : What was that like? Were there a lot of good-byes or was it like, “I’ll see you next week”? m i r a : I don’t think I can answer it. There was no way to say a lot of good-byes. My father was in the room. They came in— i n t : Did they knock on the door? m i r a : I don’t remember. i n t : This was in the apartment. They walked up six flights of stairs? m i r a : Yes. They said, “The young man goes with us.’’ i n t : “The young man goes with us.” m i r a : [. . .] I said, “Listen, Mula, we don’t know what they’re going to do. Take my dress, go into the bathroom, put it on, and come home with me.” i n t : You said this to him? m i r a : You see, I could talk to him. I talked to him in Hebrew. Pacing is an important issue in this exchange. The interviewers ask Mira to decelerate, creating scenes rather than summaries.47 Detail selection is also at stake. The particulars that the interviewers emphasize are those that widen the gates of imaginative entry. One could picture six flights of stairs just as easily in contemporary Connecticut as in Vilna, 1941. We may label these types of valued details “contingent”: This includes information or statements that do not further a rhetorical plan, or are not forensic or consequential. In Aristotelian terms, forensic rhetoric is that which attacks or defends someone, and consequential (or political) rhetoric is that which endorses a plan of action.48 To the extent that contingent detail supports neither of these rhetorical goals, so argues critic Carole Dornier, it has an important impact on testimony: “A poetic of contingent and meaningless detail, which is actually a sign of the experience, tries not to convince but to pass down. Distanced from social and political context requiring rhetorical involvement, it gives the testimony a

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universal impact.”49 The connection between contingent detail, as a “sign of the experience,” and a pathway to universality seems very apt in Mira’s testimony. The details that the interviewers endorse seem to support only Mira’s personal sensory perception of the moment, without accusation or planning involved. Here we can see the advantages of a personal experience genre in a testimonial environment so distant from the geographic, political, linguistic, and cultural context in which the event took place. The best way to cut across the contextual divide, bringing that time and place into this one, is to focus on the witness’s person—which could touch and feel anywhere. Though at first Mira’s narration frustrates the interviewers’ search for experiential truth, she gradually learns their expectations and finds a way to participate in the genre. Mira’s initial attempt to remember personal experience includes other people’s perceptions and actions—as when she shared jokes about Soviet soldiers and repeatedly returned to the story of Lithuania against “Big Brother.” But as the interview progresses, tense exchanges become fewer and fewer. Mira inserts cheeky comments about the interviewers, even as she moves toward their framework: “As a psychologist, you might find this interesting”; and later, “And again a little story, I can tell you. Otherwise ask me your questions.” Mira draws attention to her efforts to adjust to the genre, but adjusts nonetheless. Eventually, she and the interviewer are able to create a recording of approximately two hours in length, with many fluid, cooperative segments.50 While the footage makes plain that the interviewers strongly guide the witness in testifying, Mira’s ability to adapt relatively quickly and amicably suggests that the narrative genre of personal experience was already somewhere in her repertoire of possibilities. Mira’s case helps us to think about a continuum of identification and fluency with testimonial genres: She, for instance, is more resistant to personal-experiential narration than other witnesses in this ecology. But at the same time, she can recognize its practical guidelines and agrees to incorporate them eventually. While interviewers seem capable of establishing guidelines, dramatizing for the witness “what we usually do when recording”—their demands can only be met if they make sense to the witness on some level. The testimony of Esther Ancoli, recorded by the Shoah Foundation in New York City in 1998, gives further insight into personal experience as a testimonial ideal, and shows how its aesthetic and thematic emphases

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can invite comparison and allegory.51 Testifying almost twenty years after Mira and in the context of a much larger project, one can detect a greater sense of familiarity with the video testimony process on both sides of the camera. Esther’s interviewer, Florence S., sounds much less like a psychotherapeutic professional, though her profession is not listed. Recognizing these differences of institutional praxis and timing, there are nonetheless shared conceptual currents running through both cases—in relation to personal experience especially. Interestingly, the allegorical possibilities that Mira and her interviewers decline become a point of consensus at the conclusion to Esther’s interview. Esther, born in 1924 in the northeastern town of Radvilishik (Radviliškis), starts her testimony in a much more personal key than does Mira. She independently self-reflects about her childhood, in a language accessible to the contemporary listener, saying, for example, “Socially, I was a young girl, I had boyfriends.” Esther introduces the Soviet invasion of Lithuania as the event that shattered her father’s dream of sending her to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, framing a national event through the lens of individual aspiration and close family relations. This stands in contrast to Mira’s attempt to tell of Lithuanian-Soviet relations as an exchange between nation-actors. Though Esther appears receptive to and proficient in the genre of personal narrative, the interviewer repeatedly asks for more contingent detail, sense-memory, and interior exploration: “Could you describe that house for me?” “Did you have your own room?” “What did your room look like?” “Did you have mezuzas on your door?” “What kind of clothes did you wear?” “What did you see when you looked out the window?” “What was it like growing up with your cousin?” Esther spends over twenty minutes responding to this cluster of questions, then attempts to advance her narrative chronologically. Friction arises when the interviewer requests she slow down: e s t h e r : [. . . ] Quite a few of my friends from high school survived. They are in Israel and we keep very close touch. i n t : I want to get more of a flavor for what life was like. Did you have a telephone? e s t h e r : We did. It was very rare. The number was five. That should tell you.

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There were quite a few very poor people. My father was involved in that too. i n t : Did you have any special toys? e s t h e r : I don’t remember having any special toys. Probably didn’t. [. . .] I was good in school, but the war broke out. The day I finished high school—[interrupted]. i n t : Let’s spend a little bit more time. Do you remember your first day of school? e s t h e r : No. Can I say something off camera? i n t : Well, what did you want to say? e s t h e r : My memory is very bad because I’m in chemotherapy. So if you question me so much about memory, I have memory lapses. Shoah Foundation protocol prohibits interviewers from turning the camera off in order to avoid accusations that the testimonies were submitted to Hollywood-style editing.52 Following the rules, the interviewer keeps the camera on, and we are privy to this rather uncomfortable exchange. Importantly, Esther phrases her objection in terms of a personal physiological memory limitation, in a sense turning the interviewers’ own framework against her. Speaking in the interviewer’s language, focusing on the person inside her body—who experiences personal forgetting as well as personal memory—Esther convinces Florence to withdraw her request for the time being. The details that Florence requests are indeed contingent, yet they are far from random. Her interests encircle two thematic clusters: (1) childhood development, and (2) camp experience. Aside from their psychotherapeutic associations, childhood memories seem valuable in this setting thanks to their presumed quality of accessibility. Tellingly, the story of Anne Frank has emerged as a highly relatable, accessible entryway into Holocaust narration.53 Indeed, Florence pursues an entryway into Esther’s childhood, asking about toys and separate bedrooms, details familiar to a contemporary American audience. Florence even articulates her questions as a request for inclusion: “I want to go back even more to your young childhood”; “I want to get a flavor for what life was like”; and “You began to tell me what Passover was like.” Sometimes she phrases her request through the metaphor of a mutual journey, saying, “Let’s go

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back.” Beyond a simple, polite idiom, these questions frame the childhood segment as a conduit of understanding between two individuals with dissimilar pasts. As a second thematic focus, the interviewer also becomes increasingly attentive to questions about the camp experience. The special status of camp experience becomes apparent when the participants are forced to negotiate what this heading should include. Esther describes how, at the outbreak of war, her family attempted to flee to Russia but had to return home after being caught. Back in Radvilishik, Esther tells, her family and all the surviving Jews were imprisoned in a cluster of former army barracks, which Esther refers to as a “camp.”54 At the sound of this phrase, the interviewer’s ears seem to perk up and she makes a bold request for inclusion: i n t : Take me there. If you were holding my hand, what would I see? e s t h e r : A drab house. People sleeping on military little beds. Florence asks her questions like, “Did you see anybody being abused?” “Was there praying going on?” “What went through your mind?” The interviewer seems to be looking for a sense of emotional centrality, a weight associated with camp narration that Esther does not include at this point. As the two go back and forth, the interviewer refers to the Radvilishik site as a “ghetto” and then later as just “this.” Thus, the Radvilishik barracks lose “camp” status over the course of their conversation. The interviewer’s decision about nomenclature seems based on narrative and poetic judgment: Esther does not speak of the Radvilishik imprisonment in the way that one ought to remember a camp, and so the heading gets dropped.55 While Esther and Florence articulate different expectations regarding camp experiences, the rest of the testimony unfolds much more smoothly. Esther recounts how she later escaped from a different local camp, called Linkaicˇiai. Volunteering sensory images with no prompting, Esther tells: I was barefooted and I started to run. I had a little dress on. I was in a trance and I started to run from house to house. And each house that I knocked on knew my family. And they all slammed

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the door in my face. I was running like that for twenty-five kilometers from house to house till I came to this family that knew my family too. [. . .] I knocked on her door and she took one look at me. She said, “You’re staying here.” And I blacked out. Having invited the listener into her sensory world, Esther describes the gentile Lithuanian woman who sheltered her and her brother for the last months of the war. She depicts this woman, Polina Seskavicˇiene, as a devout Catholic, who prayed for the safety of Esther and her brother, Lusik, beseeching, “Please, Maria, save the children for you were once Jewish yourself.” Twice Esther quotes Polina saying, “What will happen to my children will happen to you. You’re both staying here.” Esther ponders the woman’s bravery with amazement, saying, “She risked the life of her own children to save us. I wonder if I would be able to do that.” In describing her encounter with Polina, Esther opens up a pathway between experiential detail and allegory. She creates a chain of comparisons: Polina asks Saint Mary to compare herself to the Jewish children; Esther compares herself to Polina, and the listener is thus invited to compare herself both to Esther, the victim, or Polina, the righteous gentile. This ever-widening circle of identification makes way for a potential moral message, one that Esther explicates at the end of her testimony when asked what she learned from the Holocaust: “I hate wars. I don’t want to see wars. I don’t want people to hate each other because of color or religion. . . . I think I instilled this in my children.” This statement sounds well-earned, justified in the context of her testimony. Esther has already integrated the possibility of such allegorical meaning into the fabric of her narrative, especially at its climax. In looking at these two cases in which personal experience requires negotiation, we see that it is not a neutral framework, characterized only by its openness or tolerance for individual differences, but one with weighty conceptual contours, including: (1) the distinction between the self and others and between the person and her nonsensory environment; (2) an interest in designating emotional titles to events; (3) a preference for scene narration and the inclusion of contingent details or, at least, details that do not contribute to arguments of guilt or causation; (4) focus on certain themes that appear especially important for personal development, namely

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childhood and concentration-camp experience; and (5) a strengthened possibility of allegory, which some witnesses embrace. Since personal experience is transferable to the listener today, then the lessons learned and the hardships suffered can more readily teach people about how to live their lives in the present-day world.

Community and Monument, Hebrew-Israeli Testimony By the time the American-based video testimony projects began interviewing witnesses in Israel, there was already a history of testifying to the Holocaust there. The public speeches of activists and partisans, pre-1948 immigrants like Zivia Lubetkin (fig. 2) and Itshak Tsukerman,

Fig. 2. Early Israeli testimony: survivor and Warsaw underground activist Zivia Lubetkin, speaking before leaders of HaKibbutz HaMeuhad Movement in Kibbutz Yagur, Palestine, 1946.

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offered the earliest models of public testimony in this setting.56 Not long afterward, Yad Vashem, established through a governmental ordinance passed in 1953, began recording written survivor testimony. There were also several early oral-history projects, in which specific groups of survivors were interviewed, such as Dov Levin’s interviews with partisans and political activists, which he began collecting in 1957 and continued thereafter through the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.57 These interviews were of a generally empirical orientation, with special focus on acts of heroism and resistance. But, as has been pointed out, Israeli Holocaust discourse of the 1950s was as much about weeding out disreputable survivors as it was about praising the heroic ones. The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law brought out public testimony for the purpose of evaluating the wartime deeds of other Jews—as in the well-known Kastner trial of 1955.58 Revering heroes and condemning traitors, Israeli testimony of this period was about Jewish communal self-evaluation. The Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961–1962 introduced a new model of testimony, allowing “average victims” to tell their stories on the public stage, with no direct bearing on heroism or collaboration. Of the many academic inquiries into the lasting significance of this trial,59 Shoshana Felman’s interpretation most resonates with the testimonies under examination here. She asserts that the trial monumentalized survivor testimony, making “great men” out of the dead as well as the victimized survivors. Indeed, she seems right to invoke Nietzsche’s idea of monumental history—“‘a contemplation of the past’ that will provide an impulse for a future action”—and shows the greatness of historical actors.60 The Eichmann testimonies did not supplant monumental narratives, but showed how victims could also become great actors by participating in the testimony process. In the Eichmann trial, witnesses contributed their stories to a public truth-telling project, in a way that obviated the distinction between the personal and the national. Following the Six-Day War of 1967 and perhaps even more so after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Holocaust narrative served as a stage—for both the left and the right— on which to debate the political path of Israel. The diverse phases and inflections of Holocaust memory-work in Israel— ceremony, condemnation, debate,

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self-justification, and infighting—shared an idea of personal testimony for the public good, of communal investment in the story of each witness.61 Thus, bringing American-based testimonial projects to Israel, first in the early 1980s and then in the mid-1990s, constituted a conceptual encounter between two different paradigms of witnessing, which had previously come into contact but had nonetheless developed differently. As North American projects strengthened their emphases on personal experience and allegory, building them into the video format and organizational practice, Israelis had continually updated their use of testimony for shared public history and politics. Both the Fortunoff video project and the Shoah Foundation recorded testimony in Israel with local Israeli interviewers in Hebrew. The Fortunoff leadership first asked Yad Vashem to collaborate with them on video testimonies in 1979, but the Israeli organization expressed that it was not interested in video testimony at the time. Instead, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (Beit Hatfutsot)62 agreed to the partnership with Fortunoff and began a “satellite project” in 1983 under the direction of the documentary filmmaker and museum professional Nathan Beyrak.63 Dori Laub and other members of the Fortunoff team traveled to Israel to train interviewers for the project. As Beyrak recalls this exchange, the Israeli- and American-based partners encountered differences of priority from the start: “Laub had a very therapeutic approach to testimony and looked at witnesses as patients. One needs to be very sensitive and careful about what you ask.”64 Adapting the institutional instructions he was given, Beyrak recalls training interviewers to see witnesses as “healthy, functioning people,” who were not in need of the interviewers’ emotional protection. This procedural intervention did not go unnoticed by Fortunoff leadership. Transcripts of interviews conducted under Beyrak’s supervision contain critical comments in the margins, written by the Yale-based leadership,65 confirming the differences of approach to interviewer training that Beyrak recalls. The Shoah Foundation exported its project to Israel just over a decade later and in a much more centralized manner. The interviewers were given copies of the list of the same “Topical Questions” as interviewers in the United States, translated literally into Hebrew. Interviewers were instructed to complete the “Pre-Interview Questionnaire,” which also consisted of the same questions as elsewhere. Despite the standardized

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training texts, international growth always involved an element of local adaptation. The Shoah Foundation trained interviewers through multinational meetings, the first of which was held in Amsterdam in 1995. But gradually the Shoah Foundation shifted its emphasis toward localized training sessions in each country of operation. This seems to have raised the likelihood of unwritten protocol adjustments at each site. With regard to Israel, evidence of such local adaptation appears not in the written Hebrew Shoah Foundation questionnaire materials but in the testimonies themselves. Hebrew-speaking Israeli interviewers did not quite follow the American authored questions they were given, but took the testimonies in directions they saw relevant to the person in front of them and the context around them. Often, they seemed to weave questions about emotional memory into rituals of public record–making, of monumentalizing the witness’s voice. Independent of both American testimonial organizations, Yad Vashem began recording video testimony in 1989 in a studio on the Yad Vashem campus. By 1994, they had recorded 650 interviews.66 The recording project remains active to the present day, with a record search from 2015 revealing 7,286 completed recordings at that time. That is, the majority of the Yad Vashem video testimonies were recorded after the peak activity of the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Shoah Foundation. The organizers of this project seem to have been broadly aware of the testimonial norms established by the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation. Institutionally, however, the testimonies were conducted independently without direct conversation, training, or questionnaires from abroad. These testimonies, perhaps as a result, tend to be less generically hybrid, less conversant with the idea of “personal Holocaust experience” and more attuned to Hebrew-Israeli discourse in particular. I call the testimonial genre that emerges from the Hebrew-Israeli ecology communal-monumental. The difference between this genre and the one outlined in the American corpus is not simply a matter of what the interviewer asks or what the witness says in response; the very mode of witness-interviewer interaction appears distinct. The interviewer can have a much stronger presence in these Hebrew-Israeli interviews— speaking more frequently, offering comments, corrections, reactions, interpretations, and follow-up questions. The interviewer presents herself

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almost as the witness’s equal, a guide who has been entrusted to take the survivor through an important rite.67 The assertive interviewing method—which can look like bullying if considered reductively— could also be viewed as a sign of shared investment. With regard to communication in Israel in general, anthropologist Tamar Katriel writes about dugri speech, or “straight talk,” a practice of challenging people of somewhat greater authority. Observing Israeli conversation at the same time as these testimonies were recorded, Katriel asserts that the practice dramatizes communitas, collective belonging and equality in this setting.68 A similar argument seems appropriate with regard to the interjections of the Israeli Holocaust testimony interviewer. Her vocal participation in the filmed testimony seems to be a sign of shared ownership over the history being conveyed. The witness is not free to err in testifying, not even for the sake of individual authenticity, since this material is for the benefit of younger generations, not just for himor herself.69 In contrast to the American setting, wherein personal sincerity and spontaneity show that the witness is truthful, here truthfulness is based on collective decisions about knowledge. Thus, an errant witness could inadvertently exclude himself from the collective if not guided properly through the testimony process. In many cases, the participants negotiate these various communal and monumental concerns well—as in the testimony of Hana Golani, who is interviewed by Idit A., from the Shoah Foundation.70 Hana was born in Tavrig (Taurage˙) in 1930 and interviewed in Haifa in 1998. Though Hana only reveals toward the end of the interview that she has lived in Israel since the early date of 1947, she communicates this veteran status from the moment she opens her mouth, through her speech and demeanor. Facing Hana’s confident oratorical style, the interviewer interrupts her frequently, as when Hana is in the midst of recounting that she was given soap made of Jewish flesh in Stutthof. The interviewer challenges: “There are differences of opinion on this matter, but we won’t discuss it at the moment.” Idit cites recent research to support her objection, but Hana insists that the research actually confirms her understanding of the events. The two reach no agreement on the subject but simply move on. The dispute relates to the ownership of knowledge; the interviewer not only

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conveys that the witness’s fallibility should be shown on camera, but that this factual mistake is significant in and of itself. The testimony is not an exploration of private memory, but a contribution to the communal account, one that has been researched and recorded by others as well. Though disagreeing about the specific fact in question, the witness and interviewer agree about the way that knowledge becomes valid through communal cross-checking; “personal experience” is not an epistemological or aesthetic ideal for either one. In all such run-ins, the two participants prove an equal match for one another. Cila Kogan and Luba Kaplanski: Tensions with Greatness There are, however, Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies in which this type of friendly sparring goes awry. In the testimony of Cila Kogan, the witness does not interpret the interviewer’s assertive tactics as an invitation toward community belonging, and repeatedly declines opportunities to monumentalize her story. Issues of language and timing appear central here. Cila testified in Hebrew in 2007 with Yad Vashem, the later date suggesting, perhaps, that she had long remained at a distance from formal Holocaust commemoration activities.71 Cila was born in Shavl (Sˇiauliai) in 1925 and survived the Shavl ghetto and Stutthof concentration camp. After the war, she moved back to Lithuania, then moved to Israel in 1971. Cila speaks and understands Hebrew fluently, but her speech is marked with frequent grammatical mistakes, a strong accent, and a limited vocabulary. Her difficulty with the mechanics of the language becomes indistinguishable from difficulties with conceptual norms and genre. By contrast, her interviewer, Sigal H., appears very much at home with this discourse, invested in both “getting the story right” and in guiding the witness through a kind of initiation rite, creating a community member of high standing.72 In selecting Hebrew as the language of testimony, Cila enters into an ecology of testimony in which she is disadvantaged.73 In a manner not unlike testimonies from the American corpus, the interviewer asks extensive questions about Cila’s childhood. But these questions do not contribute to an understanding of personality development and do not relate to bodily sensation or emotional memory. Rather, Sigal poses questions about Jewish organizations in prewar Shavl—youth

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movements, political parties, and synagogues. Consider, for example, the following exchange regarding Cila’s early years: c i l a : I went to a Talmud Torah school. I moved from preschool to the Talmud Torah. Rokhele went there, too. We were good friends. i n t : And you continued school there? c i l a : Yes. i n t : And that went up through all the ages? c i l a : Yes, but for the gymnasium; it cost a lot of money. i n t : So at the age of the gymnasium you stopped studying. But up until then you received a Jewish education [hinukh yehudi]? c i l a : Yes. While the witness offers ambivalent, winding answers, the interviewer paraphrases, translating these responses into clear, standardized nomenclature. From Cila’s comments about her schooling, the interviewer draws the conclusion, “received Jewish education.” There is a parallel between form and content in these questions. Not only does the interviewer pursue topics related to organizational life, she conducts the interview itself in an institutional key. Even domestic religious practice can be funneled into clear-cut formal categories, fit for institutional records: i n t : Could you describe for us please how your house was run regarding Jewish matters? c i l a : We weren’t a lot religious. But, Dad, yes, kept Shabbat. We weren’t a lot religious [interruption]— i n t : Shabbat was kept in your home? c i l a : Yes. The interviewer’s response serves as a kind of verbal index, placing Cila’s deliberations into the heading, “Shabbat was kept.” The interviewer’s translation into communally legible categories continues throughout the testimony, often enacted in the form of yes or no questions. For example, she asks, “There was an ‘organized community’ [kehila me’urgenet] in Shavl, right?” and “So, there was ‘mutual assistance’ [‘ezra hadadit]?” The contemporary, standardized nomenclature assures not only that any Hebrew speaker will understand the recording

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but also that likenesses can be pointed out between Cila’s experiences and those of other Jewish survivors. The uniqueness of Cila’s personal story, which might be sought out and foregrounded in an American interview, is sacrificed for the sake of inviting her into the group, assuring her that her experiences will find a place in a larger, communally shared archive. Much of the time, Cila accepts the categories that the interviewer proposes without dispute, answering simply yes or no. At one point, however, a disagreement arises over such headings: i n t : Did you have a goy shel shabat [a non-Jew to help on the Sabbath]? c i l a : No! How? A goy at home? i n t : Well, then how did you manage to heat your home? c i l a : We didn’t heat the house. We put our tshulnt [stew] at the baker’s. There a goya heated it up for everyone. i n t : So, yes, then, you did have a goya shel shabat [emphasis in voice]. c i l a : But just not in our house. It was at the bakery. This dispute, in which both participants raise their voices, does not involve any differences of facts, events, or causes. Rather, they become heated over how to title a past practice. It is important to note from this exchange that the interviewer shows no embarrassment or contrition in arguing with Cila’s terms and claiming authoritative knowledge about the witness’s life. Unapologetic, the interviewer seems to activate a conversational genre, a bank of past experiences, in which this clarification would not be rude or a waste of recording time: Sigal’s confident demeanor implies a concern both for the witness, since her social inclusion is at stake, and for the testimony, since its value as a source depends on its comprehensibility to the group. Cila, however, does not seem to interpret Sigal’s intervention in this light. The witness begins to increasingly resist the titles she is offered as the interview progresses. Their tension peaks when addressing the issue of local Lithuanian collaboration in the summer and early fall of 1941, a theme especially loaded for survivors who stayed in Lithuania after the war as long as Cila did. Cila relates that she hid with an elderly couple in the first week of the war.

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c i l a : [. . .] All of the sudden [while in hiding] the Lithuanian partisans came looking for young people. [. . .] They found me in the bed and said to me in Lithuanian, “Get up! Get up!” They went like this to me [motions grabbing her hair]. I had beautiful hair. How do you say it? i n t : They burnt your hair? Who are they? The Lithuanians? c i l a : The Lithuanians, one Lithuanian that I knew before the war. He had a trial. . . . But everything was with money. i n t : You said earlier “Lithuanian partisans”? c i l a : They were partisans. They called themselves partisans. i n t : Okay. [sigh] That’s not the partisans. The partisans were the ones that fought against the Germans. c i l a : They called themselves partisans! Those that went with the Germans. i n t : Okay. [sigh] Here, the discrepancy in nomenclature becomes particularly meaningful for both participants. For Cila, calling these Lithuanian collaborators “partisans,” connects them to a local dynamic of ethnic conflict that extended into postwar years. She incorporates this context explicitly when she recalls her previous acquaintance with the perpetrator, as well as the postwar trial. The term “partisans” is thus bound to the idea that this enemy is a known agent, someone with whom she has also shared a social space after the war. On the other side of the dispute, the interviewer is guarding a weighty, almost sacred category in popular Israeli Holocaust terminology. A “partisan” is an active resistor to the Nazis, whose story serves as a first-order model of Jewish strength and autonomy.74 A misuse of this term could not only skew the archival record, but also contaminate a sacred category. As Shoshana Felman asserts, any witness in this setting can gesture toward agency and political potential in such a way that makes greatness out of her suffering. Toward this end, the interviewer seems adamant on guiding Cila toward topoi with monumental potential. For instance, Sigal frequently asks Cila about organized Jewish communal activity, Zionist activity in particular: “Do you remember any activities of Zionist movements in Shavl?” Stating the existence of these activities as a given, the in-

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terviewer merely requests that Cila situate herself in some relation toward them. Cila does just that—affirming that she was involved with Beitar and even became acquainted with several well-known figures in the movement. But the conversation goes less smoothly when discussing political activity during the war: i n t : When you were situated in the ghetto, we know that there was a resistance movement that formed. Did you know about it? c i l a : [shaking her head, frowning] No. i n t : What about Beitar activities? c i l a : Who knew? Who knew anything? I went to work there. I didn’t know anything. What did we think about in the ghetto? About how to stay living, how to stay alive [Eikh lehisha’er lehiot (sic), eikh lehisha’er bahaim]. . . . i n t : Were there cultural activities? c i l a : No. No. Where? Where? We were afraid. Changing the topic from political agency to confusion and fear, Cila thwarts the monumentalization process. Not only does she dash hopes of Jewish agency and self-governance under hardship, but she also deflates her own position, rejecting the veneration offered her by these ritualized questions. The interviewer’s effort to guide Cila toward monumental status involves more than just politics proper. She offers personal and emotional headings that could help her remember having had a certain agentive mood, even under oppression. Regarding the early ghetto period, for example, Sigal asks, “Did you try to get organized?” She is asking the witness not only about actions that came to fruition, but about intentions, about maintaining the strength of will to intend something for oneself. The search for evidence of agency spreads into topics completely unrelated to political activity. For instance, Sigal asks Cila, “How did you cope [hitmodadet] with the cold?” The question invites Cila to speak of physical hardship but frames the topic as a willful search for solutions, going to battle with suffering. Similarly, questioned about synagogue attendance in the ghetto, Cila states that they did not attend synagogue because, “Jews were afraid.” Sigal follows up: “What were they afraid of ? Try to explain to me what was happening on the street.” From a

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monumentalizing perspective, if Jews were impeded from acting based on fear, there must be concrete, discernable reasons for this impediment. To enter the community of great victims, Cila must at least be able to dissect her passivity in the past. But Cila offers no explanation of her fear. Even when narrating the moment in which she immigrated to Israel, often a last-minute opportunity to show a heroic reversal and bring one’s life story in line with the community, Cila insists on maintaining the status of victim and outsider. She deflates her moment of arrival by telling about an immigration agent belittling another newcomer. The interviewer still makes more attempts to repair the testimony before it is finished. She asks Cila about her connection to Israel today, about her grandchildren, and finally: “What do you think of the Germans and Lithuanians today?” By emphasizing the difference between Cila and non-Jewish antagonists, this question has potential to finally incorporate Cila into the enclave, despite all the flaws in her testimony.75 Defying the genre even in closing, Cila cries angrily in response: When do I have time to think? Not long ago I was really sick. A bone infection. They gave me antibiotics. We’re alone, my husband and I. Our children moved there. They wanted to take us there. I didn’t want to go. [. . .] Now it’s hard to take us into Canada. Amid Cila’s tearful complaints, Sigal thanks her for the interview and the camera is turned off. Surely, this clash has much to do with individual temperament. Yet, the participants’ arguments materialize in a way that simultaneously dramatizes differences of social repertoire. Their conflicts repeatedly encircle issues of communal nomenclature, political agency, and the witness’s capacity to overcome victimhood—all topoi crucial to making testimony valuable in this Hebrew-Israeli ecology. In many ways, their clash can be seen as a two-way failure in translation. The witness attempts a literal translation of Yiddish-Lithuanian memory habits (which will be explored later) into a different ecology. The interviewer sticks to the letter of her local testimonial code. Illuminating these same generic pressures from a different angle, there are other Hebrew-Israeli testimonies in which an “expert” interviewer

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and a “newcomer” witness resolve tensions differently.76 For example, Sigal H., this same interviewer from Yad Vashem, interviews another later immigrant, Luba Kaplanski, who made aliyah just one year after Cila.77 Luba’s voice also marks her as a newcomer, clearly less fluent in Israeli Holocaust discourse and in the Hebrew language than the interviewer. Sigal intervenes frequently in order to guide her toward communal standards for titling and describing. Luba, however, activates a different potentiality of the process, utilizing the interviewer as a guide and eventually overtaking her role. For example, on the topic of prewar antisemitism, the two have the following exchange: l u b a : [. . .]They were always calling me “zhidalka” [little Jewess]. You know what that is, zhidalka? I wasn’t in the same situation as them. i n t : You felt handicapped? l u b a : Yes, handicapped. The interviewer translates Luba’s message into contemporary Hebrewlanguage terminology, removing both the ring of foreignness, with the Lithuanian slur, and hints of pure victimization, suggesting that she was not totally helpless, but merely “set back.” All of the instances in which Luba accepts Sigal’s nomenclature relate not only to linguistic polishing but to specific paths toward agency and communal virtue. As another example, Sigal asks about Luba’s response to being imprisoned with a group of Jews in a large storage building: i n t : Who gave you bread? l u b a : I don’t remember. Those people who brought it with them gave it to us. i n t : In other words, there was mutual help [‘ezra hadadit]? l u b a : Mutual, eh—yes. In accepting Sigal’s guidance, Luba titles this offering of bread in a way that supports a notion of communal solidarity. The work of emplacing communal headings becomes increasingly collaborative over the course of the testimony. Later, discussing the postwar years, Luba recalls her and her mother’s unsuccessful attempt to migrate to Israel illegally, which led to both of their arrests. After relating the

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details of these events, Luba asks, “Did you know that I’m also a ‘Zionist prisoner’ [‘asirat tsion]?” Here, it is Luba who locates her narrative in Israeli nomenclature, having preempted the interviewer. She raises herself to monumental status, both in narrated time and in the present exchange. The dynamic between the veteran Israeli interviewer and the newcomer witness is, in both of these testimonies, one of teacher and student. Many of the same issues appear at stake in both cases, though the witnesses react to these challenges differently. While Cila reads the interviewer’s interventions as condescension, Luba reads it as an invitation for connection. Her testimony demonstrates how even the most assertive interviewing tactics do not necessarily amount to coercion or manipulation. Luba accepts the testimonial process as a rite of initiation, works with the interviewer’s guidance, and appears pleased with the outcome of inclusion that they reach together in the end. Taking the same concerns in different directions, these two testimonies illuminate certain questions, ideals, and priorities circulating in the Hebrew-language ecology. In making communal-monumental testimony, “letting witnesses lead” would not necessarily help them carry out their truth-telling vow. If the best truth is a shared one, then the interviewer had better help the witness make her memories legible to others in the group. This involves emphasizing certain kinds of content: Jewish political developments as well as intention-laden, agentive moods— remembering what one sought to do to help oneself. These aims spread into conversational pragmatics, in which argumentation and challenge sound like committee-meeting debates, and give the witness the chance to show that she is, returning to the words of Nathan Beyrak, a “healthy, functioning” person as well as a former victim of atrocity.

Collective Talk and Forensic Aims, Yiddish-Lithuanian Testimony In an interview with me in Kovna in 2005, Rive K. observed, “Just now they’ve started to write about the ‘Holocaust’ [Nor itster hot zikh ongevizn tsu shraybn vegn dem ho-lo-kost].”78 Her surprising foreign borrowing—she reported no other knowledge of the English language— establishes a distinction between new Holocaust remembrance efforts

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and her own narration of events, in which she used the word “war” (krig, milkhome). Another witness, Hirsh P., spoke of his family: “They were all killed in the [pause] Holocaust [Zey zaynen ale umgekumen in dem ‘ho-lokost’],” in a seeming attempt to help me, a native English speaker from abroad, understand his story.79 Likewise, Getsel K., who lived in Vilna at the time of our interview in 2005, was not sure if there were any Holocaust related plaques in the center of the city (there are three).80 These witnesses place themselves at a distance from internationally minded, public Holocaust commemoration that expanded from the late 1980s onward. While the Holocaust as a specific conceptual configuration, expressed in official ceremonies and commemorations, did seem new to the witnesses, talking about their suffering during World War II—as Jews— did not. There are multiple, interlocking genealogies of Holocaust discourse, in the broader sense of the phrase, that developed in Lithuania. Looking solely at official, public attention to the topic of Jewish-particular victimization, we find a trajectory similar to that of the Soviet Union as a whole: a flurry of initial activity, followed by repressive silence from 1949 to 1953, scattered treatments of the topic in the 1960s, and major public commemoration efforts in the late 1980s and 1990s.81 In summarizing the developments of Holocaust commemoration in Lithuania, historians Saulius Sužiede˙lis and Šaru¯nas Liekis jump from 1949, when the Vilna Jewish Museum, an initiative of Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, was closed, to 1991, when the newly founded Lithuanian Jewish Cultural Society held an exhibition on the Holocaust.82 Other, more inclusive histories call attention to a number of memoirs and semifictional accounts of the Jewish plight in World War II that were published in Lithuanian, Russian, and Yiddish in Lithuania in the 1960s.83 Yet, indeed, it was mostly after 1988, when the Jewish Community of Lithuania was founded, that Jewish activists began to hold public ceremonies, emplace plaques, and build connections with memorial advocates abroad.84 Thus, looking only at outwardly Jewish, institutionally recognized activity, it is justified to narrate a post-Soviet Jewish “awakening” of Holocaust (as in Rive K.’s “ho-lo-kost”) consciousness.85 But, the postwar Soviet years produced other models of narrating the Holocaust, albeit by a different name, to which local Jewish survivors had also been exposed. One of these was Soviet-Lithuanian war-crime trials and investigations

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Fig. 3. Forensic precedents: exhuming victims’ bodies from the 1941 Zhager (Žagare˙) massacre. From the 1944 Soviet war crimes investigation.

(fig 3).86 Even though these state efforts did not produce victimoriented narratives and mostly did not recognize the crimes as specifically anti-Jewish, they were a part of Lithuanian Jews’ postwar memory environment. From 1944 through 1945 the Special State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the German Fas-

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cists and their Accomplices (ChGK) led extensive investigations of wartime massacres committed in Lithuanian territory.87 In parallel, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), then the Committee for State Security (KGB), led inquiries and convicted 257 Lithuanians of war crimes in the years 1944 –1947, and another 40 between 1956 and 1969. The names of Jewish witnesses, though far from the majority, appear on these investigation transcripts ranging from 1944 all the way up until 1989.88 In their testimonies, ongoing local Jewish-Lithuanian relations take center stage. In 1960, for example, a Jewish resident of the town of Butrimonys testified to the massacre she had witnessed in this very same site, her birthplace, nineteen years prior.89 Cases like these suggest that Jews living in Lithuania were aware of these legal undertakings, and could have gained impressions of what testimony sounded like in this punitive context. Moreover, press coverage of such trials also kept the forensic genre alive in the local historical imagination.90 In addition to these two discursive strands— official Jewish commemoration practices, limited until very recently, and the more extensive Soviet forensic efforts—there seems to be a third genealogical trajectory that has special importance in the Yiddish-language testimonies under examination here: that of unofficial, mostly oral conversation and gatherings among local Jewish survivors. Outside of memoirs and oral histories, there are few documentary traces of such intra-survivor, intra-Jewish memory forums. Sociolinguists have pointed out that Jews in Lithuania, more so than in other Soviet territories, continued to speak Yiddish throughout the Soviet period—a sign that older Jews, likely born before World War II, were conversing with one another and using a vocabulary that differed from that of state or institutional discourse at the time.91 Some witnesses, like Hirsh P. and Basia Tishmanene recall having met with their friends on prescribed dates to recall the horrors of the war,92 in addition to lively Jewish friendships93 and professional relationships throughout the 1950s and 60s.94 Such social spaces could have also likely been sites of Holocaust narration. Witnesses from this ecology often refer to one another by name when testifying—far more than in testimonies from the other contexts— identifying themselves as part of a small, ongoing conversation.95 Even the local Shoah Foundation coordinator, Ilya Lempertas, the son of an

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evacuation survivor, used a similar informal network to reach survivors and bring the project into Lithuania. Lempertas’s outreach method created a situation in which many interviewers knew their interviewees, if perhaps indirectly.96 This differs from the flyers and advertisements that the Shoah Foundation used to reach witnesses in North America and Israel.97 Though the witnesses were encouraged to testify in Russian or Lithuanian, some nonetheless requested to testify in Yiddish.98 Their inconvenient language choice also perhaps speaks to the residue of a narrative habit in this language. More importantly, the very form that these testimonies take strongly suggests that the local participants did not start with an empty narrative slate regarding Jewish suffering during the war— even if it went under a different name. Most of the Yiddish-language narrators show fluidity and willingness in telling, marked narrative patterns, and mutual references—the footprints of an unofficial, shared memory chain. What emerges in this ecology is a testimonial genre that we may call collective-forensic. By calling these testimonies collective, I suggest a likeness to the Jewish textual genres of pinkeysim (community records) or yizker-bikher (memory books), which include litanies of names, an abundance of local, geographic texture, and a panoramic, inclusive narrative scope.99 In distinction from what we described as a communal narrative frame in the Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies, Yiddish-language narrators put more emphasis on unofficial, circumstantial connections than on organizational ones. Many of the testimonies include what we have been calling, following Aristotle, forensic speech: that which attempts to accuse or defend, based on some idea of common law that distinguishes right from wrong.100 Collective chronicling and evidentiary rhetoric can be interwoven, though some witnesses show a preference for one element over the other. As mediator, the interviewers in this setting had to weave together the informal, local conversation habits; some witnesses’ accusatory, evidentiary interests; the new format of audio and video testimony; and any institutional instructions they had been given. Most of the time, interviewers perform this act of mediation successfully, together with the witnesses. For instance, the witness Fania Ioneson testifies to the interviewer, Roza B., in a casual, almost gossipy tone from the very beginning,

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including friendly interjections like, “ooha!” “oy!” and “Farshteyst?” (You understand? using the informal “you”).101 When Fania runs out of things to say, she asks, “Nu, what else should I talk about?” and waits for Roza’s input. At many points, Roza uses her familiarity with Fania’s social and narrative vocabulary to expand the testimony, asking for instance, about her heyf (courtyard), the space at the center of an apartment complex, typical of prewar Eastern European cities. This localized topic ignites further conversation about prewar life. To return to Shoshana Felman’s definition of testimony, it is an intimate, familiar tone here that sets the scene for truth-telling, enabling a testimonial vow to be both made and recognized. In other testimonies in this corpus, it is precisely the forensic side of local discourse that animates the interviewer-witness exchange. In the testimony of Khatzkel Zak, for example, the interviewer intervenes while Khatzkel is describing work in the Shavl ghetto: i n t : Who guarded you, a Lithuanian, a Jew, or a German? k h a t z k e l : A German. The director was a German. The ones who guarded us were Ukrainians, the ones who sold themselves to the Germans, with a couple of Lithuanians. But right there in the sugar factory, who was watching us? Rakauskas’s other son! i n t : He was a guard? k h a t z k e l : Yes! Yes! He, the one who had shot Jews. The interviewer engages the witness in assigning guilt, first by ethnicity and then by individual identification. When the witness goes into detail about the specific guard and his local history, the interviewer is able to follow him and vocally affirms his interest in the information. This exchange is very hard to relate to any Shoah Foundation protocol, though this is the institution providing the recording: Accusing “Rakauskas’s other son” certainly does not sound like “personal experience.” Moreover, the familiar tone of the interviewer’s insertion, a response of shared amazement, seems inconsistent with the rule, “Refrain from audible responses,” included in the instructions as well.102 Indeed, this simultaneous combination of forensic, ethnic, and personal concerns seems to be a local reinterpretation of testimony procedure. Tellingly, the Shoah Foundation’s topical index of the testimony, which is emplaced after the testimony

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is recorded and reviewed, is overall very sparse for Khatzkel’s testimony, including very few entries. This particular conversation in its entirety is marked simply, “factory forced labor/ghetto forced labor.”103 That is, the details that interest the Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian participants at this moment contrast with the institution’s terms of signification. Basia Tishmanene and Leia Tsalzon: “What Is This For?” Two exceptionally difficult testimonies reveal more about this gap between local narrative habits, which seem to have circulated in this environment among a small cluster of survivors for decades, and the memory norms implied by new testimonial procedures from abroad. In the testimony of Basia Tishmanene, given in Kovna in 1996, the witness vocally objects to the testimonial proceedings throughout the duration of the recording. All the while, the interviewer, Roza B., pushes her to continue. Basia’s testimony provides a rare instance in which explicit resistance to the project is recorded as part of the cinematic text. Unlike Basia, most survivors who were that fearful or critical of the testimony project simply did not agree to participate.104 The recording begins with an informational slate sheet and the interviewer’s voice, in Russian, announcing the name of the witness, the interviewer, the date, and the place. In contrast to this very somber, bureaucratically toned introduction, the frame that follows shows the interviewer in a tender stance, close behind Basia, who is thin, whitehaired, and simply dressed. Once behind the camera, Roza begins asking for basic biographical information. Telling that she was born in Kovna in 1914, this perfunctory reacquaintance does not seem to bother Basia. It is only when Roza moves from basic informational points to a request for autobiographical narrative that the witness voices her first objection: i n t : Please tell about your parents. b a s i a : What should I tell you? How they died? i n t : No, what you remember of them from before the war. What you remember about them from your childhood. [pause] Your first memories. b a s i a : Oh, this is so scary. i n t : No don’t be scared, really don’t.

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b a s i a : “You can talk now?” Is that what he’s saying to me? [referring to the camera man] i n t : Yeah. Your mother, what was her name? With some friendly encouragement, Basia agrees to return to simple informational responses about her family. She shares that she was the last of seven children and that her father died when she was ten years old. After continuing for a few more minutes, Basia interrupts once again, this time articulating her objection more fully: i n t : Did you have other friends, neighbors? b a s i a : What is this for? . . . i n t : What were your teachers’ names? b a s i a : What is this for? i n t : This is all very interesting. b a s i a : This is why I kept dodging you. I didn’t want to start this. Just as my husband’s died, then this, this . . . Basia is certainly not unique in finding the testimonial process emotionally trying. But as opposed to survivors in other settings who find some value in recording and overcoming this pain, Basia describes her emotional display as embarrassing and pointless. Basia also raises a simple yet rarely voiced question about the process itself—“What is this for?” Clearly, Roza’s explanation that “this” is interesting does not satisfy her. In fact, neither of the participants give the testimony process a title, aside from the word “this”—a further sign that it is a new practice in this environment. From this point on, Roza manages to extract the bare bones of Basia’s life chronology, with occasional moments of willing narration. Basia recounts that she received four years of schooling before becoming a seamstress and marrying her husband around 1940 (she does not state the exact year). During the war, Basia was imprisoned first in the Kovna ghetto and then in Stutthof. After liberation, she was required to perform forced labor in the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany before returning to Kovna, where she eventually found her husband. While agreeing to enumerate these basic biographical facts, Basia interjects roughly every

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two minutes with some kind of complaint. Many take the form of general, sarcastic pleas to stop, such as: Is it over yet?! ... Nu, that’s it. It’s over. ... Make this fast. ... Can I stop now? ... Dearest one, no more, please no more questions. ... Are you going to bother me for much longer? Because I’m finished. ... Maybe that’s enough? Despite Basia’s attempts to end the process, the interviewer continues reassuringly. When the interviewer agrees that the testimony has come to completion, Basia looks up toward the sky, claps her hands together, and tearfully cries in Russian, “Thank you so much. Oh, it’s finally over!” Beyond general resistance, sometimes Basia complains in a way that comments on the testimonial procedure. Sometimes she seems affronted or confused by its technological choreography. Looking at the interviewer’s pen and paper rather than the camera, Basia asks, “What is important? You’re not writing this down?” Basia repeats the point again later, inserting “You’re not writing this down anyhow.” Her comment violates the convention of the invisible fourth wall, the unspoken rule of filmmaking that she is to ignore all that is happening off camera. Basia questions this rule even more pointedly when she asks, “Do they [pointing to the camera crew] understand me at least?” Since she is speaking in Yiddish, she doubts whether all those present can follow her. By violating or claiming not to understand the behavior codes of being on camera, Basia positions herself at a distance from the language of television and visual media—a tacit, yet indispensable skill for participation in video testimony. There is no easy association between filmmaking and Holocaust memory for her.

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As a far more difficult challenge, Basia questions the value of narration, except when sharing unknown information. Several times, as in the following exchange, she insists that she remembers events but finds no purpose in verbalizing the memory in the form of first-person story: i n t : Did you see the Groyse Aktsie? b a s i a : Yes. i n t : Do you remember it? b a s i a : [raising her voice] Why wouldn’t I remember it!?? i n t : So tell us. Crucially, Basia never challenges the significance of the Groyse Aktsie, or “Big Action,” the violent event in question. In fact, she seems to find the interviewer’s feigned ignorance of the occurrence implausible— especially since Roza is a member of the same local Jewish milieu, albeit younger. Basia treats the Groyse Aktsie as an event that people live with, rather than a secret that she is to reveal. To put it differently, Basia conveys an expectation that a memory of suffering can exist, can be somehow real and legitimated in a form other than personal-experience narrative. Later in her testimony, Basia strengthens her objection against narration for its own sake. When Roza asks what kind of a life Basia led after the war, she replies bluntly: “We drudged our way through [Mir hobn zikh gehorevet]!” She insists that the fact of their poverty cannot have been lost on Roza, “You know this! You saw our apartment. We had one room! We struggled. We lived near the train station on that street.” In other words, Basia asserts that someone who has seen her and her living environment must be able to infer what kind of a life she has led. Basia protests the voiding of contextual signals and local knowledge in order to perform a story out loud. She asks that Roza read the nonverbal writing on the wall, as she might do otherwise. In fact, Basia tries twice to summarize her life story in the statement “Nu, in one word—a hard life.” That said, Basia does not find all types of narration equally unnerving. She shows more willingness to answer questions about practicalities: where she went, what she ate, and what happened to the people around her. But the closer the interviewer comes to the genre of “experience,” the more Basia resists. When Roza asks if she felt hot or cold when she arrived at Stutthof, Basia explodes: “I can’t do anything for you. You understood

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this right from the start.” Similarly, when Roza asks her how long she milked cows in Soviet-occupied Germany after the war, Basia bursts out laughing and asks, “You’re going to record how long I milked cows for?” It is precisely the contingent detail, scene narration, and sense-memory— ingredients of experience simulation—that Basia mocks and protests. Not only does Basia express bafflement at the idea of depicting experience through narration, she likewise resists recounting the past as personal as well. When asked, toward the beginning of the interview, what her friends were like, she answers, “Just like me,” rejecting the value of drawing out her individual uniqueness. By contrast, Basia seems most willing to tell her story through the inclusion of other people. For example, when discussing the immediate postwar years, Basia gives an uncharacteristically robust answer about the survivors she found upon return to Lithuania: “The Kovner were there, as they were called. One was an Utianer who lives in Kovna. Belke was there. Rivke Chayat.” In this segment, she even recalls events in which she did not take part: “For us it wasn’t that bad, but for the men . . . They used to have to carry cement bags every day. Hungry, naked, barefoot, they couldn’t bear it. But they had to.” While many witnesses in this setting offer a relational biography, telling about themselves with and through the lives of others,105 Basia dwells on the contradiction between this collective lens and the solo cinematic format. By contrast, Basia speaks fondly of the informal, insider environment in which she is accustomed to discussing these events: b a s i a : Every year on the twenty-third of January, we would get together and make dinner. On the day that we were freed, we would make dinner and we would remember our life in the ghetto and in the camp. i n t : Who would come? b a s i a : My nearest and dearest [di noenste]. Pesie Brener would be there, Khana Grinberg. In the tradition of collective chronicling, Basia names her partners in remembering. Her testimony circulated over a small geographic space and among those with pasts similar to hers. Basia explicitly includes Roza, the interviewer, in this familiar circle of people, asking her, “Did you know Meir Grinberg?” That is, Basia marks the interviewer as a member of her milieu, and thus the formality

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of the testimonial process, and the individual narrative expectations it brings, seem unfit for their relationship. A dispute over language dramatizes precisely this perceived contradiction. Basia at one point steps out of the Yiddish language, complaining, “Oy! This is like svidetel’stvo [Russian for ‘testimony’]!” Roza corrects her with the Yiddish term for “testimony,”—“Like eydes”—but Basia never accepts this suggestion. The witness classifies this testimonial format as a pseudo-authoritative and even a forced level of speech, whereas she sees the Yiddish language, the very woman sitting before her, and some of the content she is requested to share as appropriate ingredients of an insider conversation. When this witness expresses so many different types of blatant objections to testifying, we must ask Why does the interviewer continue to press on with the process? What is the justification that the interviewer implies in her persistence? From a distance, one could compare this interviewer’s act of coercion to the well-known scene from Lanzmann’s Shoah, with Abraham Bomba in a barbershop in Tel Aviv. Lanzmann staged the scene to echo the events being recalled: Bomba clips hair while recounting how he was forced to perform the same task in Treblinka for inmates about to enter the gas chambers. When asked what it was like when the family of one of the barber’s arrived for their haircuts, Bomba stops speaking for a long stretch of time, cries, and tries to continue cutting hair. After this disconcerting pause, Lanzmann insists, saying, “Go on, you must go on.” Critics have censured Lanzmann’s pressuring of Bomba, asserting that he reinjures the witness in forcing him to continue speaking.106 Regardless of one’s ethical evaluation, the scene does justify itself within the framework of the film. The camera closes in on Bomba’s face just as he loses composure. Lanzmann waits quietly before intervening, making an event of Bomba’s collapse. As James Young put it, “Lanzmann intended that we witness not just the testimony but some of the pain elicited by testimony.”107 For both Lanzmann and his critics, the witness’s emotional well-being is the main topic of concern: The filmmaker sees value in recording the witness’s pain while others believe that this pain should best be left alone. The way the scene is shot and staged, as well as the discussions it provoked, all cast witnessing as a psychically loaded process, one with potential dangers as well as rewards. Such, however, cannot be the case with the interviewer in this testimony. When Basia mentions her emotional difficulty, Roza either calmly

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ignores it or tries to soothe her and talk her out of it, as in the following exchanges: b a s i a : All in all [v’obshche], I’m about to start crying. i n t : No, don’t cry. Basia even comments on Roza’s attempts at consolation: i n t : You’re doing a really good job telling. b a s i a : You’re just comforting me. You have to boost me up a bit so that I’ll want to keep going. How much do you get paid for this a month? i n t : Do you remember any songs from the time? Quickly diverting the witness’s attention, the interviewer shows no interest in capturing or exploring Basia’s difficulties in testifying. Though Roza does not seem interested in the pain of remembering, the logic of “witnessing the witness” is arguably imprinted in the design of the video and audio testimonies. What is the purpose of recording the witness’s voice, face, and upper body—sites of affective display—if one were not interested in her individual pathos? Rather than working with a well-articulated intellectual or public model of Holocaust recounting, Roza’s investment in the video testimony seems much more loosely defined. The questions she asks in this and other testimonies point toward a self-ethnographic interest— recording the lore of her parents’ generation, capturing their methods of reminiscence. She puts a high priority on the witness’s songs108 and stories, and takes an interest in her lists of names and collective chronicling. In many testimonies in this ecology, witnesses understand and work with Roza to adapt the recording procedure. Their cooperation leans upon their personal familiarity and even the imagined familiarity implied by the use of the Yiddish language. But, as Basia’s testimony demonstrates, when an articulation of purpose is demanded, the interviewer does not find one readily available. There are elements of this particular conflict that appear in other Yiddish-language Lithuanian testimonies as well, though with highly varied outcomes. For example, the testimony of Leia Tsalzon, conducted by Chaim B., begins with tensions similar to Basia’s, though the partici-

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pants somehow find a solution about midway through.109 Leia was born in 1920 in the small northern town of Shvekshne (Šve˙kšna), which she pronounces “Sveksne,” survived most of the war living with and working for gentile Lithuanian families, and has lived in Shavl ever since. Like Basia, Leia appears slight, simply dressed, and sits uncomfortably before the camera. As soon as Leia is asked to speak, she charges forward to an account of the war. “In the year of 1941 . . .” she starts, violating the idea that she should explain herself from the very beginning, that childhood genesis informs selfhood and thus has a special truth-value. Chaim quickly interrupts her and brings her back to her year of birth. Like Basia, Leia also attempts to summarize her life in a few sentences: “I came into a big family. My family died. Everyone died and I’ve been left alone.” Far from silencing or softening her sense of hardship, Leia treats her suffering as something plain to the observer, not demanding narration or analysis. One can in fact hear Chaim negotiating different testimonial inroads as he conducts the interview. While practically oriented conversations flow fairly easily, he provokes Leia when making a request for personal memory: i n t : Do you remember how the German army came into Shavl? l e i a : Nu, in 1941. i n t : But with your own memory [mitn eygenem zikoren], do you remember it? Chaim tries briefly to teach the practice of personal narration to Leia, telling her that it comes from her “own memory.” But Leia counters with a bird’s-eye summary: “The Germans came and started taking people right away. They went to the Jews right away. They used to give us jobs. You had to work for them. Out in the morning and back at night. And that’s it [un fartik]”—rejecting personal-experience narration. Twice more, Chaim requests a personal view of this critical moment in time: i n t : Do you remember when they threw you into the Shavl ghetto? Do you remember that? l e i a : I went in with everyone together! Like, like . . . prisoners of war. . . .

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i n t : Do you remember the moment you went into the Shavl ghetto? l e i a : I went in just like everyone else went in! Leia responds with frustration to Chaim’s insistence that her early wartime story should be unique. She is not even willing to find a middle ground at this moment, as other witnesses do, and answers questions about herself with information about a larger matrix of people. The witness insists that this part of her story is not divisible from that of the group and that a personal viewpoint would not add to their understanding of the event. Chaim experiments with different avenues of questioning until he finds a topic that animates her. Discussing work at an airport outside of Shavl, he asks, “Did you sneak out from the work brigades often?” Leia smiles, for the first time since the camera has come on, and answers, “Very often.” Once they reach the topic of escape and clever interface with non-Jews, Leia’s testimony changes shape. She begins to narrate willingly and at greater length about how she gradually moved out of the Shavl ghetto to work for Lithuanian families as a nanny and housemaid, living with them on intimate terms until the end of the war. In this segment, Chaim takes on the role of the local insider. For example, Chaim asks if Leia speaks Samogitian, a northwestern dialect of the Lithuanian language. Difficult for standard Lithuanian speakers, Jews typically did not master this dialect.110 Leia smiles and answers proudly that she, however, did. Chaim understands that speaking Samogitian would be necessary to blend in with the rural Lithuanian families that helped her. More than a lucky guess, it is local knowledge that guides him toward this question. While similar signals of social intimacy work as a disservice to the testimonial process in Basia’s case, here it is critical to the participants’ mutual recognition. This is how Chaim defines himself as a trustworthy testimonial partner, and the situation as a fitting mnemonic platform for this witness.

Testing Genres on Different Audiences Looking closely at the trajectory of each testimony, the individual interviewer appears influential indeed. But the footage also shows us

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how this interlocutor presents only one voice in a chorus of accumulating conversations and contexts that help people make themselves and their memories into stories. The strength of habitual telling becomes even more apparent when we examine the testimonies of Yiddish speakers in Lithuania who testified twice: Shmuel S. and Fania B. testified both to me and to the Shoah Foundation in Yiddish.111 There were important differences between the two formats. I conducted an open-ended interview, with only a vocal recording device and without a crew. The Shoah Foundation interviewers encouraged chronological order and, of course, entered the witnesses’ houses with a camera crew. The Shoah Foundation interviewers were local residents and often personally acquainted with the witnesses, whereas I was clearly only a long-term visitor. I encouraged reflection on the present day and postwar periods. As another point of difference, I responded vocally to the witnesses and, as a result, some recordings contain a great deal of back and forth. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities between both versions of their testimonies. Shmuel S. narrates in the same chronologically ordered, forensic mode, including an abundance of names, places, and thick local detail on each occasion. Here is one brief example, taken from his narration about the events of December 1941. In his interview with me, 2004: The ones who killed the Shavler intelligentsia were from Stacˇiu u¯nu˛ valscˇius [parish]. There in Ilgoji Lova.112 That’s where our rabbis and teachers are buried. That’s where our rich people are buried [. . .] Rabbi Shapiro and also Fainberg the druggist. In an interview with Chaim B., Shoah Foundation, 1996: s h m u e l : Now, about Ilgoji Lova. That’s where our Rabbi Shapiro is buried, Treisman and Fainberg the druggist. i n t : What is Ilgoji Lova? s h m u e l : Ilgoji Lova, that’s a forest, where people from Stacˇiu u¯nu˛ valscˇius killed and buried Jews. Though Shmuel does not simply repeat a fully formed, memorized script, his narration appears governed by the same informational and formal concerns both times. The same can be said of Fania B., who includes

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very similar details and vignettes about prewar Vilna and partisan activities in the Vilna ghetto in both interviews.113 I made a similar observation about Yiddish-language testimonies of survivors who lived in Lithuania most of their lives, but have recently moved to Israel.114 These witnesses presume interest and knowledge about local Lithuanian topography, in a manner that is highly similar to those who testify in Yiddish in Lithuania. These newcomers to Israel had seemingly grown so accustomed to certain Yiddish-language conversations about the war that developed over preceding decades in Lithuania, they testify as if still there.115 Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, for instance, moved to Israel in 1992 and testified just five years later, in Rishon Letsion in 1997 to Yeshayahu P. for the Shoah Foundation.116 Yeshayahu distinguishes himself from Yiddishlanguage interviewers in Lithuania in a number of ways: Sometimes he refers to Lithuania as “Russia,” and his Polish-Yiddish dialect serves as a minor but ongoing reminder that he is not a Litvak insider. Mindful of this fact, Echyoshas occasionally attempts to accommodate his listener. Consider this cursory gesture toward geographic explanation: “We lived in the region. Not in the city [of Kovna], but in the region. That’s where a lot of Jews lived, even though the land belonged to Lithuania.” But, as Echyoshas proceeds, his topographical depictions become increasingly reliant on local knowledge. For example, he tells that he, his family, and a group of other Jews were led to “the green hill” in the first days of war. By way of explanation, he adds, “To go down from the hill, you had to go through Italius Street, and there were all these little streets that emptied out onto the bridge.” Echyoshas also incorporates specific names of local survivors, as if his listener knew them or found them in some way meaningful. Coincidentally, he happens to speak about “Tishman the barber,” the husband of Basia Tishmanene, whose testimony is addressed earlier. At one point, Echyoshas even comments on the cumulative genesis of his Holocaust narrative: “I know this story must be true because I have told it so many times.” Seemingly, this witness judges the veracity and relevance of his narrative based on parameters built over decades of conversation in Lithuania, where he lived and remembered up until five years before the testimony was recorded.

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This observation holds true for other witnesses who testify in Yiddish but have moved to Israel much later than Echyoshas, as with Genia Idels, who moved to Israel as early as 1969.117 An ongoing connection to the same place before, during, and after the Holocaust made its stamp on the language, which these witnesses carry abroad with them later in life.118 In almost every respect, these “transplanted Yiddish testimonies” of later immigrants appear indistinguishable from those Yiddish testimonies delivered in Lithuania. For this reason, I have grouped these “Yiddish-Israeli” testimonies with “Yiddish-Lithuanian” ones. The way in which these witnesses export narrative practices abroad is testament to the strength of language and context in the long term, tempering the impact of the individual interviewer and institution—who intercede only at the moment of transmission, and only within the language capacities of the witness. This chapter has been about interpersonal dynamics in testimony, the implicit negotiations through which participants cocreate meaning. In examining this dynamic as it appears on the recordings, we see that intersubjectivity extends far beyond the immediate scene of two people talking. The testimonies appear shaped by gradual historical provenance as well as broad contemporary expectations. That is, if the introduction opened with a demonstration of difference between testimonies, this chapter has been about something that is the opposite of difference119— the resources through which people create trust and recognition in speech, enough to attempt this complex memory process together, and on tape, no less. Some of these resources are formal. As in a literary genre, there are visual, verbal, and choreographic signals that help align expectations and activate testimonial precedents as guidelines. Yet it quickly becomes difficult to separate form and content. An attraction to contingent detail in English-language American testimonies, while ostensibly only emphasizing a type of information, in fact guides discussion to the specific themes of childhood development and camp imprisonment. The monumental and communal thrusts of Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies manifest themselves in a certain testimonial mood, but also in the attention devoted to organizational and political history. Presenting oneself in relation to

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named friends and enemies in the Yiddish-Lithuanian group has a poetic impact on the testimony—these recordings sound more like lists than experience reconstruction—but also directs mnemonic attention toward themes like the workplace, local ethnic interactions, and clever, groundlevel know-how. These thematic concerns, those that emerge from the very fabric of testimonial genre, will become the focus of the next chapters. I start with the topic of kinship and solidarity, moving away from the social dynamics that take place during the interview to those that the witness remembers as part of her past.

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2 SOLIDARITY: KIN, PARTY, NEIGHBORHOOD

In prying open the different social imaginaries that are at work in Holocaust testimonies, the topic of family is of central concern. Many of the most prominent representations of the Holocaust in American and Israeli culture are family dramas of some sort: Anne Frank, the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Maus, The Lost, Aviya’s Summer, See Under: Love, Our Holocaust.1 Family photographs—torn, yellowed, and cryptically captioned—have become visually synonymous with Holocaust memory and are thus among the few material objects deemed worthy of inclusion in all of the audiovisual Holocaust testimony projects studied.2 In opposition to politics or history, the theme of family is chosen as an inclusive, humanizing, and perhaps instinctive entryway into Holocaust victim narratives. Yet, upon a closer look, family histories are also sites of political and social expression. In narrating the family, witnesses absorb and comment upon the notions of solidarity that surround them. The most visible treatments of the “Holocaust family” in scholarship often draw from a psychotherapeutic framework, which highlights parent-child relationships and the transmission of Holocaust trauma through generations.3 In the English-language American corpus of testimonies, we can see how witnesses make use of the “Freudian family” model in order to remember crisis and recovery. Far from discrediting a Freudian framework, these testimonies show just how helpful it is—in vernacular speech and selfperception among American survivors—to organize both the subject 65

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matter and the poetics of their memory and their conception of the catastrophic. Yet this paradigm should be denaturalized and appreciated as contextually bound, most effective for human memory-work within a particular ecology of ideas. Activating different paradigms of belonging, Yiddish- and Hebrewspeaking witnesses place themselves and their kin on a continuum with larger social spheres when recounting their histories.4 Testimonies from these two groups enlist two different variations of the “Jewish ‘body politic,’” a term that critic Dan Miron uses to describe an imagined Jewish organism, a collective protagonist that appeared in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.5 Here I show how this social metaphor is still at work in colloquial memory-speech in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Holocaust survivor testimony, in different forms.6 In Yiddish-language testimonies from Lithuania, this collective protagonist appears fluid, informally defined. The family is part of a larger network that I term eygene, “one’s own.” Witnesses draw from prewar norms and local knowledge to stake out the shifting boundaries of this group.7 In the Hebrew-language Israeli setting, participants highlight a progression in which the Jewish polity is formalized, its membership articulated in the language of modern national ideals, rather than local instinct. According to these Israeli testimonies, it is political praxis and a vision of the future that should bind the Jewish collective, rather than mere accidents of geography, ethnicity, or profession.

Nuclear Family and Therapeutic Imagination, English-Language American Testimony Among English-language American witnesses, the nuclear family appears as a central subject of narration, the primary site of belonging. It is through these few, central family figures that events, images, contexts, names, and dates emerge as relevant. What bonds these focalized individuals together, on the one hand, is biology and genetics, natural kinship;8 and on the other hand, psychology, a history of relationships between people.9 These testimonies treat belonging as a process that occurs from the inside out, and a good testimony is one that can reenact

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this process in narration, through speech that simulates experience. Remembering prewar life thus begins with a reconstruction of what familial love originally felt like. The nuclear family not only constitutes the site of original belonging but also that of destruction and rehabilitation: Witnesses define the center of the Holocaust through familial loss. Postwar rehabilitation requires the rebuilding of close family—an ideal that some witnesses feel they have attained, while others do not. Suzanne H.: The Nuclear Family as Theme and Memory Lens Suzanne H., born in Vilna in 1931, testified in 1993 through the umbrella project of the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University.10 Asked to depict her family roots, she focuses on the genesis of her mother’s personality: “My mother’s mother died when she was sixteen years old. She lived with her sister and her family. [. . .] My mother used to say that they were very warm people.” Suzanne even goes into detail about her mother’s health, speculating, “I think now that she must have had a mitral valve prolapse. Her heart was always pounding. At first they thought she shouldn’t have any children. She waited six years to have another one.” Linking the biological and emotional realms, she connects her mother’s vulnerable health to her tenuous stance toward mothering, both of which eventually affect Suzanne as well.11 Suzanne’s parents are not only themes of narration, they serve as a mnemonic filter, helping her discern the relevance of information and images that surface from prewar life. For example, she recalls the physical space of her childhood as a reflection of her parents’ personalities and her relationship toward them. Their house in the “suburbs of Vilna,” was “a very pretty building with a garden in front. Every spring my father used to plant flowers in front. I used to look forward to it.” Regarding the kitchen, she relates, “I remember my mother having very cheerful accessories.” Like her immediate physical surroundings, the larger political atmosphere also appears in relation to her parents’ personalities. Suzanne tells that her father chose to send her to a Jewish school, rather than a Polish one because “He was angry at the way the Polish people looked at the Jews.” In this formulation, antisemitism becomes a reality of past experience, something to which she is a credible eyewitness, when it impacts her father emotionally.

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Speaking in general terms, Suzanne explains that she did not befriend those living in her immediate vicinity: “Somehow I had the feeling. . . . They were the super’s kids. They didn’t make too much of an impression on me. I didn’t really have anybody to look up to. I remember walking a distance to meet kids from school. They were more my equals. Not where we lived, there wasn’t really anybody I could emulate.” Spatial proximity and shared Jewish ethnicity did not guarantee friendship. A friend was someone she could “emulate,” someone who was her “equal.” Bringing this social perspective into the war years, Suzanne recounts events of the Holocaust through the prism of personal perception and interaction with her parents and brother. This narrative scope, she explains, reflects her social reality at the time. She did not have much of a network beyond her family throughout the war. With a small cast of characters, Suzanne depicts those intimate individuals in high resolution, by reconstructing dialogue and emotional exchanges. For example, early after the German invasion of Vilna on June 24, 1941, Suzanne recalls a conversation with her mother during one of the early roundups, presumably on July 2 or 11 of that year: “I remember I kept on telling my mother, ‘Oh, don’t worry. Everything’s gonna be okay,’ even though I was petrified. I kept thinking, ‘What will it be like when I’m dead? Is the bullet going to hurt? Am I going to know that I’m dead?’ All these thoughts went through my head.” Here, Suzanne quotes her own voice, out loud and in her thoughts. She recalls this decisive moment through the tension between internal and external dialogue and in relation to her mother’s fear. Suzanne tells that she and her family were forced to move into the Vilna ghetto, but after a short while moved to the nearby Kailis fur factory, a small work camp on the outskirts of the city, in which around one thousand Jews were held in several brick buildings.12 Suzanne explains that since her family did not have an official license to live there, they were eventually forced to move back from Kailis into the ghetto. She briefly summarizes the cultural milieu of the Vilna ghetto in the middle of the war: “They had a theater. They had some culture. They even opened a restaurant.” But events unfold almost independently from this milieu. The main stage of causation is within the intimate emotional space of her family. For instance, hearing that the Vilna ghetto would soon be

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liquidated in September 1943, Suzanne recalls a disagreement between her parents over whether or not to try to return to Kailis, since the camp was to be left intact even after the ghetto’s destruction. To return would entail crawling through the sewage system: “My mother, you know, was claustrophobic. She didn’t want to go in. My father pushed her in.” Here again, she sees her mother’s personality as an entryway into the event. Her parents’ relational interplay is not ancillary to another set of facts. Especially through her repeated use of medical terminology, Suzanne renders personalities as material, scientific objects of the past, concrete forces that have major consequences. They arrived back at the Kailis labor camp, but found no place to live. In what Suzanne describes as panic, her parents decided to flee the camp, disguised as gentiles, leaving the children behind temporarily. Both parents were caught and taken to prison. Her father, however, had the choice to leave the prison and go to another labor camp, the HKP (Heeres Kraftfahr Park 562), which, like Kailis, was also left standing for nine months after the destruction of the Vilna ghetto in September 1943.13 Suzanne relates a conversation between her parents in prison at this time: “She said, ‘You have to stay and find the children. You have to raise the children.’ He gave her all the jewelry he had, that somehow she would be able to save herself. That was it. Later I heard that they made them take their clothes off and they shot them.” The loss of her mother, the quick depiction of her stripped and shot at Ponar, constitutes the turning point in this testimony, the moment when life changed from difficult to abnormal. As Suzanne tells it, she felt the impact of this loss immediately. She and her brother stayed with an aunt and uncle in Kailis after their parents’ arrest. Suzanne does not name or describe these relatives except to say that they were insufficient surrogates for her parents. “I was twelve years old and I used to wet my bed. I later learned that you want your mother back and this is what we did. I was so embarrassed at the time, and my aunt used to yell at me and I didn’t know what to do.” Focusing on the preconscious, physiological reaction to this loss, Suzanne frames the moment as a break in the natural order of mind-body health. This quality of unnaturalness becomes even more pronounced as her story continues. The remaining children in the HKP camp were taken away in the Kinder Aktsie (Children’s Action) of March 27, 1944. To stay there, Suzanne and

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her brother were forced to hide from the authorities at all times. Suzanne recalls that her father nonetheless sent her out to work on the camp’s black market. “We could no longer go out. So I dressed up with a long dress with makeup and high heels and I used to walk around. In the yard. I had to sell the candy for my father.” Dwelling on the ill-fitting womanly disguise, a sign of the mismatch between her childish physique and this mature role, Suzanne also renders herself a poor surrogate for her mother in the family unit. Suzanne confirms the centrality of her mother’s death again at the end of her testimony, expanding on its consequences later in life. The interviewer asks her, “What was the most significant event you experienced?” Suzanne clarifies the question, “Significant in the way I feel about it?” then answers: Well of course my mother’s death. It was, I don’t know if you’d say significant. But it had the most effect on me. Just the whole thing, having gone through it, does something to one’s life. For a while I was sort of in denial, saying it didn’t happen to me. I distanced myself from it. Suzanne speaks of a traumatic “it,” one that undergoes a process of semantic expansion, at first referring strictly to her mother’s death, then encompassing the Holocaust as a whole, as when she says, “it didn’t happen to me.” The selection of her mother’s death as a metonymic stand-in for the entire catastrophe speaks to the centrality of this singular emotionally and biologically bound relationship in Suzanne’s worldview. Suzanne tells that the brutal killing of her mother—and the Holocaust by extension— continued to wound her years later. She sees herself as having suffered from a defective personality as a result of this loss, which made marriage and child-rearing difficult. She goes on: I felt very cold, very cold inside. I found it very difficult to relate to other people. I have a wonderful husband. I had a very difficult time relating to him. The only way I could relate to him would be to fight with him. And then I would feel some emotions. I came to realize it years later. I was in therapy for many years and it helped me a lot.

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As Suzanne sees it, the only way to recover from this wound, the “it” of the Holocaust, was through self-examination, in therapy. She was thus able to understand her own emotional economy, and only then to flourish socially. At the end of her testimony, Suzanne places the act of testimony itself within this ongoing kin-making process, her attempt to repair and recreate the good. Mirroring the importance she assigns to her own mother, Suzanne explains that she is sharing this narrative for the sake of her children, mending wounds she might have caused them. Suzanne’s son had previously been frightened by her attempts to discuss what she lived through in the Holocaust. By contrast, her daughter was the one that encouraged Suzanne to record a testimony, since she had always wanted to know more. Thus, the nuclear family constitutes not only the main social imaginary through which Suzanne narrates her suffering in the past, but also the impetus for remembering, the framework through which she makes truth-telling relevant in the present day. In her final summation of the war, Suzanne gives little weight to distant relatives, friends, fellow survivors, and the general milieu of Vilna and Jewish Lithuania. When asked if she reencountered any of her friends in Vilna after the war, Suzanne answers, “There were some Jews left. I think a handful survived. I did have some contact with them.” Similarly, regarding survivors from the Kailis and HKP labor camps, she replies, “I don’t think hardly anybody survived that I know of. I made new acquaintances along the way. I didn’t keep up with anybody.” For whatever reason— forgetting, lack of interest, or appropriate narrative medium— Suzanne does not dwell on the fate of people beyond her immediate circle. This tendency appears perfectly acceptable to the interviewer, who never challenges or cross-examines Suzanne’s sparse portrayal of her social milieu. It is thus an unvoiced topic that is not construed as a silence but as a socially legitimate deletion. Suzanne does deem her broader social background relevant insofar as it made family life difficult in America. Recounting why she had previously attempted to speak about the Holocaust with her son, Suzanne says, “I guess I wanted him to know, you know, where I came from. Because I do feel different from my family. My husband is American born. My children are American born. I was not, even though I assimilated. But it still is not

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my culture. I guess I wanted him to know.” The larger environment in which she grew up, like the Holocaust, presents a personal challenge. Prewar Jewish society remains a part of her identity in the form of a secret, a problem she needs to work through in her present-day family dynamic. The Family Remains While the Rest Goes: Ivar S. and Ellen Zitkin Elements of the nuclear family imaginary are alive in testimonies of American witnesses with diverse, sometimes conflicting outlooks on the past. Such is the case when we contrast the narratives of Ivar S., who testified to the Fortunoff Archives in 1988,14 and Ellen Zitkin, whose testimony the Shoah Foundation recorded in 1996.15 Speaking in an early phase of the Era of the Witness, Ivar’s testimony has a risky, adventurous feel. “I imagine I’m still shutting it out,” he says, assessing his difficulty remembering. He mentions at the end that this is probably the most he has ever said about his Holocaust experience. Ellen, on the other hand, testifies eight years later when video testimony was a process more familiar to the public. She assumes a light, humorous affect throughout. Like Ivar, Ellen also claims not to remember much detail. But she explains these deletions as purposeful, part of her philosophy of “forgive and forget and get on with your life,” an explicit dismissal of the therapeutic aims in testimony. Though Ivar and Ellen offer conflicting reasons for why they forget, the material that they both do in fact remember similarly revolves around close family members and the emotional bonds among them. Ivar was born in 1930 in Memel (Klaipe˙da), and as Hitler advanced into this northwestern region in 1939, his family moved to Kovna. Consider the way that Ivar introduces the outbreak of war in Kovna a year later: “The next thing that happened was that the Germans invaded. My first recollection of that was that it was the first time I heard the bombs. And my parents started sheltering me a lot.” He takes a similar family focus when asked about religious life in the Kovna ghetto: “I remember being called up to recite from the Torah. It must have been 1943 by then. I imagine my parents got some pleasure out of that.” Though, literally speaking, the interviewer has asked Ivar to describe ghetto community practice, Ivar answers in a personal key, reconstructing his parents’ emotional reaction to his bar mitzvah. Ivar’s interviewers concur with the way he refocuses the question. Slightly later, the interviewers adopt the same

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lens when discussing a hanging in the Kovna ghetto: “Did you question your parents?” Ivar appreciates this line of inquiry: “I imagine I did. I think they were pretty much at a loss for words.” The participants work together to foreground Ivar’s parents and his relationship to them, as their key to piecing together ghetto memories. This focus sounds not only sensible but conducive to veridical memory and honest reflection on the part of the witness. Speaking about the summer of 1944, when his family was deported from the Kovna ghetto, Ivar struggles to reconstruct his train transports. He recalls very little, and the interviewers work through this section very cautiously. Showing the strain of remembering in his face and voice, Ivar conflates dreamlike impressions of both the first transport from the Kovna ghetto to Stutthof and his later trip from Dachau to Auschwitz. Through this haze, Ivar looks repeatedly to the moment at which he was separated from his mother. Though little appears clear to him about this phase of the war, he states, “I clearly remember when my mother was taken away from me. That was a catastrophe.” Calling the loss a “catastrophe,” Ivar designates this as his main breaking point, the center of the Holocaust. He echoes this sentiment repeatedly, returning to the sensation of this loss as a defining memory of his history, an anchor that explains the final outcome of the war and affirms the reality of other, hazier images that come back to him. In moving from Ivar’s testimony to Ellen’s, it is striking how different the testimonial scene appears on the recording. Struggling with an ailment that is not named on camera, Ellen—smiling and apparently appreciative of the Shoah Foundation crew’s company—is filmed propped up in bed. If Ivar’s recording very closely resembled an intense session of psychotherapy, Ellen’s feels like a friendly, supportive visit to an acquaintance in the hospital. The atmospheric contrast between these two American testimonies renders their common kinship vocabulary all the more noteworthy. Ellen, a native of Kovna, is true to her word about “forgiving and forgetting” with regard to almost anything or anyone outside the home. When questioned about meeting extended family, she answers, “Don’t remember too much before the war. But we really socialized. I just couldn’t remember too much of it.” Like Ivar, Ellen finds the most memory resources when looking back at her close family. Ellen describes

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her relationship with her brother in depth, how they quarreled and why. But most of all, she reflects on her mother’s personality and the kind of love she recalls receiving from her. Mother was a fun-loving person. She liked to go to lunches a lot. Liked dressing up. I think in part because they were poor when she was a kid. She was quite loving. I was sick as a child, had diphtheria twice. [. . .] There are stories that when I cried they took me to bed with them. Every detail about her mother’s upbringing, hobbies, and parenting style serves as crucial material for making significance out of the past. Like Suzanne, Ellen sees history archived in the form of personality traits. Her grandmother’s habits shaped her mother’s personality, both of which informed who Ellen became. Forgetting, then, is a policy on the past that cannot apply to events inside the home. In narrating the war, Ellen draws a connection between family members’ personalities and their particular circumstances of death. For instance, she describes her grandmother as “Quite a tough bird—my mother’s mother. Much tougher than my mother was. . . . She might have survived the concentration camps, but the Germans shot her. My mother died of dysentery.” Later Ellen again intimates how her mother’s softness, her inclination toward maternal sacrifice, may have, in part, catalyzed her death: “My mother always looked after us. I’m sure she might have gone without to make sure we had enough to eat. She was a very giving person.” In other words, personal traits are not supplements to history in this genre of testimony but shape the way that events unfold. Accordingly, understanding the Holocaust necessitates this excavation of the nuclear family and its internalities. Having lost both of her parents, Ellen depicts the process of family rehabilitation as having been long and arduous, with many false starts. In the immediate postwar years, she lived in Kovna with her aunt, her brother, and an uncle with the last name of Geffen. Poking fun at this pseudo-kin ensemble, Ellen chuckles, “So we looked like a family, the Geffen family. That’s as good a name as any, right?” Later, in the United States, Ellen moves in with yet another uncle. This time she decides to move out of the makeshift household, preferring to live alone rather than rely on a

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surrogate father. Putting herself in a difficult position, Ellen feels that she prevailed with time, overcoming this unnatural, lonely state by building a household of her own. The results of this recovery project are less narrated than performed: The recording ends with Ellen’s son, daughter, and current husband speaking on camera about their perceptions of her as a person and as a survivor. In keeping with Ellen’s own light, humorous affect, her daughter comments, “She had some stories. She would say, ‘Well, in the ghetto, all we had to play with was newspapers.’ [. . .] But, she never painted it in a very terrible light.” Unlike in Suzanne’s narrative, these children dismiss the idea of traumatic wounding, claiming that their mother was unhampered by the past. The diagnostic lens, however, shows common ground: Ellen’s children also contemplate the Holocaust as it impacts its victim’s ability to mother and recreate filial love. In this framework, drawn from the English-language American ecology, social flourishing entails the creation and maintenance of strong emotional bonds. As such, the Holocaust appears most damaging when it unhinges this emotional order. If catastrophe occurs in the psychic and sensational realm of each family, then one had best examine singular family stories one at a time in order to assess the damage of history. Within this framework, it is not especially relevant to reconstruct social externalities of Jewish belonging, since internalities appear as such powerful tools for telling the truth about the past. Thus, it is not out of ignorance or shortsightedness that these witnesses omit or downplay a depiction of the larger milieu from which they came. In Dominic LaCapra’s formulation, the story of the Jewish body politic— of neighbors, distant relatives, acquaintances, coworkers, schoolmates, political parties, and the like—is absent, rather than lost in these testimonies: These witnesses may convey a general melancholic sense that this milieu is gone, but they do not use the body politic to gauge the significance of memories.16 Gazing at “The Way It Was” On the other hand, there are witnesses in this ecology who comment on the family images and social categories that are most readily available to them, within their various American settings. Calling attention to the normative changes that they have witnessed over their lifetimes, they point to a gap between their contemporary lens and the

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Jewish social world they remember from before and during the war. In a Shoah Foundation testimony, the witness Meir Vilnai-Shapiro explicitly criticizes the way that the interviewer approaches kinship matters.17 Discussing his childhood, the interviewer asks him, “So you got a sense of positive Jewish identity from both parents?” Instead of explaining his identity as the legacy of his mother or father, Meir responds by describing “Jewish Vilna at its zenith” and then explains: That is more the imprint in me than what I got directly from my family. It’s not the way it is now; parents spend a lot of time teaching their children. That was not the case then. With me or with anyone. Parents kept to themselves, and children grew up with whatever they could get for themselves. Meir hints at the past existence of a different form of social belonging but does not go far in expanding on this other paradigm. In arguing against the terms of the question, Meir simultaneously reifies them: He establishes an opposition between the city of Vilna and his parents, two distinct and possibly competing sources of social education. His somewhat nostalgic conclusion, “Just Yiddish Vilne. That’s what they gave to all of us,” reinforces the division between the milieu and the individual, context and self, wherein one gives and the other takes. Then the interviewer steps in, directing the conversation back toward matters of individual character and personal genesis: “Okay, let’s look at the specifics of Vilna that shaped you as a kid. To begin with, how do you remember yourself as a kid? What were you like?” Meir obliges. Even if he would prefer to speak about his city of origin as a whole rather than himself as an individual, such a stance would appear uncooperative and awkward within this scene of testimony. Also challenging the nuclear family focus, the witness Betty Goodfriend tries to translate her idea of Jewish tradition and collective prewar social life into a contemporary American idiom.18 She depicts her prewar household in the small, densely Jewish town of Vilki (Vilkija), with ten siblings in a few small rooms, boys and girls alike. She tells how her older siblings continued to live at home after they had begun working, and delivered their wages directly to their mother. Seeming to anticipate how strange this arrangement may sound in her current setting, Betty adds, “And we

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thought that this was the right way. Nobody had any problems with it. We were happy with it.” Expanding her description beyond the home, she relates that all three of the town synagogues were “orthodox.” She goes on, “In those days, we didn’t know about Reform or Conservative in my part of the world.” Offering a few descriptive brushstrokes of prewar social life—a large family with constant contact and little privacy, duty rather than autonomy, and religion as assumption rather than choice— she builds an implicit comparison to the norms she sees around her today. Discussing the Holocaust period, Betty focuses intensely on intimate family losses but again tries to depict “another” type of bond, one that she remembers from the Kovna ghetto, Lithuanian work camps, and later, at Stutthof. One such moment occurs in a discussion of her decision to volunteer herself for transfer from the Kovna ghetto to the Kedainer work camp, where her brother and sister-in-law were already located. Betty admits that such a decision seems illogical to her now, voluntarily moving from a familiar, minimally bearable environment to the unknown. Yet she points out that many other ghetto inmates made the same, seemingly odd choice, simply in order to be with friends and relatives. She produces a title for this mentality: “Together. Tsuzamen. Whatever it was, you have a support base. I guess that’s what it was.” Using a Yiddish term, tsuzamen, to mark the otherness of this approach, Betty analyzes this collective strategy from the position of today. As such, she offers only a “guess” as to why she sought to be with her family in this manner. Her tone is not evaluative: She does not conclude that tsuzamen was better or worse than the way she thinks now. Betty remarks about the difference between common sense then and now and moves on. The alternate kinship concept that Meir and Betty present—“tsuzamen,” as Betty puts it, or being raised by “Jewish Vilna,” in Meir’s terms—is marked as a relic of the past, something they must make an effort to translate into their contemporary, English-speaking American audience. Both witnesses later tell that they would like to emulate some aspect of this social past in their present-day lives. Meir speaks proudly about his membership in various affiliations of Jews from Vilna. Betty tells of lifelong activity in synagogues and Jewish religious organizations. An object of memory and even reverence, this collective mentality nonetheless does not work as a framework for their testimony. They both

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use emotional and self-analytic language in order to convey the significance of their memories. There is also no progressive, causal relationship between tsuzamen and the social lens of today. These witnesses present their social lives of then and now as two separate, parallel worlds that are divided by a catastrophic gap.

Eygene, “One’s Own,” Yiddish-Lithuanian Testimony When, at the start of the twentieth century, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem wrote sentences like, “Kasrilevke shouted with one voice,” or, “Kasrilevke began to reel,” he parodied the idea of a shtetl, a small Jewish town, as protagonist.19 To get the joke, Yiddish readers needed to have some sense of this collective hero in their social imaginative repertoires: The parody presumed a norm as referent. Though the material destruction of such East European Jewish communities half a century later—the “death of the shtetl” in Yehuda Bauer’s term20—is a reality of the Holocaust that needs no further affirmation. The question that contemporary Yiddish testimonies raise is whether or not some version of the shtetl imaginary lived on as part of the language in certain contexts. In the group of testimonies studied here, witnesses formed their narrative habits in both the language and physical environment of prewar life, having stayed in Lithuania for decades after the war and continued to use Yiddish in certain arenas of interaction. Thus, the temptation toward semantic continuity is twofold in this specific memory ecology. Indeed, we can see ways in which the shtetl imaginary guides the way these witnesses speak about family and belonging— even in the newly introduced situation of video and audio testimony in the 1990s and decades following.21 Whereas testimonies from English-speaking American witnesses are rich with resources for discussing emotional exchanges between parents and children, Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies display abundance in depicting a broad family-community matrix: Alongside mishpokhe (family), familie (family), kroyvim/kreyvim (relatives), and fraynt (relatives), witnesses refer frequently to people with a hazier kind of closeness: fraynd (friends), bakante (acquaintances), undzere (ours), and noente (close ones). They also refer to geographic origin as a way to define their relationship to

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someone, titling people by place names (the city or shtetl name and the suffix “-er,” for example, Vilner, Kovner, Shavler). As shorthand for this whole semantic cluster, I use the term, the eygene—“one’s own.” This adjective can be used alone, functioning as a noun, or be paired with a variety of referents. Thus, “one’s own what” is tellingly left open in this idiom22; it can refer to family, friends, townspeople, schoolmates, coworkers, and others with some significant shared experience.23 Beyond word choice, the structure of these Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies gives credence to foster-kinship arrangements, calling attention to multiple transitions rather than one central rift in the fabric of social belonging. Their portrayal of this collective is thus not the rosy fantasy of Fiddler on the Roof or Life Is with People, in which naive traditional Jewish life remains sealed in a social bubble, impervious to historical change.24 Rather, the eygene, as it emerges from these testimonies, is a method of making pragmatic, impromptu rearrangements within the body politic, in which old social norms are never thrown out, but incrementally adjusted. Indeed, it is a framework that almost seems to expect change, stretching prewar categories of people to fit a variety of situations. Charles Taylor might classify this type of social imaginary as “embedded,” one that implies “the inability to imagine oneself outside a certain matrix.”25 Here, I find it instructive to reverse Taylor’s formulation, thinking of this particular embedded social imaginary as conferring the ability to imagine oneself as a part of a kin matrix— even when reflecting on violent events that led to one’s isolation. A challenge to this eygene imaginary arises within the Yiddish-language Lithuanian testimonies from those strongly informed by formal ideology, communism especially. While also very much oriented toward the collective, these communist witnesses prioritize their like-minded brethren above the extended family or geographic matrix. Testimonies of selfdeclared communist believers are also structured differently from others produced in their ecology: Rather than telling of incremental social adjustments, they speak of youthful enlightenment, followed by sharp disappointment. While some witnesses manage to combine eygene with ideology in narrative, others dramatize a conflict between belonging that is based on political doctrine and that which is based on implicit, local practice.

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Doba Rozenberg: Family Replacements in a Stable Frame Doba Rozenberg, born in Yurberik (Jurbarkas) in 1928 and interviewed by the Shoah Foundation in 1996, introduces herself by declaring, “I myself am a Yurberiker.”26 The statement places her immediately within a network of people, connected by a common site of origin. The Yurberik Jewish community was largely destroyed in the first months after the German invasion: Most of its approximately two thousand members were brutally killed in and around the township between July 3 and September 8, 1941.27 In Bauer’s terms, this is a shtetl that “died.” Yet, this place name is still Doba’s most informative way to present herself today. Since just uttering the word “Yurberiker” is supposed to speak volumes about her prewar context, she enumerates little about this place and time. What she does depict is panoramic: a common meeting spot called “TelAviv Park,” various Jewish schools, professions. She introduces her immediate family amid this shtetl portrait. To summarize what was good about her original state of being, Doba repeats the name of her town, and, thrice over, her connection to an expansive network of kin: “I lived in Yurberik with a good family [familie] with relatives [fraynt], aunts and uncles.” She imagines self-genesis not through emotional reconstruction, sensation, experience pictures, or individual bonds, but through this idea of a local network. Doba narrates the first days of war as they affected the “Yurberiker” collectively. She reports on the fate of a broad cast of characters, telling what happened to “people,” to “men,” to “women,” and to a list of named individuals, such as “my mother’s brother, Uncle Faivel” and “my father’s brother, Uncle Max.” Doba spreads her narrative focus among many Yurberiker, but does in fact take special care when speaking about her parents. Doba is brought to tears when she recounts her father shouting, “Watch out for yourselves! Look after one another,” as he was caught and led away from their house in an early roundup of the town’s Jewish men, likely on July 3, when the gestapo and local policemen gathered and shot approximately 350 Jews in the town’s cemetery. However, following her father’s capture, her narrative quickly progresses. Doba tells that she and her mother found shelter in the house of someone she describes as “the neighbor, my mother’s cousin’s husband—Abe Vailes.” Rather than

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delving into her reaction to the loss of her father, she shifts emphasis onto this relationship. Doba performs a similar shift in focus immediately after recounting the capture of her mother, who was also dragged away from their home by locals. Having been knocked unconscious at the moment her mother was taken, Doba returns to this same household of neighboring family members: “I woke up when I was already at the Vailes’s, with Henie [ba henien] at her house, my mother’s cousin, with her kids. Of course I screamed and cried and they all comforted me.” These relatives quickly assume parentlike responsibility for her, planning where they should all go and how they might best survive. Doba describes this surrogate family arrangement as natural, consistent with their original state of being: “Of course, this Mira-Melne [Henie’s daughter] and my mother were like sisters. We were like one family.” Her acceptance and justification of this new family arrangement stands in contrast to the various reactions that we noted among American witnesses, who addressed surrogate parents with disappointment or humorous discomfort. Using intricate family-community connections, which Doba explains on the recording, Doba’s new caretaker then moves part of their kin cluster into the Kovna ghetto. Upon their arrival, Doba depicts a new iteration of her eygene collective: “The first one that saw us was Vere-Pesie. This is my father’s mother, a Yurberiker. She hugged us and asked us immediately what happened in Yurberik. She immediately went to let my grandma and aunt know.” These Yurberiker that have survived the initial shtetl violence thus reconstitute themselves as a group in another location. Doba depicts their meeting in the Kovna ghetto: “They gathered around us right away and asked what happened in the provinces.” Through their shared concern for Yurberik, Doba finds her people in a new setting. That is, while Yurberik remains a fixed place on the map, “being a Yurberike” is an activity that is portable, a strategy that Doba uses fluidly in new situations. Her source of support at this time is not a formal communal or political organization, such as the Judenrat, or a youth movement or a resistance organization, but people with some kind of unspoken obligation toward her. Doba, her aunt, and cousin initially find shelter with her

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grandmother in a school building. She recounts, “We didn’t stay there for long because one of the Yurberiker came to help us.” Shifting from place to place, Doba details the name of the person who helped her each time, sometimes the address where they lived, and with whom she shared a bed in each locale. This list of named individuals grows rapidly. Within two minutes of ghetto narration, Doba introduces “Sore,” “Brayne,” “HaRov [Rabbi] Montzer,” “Yoshe Lifshitz,” and “Khaye Rive.” She expects the listener to follow these characters’ names and take an interest in each one’s fate. A visual indication of Doba’s tendency to name names appears in her “Pre-Interview Questionnaire,” a two-page form, on which the interviewer is supposed to note basic informational points gleaned first before and then after the interview. In Doba’s case, the interviewer needed to supplement an extra sheet of paper to the form in order to list all the people mentioned over the course of her testimony.28 This inclusive narrative scope does not make Doba’s testimony more upbeat but requires her to report on the violent deaths of more individuals. Speaking of the Groyse Aktsie (Big Action) of October 29, 1941, Doba tells how she, her grandmother, and aunt survived the selection, but that a little girl, “Avivale,” was taken away. Doba has only introduced Avivale into her narrative moments before, identifying this girl as her cousin’s daughter. Despite the brevity of their relationship, Doba recalls their separation emotionally: “I didn’t want to go because this child, Avivale, was to me like a—How should I say it? I loved her very much and she loved me. I can still feel her little hands ripped away from me [starts to cry]. We parted and I went away with my aunt.” This is one of the few moments that Doba speaks of love (hobn holt) throughout the whole testimony. Even with pronounced breaks in her circle of belonging, the overall framework of eygene adjusts and continues to organize her social interactions. One way in which Doba performs this conceptual adjustment, this pragmatic stretching of the eygene category, is by loosening her geographic criteria of identification. While she was in Kovna, Doba considered herself a Yurberiker. But in October 1943 Doba is taken even farther away, selected for transfer to the Estonian work camp Ereda. Once in Ereda, part of the Vaivara network, Doba begins to speak of herself as a Kovner. Treating this identity adjustment as common sense, she says quite simply, “We all stuck together, the Kovner.” When she is taken

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to Stutthof about a year later, farther still from her site of origin, Doba bonds with the individual Kovner women in her midst: “We all stuck together. It was Mrs. [froy] Shapiro, Mrs. Karnovishsky with her daughter Malka Gempel.” Adding several other names to this new list of improvised eygene from Stutthof, Doba elevates these women to the level of protagonists.29 Doba keeps these names in her story through the Death March, their liberation in the town of Chinow (Chynowie), roughly 120 kilometers west of Stutthof, and postwar travels in Poland. For instance, she foregrounds the process through which Malka Gempel found work as a seamstress in Warsaw in the months following liberation. Doba relates that, at this moment, Malka, Sorele Fraynt, and her daughter Chayale made the decision to move to Israel. The named individuals thus serve as more than a chorus of helpful allies; Doba relies on their stories to tell hers. The eygene is flexible, but it is not boundless. All members of the eygene are most certainly Jewish, but not all Jews or Jewish inmates can or do enter her circle. While Doba’s tendency to name names spreads attention beyond her individual story, it also delimits the borders of her circle. The eygene can exclude. She specifies, for example, that prisoners arrived to Stutthof from Romania. But she quickly qualifies: “They stayed separate [apart].” Likewise, she was briefly sheltered by Polish Jews in Warsaw after liberation. Here she swiftly disclaims, “But they were not acquaintances [bakante].” Though Doba imagines her social circle shifting in its composition, each version has its confines, which she presents as both unofficial and self-evident. This holds true in postwar Lithuania as well. She depicts the country as a desolate place, in which Jewish survivors regroup, according to some new application of old ideas. Doba recounts her arrival at the train station: “We arrived in Vilna. The Vilner came and started to ask if maybe some of their eygene were there. They gave us a place to sleep. We stayed there a few days.” Doba seems to know “the Vilner” well enough to understand what kind of people they are looking for—and that she is not exactly one of them. These Vilner are close enough to a Yurberiker/ Kovner like Doba to offer her several days’ hospitality. But there is no expectation that they will offer her a permanent home. Doba continues on her journey, traveling by train to Kovna, where she encounters a similar

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scene at the station: “Again, by the train, there stood people [mentshn]. Maybe their eygene had arrived.” This time, Doba finds Mrs. Shapiro and her daughter, whom she had met in Stutthof and who are almost eygene. Doba and her aunt accept their hospitality for several weeks. Subtly shifting her circle of belonging back toward its point of origin, Doba then returns to Yurberik. “We heard that there are a couple of Jews in Yurberik. Nu, we have to go there. . . . We’ll go see our house and we’ll go to the graves.” There she finds Abe Vailes, the neighbor and “mother’s cousin’s husband” whom she’d mentioned after her parents’ capture. In recalling her encounter with Abe, her phrasing conveys homecoming and closure: “Abe spotted me like his own [eygen] child. He took me in [genumen tsu zikh] right away.” And later: “Abe kept me like his own [eygen] child.” Though their original houses were left standing, Abe and Doba are unable to retrieve them from their new residents. Abe and Doba reconstitute a household in Šiaudine˙, a town just 2.5 miles from Yurberik. Doba lives there with Abe until her wedding in 1946. The man she chose to marry, Doba hastens to mention, is “also a Yurberiker,” a title that still remains applicable in the present tense. She has a daughter who lives in Israel and a son in Vilna. She identifies the families they married into by, again, citing microgeographic origin: “My daughter-in-law is from Zarasai [Eastern Lithuanian town].” Thus, in her postwar and current state of being, Doba depicts herself embedded in the same kind of group in which she began her story. It is not that Doba’s family story is one of resilience whereas the testimonies from the English-American corpus focus on loss. Doba also depicts postwar life as incomplete; she emphasizes that over a year passed before she was strong enough to leave Abe’s house on her own. While most members of her original group have been destroyed, the criteria that enable people to connect remain alive. Her family story is thus one of suffering and loss, but not of catastrophe, in the sense of a rift in meaning. Who Is Among the Eygene? In the eygene imagining of the Jewish body politic, it is circumstance that binds people together, rather than emotion or ideology. As in Doba’s testimony, the circumstance of geographic origin often plays a central role. The imprint of this first locale remains effective long af-

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ter people have left the site, as a technology for positioning oneself and one’s narrative in relation to others. For instance, Khatzkel Zak, from the northern town of Shukian (Šaukienai)30, spent the first two years of the war alone, having escaped into the woods from the Zhager (Žagare˙) massacre of October 1941, in which most of his family and community members were shot.31 Moving solo between houses of non-Jews in the area, dodging capture, Khatzkel nonetheless incorporates people from his regional network into this portion of his narrative. He halts the station-by-station account of his hiding to insert: “The Lithuanians took in Kelmer girls and Shukianer. I can tell you their names: Itele Boys, Libe Melts. I can tell you who the sisters were from Kelm: Dveyre Mikhl and Libe Milshits.” He explains why these people are important, why their names deserve this long pause, by stating where they are from: original geographic proximity translates into social proximity, even at this moment of isolation. Some witnesses incorporate coworkers or trainees into their close circle. Fania Ioneson, for example, blurs the physical borders between familial and professional life in prewar memories.32 She describes the small Slobodke (Vilijampole˙) apartment in which she grew up as having included a kitchen where her father ran a shoemaking workshop and in which the workers sometimes slept overnight. She likewise dedicates extensive discussion to the professional training that she and her brothers received in tailoring. Much of what we learn about her prewar life relates to work and work friendships. These kinds of connections continue to remain important to her after the war. Wandering alone through the streets of Vilna in 1945, one of her first instincts is to look for tailors. Fania recognizes a certain man on the street and approaches him. She asks, “‘Are you a tailor?’ He answers, ‘Yeah.’” The two speak and discover loose prewar connections. Sorting through her family’s work history, this man understands who Fania is and helps her navigate the city. Another venue through which witnesses in the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology define their original eygene networks is through schooling. This option seems especially important when reconstructing urban Jewish life in the three major cities of Kovna, Vilna, and Shavl. Fania B., who was still involved in educational projects when I interviewed her in Vilna in 2005, was one of several who offered testimony both to me and to the Shoah Foundation. In both interviews, she spends nearly an hour of her

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testimony describing her prewar education in the Sofia Gurevitch School and Real Gymnasium.33 She names and characterizes a vast ensemble of people from this chapter of her life— close to twenty different teachers. These names appear repeatedly throughout both of her testimonies, and her portrayals of these individuals stretch across chronological boundaries. In describing her Latin teacher, Berke Grossman, whom the pupils had tellingly nicknamed “The Snake,” Fania goes into detail about the teacher’s Bialystok accent and her shabby wardrobe. Then, to complete her portrait of Grossman, Fania skips to the ghetto period, relating that she and a number of her classmates worked together to bring food to their former teachers, Grossman included: Our teachers lived together, suffering from hunger. [. . .] Whoever could spare a potato or a handful of grain brought it to the teachers. I was the one that brought [the food] to Grossman. She said, “For me? You even brought food to ‘The Snake?’” She survived, but unfortunately without a family. She became a Yiddish teacher in Łódz´. She had made herself younger on her Polish papers, and so she couldn’t retire until sixty-five. She came to Vilna to visit, and we gave her a big party on Ontokel Street. Beyond Fania’s self-portrayal as a dedicated public activist, this segment is important formally: the presentation of this episode from the ghetto, followed by the postwar fate, breaks up Fania’s personal chronological development. It is as if Fania allows Grossman’s story to bend the structure of her own. In this sense, her lengthy depictions of schoolteachers do more than reflect her reverence for a certain set of values drawn from a specific cultural and political milieu in interwar Vilna: She needs this milieu to remember what happened, embedding herself in the stories of others, even on the level of narrative order. Belonging seems at first to be a matter of inertia in these witnesses’ imaginings—be it through one’s original neighborhood, profession, or school network. But, upon closer examination, we see that the idea of eygene accumulates meaning when remembering the Holocaust and its aftermath. Witnesses introduce shared camp experiences as a new criterion for eygene. For example, Meri Gotler, orphaned in the first months of the war, lived in a Jewish children’s home in the years immediately following

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liberation.34 When she reached the age of fourteen, she was told she had to leave the children’s home and move into a Lithuanian trade school. Meri rejected this option. As she recalls, “I told them, I didn’t want to go to the trade school. I want to be with eygene.” The people that take her in, “like eygene,” are Klara Chenauskiene and her husband, whom Meri had met at the Palemon (Palemonas) work camp. Earlier in her testimony, when Meri told of her experience in this camp, she made only passing mention of Klara. Now, in the midst of recounting the postwar years, Meri circles back chronologically in order to detail the genesis of their acquaintance. She reembeds her story into theirs, now giving credence to their relationship, as if she had known them from childhood. In rendering the couple proper surrogate parents, Meri stretches her idea of origin— rewriting it, almost imperceptibly, as her narrative proceeds—fitting her prewar sensibility around Holocaust experiences. Allowing Silence about Parents In defining this fluid yet limited network of belonging, whether through geography, profession, or Holocaust experience, some witnesses detract emphasis from their nuclear families. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius, for example, repeatedly omits basic information on the whereabouts of his parents, focusing his attention instead on describing material conditions around him—number of hours worked, conditions in bunks, grams of bread, and the like.35 In telling of his transfer from the Kovna ghetto to the Ereda work camp in Estonia, he simply ceases to mention his mother. Minutes later, the interviewer asks, “Were you with your mother as well?” Ishaiyahu answers, “No, my mother ended up in another camp, Vaivara” without ever sharing details about this separation. The interviewer lets it go. This contrasts the way that conversations about parental loss proceed in the testimonies of American witnesses like Suzanne H., Ivar S., or Ellen Zitkin. Another Yiddish-speaking witness, Chaim Siniuk, relates the death of his father in a similar manner.36 As Chaim offers a bird’s-eye view of the Groyse Aktsie in Kovna, the interviewer inserts, “And your father?” The witness responds, “They shot my father in the Seventh Fort,” coughs, and continues with his previous stream of narration. If these understated reports of family death present a type of traumatic silence, it is one that

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does not interest participants in this ecology. With the collective social sphere animated in the foreground, the listener does not await a larger exploration of parental loss and its aftereffects. The topic is absent, rather than lacking. The understated topic appears as a narrative hole only when we set these testimonies in comparison to those from other settings. The embedding of the nuclear family in a wider social context may allow for brevity or understatement with regard to family loss, but it does not necessitate this reserve. Meri Gotler, for example, calls into focus the day of the Groyse Aktsie in Kovna, when her mother was taken away. She depicts herself alone the following night: I cry and cry and this is how I fall asleep. In the morning I hear footsteps. I cry out, “Mommy! My mom is coming.” I look up and here comes Simkhe with my sister. She says to me “Merele, we don’t have a mother anymore. We don’t have anyone.” Meri focalizes this loss in a manner that recalls testimonies discussed in the American cluster, especially in the way that she reenacts her own unanswered childish cry. But rather than exploring the subsequent imprint of the moment on her psyche with a phrase like “I will never forget,” Meri stays within the external space of the current scene. She also mentions a neighbor-friend, Simkhe, at this moment, allowing some attention to escape toward the nonfamilial world. As her testimony progresses, Meri recounts multiple kin replacements, and this painful scene does not appear as a clear center of the testimony. Differing from her peers in the way she emphasizes her mother’s capture, one can hear Meri’s story in conversation with theirs, pulling in the eygene imaginary from a different angle. Putting the Party before Neighbors There are witnesses in this setting who opt out of the eygene framework and instead remember solidarity through an ideological prism. The centrality of political youth culture in interwar Eastern Europe is well-known: Political enlightenment, coinciding with generational upheaval, is a common theme in the Jewish youth autobiographies that were submitted to the YIVO research institute in Vilna in the 1930s.37 As Samuel Kassow aptly puts it, “In Jewish Poland political parties were a second family.”38 Taking Kassow’s metaphor perhaps further than he intended, some survivors speak of their interwar political parties as their first family,

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as their primary base of kinlike relations. To the extent that ideologies formalize and theorize rules for solidarity, they differ from the circumstantial bonds so valued in the eygene, in the Yiddish testimonies discussed so far. There were a wide range of political options available to Lithuanian Jews before World War II, with some of them veering away from traditional Jewish-geographic belonging more than others. While Zionist sociality will become the focus of the next section of this chapter, when we turn to Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies, the antitraditional ideology that appears most relevant in the Yiddish-Lithuanian corpus, the one that poses the most direct challenge to the eygene paradigm is communism.39 Two witnesses, Rive S.40 and Meishe Geguzhinskis,41 organize their Holocaust testimonies around their ongoing allegiance to this belief system. Their narratives begin in a manner very similar to Soviet autobiographical texts of the 1920s and 1930s—in which young men and women wrote of political enlightenment as a process of self-realization. In this autobiographical mode, molding oneself according to the communist ideal required transcending the circumstances of birth to become a new kind of person.42 In remembering prewar years, Rive and Meishe depict coming-of-age within this autobiographical template. They recall themselves explicitly rejecting the eygene model of Jewish belonging in favor of political brotherhood. Midway through their testimonies, however, these witnesses begin to show holes in their language of idealism, specifically when relating their own ethnic persecution.43 Both Rive and Meishe amplify the conflict between ethnicity and idealism by electing to testify in Yiddish, rather than in Russian or Lithuanian. They position themselves in a Jewish voice from the start, yet commit to a communist-universalist narrative genre. Rive, born in Kovna in 1914, gave testimony to me over the course of several meetings in the same city in 2005. At the very start of the process, she becomes impatient with my questions about her childhood neighborhood, which I had formulated based on other interviews I had conducted in this environment. She interjects, “It was very hard for us. It was Smetona’s time. Now we’re supposed to say that it was the best time to live. But that’s not true.” Openly changing the terms of discussion, she pushes her origin story out of the eygene milieu and locates her childhood in a political climate. She does not reconstruct her earliest memories in relation to a group of relatives and friends, but to a government system,

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an officially demarcated period of national history and a public commemorative trend. Antanas Smetona, president of Lithuania from 1926 to 1940, has long received a positive portrayal in Jewish memory, especially when set in comparison to his far-right nationalist rival, Augustinas Voldemaras.44 Beyond criticizing the Smetona regime specifically, Rive rejects the selection of prewar life as a fitting measure for the social good. Dismissive of “origin” as a source of identity, she claims to have been born into a deeply flawed situation that needed repair from the start. Rive immediately plants the expectation of drastic change and transformation. Describing her parents only briefly, Rive moves her focus toward the educational, then the political realms: “Our folkshul was very progressive with very good teachers. The teachers were like mothers to the children.”45 Rive recalls that she was forced to terminate her studies midway through high school in order to earn wages as a seamstress. But, unlike eygene narrators, Rive does not dwell on coworkers as a kind of second family. After tolerating several of my questions about informal relationships in the work space, Rive interrupts again: And then there was public life. Different Jewish organizations on the street. You know, most were Zionist organizations, right and left. Hashoymer Hatzair [Hashomer Hatza‘ir] was a left organization. But there was also more activity. The rest of the activity was illegal. Children from our school went into the Pioneers, which was forbidden by the government. We used to meet outside the city and sing revolutionary songs and learn about how a revolutionary struggle is carried out [vi iz aroys a revolutsionerer kamf ]. Rive defines “we” as the youth who, like her, illegally joined the Communist youth movement, the Pioneers. She renders their activities earnest revolutionary training, incorporating doctrinal language into her own voice, most notably in her repeated reference to “revolution” and “struggle.” Rive sets her particular political “we” apart from parallel groups of Jewish youth in Kovna, namely Zionists. Rive does not simply add politics to the list of criteria for friends or family, or stretch the concept of “Kovner” to include newcomers: She places ideological allegiance in conflict with the circumstantial ties of geography or ethnicity. Rive goes on to tell how she met and married her husband in 1940, the year that the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania. She notes that they had

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both attended the same elementary school, from which many children became Pioneers. She describes him not as a Kovner or as a Jew, but as a “simple worker,” a term connoting moral value in Communist parlance. Their wedding took place in the registrar’s office without a khupah (Jewish wedding canopy). She specifies: “We were against religion, fullfledged religion. Because religion, this is an opiate for the masses.” Again through a direct quotation of Marxian language, Rive asserts that she had rewritten the rules of kin-making according to a new ideal, even in the intimate sphere of marriage. In narrating the war years, however, Rive begins to undermine the very social categories that she has so purposefully established up until now. At this point in her testimony, the autobiographical genre of a Communist political enlightenment fails to help her tell her story. She recounts the events of June 1941: The nationalists immediately put on their white bands [Garb worn by the Lithuanian Activists Front (LAF)] and started terrorizing the Jews. The first thing that the bandits did was to go into Slobodke.46 There they hung up the head of a rabbi in a window, so that we could all see what is going on. Whereas only moments ago, Rive pronounced opposition to Jewish religious practice, here she depicts the violent slaughter of a rabbi as an offense to “us,” a group that now includes her. Not only does Rive bring herself closer to the Jewish “we” when narrating the outbreak of war, she also distances herself from the political, ideological one. She mocks Soviet power at this moment saying, “The Soviets proclaimed that they are stronger than everyone. No one will ever defeat them. And when the war will break out, they will overcome the enemy and we will come right back [emphasis added].” Rive relocates her “we” outside the political sphere and repudiates the very same official language she earlier incorporated as her own. Creating even further distance between herself and Soviet power, she then refers to the Soviet government as “Russia,” saying, “We got to the border of Russia and Russia did not want to let us [the Jewish refugees] in.” Throughout this back and forth between “we” the Communists and “we” the Jews, Rive speaks very little of her own biological kin. She mentions only in passing that she was in advanced pregnancy while fleeing

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Lithuania into the deep Russian interior. It is only in brief, stark terms that she tells of her daughter’s birth in the small town of Nagorsk, in the Volga region of Russia, where she found refuge in the fall of 1941. “We were in the hospital and it was a very hard birth.” Her brother receives brief mention as having helped her move between train cars while fleeing. Rive describes her husband’s heroic service in the Red Army. Rive’s sister, also in Nagorsk, worked to support Rive and her newborn baby in her husband’s absence. Overall, she presents her nuclear family as an assumed presence during the war, but not the primary framework through which events unfold. As Rive tells of the war and postwar periods, she continues to oscillate between different ideas of “we”—an ethnic and an ideological one. Upon return to Lithuania from Nagorsk, she and her daughter find shelter in a Jewish children’s home, finding their first rehabilitative social circle in this Jewish environment. Further reinforcing her loyalty to an ethnic collective over and against an ideological one, she complains bitterly about “our Soviet government” closing down all Jewish institutions, a change that forced her and her daughter to leave the children’s home. On the other hand, Rive speaks proudly about her and her husband’s membership in the Communist Party in the postwar decades. While other witnesses present party membership as a pragmatic choice, one that allowed for a better career,47 Rive explains that, “No one forced anyone to join. We joined on our own because we believe that the only thing on the side of justice was the Communist Party.” Rive states her belief in the present tense. Indeed, she never denounces her ideological commitment, nor does she resolve its contradictions. Instead, she shows discomfort with all potential paths to solidarity. This sense of ongoing conflict in social placement stands in contrast to the fluid quality of the eygene narratives, in which witnesses adapt the same type of solidarity to a wide variety of situations. Rive’s social vocabulary, so neatly articulated early in life, does not allow for improvisation and stretching in the manner of the eygene. Meishe Geguzhinskis, who testified to the Shoah Foundation in Vilna in 1996, presents a similar challenge to local Jewish categories of belonging. Like Rive, he does not introduce himself by telling where he is from, but by saying, “I had a tragic and embattled [kemferishn] life.” In striking this literary, abstract key, he removes his testimony from the community

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chronicle and asks his listener to evaluate his story against the revolutionary ideal of struggle and transformation. Offering only a short bit of neighborhood description, Meishe narrates a tightly woven progression of events that carries him toward political enlightenment. Transferring between schools, Meishe builds up to an epiphany, which he reaches in 1939, when he was forced to drop out of school and work in a leather factory to earn wages. He proclaims, “I began to understand the life of a working man. It was a hard one in Lithuania at the time.” He joined the Komyug (Yiddish for Komsomol), the Communist youth organization that was underground at the time. Meishe tells of the Jewish youth embracing the arrival of the Red Army in 1940 and his involvement with a group of agitators, who went from door to door in Jewish neighborhoods promising a better life through Soviet leadership. Soon after he has found this political fraternity, however, Meishe begins to point out its problems. Meishe’s activism helps him to gain a position as the manager (farvalter) of a state-owned grocery store. Young and inexperienced in managerial work, Meishe recounts humiliating failure in this task, which leads to his expulsion from the Komyug. Meishe overcomes this expulsion only though the help of a Jewish neighbor, Dodik Klavin, who secures him an apprenticeship position in a factory. In relating this episode, Meishe sets up a drama between political membership in the Komyug and the eygene, the Jewish neighborhood network that comes to his aid. Though momentarily granting the eygene network the upper hand—the man who saved him was “just” a neighbor with no political credentials—Meishe then returns his narrative to its ideological track. He describes the factory in which he found new work as a space of ideal proletariat belonging: “The whole job was to my liking. I was able to improve my material situation.” Meishe repeatedly brings these two kinds of sociality into conflict, most notably when narrating the outbreak of World War II. He sets the scene for this critical moment in the factory: “I came happily to work and saw a Mayakovsky declaration on the wall. The director was a lover of literature. Working in the workshop, it started by day. We went out and heard bombs falling.” The bombing interrupts this ideologically harmonious space, in which doctrine and practice, text and action, coincide perfectly. Meishe tries to respond to the upset in a fitting political manner. His first

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instinct is to “grab a shovel” and start digging trenches in defense against the oncoming German forces. In what follows, Meishe uses “we” most ambivalently: “We understood that the war had broken out. We didn’t know that the war would bring such great misfortune on us. We thought that we would be able to help defend ourselves from fascism and quickly end the war.” Meishe’s “we” slips between the trench-digging Communists by his side, and the “we” of Jewish victims, on whom “the great misfortune” was about to befall. But Meishe does not keep his narrative “we” ambiguous and fluid for long. He bluntly reveals how these two collective allegiances come into conflict and cannot so easily co-govern his autobiographical voice. In the midst of digging, one of the leaders sends Meishe out on a bicycle to a bakery. He is instructed to bring back eight loaves of bread for the activists at work. On his way home, Meishe decides to visit his family. “In our house sat my father and brother, who were also hungry. My mother said, ‘Maybe you’ll leave us at least one loaf of bread.’ I said, ‘No. I can’t do it. This is for the workers.’ I refused.” Though the scene does not exactly offer a flattering self-portrayal, Meishe nonetheless prominently includes this episode. He shows the toll his ideological devotion took on familial love. Nonetheless, the war does not neutralize Meishe’s Communist ambitions. Meishe portrays himself returning to the political realm time and again, only to reveal problems with his membership in it. The very sense of narratological discomfort in Rive’s and Meishe’s testimonies is important: Their Communist idealism does not align easily with memories of suffering as Jews, among Jewish victims. On the other hand, their idealism gives them a language of self-critique, an expectation of progress through which to express disappointment. Both witnesses seem equally committed to telling how they transcended ethnicity through political enlightenment and then to confessing how this transcendence was stifled. Moreover, these two testimonies sharpen our vision of the eygene social framework against which these witnesses seem to argue. While I have noted places where Meishe and Rive implicitly criticize Jewish-neighborhood talk as petty and backward, one can also detect the reverse: criticism of political zealots among eygene narrators. Getsel K., from Utyan (Utene˙), whom I interviewed in Vilna in 2004, looks back at youthful political fancies with noticeable cynicism.48 He laughs as he belts

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out the anthem of Beitar, a right-wing Zionist party: “Zhabotinski zol zayn undzer firer! [Jabotinsky should be our leader!]” He joined Beitar on a whim in 1939 but dropped out after a week, since he did not enjoy a weekend retreat with the group: “It’s a good thing I left [Beitar],” he tells, “because then the Soviets came and I joined the Komsomol.”49 At the outbreak of war, Getsel fled to Russia with other Komsomol members. But he does not credit the party with his escape. He sheds all political titles when explaining who fled and why: “A lot of Utyaner ran, and Kovner. A lot of Kovner Jews ran. Whoever did not wait, whoever left right away, made it.” Getsel treats political alliances as chance, fleeting, external to one’s real identity, whereas he uses “Utyaner” and “Kovner” as categories of belonging that remain meaningful under pressure. Viewed reductively, eygene narration could be defined simply as “groupist,”50 and placed in contrast to the various personal-familial orientations found among the English-language American testimonies. But the testimonies of dedicated Communists from this same ecology demonstrate that there are very different kinds of group lenses. The distinction lies not only in the selection of people who are considered “we,” but in the modality through which this group is defined: An eygene outlook relies on implicit and subtly flexible social codes to stake out its boundaries, while communist ideology defines belonging through a doctrinal ideal, externally articulated in writing (recall Rive’s incessant Marxist quotations or Meishe’s mention of Mayakovsky’s declaration on the factory wall). Thus, Rive and Meishe stand out from other witnesses in their environment not because of their specific beliefs, but because of the way that they believe—placing ideas over circumstance in defining their social expectations.

Love in the Family-Nation, Hebrew-Israeli Testimony The formalized, politicized social sensibility, alive in communist narratives of the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology, emerges in a different form among the Hebrew-language Israeli witnesses.51 In this setting, an ideological sensibility shapes testimonies of a greater range of witnesses, including those who do not profess any particular political commitments or recall political activism as part of their stories. A Zionist framework

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appears more osmotically, a matter of biographical lingua franca that may or may not take the form of explicit ideological reflections. In terms of social subject matter, this means that many witnesses emphasize youthmovement membership, school activities, and, following World War II, aliyah (immigration to Israel) groups and underground military membership. Neighbors, extended family, and geographic bonds—the protagonists of the eygene Yiddish framework—appear only in the shadows. As in many testimonies from the English-speaking American ecology, there is often a very clear center to Hebrew-Israeli testimonies, a sharp turning point when social life changes forever. Set within an Israeli conversation, this temporal rupture presents a distinct challenge to narrators: how to show social reinvention that is both revolutionary and loyal to tradition. Ideology is supposed to work with the family and the Jewish “we” rather than against it. In terms of the family plot, the youthful protagonists should ideally honor older generations even while leaving them behind. Some witnesses solve this double bind with smooth, almost ceremonial intergenerational scenes. Others leave the problem unsolved or work around it. Looking closely at mother figures helps unpack this tension and shows a plurality of narrative solutions. Kalman Perk: Passing the Torch as Family Story The testimony of Kalman Perk, born in Kovna in 1930, has been archived and contextualized in a manner different from the testimonies discussed thus far.52 On the Yad Vashem YouTube channel, it appears as one of the introductory testimonies, with excerpts edited and set to music.53 Part of what makes Kalman’s testimony appropriate for this elevated media role is its tight coordination between family and national history. Indeed, Kalman offers a narrative progression so cohesive, it is thoroughly understandable in the recording, despite the fact that the first tapes were deleted from the record, apparently resulting from a technical error. The testimony available to us begins in media res, when Kalman is midway through narrating the ghetto period. Though we never hear about prewar life directly, his later segments allow us to infer it. He refers back frequently to his prewar Zionist upbringing, his Hebrew-language gymnasium, and his general political engagement. Late in the testimony, for instance, he inserts, “I don’t remember if I told you, but I came from a house that was half Beitar, half Hashomer Hatza‘ir. So, I went with

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Beitar.” These references allow the viewer to understand his concept of social origin, even retroactively. The recording that has been preserved begins in the spring of 1944 in the Kovna ghetto. Kalman characterizes a communal mood at the time: “In general, everyone was depressed.” Narrating the emotional state of “everyone,” Kalman imagines all the Jewish ghetto inhabitants connected through a kind of shared morale or national psychology.54 To explain why “everyone was depressed,” Kalman mentions the shared knowledge of the nearby Vilna ghetto’s liquidation half a year earlier, the shock of the Kovna Kinder Akstie (Children’s Action, March 27, 1944)55 as well as his own sister’s departure from the family. He locates events of the ghetto at large and of his family in particular on the same level of impact, together defining the group mood. Under these circumstances, Kalman recounts that the ghetto received orders to gather on the central square, a sure sign of deportation. Even in such an ominous situation, Kalman remembers a scene of youthful sanguinity in the Zionist spirit: “[People] went down to the basements and I ran to a friend of mine and we had fun together.” Prioritizing this peer relationship, Kalman depicts it as easy and natural for him to leave his immediate family in a time of danger. Kalman is careful to point out that this friend studied with him in the Shvabes Hebrew gymnasium56 and that they maintained their custom to speak Hebrew together. He remembers political identity and its accompanying language praxis as having remained alive, meaningful, even during crisis. Going on with the same scene, Kalman recalls that two girls joined them: “I remember that we hugged and kissed and rolled down the hill together, even though . . . [witness’s pause]. It was a kind of parting ceremony.” Aside from downplaying older family members and religious Jewish social mores, the scene conveys a specific message about sociality in the Holocaust: He and his peers are autonomous, agentive, keeping their revolutionary spirit alive. Instead of reaching out to increasingly distant rings of neighbors and almost-family, bending with changes as would an eygene narrator amid the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology, he emphasizes social maintenance, relationships that remain above the oppressive circumstance. Kalman does not depict his social circle remaining intact forever. On the contrary, he draws attention to its rupture in a climactic scene of testimony—in a cattle car with his whole family on their way to Stutthof

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from the Kovna ghetto on July 8, 1944. Not incidentally, this is also the moment selected and edited for prominent display on Yad Vashem’s YouTube site. Kalman opens the scene by describing the collective calm in the cattle car. Amid this atmosphere, Kalman tells of repeated escape attempts. At first, one young man in the train car climbed up to the small, slit window, the only source of light and air in the space, and tried repeatedly to eject himself. But he could not fit his body through the small opening. Kalman then introduces his cousin Arke, the next to attempt this escape. And then came my cousin, who was a member of the underground. He was much more than a cousin to me. He was a brother. He also studied in Shvabes. Two or three classes above me. And he was a Zionist—second to none. [. . .] He was a little bit of a sickling all these years. Or, in addition, his mother really spoiled him and worried about him. He had a shaved head because they thought that it was healthier to go around without hair. So, in that way he was very weak, but very strong in character, and as a Zionist, and his Hebrew was really something else. Even amid this intense sequence of events, Kalman sees fit to pause the narrative in order to insert a lengthy character description of Arke, both as a Zionist and as kin, two highly connected categories in Kalman’s view. While admirable for his political spirit, Arke was physically weak, a flaw that Kalman attributes to him having been pampered by his mother, a member of the older generation who fits the “Polish mother” typology.57 Arke’s attempt at escape unfolds precisely according to the character map Kalman has just provided: Daring and bold in his soul, Arke does throw himself out the window. But flawed in body, held back by a faulty Diaspora upbringing, Arke jumps incorrectly and falls on his head. What goes awry in Arke’s case, both regarding his family background and his attempted escape, Kalman corrects with his own parallel story, which constitutes a major climax of the testimony: “I was fourteen at the time and very thin, like most people in the camps. And then my mother always said, ‘If someone will survive and tell people what happened here, that will be you.’ That gave me some courage.” He credits his Zionistspirited mother for enabling his risky leap. Kalman’s mother is not like

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Arke’s, whose excessive coddling weakened him and thus, implicitly, inhibited his survival. The witness goes on to tell that his grandfather, a representative of an even older generation, also supports his leap: “And my grandfather got involved and said that when I’m in Israel I should remember that [his] son is there, your uncle.” Next and last, Kalman’s father helps him execute the escape. Then my father, quietly, in his calm manner, said, “Yes. Come, I’ll lift you up.” I tried to pack myself in like my cousin with my head first. This I remember very well. He said, “No, Kalmanke, not with your head, with your legs.” Today, I understand that. . . . He lifted up my legs and at the moment I looked around. I wanted to get support. Nobody cried. A kiss or a hug or something? I don’t know what I was expecting. Kalman’s father gives him the proper physical instructions that allow him to survive the jump, showing the kind of bodily aptitude so valued in the Zionist ethos. He gives Kalman permission to both literally and figuratively leave the family and move on. The family resists embracing Kalman at this moment, redefining filial love as calm, tactical support. Kalman’s daring leap from the window closely fits one version of Zionist historical progress: a transfer of agency from older Eastern European Jewish society, which is sadly going to the extermination camp, to the young and the brave who are going to remake Jewish society in Eretz Yisrael. Most important to our discussion here is the manner in which Kalman uses family relations to dramatize the march of history and, conversely, employs broader ideological frameworks to remember his intimate family. It is precisely the kind of parental love that Kalman receives that allows him to make his escape successful. Likewise, his family’s supportive behavior demonstrates the integrity in his survival and move to Israel, proof that this shift, no matter how drastic, is nonetheless in confluence with the Jewish past. This moment marks a clear transition in Kalman’s testimony. After this scene, he ceases to remember himself as a member of the previous polity, the “we” that includes the ghetto, the family, and his school friends, and begins to speak of an independent struggle for survival. He describes wandering solo among the houses of peasants, knocking on strangers’

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doors, and introducing himself as a Lithuanian boy named Kaziukas, lost on a hiking trip with friends. He even relates having hitchhiked on a German Army jeep. Looking to understand this plucky behavior, the interviewer asks Kalman: i n t : Today, as a researcher, would you say that you [and your sister] both simply lack the fear gene [gen hapahad]? k a l m a n : No, no, no. We have it. This is about the will to live. The desire not to appear pathetic [nebekh] in someone else’s eyes. He reiterates slightly later, “We didn’t have fear because the evil was so great, so controlling.” Declining the interviewer’s psychogenetic terms, Kalman moves back to the idiom of group morale. Terminological distinctions aside, both participants agree on the importance of connecting Kalman’s individual mettle to the spirit of “we.” This exchange casts Kalman’s state of disembeddedness in a particular light: He is alone, having torn himself out of a certain context of belonging. But he interprets this individuation in terms of a shared Zionist ethos: He struggles solo for the sake of collective progress. Kalman’s period of lonely wandering continues for over a year after the war. In this search for a new kind of solidarity, Kalman seeks not the familiar but the like-minded. Having been taken in by a Jewish Red Army soldier and offered refuge in a boys’ school in the Soviet interior in August 1944, Kalman returns to liberated Kovna on his own several months later. There, Kalman encounters another orphaned boy from the city and then a distant relative who takes him under his roof. Among the Yiddish-Lithuanian narrators, such relations would have likely qualified as eygene, and the family story would come to closure at this point. But Kalman remembers that he was dissatisfied with these social arrangements and announces, “I am continuing my journey. I’m going to get to Israel.” Even having made aliyah, Kalman has several false starts with different underground movements and youth circles that appeared both ideologically and socially anemic to him. Only when he finally joins the underground organization Lehi does he feel he has found the right circle of belonging. Also known as the Stern Gang, the Lehi is considered one of the more radical underground movements in Mandate Palestine, known for having pursued violent resistance against British rule.58 Indeed, it is only at this level of political dedication that Kalman feels at home:

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What I liked about it was that it was a very small group. They made bonfire after bonfire until you got to know everyone. . . . It was comfortable for me there and it was comfortable for them to have me. They appointed me head of a youth group. Indeed, it is this moment, rather than his return to Kovna or even his arrival in Mandatory Palestine that allows him to rehabilitate his sense of social connection. Though not necessarily causally linked, it is right after Kalman joins the Lehi that he finds himself adjusting to the Hebrew gymnasium, where he makes friends, excels academically, and eventually meets his wife. Kalman’s testimony tells of a social reinvention, with the Holocaust as its causal center and the family-community continuum as its cast. Politics in the Family and Prewar Lithuania Very often highlighting the organizational texture of prewar life, witnesses in this ecology position themselves and their families in a variety of stances toward parties, movements, and formal cultural activity. Bat Sheva Levitan places herself, her biological family, and her whole town of Kelm within one circle of belonging, in which circumstantial and ideological solidarity happen to coincide.59 She introduces her father as an “enthusiastic Zionist [tsioni nilhav].” She echoes this phrase to describe her elementary schoolteachers, who were “so enthusiastic [ke’eile nilhavim], they gave us knowledge of Israel.” Parents and schoolteachers are described in similar ways, although it is the school system that moves into center stage. Bat Sheva tells of school recitals, parties, school-wide drills, and pedagogical techniques. These are the images that bring her to the conclusion: “I had a very happy childhood [yaldut me’usheret].” What is noteworthy here is not the sole fact that Bat Sheva imagines herself born into an original state of social harmony, but that she pictures this harmony in political terms, foregrounding youthful Zionist activity as the stuff of early happiness. Many witnesses in this corpus cannot or do not remember personally belonging to a Zionist movement before the war. There are still, nonetheless, methods of using this political ideal to shape their memories of family and solidarity. Shoshana Murchik relates that in her hometown of Mazheyk (Mažeikiai) there was a very “developed Jewish youth. . . . The

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Jewish youth was very Zionist.”60 Shoshana states openly that she personally did not participate in these activities. But she goes on, “My brother was very active in Beitar. He was older than me by eight years. He was an intelligent and talented young man. He would travel to meet with Zionist youth members in different towns. I was still little.” Abe, her brother, becomes a kind of narrative proxy or “relational self,”61 remaining the protagonist of her testimony up until his death in 1942. Shoshana simultaneously praises his personal qualities and his political activism, speaking in the voice of both an admiring younger sibling and a political trainee. As we saw repeatedly in the testimony of Kalman Perk, Shoshana creates a two-way comparison between biological and ideological kin: Her sibling relationship takes on elevated meaning through Abe’s political achievement, and political idealism is dramatized through the fraternal-sororal bond. Disembedding from and for the Group In his testimony, Kalman portrays himself detaching from his family members with their approval. By extension, this family approval also validates Kalman’s detachment from Eastern Europe. Through this staging, he casts his separation as an act that is at once revolutionary and loyal to generations past—a transvaluation that somehow allows old values to be expressed better. Loyal breakaway stories of this sort reappear throughout this corpus. Gideon Shub, born in Kovna in 1927 and raised in Kelm, prefigures elements of his own disembedding with stories he tells about his parents.62 He recalls that his father “was a yeshiva student until the age of sixteen. It seems that he got interested in Hebrew literature. He caught the Zionist bug. He left the yeshiva.” Disconnecting himself from the old religious order, Gideon’s father makes himself into a Hebrew activist bekohot ‘atsmi, “through his own efforts,” or more literally, “by virtue of his own strength.” Later, in speaking of the ghetto period, Gideon uses similar language when discussing his mother’s recovery from childbirth in the ghetto: “She pulled herself together [lak’ha et ‘atsma bayadaim (literally, “took herself into her own hands”)]. She did not have time to feel bad.” Through these two very different contexts, Gideon credits both his parents with willpower and independent agency. He casts the ability to “take oneself in one’s own hands,” to will oneself out of a situation as a family trait.

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This trait then resurfaces, fully realized, in Gideon’s description of his own actions during the war. Having been together with his family and his community in the Shavl ghetto up until the spring of 1944, he was separated from his mother and sisters at the entrance to Stutthof, on his way to Dachau. His isolation was finalized when his father, who was originally in the same work group as him at Dachau, collapsed on the job and died in the camp hospital. Left alone, Gideon then tells of a turning point: “After my father died, I decided that I needed to take myself into my own hands [sheyikah et ‘atsmi bayadaim].” He began to steal food, to break the rules, rather than follow the pack. Gideon repeats the very same expression he used earlier to describe his mother’s recovery after childbirth. Gideon’s personal reinvention and self-reliance also mirror his father’s rebellion: “Since my father died, I started to maneuver about [letamren]. I stopped being the good boy that does what he is told.” While narrating an assertion of independence, Gideon connects this individual transformation to his family tradition and to the Zionist ethos or national personality. As a useful point of comparison, Gideon mentions, “There were several people that were from our city [yotsei ha‘ir shelanu]. . . . They helped a bit.” That is, other people from his original geographic circle were present and helpful. But, far from the Yiddish eygene imaginary, Gideon assigns them little importance, crediting his survival primarily to his autonomous spirit. Likewise, his postwar rehabilitation process did not involve distant kin or neighborhood connections, but joint political action with like-minded youths. In 1947, he illegally immigrated to Palestine on the Lo Tafchidunu ship with Aliyah Bet, where he joined the Etsel military underground. He willfully funneled his autonomy and individual agency into the communal political project. Between “Polish Mothers” and Nation Builders In several of the Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies discussed thus far, mother figures dramatize an outdated, under-politicized, and weaker configuration of the Jewish body politic.63 Kalman casts his pampering aunt in such a light, stifling her son’s physical development with undue anxiety. Maternal protection also appears to stunt national progress in the testimony of Shoshana Murchik, who recounts, “My brother really wanted to move to Eretz Yisrael. But my mother was

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afraid.” Arguably, witnesses like Gideon Shub and Kalman Perk recreate national belonging in a specifically masculine manner, emphasizing the fraternity they found in military activity in the years leading up to statehood. Other witnesses, however, create less of a dichotomous tension between the aged-effeminate network of Eastern Europe and the young-male community that they build in Israel. Such witnesses, women in particular, recast qualities from the “Polish mother” typology to render their mothers both protective and heroic, supporting national reinvention through Old World child-rearing. Yocheved Aryeh describes herself as having been a “spoiled” child [mefuneket] in Vilna before the war.64 She never joined a youth movement of any sort because she was “not allowed to move from the house.” Rather than narrating a turning point, in which she breaks away from her mother’s care, Yocheved depicts them sticking together in the Vaivara work camp and later in Stutthof. In contrast to more organizational-communal outlooks on survival, Yocheved says that in general, “My mother was thinking how best to take care of me. We were busy thinking only about the family.” At the end of the war, on a forced march from Stutthof, Yocheved fell in the snow out of exhaustion. To detract attention from Yocheved’s fall, ordinarily punishable by death, her mother lured the SS guard into beating her instead. The testimony concludes with Yocheved displaying a picture of her mother, relating tearfully, “We lived together. She took care of me. She married me off. She never left me for one moment.” Speaking these words in a house in Jerusalem with a family of her own, Yocheved implies that her inclusion in the new Jewish state is thanks to this traditional maternal dedication. The motherly tendencies that appear stifling and backward in other testimonies become a part of Zionist progress in Yocheved’s rendering. The testimony of Luba Kaplanski provides a particularly interesting instance of combining the “Polish mother” type and a Zionist ethos.65 As discussed in the last chapter, Luba immigrated to Israel only in 1972 and speaks Hebrew with a limited vocabulary and a noticeable accent. In creating a story of belonging and family, she draws from a different repertoire of memories than do more veteran Israelis, especially those who credit their post-Holocaust recovery to military brotherhood and nationbuilding in the mid- to late 1940s. Luba and the interviewer both seem

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to make an effort to affirm Luba’s Zionist credentials on camera: They not only narrate her belated aliyah as part of the testimony, they also try to show how her story is, in the final analysis, wholly Israeli. Discussions of motherhood in the Holocaust emerge as essential in this affirmation process. In the first month of the war, Luba and her mother were driven out to the forest outside of Gerul (Geruliai) to be shot, along with other Jews from the Telz (Telšiai) region. Luba tells how her mother quietly bribed a Lithuanian man to release them from the shooting. The witness adds, at first casually, that her mother took along ten other girls when they escaped. The interviewer rephrases the event for Luba, highlighting the mother’s heroism: “So, ima [mom] simply saved the life of ten girls?” Luba concurs, repeating the phrase “Ima saved the life of ten girls.” Another, later conversation displays a similar cooperative process in highlighting the mother’s heroism. Discussing Luba’s forced labor for a Lithuanian farmer, the interviewer asks, “How did you deal with this emotionally [nafshit]? Did ima try to calm you down?” to which Luba replies, “Yes, she calmed me down. She said, ‘Don’t worry.’ My mother was a hero.” The act of a mother calming down a child becomes included under the rubric of heroism in this testimonial interaction. Toward the end of the testimony, the interviewer poses two questions by way of summarizing Luba’s life. Regarding Luba’s residency in Israel, she asks, “Do you feel connected here [at margisha shayekhet lekhan]?” The question itself implies some doubt as to Luba’s native status. Luba answers insistently, “Yes, yes.” Immediately following this question about her attachment to Israel, they have the following exchange about motherhood: i n t : Everything that you’ve gone through, has it affected your motherhood? l u b a : Yes, I was a very good mother. I educated my children, too. Reiterating her motherly credentials moments later, Luba shows a picture of her granddaughter in uniform and introduces her: “Hagit Kaplanski, officer in the army, electrical engineer, she should only be well [shehi tehie

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bri’a].” The conversation, in its specific progression of topics, merges the issue of Luba’s Israeliness with her children’s achievements in the country. The interviewer and witness thus together resolve the diasporic mother–Israeli youth split by defining herself in relation to her statebuilding progeny. The testimony works with the same social-imaginative resources that are prominent throughout this ecology—progress between generations, the overlap between filial and ideological bonds, and a politicized vision of collectivity—though Luba constellates them differently than do the veteran, male Israelis. The work of testifying requires that the witness prioritize and categorize what was destroyed— choosing between and locating himor herself in relation to a town, country, household, youth movement, party, mother, father, workplace, or friend. In making intuitive choices of this sort, the witness delineates a specific, value-laden vision of Jewish existence. In foregrounding family and belonging, this chapter has uncovered parallels and contrasts that will reappear in different forms as we turn our attention toward other themes. In identifying which people demand narrative attention, the Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking witnesses both have some version of the polity in mind. But, looking at their approaches to change over time, we must rearrange the relationship between the clusters and recognize a commonality between the American and Israeli testimonies. In both of these settings, conversations revolve around specific points of fracture, followed by rebuilding: moving from “wound to healing” or “destruction to national resurrection,” as the case may be. Witnesses in these ecologies are able to designate a clear point when one kind of family life ends and another begins, when transvaluation happens in the sphere of personal relations. The Yiddish testimonies, by contrast, tend toward gradual shifts rather than sharp fissures, and it is hard to locate a single turning point in the Holocaust, when one context of belonging becomes untenable and a new one must be forged.

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3 THE VICTIM-PERPETRATOR ENCOUNTER

It is far from obvious what victim testimony should reveal about Holocaust perpetrators. There are two main ways that scholars have approached the topic. One relates to victim testimony as factual evidence, especially regarding locally perpetrated violence, about which the written, official record often remains hazy. Among scholars with such an empirical orientation, a tension has arisen over whether or not survivors can accurately identify which individuals, groups, and national forces were responsible for their suffering. Regarding Poland, historian Jan Gross has argued that Jewish witnesses would have no reason to exaggerate the role of Poles over Germans, and one should therefore accept “what we read in a particular account as fact until we find persuasive arguments to the contrary.”1 In response, Christopher Browning countered that “survivors tend to remember—with greater vividness, specificity, and outrage—the shattering and gratuitous acts of betrayal by their neighbors more than the systematic acts of anonymous Germans.”2 To write about local perpetration, both scholars agree, one has to evaluate the witness’s subject position—which is a question of ethics in Gross’s case and psychological assessment in Browning’s. While these scholars both make interesting observations about the victim’s subject position and “tendencies” in depicting the aggressor, they seek to eventually neutralize this subjective framing through cross-checking documents and other means. Approaching the topic from an entirely different angle, other scholars place the victim’s subjective perspective on the perpetrator at the center 107

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of their research. Such an approach follows the lead of Primo Levi, who announced up front that his “account of atrocities” in the memoir If This Is a Man, had “not been written in order to formulate new accusations.”3 To be sure, Levi remembers a whole spectrum of wrongdoers—including Italian police officers, SS men, German camp officials, and kapos (prisoner functionaries) to name a few. Yet his memories do not build into a forensic case against them. Rather, as he puts it, Levi recalls the brutal deeds of these people in order to “furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.”4 Some scholars would go further than Levi and claim that a narrowly empirical, forensic approach to perpetration is not only a less novel, but even a less responsible object of inquiry when studying the testimony of Holocaust victims. The extremity and scale of violence inflicted on camp or ghetto prisoners inhibit their capacity to accuse concrete people of concrete crimes.5 As dehumanizers, Holocaust perpetrators are guilty of a crime that cannot be adequately described through traditional forensic accusation.6 As a result, these thinkers would argue that the specific identity of the perpetrator recalled in witness testimony is not as relevant, or as discoverable, as the sensation of victimhood at his hands. Negotiating these two scholarly approaches is, of course, in part a matter of intellectual priorities. It is also a matter of which testimonies one looks at and which kinds of information the witnesses find most relevant to remember. In the three groups of testimonies under examination here, witnesses try to answer different questions about perpetration. As when depicting family and loved ones, a witness’s choices about when to include names, how many people to mention in a scene, how to describe these people physically, and when to reconstruct their speech all profoundly shape their claims about culpability in the Holocaust. Building from observations made in the previous two chapters, here I ask: What does each testimonial genre—collective-forensic (YiddishLithuanian), experiential-allegorical (English-language American), and communal-monumental (Hebrew-Israeli)—promise to tell about wrongdoers and wrongdoing? Are these expectations met? In what form does the perpetrator appear? Which antagonistic people, groups, or ideas matter to the witness, and how do they appear within the narrative? How does the witness position him- or herself or other Jewish victims in relation to this perpetrator?

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In testimonies from the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology, the act of identifying guilty parties is a high priority. Witnesses here tend to testify in such a manner that foregrounds questions like: Who did it? When? Where? Why and how? They explore these forensic questions most intensely when recalling the initial acts of local violence early in the war. Ethnicity, political alliances, and small-scale neighborhood dynamics constitute primary concerns. Their testimonies are abundant with scenes of victims and perpetrators interacting as two named, familiar subjects. This forensic, intimate mode of testimony makes less room for German perpetrators; these witnesses appear both less invested in proving German guilt and also less equipped with conversational avenues through which to approach the topic. From the start, English-language American testimonies do not promise to produce concrete accusations of guilt. Instead, these testimonies underscore a large crisis of values that unites phenomena of persecution in the Holocaust. In this testimonial setting, witnesses have room to explore how an evil idea takes over human interaction—in concentration camps especially—and makes dialogue between people impossible. In contrast to the rich possibilities for depicting this layer of violence, American testimonies tend to treat the topic of smaller-scale, local collaboration more loosely, as a precursor to what was to come or as a symptom of a much larger problem. In Hebrew-Israeli testimonial conversations, participants commit to affirming the guilt of various wrongdoers but avoid offering them too much descriptive attention. Not invested in fleshing out the portrait of Lithuanians or Germans per se, witnesses in this Hebrew-language ecology also rarely explore the sensation of powerlessness at length. Rather, emphasis is placed on the strategy of the perpetrator— on discerning the system behind his aggression and evaluating it. As with other topics in this ecology, witnesses also emphasize how Holocaust perpetration has now become an article of shared knowledge. This imbues discussions of the perpetrator with a forward-facing sensibility, glimpsing into a time when the Jewish polity will have disarmed these adversaries by filing them into a communal archive.

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Intimate Accusation, Yiddish-Lithuanian Testimony There is a conceptual parallel between the framework of eygene, the way that witnesses from the Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian ecology define friends and family and the way that they portray enemies. Just as many witnesses emphasize the local milieu as fundamental to social belonging, so too do they seem most invested in testifying to violence that arose from within this same local scene. In part, this means that the witnesses spend more time discussing the crimes of local Lithuanians than of uniformed Germans. These witnesses’ interest in local (or local-looking) violence also shapes their treatment of chronology: They dedicate a disproportionate amount of time to the days between the German invasion of Lithuania on June 22, 1941, and mid- to late August, depending on their location, when Jews were forced into Nazi-run ghettos. It was in these months when local Lithuanian participation in killings, roundups, and pogroms was most visible.7 Ethnicity is a central and acceptable topic of conversation among witnesses and interviewers in this ecology. It is not taboo to speak of “Lithuanians,” “Jews,” “Russians,” “Germans,” “Poles,” and “Ukrainians” as distinct groups.8 Given their acceptance of ethnic difference, these survivors do not condemn local perpetrators for having looked at them as Jews rather than as human beings. Instead, their crime was to turn an intimate and intricate understanding of difference into a violent rejection of otherness under the circumstances of war. Going beyond an interest in ethnicity, these witnesses tend to name names and to detail the means of the crime, its location, precise chronology, and possible motivation. In sum, they portray this perpetration as concrete and documentable, sometimes even on a case-by-case basis. To make these accusations, witnesses rely upon prewar identities, languages, and notions of propriety—all legitimate parameters of judgment today. Crimes within this local microcosm still matter to them, not as metaphors or broad historical lessons learned, but as singular unjust events that should have been—and still could be—righted. We find almost none of this concreteness when it comes to the crimes of Germans in this corpus. More often called “Germans,” rather than “Nazis” or “fascists,” they do not appear as yet another ethnic group in

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the mix, but as a hazy, distant, almost inanimate force. Even when witnesses do turn their attention to the acts of individual Germans, they often do so with humor, indirection, or irony. This same forensic genre, which offers witnesses a wealth of resources when trying to name the local criminal and explain the damage of his betrayal, appears thinner when applied to more systematic forces of destruction. Shmuel S.: Embedding the Holocaust in the Neighborhood Shmuel S., born in 1925, grew up in a small subsection of Shavl called Kalniuk (Kalniukas or Kalnelis),9 and testified in Yiddish in Kovna first to the Shoah Foundation in 1996, then to me in 2005.10 In both of his testimonies, Shmuel tells of the outbreak of war with a version of the following story, which he delivers urgently, avoiding interruption: That bloody Sunday is when the war broke out. The twentysecond at eight o’clock in the morning. The first one that they killed was Simkhele Luria. He used to always pass by our house. He kept cows. He always used to go by with the cows in our field. On the last day of his life he went by our field with his cows. On the road from Königsburg to Riga, the Soviet Army was then on its way, fleeing. A soldier’s vehicle stopped and asked him for directions to Riga. He knew the way to Riga. So the soldier drove away. At that very moment, a neighbor drove up, a Lithuanian, Jankunis. Until today, I remember his last name. And with the tool you use to bind cattle, the flatiron, he smashed his head to pieces, took his cattle, and off he went.11 For Shmuel, what inaugurates this violent period is not the decision of a high-ranking German official, but an offense committed on his street, outside his house. His emphatically precise dating elevates the incident, pointing to this initial rift in the fabric of local livelihood as definitive, crucial for understanding all that follows. To explain the meaning of this “first blood,” Shmuel is compelled to depict the constellation of prewar norms that preceded it. Even after promising to recount how the war “broke out,” Shmuel momentarily backtracks to illustrate the unspoken agreements among neighbors that this violence interrupts: Simkhe is herding his cattle through the yard of

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Shmuel’s family, casually utilizing their property as he “always did” (fleg tomid). The implicit message behind this picture is that, up until the war, such neighborly covenants were enough to keep the peace. This applied to both intra-Jewish as well as Jewish-Lithuanian relations: “My mother had a very good name among the Lithuanians. Why? Because she was poor. Whenever a poor person would pass through, she would always give him a piece of bread from what she had left.”12 He attributes prewar order to the power of “good names,” local reputations, and unwritten codes of civility. The Russian soldier who passes through this scene of eygene normativity is a nameless outsider. His retreat from Lithuania, and the oncoming German invasion, appear as background events, about which Shmuel assumes understanding but does not invest in narrating. In contrast to the inanimate Russian “soldier’s vehicle,” and his unremarkable interaction with Simkhe, Shmuel dwells on the name of the Lithuanian perpetrator, pronouncing it repeatedly. Shmuel is just as eager to single out local wrongdoers as he is to name his lost family members and neighbors. In naming “Jankunis,” Shmuel condemns but also humanizes the man— enfranchising him into his memory, into his sphere of attention. Shmuel depicts this violent act as if he were planning to submit this testimony to a legal trial. Not only does he include the name and the date, he also details the means of the crime, the decidedly primitive flatiron. Echoing the legal requirement to manifest the victim’s body, corpus delicti,13 Shmuel explains, “I saw the body lying in the street with the blood streaming out.”14 As he continues in the Shoah Foundation testimony, Shmuel also names other witnesses present, including a neighbor, Volodke, as well as the victim’s wife. While Shmuel presents the killing as shocking, he also grounds the act in explicable, human motives: Jankunis is both angry over Simkhe’s supposed alliance with the Soviet soldier as well as covetous of his wealth, his cattle. Leaving aside the testimony of Shmuel S. momentarily, we can see that other witnesses in this ecology make similar use of local perpetrator names. In the days following the outbreak of war, Doba Rozenberg specifies that it was “Reloška . . . a simple worker,” who led her father away from their house. Underscoring the acquaintance and shared language between captured and capturer, she recalls her father shouting in

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Lithuanian, “Reloška, Reloška, ka˛ padarau? [What did I do?]”15 Likewise, when her mother is taken away, Doba tells, “I’m not sure if they arranged it or not. But he was also an acquaintance [bakanter].” Shortly thereafter, Doba goes on: “Two Lithuanian policemen, Kelikovicˇ and Almonaitis . . . dragged me out to the courtyard and pushed me with my head against the window, so that I would tell them where the gold and silver is. I didn’t even know.” Another witness, Khatzkel Zak, goes so far as to comment on the ability of victim and perpetrator to name one another. Recounting the shooting outside his hometown of Shukian (Šauke˙nai), he inserts, “They shot, all townspeople [shtetlishe]. They knew everyone’s name.”16 After detailing other aspects of the shooting—how many culprits there were, their names, and level of inebriation at the time, Khatzkel reiterates, “[They were] All our own people [eygene mentshn].” His phrasing carves out a specific position of intimacy for these perpetrators. They are at once “other,” identified as Lithuanian rather than Jewish, but also eygene, “one’s own.” It is the abuse of this delicate balance, the position of “one’s own other,” that most concerns Khatzkel in testifying. Returning to the testimony of Shmuel S., it is striking how he maintains this neighborly, intimate perspective on perpetrators virtually throughout the war. In part, this could relate to the circumstances under which he survived: Aside from an initial attempt to flee across the Russian border through Latvia, Shmuel remained within the territory of Lithuania, in the Shavl region specifically, throughout the occupation. Much of the time, he survived by moving between Lithuanian households in rural areas, where this local, name-by-name perspective is understandable. However, Shmuel also lived at two work sites with German oversight and spent over a year in the Shavl ghetto. Even there, it is the concretizable, nameable level of persecution— committed by local Lithuanians—that he focalizes most pronouncedly. For example, describing the Akmener (Akmene˙) work camp outside of Shavl,17 as late as fall 1943, when the SS had assumed responsibility for the Shavl work-camp system, Shmuel dwells extensively on a certain Lithuanian camp director: “That’s where the bloody bandit [bandit], the thief [gazlan], Marcinkus was a shooter from Zhager [Žageriai; zhagerer shiser].” Listing this overseer’s brutal deeds, Shmuel singles out one particularly egregious act:

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On the tenth of December, 1943, they didn’t let us out to work. They surrounded us with machine guns. This same Marcinkus went into the women’s barracks and carried out ten children and an old woman, pulling them by their hands and by their feet. He and, it seems, one of the Ukrainians helped him. He shot them and threw them into one grave. We heard their shouting clearly and the shooting clearly.18 Marcinkus then arrived drunk in the men’s barracks and ordered Shmuel and several younger inmates to go bury the victims. Recounting his burial of the children, Shmuel draws attention again to their bodies: “We found the children strewn about, one on top of the other. Still warm.” Unlike earlier, Shmuel does not know all of the victims personally. Still, he focuses on those for whom he can provide some background: “They took these children away from their mothers in the barracks. From one mother, they took away two children. If I’m not mistaken, Yoselevich was their last name. A family from Memel.” Even at this advanced stage of the war, acts of perpetration that can be named and concretized are the ones that Shmuel uses to tell his story. These incriminating details allow him to accuse or defend and thus give purpose to his memory. Naming names was, according to Shmuel, part of the event, something that victims did at the very moment in which they were attacked. Such is the case in a scene of mass shooting that he witnessed in late August 1941. For several months after the Shavl ghetto was created, Shmuel lived with a Lithuanian farmer as an unpaid farmhand, with official permission.19 In this period, his mother sends him to the nearby shtetl of Yonishik (Joniškis), thirty kilometers away, to check on the well-being of a cousin. On his way, Shmuel was somehow captured with a group of Jews from that town and taken out to a shooting pit in the forest. In this moment, Shmuel quotes the words of a young Jewish boy, in Lithuanian, who shouts at his killer just before his death, “De˙de Juozai oder20 Jonai, už ka˛? [Uncle Juozas or Jonas, what for?]” The sudden switch from Yiddish into the Lithuanian language not only draws further attention to the perpetrator’s ethnicity, but invokes the long history of close contact between Jews and Lithuanians that would enable such conversation: The boy formulates his accusation in the victimizer’s small mother tongue—a detail that Shmuel highlights—and says thereby, “I know you.”

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The language switch here also dramatizes the very fact that the boy speaks, that he is able to address his enemy at the moment of his brutal death. The very possibility of addressing this enemy is surprising in light of many scholarly characterizations of Holocaust victimhood. Dori Laub writes, “The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another.”21 This scene thus does not coincide with the way that Laub diagnoses Holocaust victimhood on the whole. Shmuel highlights the victim speaking directly to the man about to shoot him. The perpetrator is an accusable agent in this scenario, whose name could be sought out for punishment. In his mirror image, the boy dies as an accusing, speaking subject, with a history and an identity. What the boy speaks is a question, an expression of bafflement at the violation. It is also, using Laub’s phrase, an “appeal” to recall their past record of familiar interaction. At a later point in his testimony, Shmuel literalizes the idea of the Jewish victim accusing and acting on the Lithuanian perpetrator—in the form of a personal revenge story. Immediately following the liberation of the Shavl region in July 1944, Shmuel enlists in the Sixteenth (Lithuanian) Division of the Red Army. When traveling near the Akmener work camp, Shmuel requests a day’s leave, supposedly in order to visit the gravesite of the ten Jewish children he had buried there, Marcinkus’s victims. Once granted his leave, Shmuel actually retraces his steps to the house of a local Lithuanian woman, who had once released her dogs onto Shmuel’s mother. In the afternoon, I went into the mistress’s [balebostes] house. [. . .] I greeted her and she gives me this kind of smile: “Oh nice, a Lithuanian soldier, how did you get here? Where are you from?” I said to her, “You don’t recognize me?” “No,” she said. I started asking her about the lime-pits, about the men and the women, and she says, “Yes, yes, yes, there were, yes.” I said, “Do you remember when you let your dogs out on an old lady and they ripped her clothes and her body until she was bleeding, like a downpour of rain?” She says, “Yeah, there was something like that.”

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I asked her, “Why didn’t you feel the need to stop your dogs?” She says, “I liked the sound of her screaming.” I say, “I like the sound of your screaming.” And I let out a half a round of bullets into her.22 Revenge tropes were ubiquitous in Soviet wartime propaganda and in the Jewish press specifically.23 Thus, it is not surprising to hear a Red Army veteran recounting an act of vengeance. What is remarkable here is the manner in which Shmuel figures this vengeance as intimate: The two share similar memories of the nearby camp, and as a final sign of familiarity, Shmuel borrows the mistress’s language, mirroring her wording in his own. In seeking out such wrongdoers, touching them, talking to them, and weighing their guilt, Shmuel actually makes them his equal, showing their potential for shared moral standards. His memory, most likely a fantasy,24 of revenge conveys a sense of unsettlement or dissatisfaction with the way this history has been judged in his environment. Such a scene would lose its urgency, seem redundant, if Shmuel thought that justice or even public recognition had been achieved in his home. Finally, the segment sharpens our understanding of Shmuel’s idea of victim agency, and of what a valuable, agentive response to persecution should entail under such circumstances. In contrast to the overwhelming number of prominent moments that depict Lithuanian aggression in his testimony, too many to cite in this chapter, one has to comb through Shmuel’s testimony carefully to find German perpetrators. When he does bring in Germans, Shmuel applies a different moral and representational grid. For example, around October or November of 1941, Shmuel is taken to the Zokne (Zokniai) airfield25 outside of Shavl with his mother and his sister. This time he clarifies that no locals were at fault: “There were only Germans working there. There were no other peoples [felker].”26 Shmuel depicts a German overseer’s aggression in general, ongoing terms: “The German used to come up [es flegt tsugeyn der daytsh] with a stick and hit someone over the head, so that he would fall in a puddle of blood. He used to lift him up and coldly shoot him.” Though conveying this figure’s cruelty, Shmuel does not specify who “the German” is, whom he is beating, or when. It is odd,

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then, that Shmuel proceeds to insert himself into the picture, not only as an eyewitness, but as the very recipient of these blows: “I was working that day, I was very weak. I didn’t do the task. I was beaten [Me hot mir tseharget]. I was lying on the floor.”27 Victim and perpetrator both appear, but on separate levels of narration, in different tenses, and the two are not shown interacting in the same frame. It is not an accusable agent that knocks Shmuel onto the ground, but a general sadistic presence. Shmuel envisions his vengeance against German soldiers as similarly indirect. When Russian forces liberated the Shavl region at the end of July 1944, Shmuel was working in a Lithuanian household, under the guise of a gentile farmhand. Shmuel was given a shovel and ordered to go out and bury German bodies, killed under Russian fire: “I can’t describe my happiness. One day earlier, the German could have shot me like some useless object, and now I have to go bury him. This was my first revenge.”28 In contrast to his graphic vision of revenge against a Lithuanian perpetrator as a living, speaking being, Shmuel here acts only upon a dead body, inanimate and unresponsive to his touch. This mirrors the distant type of brutality he received from them earlier. Shmuel’s testimony thus establishes two very distinct levels of violence in the Holocaust, one that he remembers through forensic and thus agentive terms, and one that he remembers as impersonal, even beyond his mandate as a witness. Intimacy through Ethnicity While Shmuel S. often emphasizes the names of individual perpetrators, this type of individual recall appears less available in other testimonies from this same ecology. Witnesses who hail from the more densely urban areas,29 Kovna especially, tend to address the pressing question of “Who?” more in ethnic than in individual terms.30 For instance, Chaim Siniuk from Kovna mentions no Lithuanian friends or enemies by name. He nonetheless places a similar emphasis on social intimacy across ethnic lines.31 In remembering the first phases of war, Chaim tells, “The Lithuanians [Litviner], the fascists, with the white bands, the ones that worked with the Germans, ordered everyone to go to the square.” Among them, he recalls a twenty-year-old youth from the neighborhood, whom he describes as “a good acquaintance [a guter bakanter],” holding Jews at gunpoint. Chaim does not pronounce this individual’s name. But

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he designates the boy as nameable, a quality that shapes the meaning of his crime. Chaim then recounts how he was imprisoned for several days at the Seventh Fort, a Tsarist Russian military stronghold outside of Kovna, which was used as the site of mass shootings during World War II. There too he foregrounds the Lithuanian identity of the perpetrators: “It was Lithuanian power, with Lithuanian uniforms there. They used to come through and say, I’ll say it in Lithuanian, ‘Aukso, sidabro! Atiduok ji˛ mums.’ That means, ‘Money, gold, silver, give it to us.’” Repeatedly stressing the ethnic identity of the perpetrators at the fort, Chaim also gives them a voice, makes them sound real and knowable by quoting them in their original language. As he continues to recount events at the Seventh Fort, where he was imprisoned on the women’s side with his mother, he casts this Jewish-Lithuanian familiarity in a particularly painful light: The Lithuanians used to rape the girls and then drag them away to shoot them, and we heard the shots. [Witness pauses. No reaction from the interviewer.] I remember one incident. There was a mother and a girl. They raped the girl in the hallway. I remember how she was screaming, “Skauda! Skauda! It hurts. It hurts.” Twenty minutes later we heard “Poom! Poom!” Shot. They were terrible criminals [farbrekher] in the fort. It is important to note not only Chaim’s continued emphasis on the ethnicity of the perpetrators but also his lack of euphemism or hesitation in portraying their heinous act of rape. Researchers on sexual violence point out that wartime rape may have less to do with intimate bodily desire than with political domination.32 But, crucially, this witness does present these instances of rape as a kind of intimate violation. The Lithuanian language reappears here again, this time in the voice of the victim. As Chaim presents it, this young victim knows her perpetrator well enough, in social terms, to shout at him, to articulate her pain in his language. Emphasis on the Lithuanian identity of the perpetrators goes hand in hand with a particular characterization of their crime: a wickedly human act in which one nameable, agentive subject violates another.33 In addressing the question of “Who is at fault?” not all witnesses from this ecology produce the same answer. Gershon Shuster tells of Jews being led into the Kovna ghetto by Lithuanians, but then he adds, “The

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Germans filmed it. The Germans filmed it so that you would see that Lithuanians are driving out the Jews, not the Germans.”34 One can easily imagine Gershon using this explanation for the invisibility of German participation to respond to his cohort of survivors in Lithuania. He insists that the camera lens, which parallels the perspective of the Jewish observer, did not capture the full truth. Another witness, Hirsh P., similarly explains that German soldiers organized “bands,” and wooed Lithuanians into inciting violence in his hometown of Vilkomir (Ukmerge˙). He qualifies accusations of Lithuanian guilt by assessing the matter numerically: “In all of Lithuania there were twenty-five thousand bandits. In all of Lithuania. In all the cities, just like in Vilkomir there were three hundred seventeen. [. . .] But, half of all the Lithuanians were decent [mentshlekh].”35 Even though Hirsh seems to argue against a certain idea of collective Lithuanian guilt that has currency in his environment, he does not reject the terms of the debate: He engages the same forensic rhetorical mode of his peers, their concern with ethnic identity, as well as their chronological and geographical focus. Witnesses in this ecology appear perfectly ready to discuss possible motivations for Lithuanian violence against Jews—and here too they do not always agree. Khatzkel Zak, for example, is willing to consider Lithuanian anger over a Communist-Jewish alliance as a possible motivation for violence: “One of the yidn-shisers [Jew-shooters] was very strongly against the Communists and against the Jews because a soldier had killed his father.” The equation between Communists and Jews does not seem to bother Khatzkel in particular. He does not dismiss the logic of this “shooter,” but seeks to prove the magnitude and injustice of his violent response. By contrast, Mariia Voronova, who happens to be Khatzkel’s acquaintance, does refute the popular claim of Soviet-Jewish alliance. She asserts that there were more Lithuanian supporters of prewar Soviet rule than Jewish ones. As an example, she recalls that a Lithuanian boy from her gymnasium “was a Communist and [then] in the German times [daytshishe tsaytn] was one of the leaders of the shooters.”36 Whether accepting or refuting the political motivations of Lithuanian perpetrators, the witnesses similarly engage this explanatory thinking. Discussions of motivation allow for a certain level of identification with the perpetrator, even if only as a heuristic device.

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Envisioning Lithuanian Guilt on a Chronological Continuum The way in which witnesses describe Lithuanian perpetration situates the phenomenon on a messy, chronological continuum. As in the descriptions of family and social belonging, we can detect a sense of inertia—a heavy prewar residue—in the way that Yiddish speaking witnesses in Lithuania define wartime persecution. Not only do they focus more on the beginning of the war than on its final stages, but they also draw attention to primitive, bodily and nonindustrial strains of violence. Khatzkel Zak creates a strong association between wartime violence and centuries-old images of blood-libel killings. While in hiding, Khatzkel recalls hearing that locals had hung up a sign in all of the neighboring towns surrounding Shukian, announcing, “that in a soccer field, there will be a Star of David in blood, and there they will kill and lay down all the children [caught in hiding]. Head to head.” With the ritualistic display of children’s bodies alongside religious insignia, it is hard to ignore a comparison with Jewish blood libel imagery.37 Witnesses also imply a likeness with past violence through their choice of words. Describing events in Kovna, Ishaiyahu Matusevicius interchangeably uses the labels “pogromtshikes,” (pogromists)38—a term of prewar provenance—and “partizaner” (partisans)—a term more specifically relating to World War II.39 Through this vocabulary, he builds a semantic bridge between local Holocaust massacres and previous, local rampages. These local wartime atrocities are thus cast as an extreme violation, unprecedented in degree but nonetheless describable through existing language and images. Echoing precedents of violence from long before World War II, these witnesses also stretch the category of local betrayal into their descriptions of life after the war. The term bandit is a case in point.40 The word appears prominently in the narration of wartime offenses, as one of the main titles for local perpetrators, as when Hirsh P. says, “We lived with them [Lithuanians] perfectly well. Perfectly well. But later, when the Germans occupied, they created entire groups of banditn in Vilkomir.” Its synonyms, in the wartime context, are yidn-shisers (Jew-shooters), vayse bender (the white bands, referring to members of the Lithuanian Activist Front), sometimes politsiantn or politsistn (policemen), as well as the previously mentioned terms, pogromtshikes and partizaner.

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Though clearly denoting “a wartime perpetrator,” the relevance of banditn expands into postwar life through several different avenues.41 Rive K. and Mendel G.42 both assert that the same banditn who shot Jews during the war also became anti-Soviet partisans, “forest brothers,” in the guerrilla warfare that lasted up until 1952, and are today revered by some as heroes of Lithuanian national independence.43 Similarly, Leah Z. tells of a Lithuanian factory supervisor in Vilna in the 1950s whose “brother was a ‘forest brother.’ These were banditn who were in the forest and killed Jews. His family name was Sakauskas. [. . .] He used to tell us that if we didn’t work, he would kill us.”44 In Leah’s equation, the anti-Soviet partisan is a bandit both because of his wartime record of persecuting Jews and because of his postwar participation in guerilla activities. In these cases, witnesses use the term banditn to point out actual personal continuity, averring that the same individual actors committed similar crimes both during and after World War II. But some witnesses expand the term differently, not through the persistent presence of violent individuals, but through the persistence of their attitudes and behaviors. A bandit is someone who acts, looks, and sounds in some way like a wartime perpetrator. Consider, for example, how Doba P. introduces a story about her neighbors decades after the war: “One time, I said to a poyer [a peasant or non-Jew],45 to a bandit,” equating the two terms in reference to a Lithuanian person who quarreled with her recently.46 In literal terms, her neighbor in Vilna is neither a peasant nor, seemingly, a Holocaust perpetrator. But she sees some kind of correspondence between her outsider status in the present day and her outsider status in 1941, as well as between the people responsible for this marginalization at both points in time. As she speaks of her neighbors in her apartment building, who become intensely angry at her for minor reasons, like feeding animals in the courtyard, the comparison grows stronger: “So, he says one time, he and a couple of other poyerim, they were all heated up, like they were ready to kill us. . . . He says to me, ‘Važiuokit i˛ Palestina˛! [Go to Palestine!]’” In this instance, the witness so strongly compares present-day anti-Jewish expressions among Lithuanians to anti-Jewish actions during the war, that she almost presents what Dori Laub calls a “second Holocaust.” This is a narrative tendency that he observes in which survivors tell of “an uncanny repetition of events

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that duplicate—in structure and in impact—the traumatic past.”47 What is striking, and not possible in other ecologies, is that Doba P. emplots this emotional repetition onto a perception of contextual continuity: Since Doba has used the word banditn throughout her life and throughout her testimony, it becomes hard to tell when it means “bad people who happen to be Lithuanian” and “the very same bad people who were Holocaust perpetrators.” Both definitions seem to inform her use of the word and her perception of Lithuanian-Jewish relations. The word supports an impression of continuity over time. Other witnesses in this same ecology bring banditn into the present in a much more casual manner, disarming the term by inserting it into lighthearted postwar anecdotes. Dvorah Minin speaks in circles about different banditn, creating a consistent texture of interaction with these types throughout her life. While speaking about a Lithuanian guard in the Shavl ghetto named Antanas, Dvorah cuts to the recent past and tells: After the war, I found him in Klaipeda. He was a big man. My uncle wanted to take an apartment. And he [Antanas] was in charge of the apartments. And so I went to him and he told me where to go. As I’m walking away from the door, I remember. He was sitting just like that and I recognized him. I couldn’t say a word. But I didn’t give him away. Instead, I asked him to help us. After he had already helped us [to get the apartment], I told him that I’d been in the ghetto: “I know you. You were in the ghetto.” He says [in reply], “Yeah, but don’t tell anyone.” I never told.48 Dvorah continues, winding this encounter into a web of other anecdotes, telling of future encounters, with Antanas and his wife as well as with other banditn, as if gossiping about disreputable neighbors. Through this bandit figure, Dvorah inserts the flavor of mundane postwar life among Lithuanians into her narration of wartime persecution. Her chronological expansion of the term is, thus, in its evaluative perspective, the reverse of Doba’s. For both, it seems hard to distinguish between a local term, which long remained relevant in language, and a culpable local person, who remained physically present in their midst. In sum, a bandit describes a noxious type who could appear at any moment in local history, though his or her defining moment was World

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War II. There is nothing unusual about “reading the past through the present” or contextualizing Holocaust perpetration as a long-standing phenomenon in Jewish history. Yet the type of historical continuity that witnesses project through the notion of banditn is distinct in several ways. First, since the term is of an oral, low register it creates a deflated, nonmonumental picture of anti-Jewish violence in the longue durée. Secondly, it has geographic implications, drawing on specifically Eastern European associations, with no universal inflections.49 The Hazy Representation of German Perpetrators Many witnesses in this ecology discuss German perpetrators as an event or a system rather than as people. The German Army often appears as an intangible force in the background, causing damage through the mere fact of its presence. Bella Rabinovich, for one, describes the connection between the arrival of the German Army and new restraints on Jewish liberty as a feeling: “Immediately, one [men] didn’t let us on the sidewalks, Jews. There was a big segregation. One could feel that the Germans had arrived.”50 For Gershon Shuster, the German invasion is observable primarily through the concrete actions of local people: “We had no idea that the Germans would arrive to Kovna so quickly. . . . Lithuanians with white bands appeared throughout the city.” Even when recalling face-to-face interactions with German officials in concentration camps outside of Lithuania, witnesses somehow avoid direct human depiction. Meishe Geguzhinskis relates an incident in which he was caught stealing potatoes in Dachau. “They beat me, hitting me good and hard. There was one German who came and said that he wanted to resolve matters with me by himself.”51 Meishe then goes on to imitate the soldier speaking half German, half Yiddish in strange, caricatured tones: “Ich vel zey nit lozn shlogn [I won’t let them beat you].” While this moment sounds at first like one of relief, the guard’s “protection” proves much worse than the initial beating: He orders Meishe to be hung by his hands until he loses consciousness. Meishe inserts an ironic gap between the guard’s sympathetic-sounding speech, his “veneer of respectability,” and his cruel action.52 That is, even face-to-face, the German figure remains aloof from his Jewish victim, on a separate plane of action. With caricature and ironic reversal, Meishe places the encounter outside the realistic forensic genre and absolves the man from judgment.

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As another instance of humor, Genia Idels describes herself working with a group of other young women at Stutthof: “We were standing and philosophizing—what will we do if we survive the war?”53 One German supervisor caught them chatting and then recorded their infraction, threatening that the women would receive a beating in the evening. Genia goes on: “Then we got to work, throwing shovels in the air.” A different German overseer then came by and saw the group working so diligently that he reported them as deserving a double portion for dinner. Genia chuckles. “One German recorded that we should get a beating, one a double portion. . . . That night I got both.” Genie ridicules German authority, laughing at the contradictions of bureaucratic “recording.” These two witnesses laugh about Germans in slightly different ways: Meishe uses verbal irony, Genie situational humor. But the comic sensibility in both cases recalls what Henri Bergson describes as “something mechanical encrusted on the living” or “the mechanization of life.”54 They show a clash between a potentially human figure and his adherence to a machinated system, whose logic is entirely out of step with the witnesses’ human intuitions. Like the de-animating portraits of the German military arrival, humor has the effect of distancing this perpetrator from the narrator—and from her drive to assign blame.55 Notably, this comic mode is not used to portray Lithuanian perpetrators, whom these same witnesses describe realistically. Clearly, there is room for a reading of traumatic silence in the way that these witnesses in this Yiddish-Lithuanian environment depict German perpetration, in concentration camps especially. But, crucially, participants involved in this conversation accept this silence and do not define it as a hindrance to the truth-telling project at hand. The witnesses are never judged as withholding authentic memory from the camera or from themselves when they downplay, deflate, or joke about Nazi tormentors. To make sense of this framework, we must reckon with the topics that these witnesses do find themselves not only capable but required to confront— local atrocities committed within their cultural and linguistic sphere. Thus, unlike Browning, I do not point out these witnesses’ disproportionate focus on local perpetration in order to suggest that it may be factually misleading, but to get at the stakes of testifying in this setting. The local focus of these witnesses is a matter of historical precedent, the influence of forensic investigations modeled during the Soviet period.

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It is also a statement about values over time: The people and rules of prewar and wartime life remain relevant, accessible to the imagination, so long as they are connected to the site of Lithuania and are describable in timeworn Yiddish idioms. In making accusations across time, but within a very limited space, witnesses activate a perception of continuity in values. Forensic witnessing is possible for them because standards of right and wrong have survived the Holocaust.

A Crisis of Values, English-American Testimony In an article about historical memory written in 1991, Dan Diner observed the growth of a different “diagnostic enterprise” in the United States than existed in Europe, especially Eastern and Central Europe. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Diner argued, European historical discourse returned to its traditional interpretive trope of “the totality of ethnos,” centering narratives of the twentieth century around ethnic and national struggles. Placed within such an interpretive paradigm, the Holocaust came to represent the extreme result of centuries-old ethnic competition. By contrast, according to Diner’s argument, the collapse of the Soviet Union led American observers to strengthen their tendency to frame each historical event, the Holocaust in particular, as “a struggle over values.”56 Indeed, witnesses testifying in English in North America—around the time that Diner voiced these very observations—are far less ethnically minded than their counterparts who stayed in Lithuania, discussed earlier. Witnesses in this North American ecology openly recall local perpetration, but not in order to accuse neighboring ethnic groups of betrayal. Rather, witnesses here discuss perpetration in a way that makes room for an inspection of values, or of personal experience, in the face of extreme aggression. To enable these kinds of discussions, a certain degree of “figural plasticity,” to return to Bernstein’s phrase, must be allowed.57 That is, all the details that make a perpetrator portrayal forensically effective—his name, ethnicity, language, geographic origin, and means of violence—limit the witness’s ability to make him a model for comparison and allegory. Such forensic details also detract attention from the witness’s experience as a sensual, subjective observer. Beyond shaping the witnesses’ mode of narration, these priorities also inform their chronological and geographic

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foci. These testimonies invest more time and energy in scenes of perpetration that occur in concentration camps, which are removed from the culturally freighted, linguistically marked prewar landscape. This barren backdrop allows them to dedicate more attention toward conceptual and affective investigations of wrongdoing.58 To be clear, when setting these English-language American testimonies against those from the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology, I do not mean to imply that this testimonial genre simply “removes information” from the record or attenuates memory of perpetration. Rather, it adds its own intricate fields of knowledge that cannot be dealt with seriously as part of a forensic project. As one such outcome, these testimonies afford more opportunities to remember the victim-perpetrator interaction, precisely when it was not an interaction, when Laub’s assessment of the “I-thou” failure truly does seem warranted. Marsha Almos: “They Were Antisemites, Too” Marsha Almos was born in 1928 in Shavl and testified in English in 1995 in Ontario, Canada, to the Shoah Foundation.59 Marsha and her interviewer open the recording with a condensed biography of each of her immediate family members. At the interviewer’s request, Marsha lists the names of her mother, father, sister, and brother and tells how each, with the exception of her sister, perished during the war years. The topic of perpetration arises within this urgent synopsis of family history. i n t : And did he [your father] survive the war? m a r s h a : No, he did not. i n t : Do you know when he was killed? m a r s h a : When the Germans came in after a couple of days. He had a factory. There were some Lithuanian workers working for him. They came and knocked on the door. They told him to take money. They took our radio. We were asleep. We didn’t wake up. Then they dug holes and they killed them all. [Starts crying.] i n t : When did this happen? m a r s h a : In 1941. i n t : Could you please tell me your mother’s name?

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m a r s h a : Riva. [. . .] i n t : Did she survive the war? m a r s h a : No, she did not. In its factual content, Marsha’s first recollection includes many of the same elements that appear repeatedly in the Yiddish-Lithuanian corpus: acquaintance between victim and perpetrator and the intrusion into Jewish homes in the first days of occupation. But the scene of her father’s capture does not develop into a forensic exploration of neighborly betrayal. Marsha and the interviewer together maintain focus on Marsha’s family, moving on to discuss her mother’s fate. i n t : What year did she die? m a r s h a : In 1944, when they took us to the concentration camp. When we came with the cattle trains. When they opened the cattle trains, they started to hit everybody. My sister and I found each other. My mother was holding my brother. The mothers with the younger children they took to the crematorium. They told us to sit down. We could see my mother and we were shouting, “Mother, mother.” But she couldn’t hear us. In the context of her family story, violence inflicted by locals at their doorstep in 1941 and the Stutthof crematorium in 1944 merge into one destructive phenomenon. The focus does not fall on Lithuanians or Germans per se, but on the holes that they jointly created in her family picture. Once Marsha has succinctly revealed the fates of each of her loved ones, she and the interviewer begin working through her life story step-bystep. In discussing local dynamics during prewar life, the term “antisemitism” becomes a focal point: i n t : What about the non-Jews? What did they do? m a r s h a : Can’t tell you too much about them because I wasn’t involved with them. You know. And I went to a Hebrew school. i n t : You had absolutely no non-Jewish friends?

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m a r s h a : I had no non-Jewish friends. And really the nonJewish friends were not that good to the Jewish people. They were antisemites and they didn’t like us. Marsha and the interviewer carry on this entire exchange without mentioning “Lithuanians” by name. Her main method of characterizing these neighbors is to position them within a broad conceptual category, “antisemites,” which could be applicable anywhere in the world. Whether Marsha broadens her terminology because she anticipates lack of knowledge on the part of the listener or because she fears that the ethnic specificities may sound offensive, the effect is clear: these local others are but one piece of a larger phenomenon of hatred toward Jews. In direct contrast to the early chronological focus found among Yiddish-language testimonies, over half of Marsha’s testimonial recording is dedicated to the later war years of 1944 and 1945, when she was in camps outside the borders of Lithuania. Marsha spends little time narrating the outbreak of war and the ghetto period. She does not repeat the scene of her father’s death as part of the war story, but moves quickly to the moment in 1944 when she, her mother, brother, and sister were deported to Stutthof. There, interestingly, she elects to retell the moment when her mother and brother were brought to the gas chambers, almost exactly as she did at the start of the recording. She also describes at length a kind of faceless, routinized mistreatment she remembers from this camp: “They told us not to talk. In the morning they gave us a watery coffee and a little piece of bread.” The inhibition of speech, all the factors that prevented her from addressing the perpetrator, is a theme that Marsha is able to talk about in this setting. Marsha even finds a way to dramatize the paradox of encountering this faceless perpetrator on an individual basis, still without any opportunity for verbal exchange. In contrast to the Yiddish-Lithuanian witnesses quoted above, she approaches this kind of German aggressor with no irony or tongue-in-cheek response. When recounting the Death March west from Stutthof in late winter 1945, Marsha shares that she escaped at night from a rural church in which she and the other prisoners were being held in order to scavenge for food in a nearby village. When she returns from the village, she calls attention to her encounter with a German guard outside the church:

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And then as I was coming closer to the church, I saw the German coming to me. I pulled down my pants and I made myself like I had to go the bathroom. And he says [raising her voice to a shout] “You verfluchte [damned] Jude! You so and so Jew! You gonna make beside the church?” And he threw me with the gun into the church. And he didn’t kill me. He was gonna kill me. Striking, first of all, is Marsha’s depiction of the German soldier’s voice. In contrast to the caricatured, comedic tones that Yiddish-speaking witnesses put into the mouths of German perpetrators, Marsha attempts to imitate his voice realistically, both in sound and in content. In response, she escapes death not by negotiating with the guard verbally, but by acting out the part of a grotesque subhuman. She suggests that something in this nonverbal performance, confirming the German’s expectation of a “damned Jew,” saved her life. This type of enemy gives her no room for retaliation, response, or accusation. Thus, Marsha portrays herself— oddly—performing the perpetrator’s object of loathing in order to quiet him and survive. Marsha is precise about what this specific strain of Nazi aggression includes and excludes. Later in the testimony, the interviewer asks if Marsha ever witnessed German soldiers sexually abusing Jewish women. She answers, “I didn’t see it. . . . But they were bad. For fun, like in the barn, they used to take out a few women and just shoot ’em, throw them on the pile.” The soldiers’ violence did not, to her mind, express itself in sexual aggression but in rendering these women inanimate, part of a pile. Far from a loose, all-encompassing picture of evil, it is a very particular species of objectifying violence that Marsha depicts at the hands of Nazis and places as the center of her testimony. At the end of the recording, Marsha is prompted to summarize her thoughts on perpetrators and their relevance today: i n t : Do you think the Holocaust happened just because of Hitler, or are Germans predisposed to hate Jews? m a r s h a : I think through his teaching they believed him and they became this way, too. If you teach people long enough, then they believe it. i n t : Could you trust a new generation of Germans today?

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m a r s h a : No, I couldn’t. I don’t know. But I myself going through what I did . . . Especially the youth, they have so much hate. i n t : What about the Lithuanians or the Poles? m a r s h a : The Lithuanians were very bad to the Jewish people. They were antisemites, too. They didn’t like the Jewish people. They hated them. And they helped the Germans. Posed questions about a number of groups—“Germans” then, “Germans” now, “Lithuanians” and “Poles”—Marsha pulls them together under one rubric, with a clear conceptual center: a hateful idea that begins with Adolf Hitler. Hitler, though named, is not an individual person in the way that Jankunis of Kalniuk, the cowherd and murderer of Simkhe Luria, appears to be in the Yiddish testimony of Shmuel S. Hitler’s name stands in for an evil idea. Though ethnic groups are named and judged, it is ultimately this destructive idea that is at fault. Far from forgiving, Marsha nonetheless proffers no wish for justice or vengeance. “I can’t even hear the German language,” she says a few moments earlier. “It brings me such bad memories when I hear German spoken.” Rather than envisioning her victimizers in a courtroom setting, she judges them according to the measures of her emotional economy. The very strongest affirmation of Nazi evil lies in her gut reaction to the German language. And this proof is garnered not in order to accuse and then punish the perpetrator, but to establish a psychically healthy course of action for the victim; the verdict prescribes what she can and cannot hear. From Marsha’s position on the globe, individual Holocaust perpetrators can only harm her through this internal pathway. Emotional data is thus crucial for assessing different levels of past injustice, as well as deciding upon the best contemporary response. Marked by the Perpetrator Witnesses from the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology incorporate a certain type of evidence into their testimonies: Dead bodies, weapons, motivation, time, and location are details that depict and prove a perpetrator’s culpability. Here, in English-language American conversations, witnesses draw out a different type of material evidence from the scene

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of the crime: the sensual impressions of violence that informed family relations and that have left a trace on their personalities ever since. For example, Esther Ancoli tells that, after the first wave of shootings in Radvilishik, her family and all the remaining local Jews were rounded up and imprisoned in former army barracks. She relates that every night, Lithuanian guards used to line up the Jewish prisoners and give them a speech: “‘You parasites, you nothing, you bastards. Now we’re going shoot you.’ With machine guns in front. I always had marks in my hand from my father’s nails, trying to control himself.”60 The evidence that she submits to the testimonial record comes from her own body. Its purpose is not to assign guilt to specific parties, but to track the affective exchanges that this aggression set off among family members. Jack Arnel similarly foregrounds the emotional footprint left behind by Holocaust perpetrators. He recalls the day in the summer of 1941 when he and his family were evicted from their home and forced into the Vilna ghetto: There were Polish and Lithuanians who would jump on people and grab their bundles. Sickly people, the contents sprawled out. It is a scene that has made a very, very big impression on me. I just walked around with a big pain in my heart.61 The cause-and-effect process that interests Jack is about the impact of the event on his person. He does not catalog stolen goods but the images most critical for his self-development thereafter. Such attention to the victim’s side of this encounter, to his experience of the perpetrator, guides some witnesses to explore certain complex, even paradoxical aspects of severe oppression. Gita Taitz, not unlike Marsha Almos, dramatizes a moment in which she experienced her own voice as crippled and she could not even address the perpetrator with a shout.62 She describes the German overseers at a labor site outside of Stutthof as follows: We didn’t have any communication with them. I never showed them that I know German. I was afraid to speak up. One day, one German . . . thought that I stole some clothing and he started to hit me. He hit me and hit me and he was in such a trance. He

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didn’t know what he was doing. [. . .] He had no control over himself. Hatred, most likely. He had hatred, because otherwise, I couldn’t explain it. My mother showed up like an angel, and she spoke up: “Mein Tochter hat nicht genommen; nicht gestohlen [My daughter didn’t take it; she didn’t steal].’’ I mean she spoke up in German. And he woke up!63 Gita recalls an irrational distance between herself and her German overseers. For some unexplained reason, she never spoke to them, though she possessed full mastery of the German language. When one starts to beat her, Gita cannot even produce noise in protest. Under the influence of “hatred,” this guard acts under a parallel trance of silence. Gita points to her mother’s sudden capacity to communicate as a surprising disturbance to this reign of noninteraction, one that pierces the guard’s glaze as well. Gita shows a Jewish victim momentarily undermining the violence of objectification, whereas Marsha Almos—in the equivalent situation discussed earlier—showed herself trapped within it. But, most importantly, both witnesses find room in the testimonial conversation to emphasize this type of victim-perpetrator dynamic, the kind that annihilated people’s capacity for address and response. The very sensation of nonpersonhood that they depict in these moments belies the value of concrete forensic accusation. In some cases, it is the interviewer who seems most concerned with the elusive nature of camp perpetrators. In the testimony of Boris A., the witness attempts a rather brief narration of his transport to Stutthof and subsequent imprisonment in Landsberg-Kaufering, a subsidiary of Dachau.64 The interviewer interjects, “Did you see anybody shot or killed in the ghetto or in Stutthof ?” Boris answers, “Mmm,” and offers two single anecdotes of seeing individuals punished. The conversation dramatizes the difficulties of witnessing camp violence as one would an ordinary crime: No matter how much detail he adds, Boris somehow cannot provide a straightforward picture of one person applying force to another. The interviewer takes note of this: i n t : Did you see any physical beatings? b o r i s : Physical beatings, there was a lot of them. I had one

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time [an] SS man hit me here on the nose [shows his nose]. Even with his ring, there was a mark. I think. When I came over here to the United States they operated on my nose. i n t : What made him do that to you? b o r i s : I think I didn’t have pants. I had cement bags. I asked him. You were not allowed to ask. Boris’s answer sounds awkwardly trivial. In both his depiction of the beating and his explanation of the SS man’s motivation, he elides some element of scale or significance. The interviewer circles around this missing element, pointing it out with questions. On four different occasions, she asks Boris to go back and renarrate physical violence at camps. Even with all of these attempts, Boris never produces a straightforward chain of cause and effect, one person beating and another being beaten, with a reason and a response. Though Boris does not introduce the automated, faceless, or unaccusable perpetrator of his own initiative, as do Gita and Marsha, the theme becomes equally central in his testimony through this interpersonal dynamic. This stands in strong contrast to the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonial setting, in which the interviewers and witnesses both allow deflation, brevity, and humor regarding camp perpetration to pass. Bigots versus Human Beings Another prominent emphasis that emerges in scenes of victimperpetrator encounter is a discussion of human values. Here the object of analysis is not the self, but different concepts of bigotry, discussed as “antisemitism” and sometimes “hatred.” Keeping a macro-geographic lens, singular acts of Lithuanian antagonism toward Jews connect to these larger, worldwide phenomena. Consider Gita Taitz’s memory of prewar discrimination: I never encountered antisemitism. I mean, I heard about things. [. . .] My husband, he had a store in Šancˇiai. He always said that his best friends were the Lithuanians. They were very friendly to him. But sometimes they would ask him, “Simon, are you really Jewish? You speak such a good language and you don’t look like a Jew. Tell us you are not a Jew.”

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Though Gita starts with a concrete interaction in a specific place, she quickly translates these particulars into their larger moral ramifications. Gita describes her husband as having been able to integrate easily into non-Jewish society, though his Lithuanian customers inject concerns about ethnic distinction. Their problem, as she presents it, is that they did not appreciate the critical notion of being “a good human being.” “I don’t know why it is so important to be a Jew, a Lithuanian, or any other nationality. It’s important to be a human being. And a good human being. And we were all good people trying to do our best.” The point of the episode is not to chronicle the injustices committed by particular people or even a particular group, but to demonstrate the danger of ethnic bias at large. Gita returns to this point repeatedly throughout her testimony: At another moment, she tells how a cousin was chased among the rooftops in her town of Shaki (Šakiai) during the first days of war, and then concludes the episode by saying, “I never knew human beings could be so cruel.” Even here, she deems it most urgent to use memories of local aggression to exemplify a larger ethical collapse, a massive violation of humanistic values. Some witnesses in this American ecology combine accusations against locals with a reflection on values. Consider, for example, the following macabre scene from the testimony of Betty Goodfriend: They caught one of our great rabbis in Kaunas. On one of the main streets in Kaunas. They cut off his head and put it in a window. At the butcher’s store where they cut it off in the window, and there it was for eight days with the beard dripping with blood. And Lithuanians standing and laughing. Laughing. Usually they’re a superstitious people who were afraid of ghosts and devils. And that they were not afraid of this. To take a scholarly old gentleman and cut off his head and put it in the window as a triumph.65 At its outset, this early, local scene resembles many found in the Yiddish testimonies. Nearing the trope of ethnic conquest, Betty accuses “Lithuanians” of carrying out and supporting this particular act, which she describes in grotesque, bodily terms. But when Betty defines why the act was so atrocious, she turns away from the specifics of the local milieu.

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She renames the victim. He is no longer just a rabbi or a member of her social network, but a “scholarly old gentleman”—an honorable human being, a member in good standing of polite society. In shifting the victim from an observant Jew to an upstanding citizen, Betty performs a parallel shift in the role of the perpetrator: from a jealous Lithuanian neighbor to an envoy of inhumanity. In making her final case for the relevance of this story, Betty points to a crisis of human values. What she has encountered, as an eyewitness, was a paradigmatic act of bigotry rather than a singular, isolated, or avengeable crime. In such depictions of Lithuanian aggressors, a humanist ethos and a distant geocultural position merge together almost seamlessly. Certainly, generalized language choices, such as “antisemitism” and “non-Jews,” have a humanist message: The witness does not want to single out one specific group as culpable, at least not through ethnic categories. At the same time, this perspective also seems related to expectations of knowledge circulating in this environment: The English-speaking North American listener simply may not know much about “Lithuanians” or have any stake in their culpability. Thus, there is an overlap between what is morally wrong to say about local perpetration here and what is deemed irrelevant or confusing to the anticipated audience. In the case of “Germans” or “Nazis,” on the other hand, the sustained relevance of their identity is almost self-evident. These titles alone make a scene fitting material for global comparison and allegory. After the gruesome beheading recounted above, Betty Goodfriend explains, “So we had two enemies to worry about. We couldn’t trust our Christian neighbors anymore. And of course we knew that the Nazis are Nazis.” Betty places the violation of her “Christian neighbors” alongside “the Nazis,” whose guilt requires no explanation. Since “Nazis are Nazis,” their name alone is enough to signify the violation of humanity at the center of her testimony. As a departure from this focus on values, some witnesses are diligent about identifying German or Nazi perpetrators with more specificity. For example, Solomon Kaplan consistently takes the time to state which deeds were conducted by the SS or Wehrmacht.66 He also refers to specific military personnel, such as Wilhem Göcke, the commandant of Kovna once turned into a camp, and Kurt Krause, an SS leader stationed in Shavl in

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1941.67 At Dachau, Solomon tells, “As Eichmann started with the Jews to liquidate in Hungary in late ’forty-four, he brought a lot of Jews to that lager, lager ayns [Camp One].” Jack Arnel also specifies German perpetrators through military terminology. He describes the German invasion of Vilna: “They had an SD police, Einsatzgruppen. All murderous divisions.” Still, the thrust of their message about perpetration does not seem to lie in this Nazi nomenclature. Solomon Kaplan, for instance, concludes his testimony with the following reflection: “My message is: Not to have in your heart to feel nekome—revenge. This is up to God. The Jewish people suffered. This is not our nature. The only thing I asked for the day after the war was a piece of bread.” Neither Solomon nor Jack follows up on their named aggressors with a recommended course of justice or indictment. The names do not build into a forensic case but are absorbed into other rhetorical strands. What Matters Today In the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology, witnesses stretch terms for local wartime violence, like bandit, into postwar and even present-day life. Witnesses testifying in the American context display a different manner of incorporating the crimes of the past into the present. The most visible way of doing so is in the form of a final moral assessment at the end of the recording. Such moments, encouraged in the questionnaire and labeled “Future Messages” in the Shoah Foundation indexes, often include some statement of how Holocaust perpetration should be instructive today. In addition to Solomon Kaplan’s final reflections on the dangers of revenge, or Esther Ancoli’s conclusion that she “hates war,” discussed in chapter 1, here are two more examples: Arnold Clevs: I feel that Hitler may have lost the war, but I would have lost also if I didn’t have children to carry on. [. . .] It’s not just Jews that have to remember. I think the whole gentile world must know what happened and not let it happen again. I, for one, would not go through this experience again without a very strong physical fight. I would die in the fight, but they would never take me to another concentration camp again.68

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Irv Barowsky: My experiences certainly formed some thoughts and opinions, which possibly changed my thinking and some of my actions. . . . [Y]ou should be fair and not harm anyone, not only physical harm, but emotionally.69 Building off of the allegorical suggestions they have integrated throughout, these future messages clarify the focus on values—ranging from selfdefense to pacifism—as a way to relate the memory of Holocaust perpetration to the present. Another kind of chronological stretching found in English-language American testimonies more closely resembles a “second Holocaust,” Laub’s term for a later event that repeats some crucial aspect of Holocaust victimhood. Here the incident takes the form of an emotional and structural repetition alone—with no suggestion of contextual continuity, a possibility that is constantly looming for witnesses in Lithuania. For instance, American Fortunoff witness Bela E. interrupts the interviewer’s questions about the Bromberg labor camp during the war in order to speak about a more recent loss.70 “Yeah, even now I went through a lot. You know in 1980 when they killed my husband. I went through a lot.” Despite the interviewer’s efforts to stick with the war years a bit longer, Bela returns to the topic of her husband’s death again moments later. “It’s gonna be six years since they killed my husband. He didn’t deserve. A fourteen-year-old color boy [sic] stabbed him to death.” Then, finally, as the most detailed scene of the whole testimony, Bela relates: He was so friendly with the colored children. We had a store near Penny’s. I was off. Four o’ clock they called me up that my husband was stabbed. I ask a friend to take me there. . . . [The doctor] said, ‘We did everything we could. But couldn’t help him.’ Some people faint. I couldn’t move the tongue. I thought it was terrible. He was gone. Why? Using racially charged wording, Bela expresses bewilderment at the fact that a neighborhood boy killed her husband, despite previous “friendly” relations. Inserted amid her wartime narrative, Bela imagines a structural similarity between the betrayal of neighbors in the Holocaust and

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the betrayal of one neighbor in Texas in 1980. Bela strengthens this suggestive connection by pondering aloud, “Maybe if we went to Israel [my husband] would still be alive”—as if moving away on time could have protected him from this neighborhood homicide, as it could have, perhaps, from suffering through the Holocaust. In repeatedly connecting these two painful events, Bela underscores their similarity in emotional impact. Circling around the topics of antisemitism and Israel, she also begins to imply that the perpetrators of both events shared a common antagonism toward Jewish people. But such a connection remains a fleeting suggestion, and the English language does not tempt Bela into calling both perpetrators by the same title. The racist implications in Bella’s word choice, discussing her husband’s relations with “colored children,” further weaken this parallel, which receives no encouragement from her interviewers. The individual responsible for the returned suffering in Texas has a completely different face, speaks a different language, and inhabits a different social dynamic than those who harmed her in the 1940s. This stands in contrast to Yiddish-Lithuanian narrators who stretch the figure of the bandit from Holocaust violence to postwar and even present-day interactions, plotting emotional repetition onto political and ethnic continuity. Violating the Norm Matis Finkel, who testified with the Shoah Foundation in English in 1996, violates these allegorical or emotional approaches to perpetrators.71 While speaking about the outbreak and first months of war, Matis includes many details about Lithuanian violence, including specific times and locations as well as names of victims. Indeed, the following segment in particular resembles the forensic mode found in the YiddishLithuanian testimonies: He walks in, a Lithuanian by the name of Algirdas. He was a house painter. [. . .] My mother-in-law used to recommend him for jobs. This is the way he made a living. Every morning, day in and day out. He came in there and got a job there. He walked in with a rifle on his shoulder, a gun in his hand, and a big sack over his shoulder. He walks in. “Kupricas [the Jewish family’s

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name], give me all your gold, silver, money, whatever you have. You don’t need anything. In a day or two you’ll all be dead.” Matis goes on to tell how Algirdas called out to one son in the family, David, since “He knew all of them by name.” Algirdas ordered David to accompany him and the two walked out the door. After a few hours, Algirdas returned alone, carrying David’s jacket, now soaked in blood. Obeying corpus delicti, Matis locates David’s body, “by the Nemenas River.” Matis conveys a literal interest in proving the guilt of this particular Lithuanian man, detailing the means, remains, and motivation of his crime. He emphasizes the social intimacy between Lithuanians and Jews, the ability of each side to call to the other by name. As the testimony continues, Matis’s story does not progress in time but spirals further into the details of the summer of 1941, sharing what happened in a number of households. The interviewer expresses some discomfort with this testimonial approach and asks, “Where were you at this time?”— directing him toward personal, experiential description. Matis takes his answer in another direction: I was in a home that belonged to Mr. Yatkunstki. He was the administrator for the Jewish newspaper, the Yidishe shtime. I walked into his home with two more Jews, and it was a slaughterhouse! Blood on the walls all around, even the top was blood. In the living room was a big black piano. On the piano was a statue of Beethoven. Around the statue, pieces of flesh. Looks like there was a wife with a daughter, pieces of breast were cut up and put around the statue. [. . .] I was there. I saw this with my eyes and I touched it. These were the Lithuanians. Instead of exploring his own responses at the moment, Matis utilizes his sensual perspective to describe the flesh and blood of the victims’ bodies. Immediately afterward, Matis comments directly on how he sees this information as relevant to the present day: “This is the reason I would like to have an atom bomb and smash them to pieces. Kill their children because they killed our children.” Matis reemphasizes the contemporary importance of these indictments by stating that the man who killed his uncle and his family currently resides in the very house where these

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victims once lived. The interviewer tries several times over the next ten minutes to interrupt Matis, then finally succeeds. He cuts Matis off at the peak of his rage with a concluding remark that fully contradicts the tenor of the witness’s testimony: “Okay, ah, with all that you’ve gone through, you’ve still managed to create your own family, so there is some happy ending. I want to thank you very much for this interview.” This witness’s noticeable defiance of the allegorical approach to Holocaust perpetration is received with marked discomfort and aversion. This example demonstrates the type of generic failure that occurs when witnesses step outside the range of acceptable stances toward this topic. Matis’s defiant approach to perpetrators virtually annuls his authority to speak freely as a Holocaust witness, which is otherwise almost sacred within this ecology. More broadly, Matis’s testimony shows that, even if witnesses would attempt a literal translation of a specific testimonial genre from one ecology to another, such an approach would not survive the test of dialogue. As a liaison to the witness’s greater audience, this interviewer funnels legitimate moral concerns into their exchange: Outside of the local Lithuanian context, Matis’s contemporary rage does not sound like the complaint of a disempowered minority. Here, it sounds like bigotry. Speaking from another point on the map, with English giving access to a wider audience, witnesses testifying to local Lithuanian perpetration in an American ecology face a different set of moral considerations than do those in Yiddish in Lithuania.

Enemy Offstage, Hebrew-Israeli Testimony One does not need to look far to find references to Holocaust perpetrators in contemporary Israeli life: In a recent study conducted in Israeli state schools, the vast majority of twelfth graders described themselves as knowledgeable not only about iconic figures like Adolf Eichmann but also about a more expansive list of personalities and topics, such as Reinhard Heydrich, the Wannsee Conference, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Nuremberg Laws.72 Ruvik Rosenthal’s dictionary of contemporary Hebrew slang includes both “Nazi” and “kapo” as synonyms for “bad people.”73 In 2013, Israeli parliament members from three different parties proposed banning the use of the word “Nazi” and Nazi insignia in public

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events because, as they wrote, “Most unfortunately, the phenomenon of using Nazi symbols and labels has increased in recent years.”74 Given the centrality of Nazism and Nazis in popular knowledge and daily communication, it may be surprising to see a restrained depiction of perpetrators in contemporary Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies. Shoshana Felman’s interpretation of the Eichmann trial can help understand this seeming contradiction: Whereas the Nuremberg trials view murderous political regimes and their aggressive warfare as the center of the trial and as the center of what constitutes a monumental history, the Eichmann trial views the victims as the center of what gives history its monumental dimensions and what endows the trial with its monumental significance as an act of historic justice.75 Indeed, the Eichmann trial offers a template for testifying to the Holocaust in a way that speaks around but not to the perpetrator. Much of the witness testimony voiced at this trial had little direct bearing on Eichmann.76 At the same time, Eichmann’s physical presence in the courtroom—separated from everyone else by a glass booth—was the impetus for the witnesses’ public narrative act. A similar sensibility toward the perpetrator emerges in contemporary Hebrew-language testimony: Their testimonial framework, which I have been calling communal-monumental, foregrounds the response of the Jewish body politic to aggression, its virtues, and downfalls under pressure. To conduct this self-evaluation, the perpetrator must be present, but on the sidelines. Witnesses find ways of incorporating German and Lithuanian enemies— of evoking their guilt—without letting them monopolize the narrative stage. To put it differently, these testimonies repeatedly affirm the reality and impact of Holocaust perpetrators without engaging these people up close. This balancing act is not simply a matter of budgeting narrative resources in a limited time frame, of trimming off words from perpetrator depictions and putting them toward the Jewish subject; to allude to the perpetrator without rage or accusation supports an idea of Jewish agency (‘amida) in light of the Holocaust.77 As anthropologists Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya write, “Of all the policy consequences of the

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[Holocaust] symbol, none is more deeply entrenched than the notion that Jews can rely only on their own strength and never on assistance from others.”78 To demonstrate both self-reliance and the problem with “others” is an ethical as well as a narrative demand.79 Witnesses negotiate this double bind on perpetrator portrayal in a variety of ways. One is to depict them through civic or military language, to speak of both German and Lithuanian aggressors through their respective military strategies, as if they were opponents in battle. In this constellation, the witness remembers him- or herself remaining a subject, not through direct physical or verbal exchange with the enemy, but through a distanced, cerebral assessment of his aggression. In assessing the strategies of Germans and local collaborators, these “soldierly” witnesses make Jewish political autonomy a lens of depicting history throughout their lives, rather than just a final historical outcome. Another way of bringing the perpetrator into a Hebrew-language testimony is through what we could call communal footnoting. Witnesses incorporate recognizable phrases that stand in for the identities and deeds of perpetrators. Referring to “something that someone else once said or wrote” relieves the speaker of his burden to depict a wicked human figure. Drawing from popular, educational, or even religious references, these shortcuts rely on the help of a communal archive and the idea that the listener will import vast amounts of shared information upon hearing certain phrases. Sa’adyah Bahat: “Outstanding German Psychological Work” Sa’adyah Bahat, born in Alite (Alytus) in 1928, testified to the Shoah Foundation in Haifa in 1997.80 To describe his family’s relationship to its Lithuanian neighbors, he tells a story about his grandfather: “I have documents that show that he [my grandfather] brought weapons to the Lithuanians.” Unlike the door-to-door exchanges that arise in the Yiddish-Lithuanian setting, Sa’adyah highlights the kind of JewishLithuanian interaction that occurred at the level of infrastructure and governance, and that is archived in written documentation. The story says much less about the specific Lithuanian individuals involved than about the potential symmetry and equality of strength between them and Sa’adyah’s family. These recollections also establish the military or

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organizational register through which Sa’adyah incorporates this other polity into his field of vision. Sa’adyah recalls the dissolution of Jewish life in a similarly civic, official key. Indeed, it is through this lens that he narrates the outbreak of World War II in Vilna, where his family had resettled in 1939: “The war started in Vilna with eighteen hours of bombing. And then began some outstanding German psychological work [‘avoda psikholigit germanit yotseit min haklal].” He presents this initial rift as technologically advanced and numerically precise, emphasizing the exact duration of the bombing. What stands out about this perpetrator is neither a personality nor a value but a strategy, one that Sa’adyah can understand and even assess: He presents the early restrictions on Jewish life—the wearing of the yellow star and the prohibition from walking on the sidewalk—as rational and analyzable “psychological work.” As narrator, he positions himself as the German Army’s opponent, working to expose his method. It is not surprising that Sa’adyah tells of the German military invasion in this way. After all, this was an event that went beyond his physical field of vision, and witnesses from the other two settings also depict the German invasion as distanced and mechanical in a similar way. More remarkable, perhaps, is that Sa’adyah also narrates the face-to-face aggressions of locals in a like manner. After they received “orders to vacate” (tsav pinui) and move to the ghetto, he recalls, “A guy came in and tried on my father’s clothes. In a systematic way, he packed a suitcase and left. It seems that we were busy with matters of survival and not possession.” Something that would likely be called “banditry,” a messy act of primitive greed in the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies, is here characterized as “systematic” (shitati). Sa’adyah refers to the thief simply as a “guy” (bahur), who is present but not named, described, or condemned. Sa’adyah’s family does not touch or speak with the thief. The witness extracts his family from this singular confrontation. He casts their nonresponse as a kind of strategy, which he can evaluate in retrospect: They allow the man to steal their clothes, not out of passivity but as an instinctively wise prioritization of concerns. Moreover, the incident ends with a pronouncement about “we,” the Jewish subjects who maintain their dignity in the face of this intruder. At the moment of their final eviction from home, however, Sa’adyah shows his and his family’s strategies and civic capacities to be ineffective,

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systemically violated by the situation. Walking out onto the street, his father donned the numerous medals of civil service awarded to him by the Lithuanian government. The picture is like this: Lots of Poles. We are a Lithuanian-speaking family. They see the medals. The Lithuanians evicting us don’t know how to swallow it. The head of the household is decorated with Lithuanian medals. They let us walk first, which I guess is some kind of honor. But they evicted us nonetheless. Part of the confusion arises from the Buchshitski81 family’s Lithuanian cultural fluency, since most Jews in Vilna were Polish-speaking. But, more importantly it seems, Sa’adyah’s father presents himself to these Lithuanians as being a soldier-citizen like them. Though the Lithuanian evictors (presumably policemen) recognize the family’s signs of civic status, this does nothing to ameliorate the situation. The perpetrator here is portrayed in a deadlock: In fulfilling his military duty, he must respect the medals on the man’s jacket and also deny their meaning when donned by a Jew. Sa’adyah’s story seems to communicate that the real enemy was not the Lithuanian soldiers themselves but the place and the system: Non-Jewish countries could not be relied on to recognize Jewish civic or military loyalty. Thus, the Lithuanian soldiers cannot be blamed for carrying out an injustice inherent to life in the Diaspora. The Jewish people must move elsewhere in order to manifest the governmental and military capacity that they may have possessed but could not fully realize. While this message is clear to Sa’adyah as a present-day narrator, he depicts his family as having been surprised when it happened. Sa’adyah’s own repeated emphasis on his family’s proximity to the Lithuanian political and military system heightens this disjuncture. Through it, through the gap between Jewish victim-actor of the past and victor-narrator of the present, Sa’adyah casts this moment as one of profound unhinging. If, in the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology, it is the intimate violation of the local milieu that becomes the central violation, and among American witnesses, the negation of human subjectivity in concentration camps, in Sa’adyah’s case it is the act of disenfranchisement, of denying the Jewish polity its civic potential that demands exploration.

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Sa’adyah speaks at length of his imprisonment in Estonian labor camps and his transports between them. But these segments of his testimony rightfully appear later in our analysis of “place,” since he depicts more of an environment of repression than concrete violent deeds there. Statements with passive constructions and impersonal subjects appear frequently: I was taken to the children’s camp. [Hufneti lemahanei hayeladim]. ... [They] hit you when you come out and also when you return. So everything had to be at a running pace. [Marbitsim bayetsiya vegam bahazara. Hakol tsarikh lihiyot beritsa.] There are occasions when Sa’adyah uses irony or humor to portray German guards and overseers in the camps. He speaks, for example, of a German at the Vaivara work camp who heard that Sa’adyah was a skilled woodworker. This German ordered that Sa’adyah carve a walking stick in exchange for special privileges. Producing an impressive, decorative stick, Sa’adyah mistakenly carved a backward swastika on its handle. “I learned that there is a direction for the swastika. I got an indoctrinatory beating [makot indoktrinatsia].” Sa’adyah couches this humor in political language; to beat is to “indoctrinate” in his phrasing. His irony—in distinction to the kind circulating among the Yiddish-Lithuanian witnesses—strengthens the voice of the soldier-narrator, learning to strategize around the oppressor. After liberation, Sa’adyah takes little to no interest in the human perpetrators who caused his suffering. Narrating his postwar transition, Sa’adyah produces no revenge scenes, even though he has ample opportunity. Liberated at Goddentow in Germany by Soviet forces, he was then employed as a translator and assistant for Red Army officers, entering the houses of German civilians in the area in order to extract resources. He treats the matter lightly and briefly, recalling the vodka he was required to drink and the caricatured “sovietskii geroy [Soviet hero]” types he encountered. Individual revenge does not interest him. Instead, he seeks reciprocity on a larger historical, national scale. Strength changes hands in a meaningful way when Sa’adyah joins the Palmach, a year after making aliyah to Palestine. He enters combat in the

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Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which he narrates at length. Afterward, he builds a lifelong career in weaponry engineering. Sa’adyah explains his career choice: “I never thought that my grandchildren wouldn’t have to serve in the army. So long as they do, one needs to equip them with the best equipment possible.” These segments sound very much like a continuation of his exchanges with German and Lithuanian perpetrators, in which he consistently prefigured his strategic, soldierly viewpoint. Though he never lays a hand on a Nazi or a local collaborator in his story, Sa’adyah overcomes these aggressors indirectly, by fulfilling the military and civil potential they denied him. What makes Sa’adyah’s path to agency so different from the revenge stories in the Yiddish-Lithuanian corpus is his act of disembedding, of transporting himself into a new social and physical ecology. The Perpetrator as Military Opponent There are many noticeable instances when Hebrew-Israeli narrators, men especially, present the perpetrator through the lens of military know-how—what I call a “soldier-voice.” These witnesses speak of the perpetrator in a calm, cerebral tone, use official-sounding terminology, and, most importantly, show an interest in assessing strategy rather than accusing people. For instance, Ofer Haim activates this voice as he recounts the initial capture of Jewish men in Shavl, in fall 1941: “The Lithuanians did this. They were organized and preceded the Germans.”82 He narrates how Jewish leaders first attempted to engage these perpetrators almost as diplomats, working from the top down: “The elders of the community got organized and approached the German office of the conquering army. The civilian government had not arrived yet. They spoke to them about the rampages of the Lithuanians. The Germans stopped it according to their system [lefi shitatam].” Ofer goes on to add details about the internal workings of German forces in Shavl: “They were constantly switching their officers as the front progressed, until their permanent officer finally arrived.” He speaks almost as if looking through their office files. In response to an orderly, strategic perpetrator, Ofer shows how Jews should continue to respond with similar systematic work. For instance, he tells that the ghetto arranged a system for collecting firewood: “This

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was through Hebrew labor exclusively [‘avoda ‘ivrit] so that non-Jews would not cheat us.” If we recall the many scenes of victim-perpetrator dialogue in the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies, wherein Jewish witnesses vocally accused their attackers, thereby placing them in the same intimate cultural and temporal space, Ofer’s strategy talk does the opposite. It engenders distance between Jew and aggressor, locating their interaction on the level of mutual assessment rather than face-to-face (or voice-tovoice) clashes. Witnesses committed to this technique, narrating victimhood through a language of political strength, quite often reveal and even call attention to its very holes: They recall how even the best Jewish survival strategies failed them. In this sense, they reveal a contradiction in their own biographical stance. This was the case when Sa’adyah Bahat’s family was led into the Vilna ghetto, decorated with Lithuanian medals. If these upstanding Jewish citizens were savvy enough to earn accolades from the state, how could they not have prevented their own exclusion? Why does the narrator dwell on prewar Jewish civic capacity if the Holocaust proved it impotent? One could connect this narrative hole to a kind of hypocrisy in Israeli Holocaust discourse, as does philosopher Adi Ofir. He claims that the Shoah is treated as a “singular, one time revelation, of absolute evil” that, according to the same myth, could have and should have been expected.83 Rather than a fault, deriving from the kind of institutional manipulation that preoccupies Adi Ofir, we could instead see these moments of contradiction as testament to the frame-breaking quality of the Holocaust in this version of Jewish history: No matter how much these witnesses prefigure Jewish political capacity or Zionist consciousness in prewar life, they insert a moment of rift and paradigm change at some point during the war. This is most notable in the testimony of Kalman Perk.84 A master at synchronizing the personal and the national, even Kalman draws our attention to a moment when an other overpowers him, penetrates his spirit. In reconstructing his wartime mind-set, he shows himself both aloof to the Lithuanian betrayal of Jews and shockingly disappointed by it. In July 1944, he and the remaining Jews from the Kovna ghetto are being marched to the train station for deportation. He describes a group of Lithuanians watching their expulsion from the side of the road:

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I didn’t hear them cursing the Jews, as they had been doing earlier, like how they used to insult us on the way to the airport. [. . .] But now I don’t even want to say it. I didn’t need it. I felt some sort of compassion from them. Kalman states outright that he deems these Lithuanians’ remorseful posture irrelevant—he does not “need” compassion from non-Jewish neighbors. Kalman has already learned his lesson about these unreliable neighbors. But, shortly thereafter, Kalman arduously seeks the very compassion from others, which he pronounced moments before as unnecessary and unwanted. Having escaped from the train deporting his family to Stutthof, Kalman sets out to find a man named “Šmeinšis of Rumšiškis,” (Rumishik) a childhood friend of his father’s. After a long journey, Kalman finally reaches his destination. He approaches the house of Šmeinšis: I knocked on the door. A tall man answered. He did look to be the same age as my father. I asked if he is Šmeinšis. He looked at me. I said that I am the son of Šimonas Parkas. I thought that he would hug me or say something to me. His answer was very cold. He looked at me and said, “I’m very sorry. The front is very close. We need to saddle our horses and leave this place.” Then he closed the door. [. . .]I remember this shock. I remember it exceptionally well. This truly made an impression in my memory. I climbed up a tree. I sat there and felt such deep disappointment. Notably, Šmeinšis’s reaction to Kalman’s request is cold—not violent or malicious, qualities that figure prominently in the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies. He conveys that the man is behaving according to rules and one could not expect otherwise. The moral of the story is thus not that Lithuanian traitors should be brought to justice or made to change, but that the Jewish body politic should cease to expect their goodwill. On the level of “moral lesson,” this disappointing outcome affirms the thrust of Kalman’s already-articulated worldview. But if the rejection was so necessary, so predictable, why should Kalman put so much emphasis on his feelings of shock? Kalman continues to reflect on his emotional state at that moment: “I remember this blow. I don’t want to say that I

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was powerless [khaser onim]. But I woke up. Where am I? Who am I?” Kalman’s extensive recounting of this episode with Šmeinšis is decidedly uneconomical, opening up a gap between narrative outcome—which reaffirms the necessity of Jewish self-reliance—and narrative process, which highlights a sense of profound reliance. Put differently, Kalman invests deeply in testing a friendship that he claims to have already dismissed as broken, unnecessary. Thus, despite its almost parabolic clarity, the segment willfully forces into view the contradiction of the soldier-survivor gazing on himself as Holocaust victim. It is this very gap that seems to manifest the need for disembedding, for metamorphosis. The Perpetrator as Common Knowledge There are other ways of speaking about the perpetrator in this Hebrew-Israeli ecology, employed by witnesses who have less access to a soldierly perspective, women especially. Not so heroic, this cluster of approaches still does not focalize the sensation of being a nonsubject, as happens so visibly among American witnesses. Instead, witnesses manage to indicate the perpetrator’s presence—without engaging him in accusation or depiction—through references to presumably shared knowledge, moments that can be described as communal footnoting. Sometimes, witnesses make direct reference to canonized Holocaust knowledge in Israel, such as that stored in the Yad Vashem Archives, or taught in the state Holocaust curriculum. Other witnesses include quotations from sacral (or sacral-sounding) Jewish texts at the moment of perpetrator depiction. These techniques, though polyvalent, all effectively distance the witness from the aggressor and define perpetration as a topic to be recorded and interpreted communally, institutionally. For example, this is how the participants render the outbreak of war in Vilna in the testimony of Yocheved Aryeh: i n t : After a short while, war broke out between Russia and Germany. Describe it to me. y o c h e v e d : I could have never imagined that the Germans were really destroying the Jews. Right away the horrible things started. The Lithuanians came in. They took away my father and brother.85

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The interviewer relieves Yocheved of her forensic duty, opening the conversation with a statement of facts already known. In turn, Yocheved repeats various well-known phrases: “I could have never imagined . . . destroying the Jews . . . horrible things”— oral shortcuts, allusions to perpetrator images drawn from the same repertoire of knowledge that the interviewer has just referenced. In an even tone, Yocheved goes on to tell how “the Lithuanians” came and took away her father and brother, without any attempt to flesh out the people behind these deeds. Again the conversation turns to a confirmation of communally established facts, this time with a very open reference to their canonicity: i n t : According to the books, history tells us that the Lithuanians plundered the Jews on the street, that they simply murdered them [pashut rats’hu otam]. y o c h e v e d : It’s true, the Germans couldn’t tell who was a Jew and who was a goy. Because they’d been with us more. Both the Poles and the Lithuanians. They carried out the “actions” [ha’akstiot]. They just really, really helped [Hem pashut ‘azru me’od me’od]. The conversation includes a direct accusation against Lithuanian perpetrators, but one that appears in the form of a citation—not just in the interviewer’s explicit reference to the written record, but also in Yocheved’s calm affirmation of its validity. Yocheved and the interviewer both use the word “simple” to describe these acts of local aggression, characterizing the violence as straightforward, ever-ready in the communal imagination, which makes gory, mimetic elaboration unnecessary. Citing a veridical consensus, Yocheved invokes accusations rather than arguing for them. In these question-answer scenarios, it appears important to have facts about perpetrators, Germans and locals alike, sounded out loud—almost like incantations. Once recalled, the perpetrator is then left alone and the focus becomes about Jewish communal response. In the Yad Vashem testimony of Ofer Haim, his interviewer asks him: i n t : Was the “shooting pit” [bor hahariga] something that you’d heard of during the war?

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o f e r : Yes. A survivor of a shooting, got to the [Shavl] ghetto and said that he had been in the woods. He was from the Telz area originally. Everyone said that his head was scrambled. The term “shooting pit” stands in place of the extensive scenes depicting local killings in Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies. Compressing all the details about such massacres into one heading, the interviewer introduces it as a known, researched phenomenon. The witness responds with a confirmation as well as an implicit criticism of the community’s past naïveté. The conversation provides another reminder of communal Jewish transformation, moving from unpreparedness— calling this early witness crazy—to preparedness through knowledge—having an academic heading ready to denote such a phenomenon of violence. The perpetrator, incorporated through the label “shooting pit,” is the critical impetus and cause for self-evaluation. But the conversation develops around him rather than about him. It is worth pausing momentarily to consider what is distinct about the type of hindsight perspective that emerges from this Hebrew-Israeli ecology in connection to perpetrators, both in the soldier-voice and in communal footnoting, and how it works differently than hindsight in the other environments. There are, of course, ways to point out the influence of present-day knowledge on nearly every utterance of oral testimony. When Shmuel S. narrates the massacre in the woods outside of Yonishik, he includes two possible names of perpetrators, “Juozas” and “Jonas,” which he heard a young boy shouting at the moment of his death. In 1961, three men were tried for this very massacre in Yonishik. Following their conviction, Soviet newspapers publicized their execution by firing squad. Two of the men were Jonas Ožalas and Juozas Sutkus.86 Testifying in 1995 and in 2004, Shmuel may very well use what he learned from the trial in 1961 to reconstruct what he heard the boy shouting in 1941. But he does not announce this hindsight perspective to the listener in any way. One does not need to know about the trial in 1961 to make sense of what Shmuel tells of the Yonishik massacre. In fact, Shmuel gives the impression that he does not know that the trial reports exist or, perhaps, that everyone knows about the trial but no one believes the verdict, entangled as it was in Soviet-Lithuanian politics. His firsthand account thus remains

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necessary. By contrast, in this Hebrew ecology, witnesses and interviewers alike draw attention to the presentness of their information. They are testifying to the validity and strength of the consensus-making process that has already been set in motion, as well as the truths that it reveals. Or we may recall that Dvorah Minin interrupts her wartime narration to tell about later encounters with a certain “Antanas” on the streets of Klaipeda. Indeed, she explicitly inserts a vision of the future into her rendering of wartime events. But there is no suggestion of disembedding in this process. “Antanas” has not been translated into the “shooting pit” or another official-sounding category. She conveys no sense that a certified archive stands behind her judgment of the man. If Dvorah has publicized Antanas’s deeds after the war, it is only by word of mouth. Unlike in these Hebrew-Israeli cases, Dvorah’s flash-forward is one that does not invoke the institutionalization of her knowledge. Conversations about perpetrators in this setting echo local investigations and trials but are self-standing as oral conversation, referencing no written prosthesis. Looking back at the English-language American corpus, we can recall an important hindsight statement in the testimony of Jack Arnel. Depicting the looting of Jewish belongings when forced into the Vilna ghetto, he inserts, “It is a scene that has made a very, very big impression on me.” Betty Goodfriend makes a similar insertion at a critical moment in her testimony: “Every time I think about it [her mother’s death] . . . it tears me apart.” Both witnesses’ mention of a long-term impression are prolepses of a sort, flashing forward from the 1940s to the 1990s, when they can assess the impact of certain images and sensations over time. But in distinction to the hindsight of Hebrew-Israeli witnesses, their insertions claim only private knowledge of the past. Each event’s conduit of relevance, the vessel that has carried it from one ecology to another, is not a national museum or even communal talk, but Betty’s or Jack’s personal memory-work. If Jack has retaliated against these perpetrators who looted his prewar home, it is not through state knowledge-making but by gaining control over his emotional makeup. To turn the perpetrator into a pain memory, to be able to articulate his feeling about this violence is, in Jack’s memory world, a step toward victory. His insertion suggests a progress from sick to healthy, rather than weak to strong—and Jack is unsure if this trajectory has been completed.

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In short, expressions of hindsight perform a special kind of labor for witnesses in this Hebrew-Israeli ecology: Participants call attention to this hindsightedness. It can be a virtue rather than a flaw of the testimony, and witnesses are unembarrassed about the presentness of their perspective. Secondly, the future sensibility that is inserted suggests an improved and detached position in relation to the perpetrator. Lastly, this progress has been achieved through communal and often institutional work, and thus it has a monumentalizing effect on the memory. There is an additional source of communal knowledge available to witnesses in the Hebrew-Israeli ecology, concerning the topic of perpetration: a reference base of past responses to persecution, inherited through the Jewish sacral tradition. Hana Golani makes use of this resource when describing a scene from the beginning of the war: Now, the Lithuanians began to get organized. All sorts of different criminals who were released from prison began to harass Jews, right away in the first days. They felt that dam yehudi hefker [Jewish blood is illegitimate/ownerless.]87 Her last phrase echoes sacral images of Jewish vengeance from early Ashkenaz. At least since the Middle Ages, Jewish blood on the garments of martyrs was depicted as future evidence against gentile persecutors, which would serve as a call for revenge with the messiah’s coming.88 The exact phrase “dam yehudi hefker [Jewish blood is illegitimate/ownerless]” is a modern adaptation of this traditional motif.89 It has been used frequently in Israeli journalism and political discussions in the past decades,90 but it still marks a shift in diction, standing out as a quotation in Hana’s speech. Crucially, she supplies this allusion just at the moment when she seems about to explain or analyze this Lithuanian violence in greater detail. Instead of engaging the perpetrator with accusatory detail, Hana takes him on as an archetype. Later in her testimony, Hana returns to and refines her vision of the Holocaust within Jewish history. She depicts the public hanging of a Jewish man, which all Shavl ghetto inhabitants were forced to watch: His wife fell to her knees and tried to kiss the German’s boots. “We have a little boy. Don’t do this to us.” The German, in scorn

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and boastfulness, shook her off him and the man was hung. [. . .] At that moment, I stopped believing. If something like this could happen, nothing is protecting us from above. Up until this point we had kept religious law strictly. Because we were religious in Lithuania. The conclusion that Hana draws from this scene does not relate to the sadistic Nazi person but to her decisive loss of faith as a result. She has foregrounded this turning point by dwelling on her and her community’s piety in prewar life. Thus, the break of faith marks a severe overturning from the kind of community existence she remembers before the war, what “we” meant in Lithuania. This story, in fact, responds to her earlier quotation about the defilement of Jewish blood: The sight of the hanging has convinced her that Jewish blood had indeed been rendered “hefker,” denied a divine protector. Describing the perpetrator thus provokes Hana to enunciate a necessary program of change, in which the Jewish people take ownership over their own “blood,” their own fate. This monumental historical shift is very much a part of the scene for Hana, integral to the event she saw with her own eyes. The Hebrew ecology thus enables witnesses to elevate the perpetrator into a monumental trajectory of Jewish history, into the revered realms of the sacred and the national. Witnesses like Hana do not respond to the perpetrator in the streets, apartment buildings, or courthouses of their shared cities but in state politics and archives. To make aggressors into archetypes—modern and antiquated alike— demands an act of disembedding from the scene of aggression. This metamorphosis appears in the texture of the witnesses’ hindsight lens, before it ever unfolds in action. There are well-known critiques of Israeli and American public responses to Holocaust perpetration. Arguably, too much allegory or affect can put a haze over the agency of wrongdoers, relieving people of their crimes before they have ever been sufficiently convicted.91 Likewise, following Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, there is an ongoing critique of Israeli treatments of Holocaust perpetrators.92 Against these well-known frustrations with Israeli and American responses to perpetration, it may be tempting to see the forensic approach in the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies as preferable, closer to events on the ground and with a more

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precise sense of context. As another source of appeal, these witnesses’ operative questions on the topics of Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? most closely approximate those of the empirical historian. The Yiddish narrators’ interest in agency and blame may also, at first glance, seem more socially responsible than the focus on witness recovery and growth. Here it may be helpful to consider Marc Nichanian’s provocative claim, “Genocide is not a fact,” and his critique of fact-finding in testimony.93 Nichanian distinguishes between testimony as “document” and “monument.” Documentary testimony (what I call “forensic”) tries to prove the damage in facts, and monumental testimony (which could be either “monumental” or “experiential” in the lexicon of this book) shows the wrong of the event. Testimony as document invites refutation and, as monument, it exists only for the witness as an emblem. “A document is always instrumentalized, it serves something else than itself. A monument, on the other hand, exists only for itself. . . . [T]estimony as document belongs to the witness according to the fact; testimony as monument belongs to the witness according to the sign.”94 In essence, Nichanian asserts that forensic testimony is a trap of the disempowered, in which victims present their suffering in a form that will always be met with evidentiary rebuttal. Jewish-Lithuanian politics, starting in the immediate postwar years and continuing up until today, have indeed involved many stages of factual accusations and refutations, which have placed the law, professional history, and ideologies into an ongoing entanglement. Complicating matters is that ethnic Lithuanians can also apply Nichanian’s thinking to their own victimization under Soviet occupation.95 We could say that, in Lithuania since World War II, there have been two competing forensic testimonial projects. One can weigh these disadvantages that Nichanian helps articulate about the forensic approach against inconsistencies and weaknesses of the other approaches to perpetration discussed in this chapter. It seems that there is no good way to testify to Holocaust perpetration: In experientializing testimony, one loses sight of guilty parties and fetishizes affect; in monumentalizing, one intrudes on the recollection of powerlessness with a promise of progress. In the forensic mode, one keeps sight of contingency and culpability but threatens the dignity of the witness with doubt and the suspension of final judgment.

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4 ACCENT AS ARCHIVE: YIDDISH AND LANGUAGE BIOGRAPHIES

Asked if she ever told her children what it was like to be imprisoned in a ghetto or concentration camp, Fortunoff witness Sonia M. shares the following story: My daughter was about eight. Matter of fact, it was before tanksgiving [Thanksgiving]. The teacher asked how they gonna’ celebrate tanksgiving. She said, “We gonna’ be by ourselves.” She said, “What you mean you gonna’ be by yourselves?” “We don’t have nobody here.” She called me up. She tawt [thought] something is wrong. I told her the story that it’s true that we don’t have nobody.1 On its own, this episode could appear in any number of immigration narratives. Doing Thanksgiving wrong is a leitmotif of American popular culture.2 In this testimony, the story is not just about lacking cultural know-how as a newcomer, but about the particular violent history that turned this woman’s relatives into “nobody.” As part of an audiovisual recording, moreover, this story is not just about Thanksgiving, but about “tanksgiving.” The witness’s accent preempts the content of her narrative. It forces her history onto the sonic landscape. Every consonant implicates her journey from Lithuania to America. Yet all the richly meaningful work that Sonia’s voice performs, with “tanksgiving,” with “tawt,” remains tacit. Neither Sonia nor the interviewer dare mention her accent. They do not name the previous languages that haunt that blundered 156

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“th,” foremost among them—as one can only discern with the help of additional context—is Yiddish.3 Up until now, this book has investigated the distinctions between the three ecologies of testimony on the level of content. Focusing on different sides of social imagination, I have treated language and place as ecological resources that shape how witnesses understand friends and enemies. In the next two chapters, language and place become the very focus of analysis, as themes of witness narrative as well as formal aspects of the recording—the source’s visual and aural environment. This chapter is about how contemporary Holocaust testimony collections are not only archives of story but of sound.4 The spoken voice duplicates, undermines, and comments on what the witness tells.5 I focus on the appearances of the Yiddish language—in words and in tones— because this tongue carries an especially wide range of potential meanings, which dramatize different layers of transformation in the witnesses’ life trajectories. In both the Hebrew- and English-language testimony groups, Yiddish signifies a variety of ideas about the past—authenticity, domesticity, a previous iteration of identity, and a lingual footprint of the Holocaust event.6 While incorporated through narrative means, Yiddish also appears in these ecologies in the form of a shadow or an echo, a tonal undercurrent whose meaning is not fully defined.7 The Yiddish language, both as a narrative theme and as an aural specter, stands in contrast to the languages of the present day and manifests the difference between then and now. In positioning themselves toward this language, witnesses articulate the kind of transformation they discern in their lives as a result of the Holocaust. Witnesses face different precedents and possibilities when curating their Yiddish accents in the present-day testimony. Hebrew and Yiddish have a long-standing historical relationship dating back to the tenth century, one that shifted from Jewish diglossia toward a competition for national significance and legitimacy in the nineteenth century.8 As historic partners or rivals, Yiddish carries a well-articulated symbolic relevance in Hebrew narratives. It has a prominent, almost ritualized role in explaining how the present is different from the past and how the collective path that has been taken is essentially the right one. English, the language of universalism and globalization, has no such intimate friendship

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or competition with Yiddish. The two languages are not tightly bound historical opposites. Rather, American English (standard) is in a sense the opposite of every language of marginality. When Yiddish is thematized in this context, it is not as a precursor or competitor for Jewish national identity, but as a sign of particularity or foreignness in general. Cultural difference and psychic wound—“unclaimed identity” and “unclaimed experience”—are often collapsed into a broader sense of difference, which is located in Yiddish speech.9 This chapter concludes with an exploration of “Yiddish” in Yiddishlanguage testimonies. If, in both the Hebrew- and English-language clusters, Yiddish represents a variety of ideas about the past, how is the past signified in Yiddish-language testimonies? Is there still a way that witnesses can mark a difference between the “language of experience” and the “language of explanation”? Do they have a way of pointing out terms or ideas that are particular to the Holocaust period? Addressing these questions places the relationship between language and historical imagination in sharper relief. Witnesses in this ecology treat language with greater fluidity, allowing speech from different time periods to cohabitate with the Yiddish of testimony. In parallel to this language fluidity, these witnesses irreverently combine memories of extreme atrocity and normal life— creating a kind of memory shatnez, a taboo blend of past and present sensibilities.

Our Familiar Shadow, Yiddish in Hebrew-Israeli Testimony An aura of familiarity surrounds the Yiddish language in this Hebrew-Israeli ecology. Both witnesses and interviewers act as if they know what to do with a Yiddish accent or word slip. The appearance of Yiddish within a Hebrew testimony—in anything from brief syllabic form to extensive narratives about the language—invokes earlier, ongoing conversations about how the Jewish body politic has changed over time. Indeed, witnesses have access to an abundance of symbolic resources that tie the Yiddish language to a previous, more effeminized version of Jewish life. To cite just a few examples: Writing in Hebrew in the 1920s and early 1930s, poet Uri Zvi Grinberg called Yiddish “my mother’s

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Jewish tongue”10 and “the language of the heart,” in contrast to Hebrew, “my father’s holy tongue.”11 Decades later, in 1981, the poet Avot Yeshurun penned the important lines “Heveiti mila / mi’imi le‘ivrit” (I delivered a word / to Hebrew, from mother). The word “from mother,” as his contemporary readers understood, referred to Yeshurun’s earlier poetic use of the term yandes. Yeshurun had incorporated this Yiddish colloquialism, which means approximately “soft, compassionate values,” in order to name something he felt was missing from the Israeli public stage at the time. Here too, Yiddish signifies a specific type of Jewishness that had been left behind, though Yeshurun, unlike Grinberg, advocated its revival in contemporary Israel.12 Using the same imagery toward different ends, caricatures of the ’ima polaniya, the Ashkenazi Jewish mother, remain a common vehicle for self-ridicule in contemporary Israeli popular culture.13 When testifying on video in Hebrew, Holocaust witnesses draw on this repertoire of geographic, political, and anthropomorphic connotations in a variety of ways. With its homey associations, the sounding of Yiddish phrases can work to break down the formality of the recording and can demonstrate social camaraderie between witness and interviewer.14 In other cases, Yiddish accents and insertions limit the witness’s authority, defining him or, more often, her as an authentic, but not knowledgeable, witness to Jewish catastrophe.15 Witnesses also enlist Yiddish in order to help them “misbehave” narratively, telling stories that do not support the overall thrust of their biographies but instead expose the limitations of their own political agency. Throughout, the participants in this setting show a tendency to call Yiddish by its name, to make an accent into a story, moving its shadowy tonal presence into the realm of historical narrative and public debate. Antithetical to the idea of silences, or not remembering one’s past identity, witnesses use Yiddish to give the Jewish past a specific character, a name, a face, and a sound. Making Sense of Accents In the testimony of Miriam Ulman, a witness from Shavl who emigrated to Israel in 1972, Yiddish is the first sound that one hears on the recording.16 After the camera has started to role, but before the interviewer begins to read the introductory slate, Miriam’s voice becomes

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audible saying, “Mir dakht zikh az ikh eykh bin krank” [I think I’m also sick]. This speech— off camera, off topic, and out of language—is meant to be ignored. Its chance inclusion shows the witness’s consensual switch from one level of talk to another, from the mundane to the monumental, and from the topic of personal bodily ailment to communal transformation. Still, Yiddish does not disappear from the recording, even once the camera comes on and the official testimony begins. Yiddish marks her speech patterns and accent throughout her testimony. In fact, witnessing in Hebrew does not prove easy for Miriam. As if going off script for a moment, the female interviewer instructs Miriam at one point, “Say it in Yiddish [tagidi be’idish]. . . . If you’re missing a word, say it in Yiddish.” Though the witness accepts the offer momentarily, she quickly switches back to Hebrew after a phrase. The fact that continuing in Yiddish would be easier for Miriam, and manageable for the interviewer as well, proves irrelevant. Based on whatever impulses, the exchange has the effect of demystifying Yiddish. After this frank conversation, Miriam’s accent has a name. It is a familiar, alternate voice that both women know how to use when they wish. The conversation also renews their language contract: Hebrew will remain the language of official speech today, of on-camera narration, and Yiddish will be reserved for off-camera asides or parenthetical assistance. This arrangement does not result from institutional coercion, but from the witness’s own sense of where Yiddish and Hebrew belong. Reconfiguring traditional notions of the “holy tongue,” Hebrew is now set as the sacred language of late-twentieth-century Jewish archival rituals. In the case of Miriam Ulman, the meaning of Yiddish speech appears mostly in what she consents to suspend over the course of the recording. Other participants create meaning around Yiddish through what they do say. Rivkah Porat, also a relatively recent immigrant to Israel, makes Yiddish word intrusions a prominent, ongoing element of her interaction with the interviewer.17 Rivkah allows more and more Yiddish words into her speech as the testimony progresses, often without any particular thematic unity: “Gemakht shiterer” (thinned out), “beydem” (attic), “shviger” (in-law), “kugl” (casserole). In almost every instance, the male interviewer solemnly translates Rivkah’s Yiddish for the recording. Rivkah waits for his translations before moving on. Marking each Yiddish stum-

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bling with apologetic body language, Rivkah activates the effeminate associations of the Yiddish language, giving the male interviewer the last word each time, in Hebrew. In drawing from the traditional gender associations of the languages, the participants carve out a very specific role for Rivkah as both victim and witness of the Holocaust. In one instance, the interviewer questions Rivkah about the news she and her family received on Hitler in the late 1930s. The Shoah Foundation index calls this topic “Jewish persecution awareness” and “politico-military event awareness.”18 In the HebrewIsraeli group, the question of being “aware” or “unaware” often becomes a focus of conversation, wherein strength depends on knowledge of news and politics.19 As part of this exchange, the interviewer asks if Rivkah’s family received a newspaper in the 1930s. She answers, “Yes, Di yidishe shtime” (The Jewish Voice).”20 The interviewer laughs at her response and repeats the Yiddish name of the paper in surprise: “Di yidishe shtime? It came just in Yiddish or also in Lithuanian?” The interviewer’s laugh seems to mark a dissonance between the weighty political knowledge about which he inquired and the light, effeminate sound of the Yiddish phrase. Seemingly perturbed by her response, the interviewer asks to what extent they read or talked among themselves about the news. Rivkah explains that, as a girl, she did not pay attention to discussions about current affairs. “But,” she adds once more, “I do know that the newspaper was Di yidishe shtime.” The significance of the Yiddish phrase expands as the participants dwell on it: Being a girl, being “of the Diaspora,” having a limited understanding of world politics, and being unready and thus helpless before the Nazi onslaught all become implicitly bound through the repeated enunciation of the Yiddish title. A similar exchange about Yiddish words delineates the kind of authority Rivkah possesses as a Holocaust witness today—and the kind she does not. While discussing life in the Shavl ghetto, Rivkah recounts that she and her mother were able to obtain “blue passports” (pasportim kehulim) as a means of securing their places at work. The interviewer asks her: i n t : What’s that, a blue passport? r i v k a h : Passports that are blue. I don’t know. That’s how we said it, “a bloyen pasport” [giggles].

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The Yiddish phrase stands in place of knowledge or explanation. It signifies that Rivkah’s source of authority as a witness, her expertise, derives from her contact with the original experience, the original language in which these ghetto events took place. While signaling her authenticity in memory, the insertion also shows that she does not understand the event outside of memory. Rivkah’s giggle, which ends the exchange, works as a sign of consent, a retreat from a pronouncement of knowledge to a recollection of experience. Her Yiddish echo becomes narrative in the way the participants frame it: They encase the word insertion in such a way that dramatizes a progression from Jewish helplessness to Jewish agency, from not understanding the mechanisms of power in one’s environment to understanding them, from an effeminate to a masculine Jewish body politic, and from remembering the Holocaust to mastering the event through knowledge and analysis. In the cases of Miriam Ulman and Rivkah Porat, a Yiddish echo or shadow voice emerges in conjunction with limited knowledge of contemporary Israeli discourse and of the Hebrew language. Another Hebrewspeaking Israeli witness, however, points to her Yiddish shadow voice in a way that shows perfect control over the issues at stake. A long-standing citizen of Israel, Hana Golani recounts explicitly that when she arrived in Israel in 1947, she made a conscious decision to stop speaking Yiddish.21 When asked, “What did you do to become a tsabarit [Israeli]?” Hana answers immediately, “I decided to speak only Hebrew and not any other language. My friend Dvora started speaking to me in Yiddish, and I answered her in Hebrew.” The sound of Hana’s voice on the tape corroborates her story of language conversion, of removing Yiddish from her speech when she made aliyah: Hana speaks a high, literary Hebrew without a noticeable accent and makes no language switches at any point in the testimony. However, at the end of the testimony, after the interviewer has already thanked Hana for the interview and the witness has begun sharing photographs and different memory objects, she announces, “I wrote a poem in Yiddish about what happened to me in the camps.” The poem is not read aloud but simply displayed in written form before the camera. Hana effectively externalizes her Yiddish accent, exhibiting the alternative voice she once possessed without inhabiting it. There is a sense of gravity in this silent shot. The sight of the Yiddish text, an

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earlier version of her testimony, allows Hana to validate her status as an eyewitness, an expert by way of experience, while still defining herself as a knowledgeable interlocutor in the Israeli present. The moment also serves as a public recognition of her transformation, an on-the-record, unembarrassed admission that she used to speak differently. The Story of Yiddish in Hebrew-Language Testimonies Beyond its tonal presence as an accent or an insert, Yiddish appears prominently as an object of narration in this ecology of testimonies. In recounting the prewar years, witnesses thematize Yiddish directly and repeatedly according to the well-known dichotomies of Jewish language ideology from that period: Zionists versus Yiddishists, public activity versus domestic life, male strength versus female tenderness, and young versus old. This conception of Yiddish-Hebrew competition, and its attendant cluster of oppositions, is certainly nothing new in the Israeli cultural horizon.22 Importantly, however, the witnesses and interviewers alike find that this language narrative bears reenactment as part of the testimonial process. Yafah Zusman, for example, speaks with pride about how, in Shavl, “Only a very small percentage [of children] went to Yiddish schools. . . . Just Hebrew schools—that’s what was customary.”23 When asked what language Yafah and her family spoke at home, she laughs and answers, “Yiddish!” Casting the languages in similar roles, Shlomo Baron tells that he, like most children in Kovna, went to an elementary school in which all the subjects were taught in Hebrew.24 But when asked what language the family spoke at home, he smiles and answers, “Yiddish, mame-loshn [mother tongue].” The chuckle, the memory of domestic life, and the evocation of “mame” all converge in his mention of Yiddish. Ofer Haim explains why the Yiddish gymnasium in Shavl did not suit him and his family: “There was a Yiddish school, the school of the Yiddishists, the Bund, and they were, well, far from Zionism and, of course, far from religion.”25 Ofer reluctantly admits that Yiddish was the language of homelife, though, he adds quickly, “Everyone understood Hebrew.” Thus, these witnesses introduce Yiddish into their life stories on stable symbolic grounds, rehearsing consensus opinions, almost stereotypes, about the implications of speaking the language before the war in Lithuania. The very similarity

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between these early portrayals of Yiddish is, in and of itself, an important quality of the communal-monumental genre: Repeating these binaries of language roles in an almost ritualized fashion, the witnesses perform their inclusion in a larger historical trajectory that is about to unfold. If Yiddish enters onto the biographic stage through a clean, symbolic role, it does not always stay there. When narrating the Holocaust, witnesses sometimes tell stories about the language that do not readily support the tidier, politicized binaries of interwar language competition. In ghetto and camp memories, Yiddish appears prominently in moments of identity revelation, when speech undoes the labor of self-camouflage. These are moments in which language praxis ceases to be an intentional political and cultural choice, and Yiddish speech leaks out as an unwilled yet unmistakably authentic sign of Jewishness. Witnesses treat this revelatory power of Yiddish during the war with ambivalence, as a last vestige of truthful communication on the one hand, but also as an imposed mark of Jewish rejection, much like the enforced wearing of a yellow star or a concentration-camp number.26 Gideon Shub, who presents Yiddish in an unambiguously political framework when discussing prewar life, attends to the language differently when recalling the war years.27 Speaking of a roundup in the Shavl ghetto, Gideon recalls that he, his sisters, and his mother went into a small hiding place inside a wall, behind a closet in their house. From their hiding place, they heard German soldiers looking through each room. After a short time, they also heard their father’s entrance: It was a terrible moment when we heard my father come home from work and didn’t know where we were. He called out our names. We were a bit afraid. We suspected that someone from the Germans was with him. Anyway, we called out to him in Yiddish, “Moyshe! Moyshe! We’re all here.” Yiddish does not make sense in this story. While presumably all of their interactions from this time period were in Yiddish, this is the first time that Gideon finds the language worth mentioning. What is more, there could be no practical advantage in calling out to their father in Yiddish, since a German soldier could easily understand or at least locate them from the cry. Pointing out the use of Yiddish in this moment, thus, does

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not relate to the plot but bears some loosely defined, qualitative connection to the revelation act. Another witness, Cila Kogan, inserts Yiddish in a similar moment of revelation.28 She recalls hiding overnight in a snowy ditch at the end of the Death March: “I heard people walking and talking in Yiddish. I called out in Yiddish, ‘Who’s there? Who’s there?’ They said, ‘Come out. You’re free.’” Here too, speaking in Yiddish provides no practical advantage for Cila the protagonist and must earn mention for reasons beyond plot. Indeed there seems to be something in the act of self-disclosure that makes Yiddish relevant. Yiddish as a revelatory tool, however, is presented as a source of danger as well as relief in Hebrew-Israeli testimonies. After the incident described above, Gideon Shub relates that his family decided to send his youngest sister, Amia, two years old at the time, out of the ghetto to take shelter with a Lithuanian woman. His parents went to great lengths to carry out the transfer smoothly, obtaining sleep medicine to quiet the girl while her father carried her out of the ghetto in a sack. Having arrived at the gentile woman’s house, their father even waited to make sure the girl would awaken to full consciousness before returning to the ghetto alone. We thought that the problem was more or less solved and then [. . .] After a week someone came and told us that there is a gentile woman waiting by the gate for us. [. . .] We went out to the gate to see her. She said, “I throw up my hands. We told people that she is a relative of ours. But this girl is not willing to speak Lithuanian. We tell her ‘baranka’ [bagel, in Lithuanian] and she says, [stomping his feet] ‘Neyn! Beygele!’ [No! Bagel! in Yiddish]. And every time the door opens, she says, ‘Papa vet kumen!?’ Daddy’s coming. This patriot of Yiddish. There’s nothing we can do with her.” Gideon’s father left the ghetto once more and returned with the little girl. Gideon tells that, as a result of her linguistic stubbornness, Amia was deported to Stutthof, along with the rest of the ghetto, where she was removed from the family and never heard from again. Gideon’s quip about the child’s language “patriotism” recalls precisely the type of Jewish political agency that has now been suspended.

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While the urge to speak Yiddish seems an especial liability for children, who are associated with honesty and intuitive behavior, Rivkah Porat shares a story in which a savvy adult also succumbs to the tongue of instinct. In the final days of German occupation in Lithuania, Rivkah relates that she and her aunt, claiming to be gentile refugees, were allowed to sleep in the house of a Lithuanian couple in exchange for household labor. The two women go to great lengths to disguise their Jewishness. Her aunt taught Rivkah how to cross herself convincingly and pass as a Christian. When the host couple became suspicious of Rivkah, more identifiably Jewish in appearance, the aunt invented a plausible story to explain her dark physical features. Rivkah, she answered quickly, was born to a Polish rather than Lithuanian mother. But this great resourcefulness in the waking hours proves futile when, at night, Rivkah’s aunt begins shouting in her sleep in Yiddish. The language of dreams, Yiddish foils even the best efforts to gain control over one’s fate. Against the predominant narrative thrust of these Hebrew-language testimonies, such stories of Yiddish outbursts dramatize an uncontrollable kind of Jewishness, something that emerged outside of the witness’s political categories and her stated notions of historical progress. In this sense, as in others, memories of Holocaust victimhood fit imperfectly into a larger Zionist trajectory. In contrast to the Yiddish revelation scenes, where Yiddish “misbehaves,” many witnesses return Yiddish to its more choreographed role as their stories progress. For instance, in recounting parting moments with their parents, several witnesses quote their parents’ last words in Yiddish. These segments return to the opposition established in prewar segments, between Yiddish as the language of generations past and Hebrew of generations to come. Yafah Zusman, we recall, spoke proudly of her youthful Hebrew-speaking environment in contrast to the Yiddish of her parents. She reactivates this connection between her parents’ generation and the Yiddish language when she later tells of her family’s separation upon arrival at Stutthof: y a f a h : Men were taken to the other side of the fence. They said to me, “Your dad is calling you.” He said to me— (pause) Do you understand Yiddish?

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i n t : Yes. y a f a h : “Kinderlekh, oyb mir veln blaybn lebn, zoln mir zikh trefn in Shavl.” i n t : Translate to Hebrew. y a f a h : “Kids, if we should survive, let’s meet in Shavl.” This is indeed the last time Yafah speaks to her father. Her language switch sets the moment apart from others, privileging and honoring her father’s voice in its final moment, almost like a mourning ritual. The father’s parting wish, crucially, remains unfulfilled. Yafah follows his instructions, returning to Lithuania to look for him and her other family members after the war but finds no one. She then makes aliyah to Palestine with the Brichah movement. Thus, the Yiddish quotation both honors her father’s memory and aurally accentuates his mistaken perception of the Jewish future. Kalman Perk also represents his father’s last words in Yiddish.29 In a scene important to our analysis of family representations, Kalman tells that he, his parents, grandparents, and relatives were deported from Kovna in a crowded cattle car. Kalman decides that he will jump from the car. His father hoists him up, and, as Kalman tells it, “Usually our conversations were conducted in Hebrew; but at this moment he said to me in Yiddish, ‘Kalman, zolst zayn a mentsh.’ Be a good person. He pushed me and I fell, and the train kept going.” Here, the Yiddish parting message has a different tone. Instead of a heartbreaking, delusional hope for return, as Yafah’s father shouted out, Kalman recalls his father’s final words as calm, heartfelt wisdom that, importantly, acknowledge and accept their separation: the Yiddish words, in a sense, gracefully announce their own end. The strength of this closure ritual, quoting Yiddish as a way to part with family and with a culture, is put to the test in the surprising second half of Rivkah Porat’s testimony. After the war, Rivkah not only moved back to Lithuania, where she stayed until 1979, but back into her very prewar house in the town of Radvilishik, where around 250 Jewish families had lived in 1939, most of whom were eradicated in the summer and fall of 1941.30 When Rivkah returns in 1945, the town is all but emptied of Jews. In the context of a Hebrew-language Israeli testimony, this segment of her life seems like a kind of strange afterthought, a lingering extension

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of Diaspora existence in all its implications. Living with her aunt, uncle, and several other relatives in this house in Radvilishik, Rivkah began to attend school, to work, and to rebuild some semblance of a normal life by 1946. She had heard nothing from her mother, who had been deported to Stutthof in 1944, and thus assumed her to be dead. Against a backdrop of healthy teenage social activity, Rivkah tells how her mother suddenly arrived at their house, unrecognizable in every way except her voice: I put on a dress and I wanted to go out to a school dance. I keep on hearing, “Rivele? Rivele?” But my mother died. Then suddenly again, “Rivkele, mayn kind” [my child]. [leans her head back and pauses] I didn’t feel well. I started crying and screaming and I ran away. Without translation, Rivkah reenacts her mother’s voice in Yiddish, whose very unmistakability frightens her. In this moment of narrative limbo, of delayed aliyah, delayed progress in the testimony, both the mother and her Yiddish voice appear as stubborn specters of the pre-Holocaust past. The ghostly quality of the Yiddish voice becomes sharper as Rivkah’s story continues. The uncle searches for Rivkah’s mother, Liuba, in and around the house. He hears Liuba’s voice but sees no one. Finally he spots the woman, dragging herself across the floor, legless and completely transformed physically. Rivkah describes Liuba’s mangled, morphed physical appearance in contrast to the fixity of her voice: I went out and saw that it’s not my mother. It’s the voice of my mother, but it’s not my mother. She was on her knees with some kind of dress. She used to have long hair and now no hair at all. [. . .] She has no teeth. Her face is crooked. That’s not my mother. [. . .] I heard my aunt say, “We’ll tell Rivkah that it’s her mother. But it’s some kind of ghost, not Liuba.” [emphasis in intonation] Her relatives would sooner believe they are being visited by an apparition than challenge the truth of the voice. After several weeks of dwelling with this frightening physical remnant in their house, Rivkah and her relatives do accept that it is, in fact, Liuba. Rivkah draws out this segment, creating a drama between the transformed postcatastrophe body and the pre-

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served prewar voice, competing and contradictory signs of identity. The overpowering authenticity of the Yiddish voice eventually wins out, but not without fearful reticence. The story of Liuba’s return takes the motif of Yiddish revelation to an extreme. Liuba’s identity disclosure also stands apart from parallel stories in that it foregrounds the maternal Yiddish voice returning after the Holocaust, coming in the place of geographical and social progress in the postwar years. Yet even in Rivkah’s delayed aliyah story, where personal and cultural closure do not occur when they are supposed to, she and the interviewer still manage to create a ritual parting scene, using elements of the communal genre. After the narration of Liuba’s surprising return, Rivkah recounts how her mother managed to function in the harsh conditions of Lithuania for years, even in her physically handicapped state. Liuba even moved to Israel in 1979 along with Rivkah, her husband, and their children. There, Rivkah tells, Liuba died a natural death in her own bed. As Rivkah begins to recall putting her mother to bed for the last time, the interviewer stops her and asks her to report the conversation in Yiddish. This suggestion appears appropriate to Rivkah as well, and she immediately catches on: “‘Gib mir a deke, avelkhe a vareme’ [Give me a blanket, a warm one], she said. In the morning I got up. ‘Mom, I’m going.’ [Louder, repeats in Yiddish:] ‘Mame ikh gey shoyn avek! ’ I see that she’s asleep.” Even though this death scene occurs later and in an entirely different situation, Rivkah uses Yiddish in a manner very similar to Yafah Zusman and Kalman Perk, sounding out the language as she bids it farewell. The ritual narration of bidding farewell to the language and its speakers appears so well defined, so readily available in the Hebrewlanguage Israeli context, it is accessible to witnesses with a wide range of biographies and narrative sensibilities. These testimonies begin and end with a depiction of the language in its expected symbolic, anthropomorphic role. Such tame, ideologically consistent tales of Yiddish work like bookends to Holocaust segments. There, witnesses tell more surprising stories about the language, ones that do not support the idea of Jewish agency and progress under persecution. The dense symbolism surrounding Yiddish certainly allows for psychic exploration, yet cultural history seems to be a more interesting

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interpretive mode for participants on both sides of the camera. In all of these regards, the Hebrew-Israeli ecology offers rich resources for making a story around Yiddish, both in narrated time and in the testimonial setting. Yiddish is presented as a publicly accessible measure of transformation, one that others can relate to and evaluate.

Two Ways to Frame a Silence, English-Language American Testimony The linguist Ruth Wajnryb, child of two Holocaust survivors, reflects on how her father and his friends all chose to write their autobiographies in English. She posits: What English might have lacked in ease, however, it offered in comfort. . . . English was the language most closely associated with liberation and survival. . . . And anyway, if not English, what? Yiddish was rejected because it was too close to the experience of loss and, in any case, inaccessible to the next generation.31 James Young has similarly written that English serves as a language of mediation between the survivor and the experience, and Yaffa Eliach lauds the protective advantages that the English language provides in witness memory.32 In this well-developed discussion about language choice in English-speaking environments, the stakes are defined emotionally. The move from Yiddish to English is one from raw feeling to narrative, from vulnerability to safety.33 Holocaust survivors testifying in English in North America frame Yiddish as a sign of their own displacement, rather than as a specific place left behind; of memory that is untranslatable into narrative, rather than as a linguistic path not taken. As a dramatization of silenced language, Yiddish appears far less anthropomorphic in this setting. Though participants in the English-American ecology tell fewer stories about the language than in the Hebrew-language testimonies, Yiddish has a strong tonal presence: Accents, word intrusions, or non-narrative quotations are hard to miss. The two American testimonial institutions included in this study—the Shoah Foundation and the Fortunoff Archive— differ distinctly on how much this Yiddish shadow should be

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inspected and discussed over the course of the testimonies. While there are often distinctions between these testimonial institutions, this is a case in which their subtle divergence relates directly to my theme of analysis and thus warrants investigation. In the Shoah Foundation, participants tend to frame the Yiddish-language slips as barriers to understanding, to be ignored or translated as smoothly as possible. In the Fortunoff project, however, there are times when the participants attend to this Yiddish shadow with special interest. Especially in early testimonies under the guidance of Dori Laub, Yiddish speech gains a particular truth-value, as it is believed to provide more direct access to dormant memory, an unprocessed mark of the experience. These diverging stances on Yiddish intrusions seem related to larger institutional priorities in creating testimony.34 As discussed in chapter 1, both American testimonial projects valued some idea of “personal experience” when conceptualizing the interview. But whereas the Shoah Foundation placed more emphasis on imparting the survivor’s experience to others, the Fortunoff Archive encouraged more of an inward gaze, attempting to understand and possibly facilitate witness healing. Overall, psychotherapeutically oriented participants place special value on shadows of all sorts, that is, any latent content buried in the witness’s speech. The very tonal, amorphous quality of Yiddish—in these cases—is what makes it meaningful. The Yiddish language serves as a tool for enacting a verbal excavation process. In Hopes of Being Understood: Working around Yiddish in English-Language Shoah Foundation Testimonies Khane Baltser, a native of Kovna, moved to the United States in 1988 and testified to the Shoah Foundation in English just eight years later.35 On the whole, she discusses language matters very little. This begins with the pronunciation of her name. Misreading the transliterated spelling, the interviewer introduces the witness as “cane” (rather than kha-ne) and Khane does not correct her. They leave the name an oddity and move on. When recounting prewar years, Khane states briefly, “We spoke only Yiddish,” and “I went to a Yiddish school.” In contrast to this scant thematization, Yiddish words arise frequently, as in this discussion of Jewish life before World War II:

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k h a n e : My grandfather was a gabbay. This you can say in Yiddish. In English, I don’t know. Like a helper for the rov. i n t : This was in Hebrew? k h a n e : Yes. i n t : Okay. Khane and the interviewer move on without finding a precise translation for gabbay. Its foreignness is simply deferred to the next untranslated term: rov [rabbi]. Both words are categorized as part of a general vocabulary of past particularity, in which it is not imperative to distinguish between Yiddish and Hebrew.36 This usage of Yiddish closely resembles the statement that Khane uses to characterize her family life before the war as a whole: “This was like—Jewish family.” She establishes a distanced position toward the world in which Yiddish was spoken and, moreover, very little urgency in characterizing this world in her present exchange. Khane is similarly resigned to leaving Holocaust-specific terms untranslated or scantily explained. To describe living conditions in the Kovna ghetto, for example, Khane recounts: k h a n e : We did have a place to stay. [. . .] We was happy. It was not raining. It was not outside. i n t : Was it an apartment? k h a n e : No, in Yiddish I can say a shtal, a special place, for, um . . . [witness’s pause] for food. It’s not an apartment, nothing there. We stayed there, seven, six people. The challenge of producing an equivalent seems to go beyond a mere lexical gap and cannot be reduced to Khane’s ignorance of the English word “stable” (for animals). The situation she attempts to describe—in which six or seven people are grateful to be living in an outdoor stable— seems drastically out of step with the conditions and expectations of her life today or how she imagines the American norm. It would seem that Yiddish once again marks the moment when translation fails, though the participants do not focus on this gap or its Yiddish-language signal. Khane stumbles repeatedly onto conceptual gaps through lexical ones, but the participants focalize neither. This downplaying of Khane’s Yiddish-language insertions, it turns out, has little to do with linguistic in-

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eptitude on the part of the interviewer. As Khane’s testimony progresses, she defers to more and more Holocaust-related words in Yiddish: “oysgrobn griber” (digging graves), “keyln” (killing/slaughtering), “politsey” (police), “bafrayt” (liberated), “banditn” (bandits), “bahaltn zikh” (to hide), “drot” (fence/barbed wire) “kinderheym” (orphanage), “velder” (woods).37 Almost each time, the interviewer assists Khane with quick, literal translations. The witness-foreigner and interviewer-interpreter dynamic almost reminds us of the Yiddish insertions in the Israeli testimony of Rivkah Porat. Here, however, the participants call minimal attention to such moments through their facework, tone, or discussion. Unlike in Rivkah Porat’s testimony, where the interviewer and witness fold their translation work into their discussion of the Holocaust—naming that language as Yiddish—here the Yiddish word insertions are left very much alone. The way in which Yiddish is both strongly present and unnamed becomes especially noticeable in the final moments of Khane’s testimony. The interviewer asks Khane to sing “a song from the ghetto.” Khane agrees and, without mentioning that the text is in Yiddish, performs the following song: Mir zaynen yidn ba dem drot Arum dem shtekhldikn drot. Ikh vil aheym nor [FLK: un]38 ikh ken nisht geyn Vayl farfolgt zaynen mir fun di royber. Mir zaynen yidn [FLK: ale] do farfaln. Un di banditn [FLK: partizaner] kenen undz bafaln. Zey geyen arayn un shnaydn ayn Un nemen tsu dem gantsn lebn. Dos gold un zilber opgegebn Kedey mir zoln blaybn lebn. Mir gibn alts—nor mir blaybn gants Nor [FLK: un] ba undz zol shoyn keyner nisht [FLK: nit] feln.39 Oy got fun himl, kuk arop! A shvartser volkn iz arop af undzer kop. Oy, yidisher folk, farpaynikter folk— Shtendik gelitn tsores un payn.

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Gelitn vi di rinder, Gekaylet [FLK: gekoylet] kleyne kinder.40 Oy gotenyu, oy makh a sof! Nisht eybik yidn veln mir in geto zayn. Es vet nokh ufshaynen far undz di shayn. Dan [word not in FLK] geyen mir aroys Un shnaydn oys Ale sonim Do fun undzer land. We’re Jews with wire all around Barbed wire all around. Home is where I want to go, but home is where I cannot go, Since we’re tormented by the robbers. We are Jews, down and out. Bandits ready to prey [lit: fall] upon us. They’re coming in, tearing in, Grabbing all the life we have. We gave away our gold and silver So we could stay alive. We give it all, But we stay whole. Just so we don’t lose one more. Look down, oh, God in heaven! A black cloud’s come down on our head. Oh, Jewish people, a people in pain, Always suffering sorrow and pain. Suffering like cattle, Small children slaughtered. Oh, dear, dear God, oh, make it end! We Jews will not be in the ghetto forever. The sun will shine for us yet again. Then we’ll get out

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And cut out All of the enemies Here, from our land. Typical in form of the Yiddish folk-song genre and inflected with Litvak regionalisms,41 this text appears in the pages of Fun letstn khurbn in 1948, as a song of the Kovna ghetto. This journal was published by the Central Historical Commission in Munich, in the American Zone, between 1946 and 1948. The editor, Israel Kaplan, a Kovna ghetto survivor, collected and printed personal histories, documents, folk sayings and songs, like this one.42 Indeed, when the content elements are examined, they appear as artifacts from a different world, much more fitting to the perspective of a Kovna ghetto inmate in 1941–1944, than to an American citizen remembering the Holocaust in 1998. The song emphasizes robbers and bandits, local perpetrators—as opposed to the uniformed German soldiers that dominate much retrospective narration in her new environment. Likewise, the anguish over giving away one’s gold and silver, the loss of small property, could appear petty once a witness has already learned about or lived through the death camps. Perhaps most out of place today is the last of the six verses, expressing what literary critic Naomi Seidman calls “scandalous Jewish rage”43—a promise for a better day, not when all people will live as equals, as Khane herself expresses in English, but when the Jewish people will take revenge on its enemies, not in a modern Zionist state but “here in our land,” in this case Lithuania. The song employs variations on the same verb, “aynshnaydn” and “oysshnaydn” (to cut in or stab, and to stab out), to describe the acts of perpetrators (stanza 2) and revenge to be carried out by the victims (stanza 6). Thus, there is even a sense of parallelism and equality between victim and perpetrator. The idea that survivors should take violent revenge on non-Jewish collaborators and win back their homes would be ludicrous if expressed in an American-English conversation and antithetical to Khane’s own testimonial tone.44 The song thus demonstrates the inappropriateness of using this Yiddish voice to testify in Khane’s present-day context and the utility that the language gap grants her. The Yiddish-language song reveals an ethical and epistemic stance that is an artifact of the event: authentic, yet out of sync

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with the world in which she currently lives. It is thanks to the foreignness of the words that the song may be admitted to the testimony and excluded from moral judgment. In her manner of presentation, Khane supports this separation between the content of the song and the testimony. Her bodily comportment changes when she begins to sing. From still, direct eye contact with the interviewer, she begins gazing off at an imagined audience elsewhere. The voice from which she sings, a “we” of Kovna Jewry, which still assumes its own survival, is no longer the one from which she speaks. As Khane puts it, “These were the words we had in the ghetto.” It is not only the shift in genre, from narrative to lyric, that encodes the song as a different level of text.45 The song contains three of the Yiddish words that Khane has employed elsewhere (banditn, drot, keylen), suggesting a fluid connection between the momentary Yiddish word insertions that have arisen throughout the testimony and the words of the song. This shared vocabulary points to the significance of the Yiddish language in bolstering the barrier between sensibilities of now and then. Still, even this extended presence of Yiddish does not demand a discussion, since, as noted, there is no narrative about the language in this testimony. A required Shoah Foundation questionnaire asks the interviewer to summarize each testimony in a “Post-Interview Information” section. This includes the questions “Did the survivor use any other languages? Which? How often?” On Khane Baltser’s form, the interviewer leaves this language question blank, even though she has helped Khane with Yiddish-English translations throughout the testimony. Instead, at the end of the form, under “Interviewer’s Comments,” she writes, “The survivor is in the USA only seven years, so her English is not perfect, but I hope that most of it will be understood.”46 That is, the main aim of the interviewer, to which the witness consents, is to be understood. This seems related to the Shoah Foundation’s interest in transmission, in creating a unity between the witness and the listener. Instead of giving the listener the feeling of “what it was like to be there,” the Yiddish shadow voice boldly reminds the listener that he or she was not there and that aspects of “being there” are hidden from him. In this light, the Yiddish interruptions largely pose impediments toward contemporary understanding. They inhibit the effort to make the witness’s message travel in space and time.

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We find a similar appearance of an unremarked Yiddish shadow voice in the testimony of Jane Alter, who testified for the Shoah Foundation in 1995.47 Though she has lived in the United States since 1949, her English is strongly inflected with Yiddish pronunciation and sentence structure. The foreign sound of her speech seems mismatched with her very American name, the adoption of which she never addresses. Like Khane Baltser, Jane’s translation problems encircle the themes of prewar Jewish life as well as the particular strain of horrors that destroyed this society. Jane says, about her father, “He was a cantor, but also a showkhet,”48 and again, slightly later: “He was a showkhet. I really don’t know the word for it. In Hebrew it would be shohet.” She leaves the term alone and moves on. Likewise, Jane encounters translation problems when describing the first, very turbulent days of occupation around her town of Upine: We were walking, twenty, thirty girls. We see a big truck full of [pause] . . . the partisans. Not the . . . not from Vilna, the partisans. This we call the partisans. This who was shooting. Killing. We saw they were going with the uniforms with the guns, that they were going that way. [. . .] They chased out all the men, chasing around. They called it like sheydim. You know what is a shed? A shed is like a, hmmm . . . like a devil. A devil’s dance. The first challenge Jane faces is with the identity of local Lithuanian perpetrators. She uses the English “partisan” for the Yiddish partizan, but then backtracks, correctly sensing that this literal word equivalent will not call forth an image of Nazi collaborators but, instead, of their resistors.49 Then she gets stuck on the word shed. While able to produce its semantic equivalent—“devil”—she still cannot tell us who or what became demonic in this instance. She leaves the word as a loose association with the moment. The challenge of translating from Yiddish into English appears simultaneously social, finding the right vocabulary to describe prewar life, and perceptual, depicting the extremity of suffering she endured. Even when these translation problems arise within seconds of each other, Jane does not name the source language, but leaves its presence implicit, unthematized. In these instances, Yiddish appears as a handicap to dissemination and a spectacle of the witness’s outsider status. In another Shoah Foundation

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testimony, witness Samuel Owic shows greater confidence in his ability as a translator, in a sense playing with this language gap.50 On the level of narrative, Samuel also has little to say about Yiddish, though the language is audible in his accent and seemingly inadvertent word slips (saying “un” instead of “and”). But, mostly, Samuel uses Yiddish in a more deliberate manner, not as a replacement for vocabulary he lacks in English but to set apart certain ideas or images. For example, he uses the Yiddish words handl (trade) and gesheft (business) to depict bartering and black marketeering as a particularly Jewish survival mechanism, translating the terms into English fluidly as he speaks. Samuel also turns to Yiddish to describe phenomena of life and death unique to the war period. When depicting the shocking encounter in April 1945 between American soldiers and camp inmates at München-Allach, a labor camp in the Dachau system, he recounts that there was a soldier who was able to communicate with the prisoners in German but broke down crying when he saw “all the people dead on the floor. Oysgedart. Thin.” Here, the Yiddish word, even for a listener who does not understand it in the original, dramatizes the otherness of this bodily state—not simply “thin” as we know it today, but a body so starved that it caused the American soldier to lose self-control. In all of these instances, Samuel does not expect the Yiddish word to convey literal meaning. English does the work of narration, while the Yiddish insertions dramatize some form of difference—first Jewish particularity and then the extremity of Holocaust conditions.51 Importantly, however, the Yiddish language does not stand alone in Samuel’s effort to mark the alterity of the past he is describing. He also uses other languages, mostly German, to the same effect. Most often, these German words refer to well-known Nazi practices: Entlausung (delousing), Aktion (mass killing operation), Appell (roll call). But, interestingly, these German interferences also carry a strong Yiddish shadow. Orally, it is nearly impossible to distinguish which language Samuel intends to speak because of his distinctly Yiddish pronunciation. For example, he speaks of the hoyptkomandant (Yiddish pronunciation) instead of Hauptkommandant (German). Enclosing Yiddish inside German serves to strengthen the shadowy, indistinct nature of its presence in Samuel’s testimony—as a salient element that is barely named and not discussed.

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Just as Samuel conflates Yiddish with a broader repertoire of foreign vocabulary, so too does he situate the language within a broader procedure of explaining the difference between then and now. There are many moments in which Samuel makes an apparent effort to translate Holocaust-era concepts and norms into a present-day idiom, as he would a foreign language: And four loaves of bread in Lithuania in the ghetto, means like a million dollars. ... We already know what a shower means. That means gas. ... Half a liter of soup. You know what a liter is? Good enough for two days. ... We go out in the morning and he was stiff, like you ever wash clothes and you hang it outside? How they get stiff and frozen? That’s the way he was. He was dead. Sometimes Samuel combines conceptual translations with linguistic ones, as when he says: The Appellplatz. That means you go down to the place and you be counted. ... Then we made it to Allach. Allach was a gan eyden (paradise— Hebrew/Yiddish). The different phrases that Samuel translates thus appear in one large pool of foreign terms. He intertwines Yiddish, German, concepts of suffering, proper names, Holocaust terminology, and terms of Jewish particularity into an expansive glossary of the abnormal. Samuel does not single out Yiddish as having any particular significance, but places it amid this spectrum of alternate languages. Yiddish as a Sign of the Truth in Fortunoff Testimonies In English-language Fortunoff testimonies, there are particular instances when participants call attention to Yiddish insertions, rendering

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Yiddish parallel to latent or nonverbal sense-memory. That the Yiddish language should be considered a valuable element of testimony in the Fortunoff project is certainly not self-evident. In fact, in one of the sharpest published critiques of the Fortunoff project, David Roskies protests the lack of Yiddish in the recordings, asserting that Jewish particularity had been traded in for a universalist, psychological portrayal of survivors.52 Part of this erasure of the survivors’ Jewish identity, he argues, resulted from their oral delivery in (accented) English. On the one hand, Roskies seems correct in characterizing the Fortunoff project’s priorities as universal and emotional, rather than Jewishly particular. Indeed, in many Fortunoff testimonies, creating a universalist lens does entail a simple “lack of Yiddish.” But, in some of the most psychoanalytically oriented testimonies, the role of Yiddish actually comes full circle: Yiddish insertions contribute to the study of human memory at large, precisely because the participants consider the language non-narrative, deriving from the past. Outlying the idiom of contemporary conversation, a Yiddish quotation is meant to be sensually mimetic, retrieved through an alternate memory process— one more sonic than verbal.53 The tonality of Yiddish becomes its truth-value. Beatrice S., who was born in 1933 in Krevich, a small town outside of Vilna, testified in 1982 in Connecticut as part of the Fortunoff project. In her testimony, both she and the interviewer build an explicit connection between Yiddish and memory retrieval.54 When she first sets out to narrate, Beatrice tends toward summary and generalization, moving quickly through events and periods of time. For example, when asked to recall her childhood, Beatrice responds, “Eh, my childhood, ehh . . . Whatever I can remember. It was Poland until 1939. I was there until 1942 and then I escaped to Siberia. Then I came back to Poland. Then I came to America.” One of the interviewers, Dori Laub, encourages her to slow down, to share scenes rather than summaries, and offers the following metaphor: “You’re opening an album and looking at the pictures. Go on with the page.” The witness seems to understand Laub’s suggestion easily and adopts several different methods of making her narration more photographic and sense-driven. One is to describe very precise, specific moments in detail: “Germans came into our house and they said they were looking

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for guns. . . . They threw me on the bed. They thought I was out cold.” Another is to incorporate Yiddish words with a translation, as verbal impressions from the moment: “They had a plan for the shkhite, the slaughter—that’s what they called it.” Because Beatrice’s English diction lacks any trace of an accent, these switches into Yiddish stick out on the soundscape. They appear correlated to her concerted efforts to “zoom in the lens,” and search for more sensual and pictorial memory. The participants foreground the way Yiddish works in a conversation they have about Beatrice’s methods of testifying. It comes at the beginning of a videotape and seems to be the continuation of a discussion the two had started during a break. i n t : . . . You have a particular way of remembering. You remember pictures. You remember details. There must be more. Under the German occupation. b e a t r i c e : Well, you know I remember the rabbi with the dogs. That’s with me all the time. And I remember the screaming. The shrayen. i n t : You can use Yiddish words. Shrayen serves as an entrance into a deeper layer of internality, an image of the scene that is closer to the original. She places this Yiddish word directly alongside her retrieval of photographic moments and the exploration of what has stayed with her until the present. When Laub expresses approval of this use of Yiddish, it seems well in keeping with the witness’s own perception of the language. In their back and forth, the participants cooperatively define Yiddish quotation as a particularly honest and ethical way of testifying. This parallel between Yiddish language quotation and sub- or preconsciousness appears prominently in another Fortunoff testimony, one that differs from Beatrice’s in many other regards. Ralph F., who was born in 1933 in Kobilnik (Kobyliki, Narach) in the Vilna region, testified under the guidance of Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock in 1980.55 Unlike Beatrice, Ralph claims to remember every event he witnessed with great precision. About a third of the way through the testimony he tells how he, as a nine-year-old boy, entered a Judenrat meeting uninvited, in which his mother was taking part. “I subconsciously came over to the table where

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the committee was sitting, and I said in Yiddish, ‘Why can’t we jump all those policemen, take away their eight rifles, and escape into the forest?’” Though presumably many of the conversations already quoted were also in Yiddish, Ralph first mentions the language here. He also describes the act as a “subconscious” one, drawing on the perceived correlation between Yiddish and alternate levels of cognizance. Amplifying the witness’s mention of the language in this moment, Dori Laub asks him, “Can you say it again in Yiddish?”—to which Ralph responds, “Absolutely.” The participants can expect no additional content revealed through this reverse translation. Yet, they both value its enunciation. Ralph not only repeats what he said to the committee in Yiddish, but goes on to quote their response in the source language as well: “Vos darfn mir vartn? Far vos kenen mir nisht onkhapn di ale akht politsyantn, tsunemen zeyere biksn un antlayfn56 in vald.” And the chairman of the committee, without saying one word, walked over to me and smashed my face, and my nose began to bleed. He said, “Ir zolt keyn mol nisht hern fun dir, anader vord. Nokh a vort aza zolst keyn mol nisht redn.” “You should never come up with another statement of this kind or I’ll kill you.” Looking carefully at Ralph’s Yiddish, it appears doubtful that these are the precise words spoken in 1942 —most noticeably because he includes the Anglicized phrase anader vord (another word) instead of the Yiddish term an ander vort. Even so, the witness uses Yiddish in an attempt to quote the language of experience, specifically of an impulsive, “subconsciously” driven intervention. Ralph too places Yiddish in parallel with photographs, both of which he uses as evidence of the event’s reality. Shortly after relating this incident in the Judenrat meeting, Ralph tells that nearly the entire remaining Jewish population of his town of Kobilnik, to the east of Vilna, was taken to the woods and ordered to dig their own grave. In the midst of digging at gunpoint, Ralph fled into the woods alone, while his parents escaped independently later. Immediately after relating this moment, Ralph holds up a photograph of the grave from which he escaped. The camera zooms in as he says,

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And this is the grave that I escaped from and this is the grave that I have here. And this is the picture that I took after the war ended. And this is what the grave looks like, with or without me in it. This is the only photograph that I have in this world, that I or anyone has. There are no negatives, no duplicates. This is the one and only [. . .] Taken in 1945. Along with the visual artifact, a physical sign of the event’s actuality, Ralph introduces an inscription in Yiddish, also elevated as proof of authenticity: There is an inscription. Written by my mother, may she rest in peace, and signed by me, by my father, and my mother. And I’d like to read this in Yiddish if I may. Dem keyver hobn farflantst undzere sonim, oyf morgn nokh yunkipur, 1942, fun velkhen siz gelungen tsu antloyfn undz un andere fun oyfn bild.57 Signed, Leyb, Yehudit, and Refa’el. My father, my mother, and myself. Ralph underscores the truthfulness of this text by mentioning twice that he and his parents signed their names to it. Here, he leaves the Yiddish text untranslated, making the speech resemble an authorial signature, which does need not to be legible, only authentic. The signature, the photograph, and the language together affirm the truthfulness of what is shown. Their message, to recall Roland Barthes’s description of photography, is “simple, banal; no depth: ‘that has been.’”58 Ralph and the other participants affirm their interest in the photograph and caption through close-up shots and, moreover, by patiently tolerating a long, untranslated, and non-narrative segment in the middle of the testimony. This Yiddish quotation, however, interests the participants specifically in its relationship to the psyche and to the event. Ralph has no comment on the cultural implications of the inscription or the caption. He does not see a story implied by the gap between “Refa’el,” his signed name in 1945, and “Ralph” the author/speaker of the current testimony. Likewise, Yiddish is disconnected from its effeminate figuration, especially when he uses the language to convey a violent impulse

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in the Judenrat meeting. Though Yiddish quotations emerge in climatic moments of remembering, Ralph does not discuss the language as a part of communal history, as in the Hebrew-language Israeli testimonies; its schools, youth movements, literature, or cultural rivalries do not interest him. When Yiddish becomes of interest in this English-language American conversation, it is as a memory-medium, manifesting former impressions of self rather than Jewish historical progress. These participants create a path for Yiddish from tone to story that is more psychic than cultural-historical. Narrating America through Yiddish In the cases explored above, American witnesses strikingly circumvent discussions of Yiddish or thematize the language only as they thematize silence itself. But Yiddish does appear occasionally as a direct topic of narration in this environment, mostly in the context of an immigrant acculturation story. Sonia P., a Fortunoff Archive witness, accords her language biography special attention.59 She grew up speaking “only Yiddish,” she explains, though much later in life, she and her husband never spoke the language to their children: That’s why my children don’t speak Yiddish. They understand. Everyone understands, but a fluent Yiddish they don’t speak. Because I didn’t disclose too much. Perhaps it was a mistake, I do admit. That right in the beginning I didn’t tell the children right away I was in a concentration camp and this and this. My policy was that I didn’t want to scare them. Because I myself was always scared and I didn’t want to implant in them this fear. The only time when they used to start telling me was when they went to school. Why don’t we go to grandma’s? [. . .] Then it started to open up. I started to tell them why I don’t have any parents. Then they got bigger and they heard in school [emphasis added]. For Sonia, there is a self-evident connection between not speaking Yiddish and not speaking about concentration camps. She equates terrorizing wartime images with the very language system itself, both of which have the potential to pass on her wound. Sonia P. attributes her children’s feeling of difference in their new setting to her dual silence, which she

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was then forced to break, as a necessary and perhaps ethical act of double revelation.60 Sonia P.’s heavy Yiddish accent foreshadows her story of identity disclosure: One can hear why it would be hard to conceal her outsider status, as both a Holocaust survivor and as a Jew from elsewhere. By contrast, Beatrice S., whose testimony was discussed above, sounds and looks like a North American news broadcaster. Appropriately, Beatrice remembers a much earlier and thorough act of language- and self-transformation. When she first moved to New Jersey as a teenager soon after World War II (she does not cite the year), she recounts that she was nicknamed, in Yiddish, di 61 grine freserl (the greenhorn face-stuffer), deriding both her status as a newcomer and a Holocaust survivor, who after years of starvation, had little self-control with food. She recalls children expecting her to look abnormal: “They thought I would have horns because I was a grine.” While this Yiddish slur plagues her at first, Beatrice tells how she quickly got away from the label and the language in which it was spoken: I wasn’t so green for so long. I went to school. I mentioned that I didn’t know a word of English. She was teaching me “ceiling,” “floor.” I was in the class with the kids that couldn’t keep up because they were a little slow. When I graduated high school I graduated with the highest honors for achievement and my picture was in the paper with a headline because they couldn’t believe how well I had adjusted. In school, in a broader American social setting, the language with which Beatrice arrived was not regarded as a point of derision, but as a nonlanguage: The school regards her simply as a pupil who cannot speak properly, and she is placed not with immigrant children, but with those who are generically substandard. It is precisely in this environment, where Yiddish is a nonlanguage and her brand of strangeness is given no particular consideration, that she is able to shed her outsider status successfully. Beatrice reiterates her act of rapid transformation several times, characterizing it sometimes as forced, violent, and even dishonest, with repeated metaphors related to the act of sanitizing and concealing. Speaking of her same postwar adjustment period, she tells that her uncle forced her to lie on the beach with her legs bare to bleach out the black frostbite

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stains she carried. Like her stain-free skin and impeccable physical appearance on camera, Beatrice’s unmarked voice on the recording substantiates the totality of this transformation. Yet, as part of the testimonial act, she confesses to the problems of this success, identifying a sense of self-disguise in the way that she leads her life: “It’s like there’s two of me. One that’s just for life and I want to live and enjoy, and there’s another part of me that had guilt feelings.” Reiterating this double identity, she says, “I just can’t tell people that I’m hurting. You put on a smile and you go. You become an actress.” In the context of her story and the manner in which she testifies, Yiddish has an implicit role in this doubling, the voice of the other “me,” the one that is both emotionally and socially unfit for today. Of course, Beatrice’s very act of self-examination accords with the psychotherapeutic ethos. The witness must somehow negotiate her particularity— explaining it, working through it—in the face of American normalcy, a standard defined by cultural and linguistic practice as well as healthy affect. Unlike in the Hebrew language testimonies, post-Holocaust transformation is framed as the work of the individual, her nuclear family, and her psyche rather than the domain of the Jewish body politic. Moreover, witnesses characterize this process as an internal struggle rather than the materialization of a national narrative. The difference becomes vivid if we consider Beatrice’s exposition in light of parallel moments in the testimony of Israeli witness Hana Golani, who unflinchingly explains why and how she “became a tsabra,” displaying a Yiddish text as corroboration. Hana does not consider her new de-Yiddished self as a mask, but as a legitimate telos of history. Hana’s kind of transformation can best be recognized through the ritual reenactment of progress, whereas Beatrice treats transformation as a matter of painful self-searching. Another way that English-speaking American witnesses thematize Yiddish is in a broader, conclusive discussion about identity choices. In this position, prewar East European Jewish particularity does not haunt the witness but stands as an identity option, to be embraced or dismissed at will. Betty Goodfriend, who testified to the Shoah Foundation in 1996 in Houston, Texas, ends her testimony with a long reflection on the loss of Yiddish, advocating for the language’s inclusion in a Jewish memory canon:

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To me, the destruction of the eastern part of Europe, of European Jews, I compare it with the destruction of the Second Temple. [. . .] Yiddish is gone. Gone. And our civilization was a proud one, it was. And I hope that the future generations will look back and remember with pride like we remember the Temple and the way the people lived then and how we lived then.62 Betty emphasizes that her position is personal, saying “to me” and “I compare” and “I hope.” She does not hide that she is prescribing rather than describing a stance toward Yiddish. Equally important is her repeated assertion that the language is “gone.” The metaphor of Yiddish as wound no longer applies, since no mark is left on the present-day cultural horizon. Beyond foreign or embarrassing, the language has become unknown and should be willfully retrieved. Other witnesses testifying in this environment take a similar stance on defending Jewish particularity—“reversing Americanization”—though Yiddish is rarely embraced as a central strategy in such a project. Solomon Kaplan, for example, concludes his testimony by weighing different manners of commemorating the Holocaust and fostering Jewish identification among youths.63 As one possibility, he mentions singing, “Zog nisht keyn mol az du geyst dem lestn veg,” the Yiddish hymn of the partisans, but asserts that this is “not enough.” In the end, Solomon avers that religious education is the best way to create Jewish identity, “a little religion can’t hurt. They can learn it and throw away later what they don’t want.” According to Solomon, Yiddish culture is not embarrassing or defective, but simply nonstrategic in the struggle to maintain or revive particularity. While discussing Yiddish in relation to traditional Jewish memory, Betty and Solomon speak, in the mid- to late 1990s, through a distinctly disembedded perspective.64 In this context, Yiddish, or more precisely— longing for Yiddish— emerges as one possible identity path among others. They articulate freedom in planning memory, which depends on the idea of choice and flexibility in designing one’s self. That is, the very terms of this final discussion on Yiddish attest to a specific kind of transformation: one from a particular, embedded Jewish identity to global identity freedom. Through their thematic treatment of Yiddish, English-language American witnesses articulate two different ways of looking back at

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themselves and their milieu before this change occurred—as a haunting truth that must be confronted psychically, or as something lost, accessible only through deliberate identity work.

When Past and Present Speak the Same Language In these American and Israeli ecologies, witnesses face translation hurdles when relaying past events, relating to the Holocaust years especially. These translation challenges begin on a lexical level, simply having the right words to denote what happened, and then, in some cases, build into problems of conceptual translation, of capturing the “network of signals, rules of conversation, encapsulated formulas and labels” from the people and events depicted.65 There is an expressive utility to these translation blunders. They dramatize, in compact metonymic form, the extremity of change that the witness unfolds in narrative. Yiddish appears as a tool for marking this gap and making meaning out of it. In testimonies wherein Yiddish is the language of narration, this tool could hypothetically be missing. Indeed, scholars in other fields have pointed out the symbolic deficit created when people excessively quote language from an earlier period. Regarding post-Soviet Russian speakers, anthropologist Sergeui Oushakine remarks a “regression to symbolic forms of the previous historical period” as a form of collective aphasia, a lack of language for a new social situation.66 While I point out certain inconsistencies in the way Yiddishspeaking witnesses narrate their language biographies, I argue that their use of the Yiddish language overall does work for the act of testimony. That is, they do not simply speak through anachronistic clichés from earlier periods, but use language in a way that creates a meaningful position toward the past overall and toward events of the Holocaust specifically. To get a sense of the internal language logic used in this group of Yiddish testimonies, consider one witness’s treatment of a material object: A woman I interviewed in Vilna in 2005, Genie V., explained to me that the coat she wore during our meetings was a military jacket she had found in Königsberg at the end of the war, which she had taken as her own.67 She treated the coat as an artifact, an object of historical interest, requiring a special kind of gaze and touch. As a thing, the jacket was distinct from items in her apartment and bore the message “That has been.” At the

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same time, the coat did not sit in a glass case with a caption. Genie wore it as a functional piece of clothing, to dress herself in the mundane present day. So too, witnesses in this ecology occasionally hold up pieces of their Yiddish language to be examined as traces of the events from which they originated. While placing these terms on another level of speech, or cordoning off what we could call “Khurbn Yiddish” (disaster Yiddish) into quotation marks, they can also remove this symbolic boundary and put this Holocaust vocabulary to work in narration, in denotation. They treat Khurbn Yiddish utterances as both artifacts of a liminal experience and terms that make sense today. Aside from mixing atrocity and the mundane—a practice that reappears on multiple levels in this ecology—the way in which witnesses move between layers of Yiddish also implies a provenance of telling practices. These testimonies display a shared, habitual framework through which Khurbn Yiddish terms have circulated for decades. Bringing up these special war-era terms, defining them, and intoning them reminds group members of their mutual connection, of having a collective insiders’ glossary. In this sense, wartime language is used to enact a long-standing postwar social strategy of inclusion. Quoting Texts and Terms of the Holocaust One of the clearest ways of separating the language of experience from the language of narration is through the quotation of war-era texts, namely songs. In our discussion of Yiddish in the English-language corpus, we noted that Khane Baltser’s Yiddish song from the Kovna ghetto was sealed off from the rest of her testimony, with the exception of Yiddish words she invoked at other moments.68 The moment that Khane passes from English narration to Yiddish song is one in which she reenacts the process of transvaluation. The performance articulates a clear and meaningful distinction between song and testimony, Yiddish and English, 1941 and 1995, Lithuania and the United States—and the person she had been and is now. This cluster of distinctions, built around the difference between artifact and explanation, is less clear-cut when Yiddish song is performed in Yiddish testimony. For instance, Gita Bargman includes Yiddish song in her Yiddish testimony in an especially interesting manner.69 She was interviewed by Roza B.

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in Kovna in 1996 and sings five songs over the course of her testimony, one from before World War II and four from the Kovna ghetto. All of Gita’s ghetto songs also appear in publications from displaced persons camps in the late 1940s, most in the journal Fun letstn khurbn.70 The consistency between the songs performed in the late-1990s with those transcribed in 1946 –1948 suggests that they are, most likely, loyal quotations, presentations of preserved language from the Kovna ghetto. Indeed, Gita treats these songs as quotations, as language extracted from another context. She expresses anxiety before starting each performance, concerned that “it’s hard to remember,” and fears that she will err or fall short of reproducing all of the lyrics. She also chuckles at her poor singing ability. By commenting on her presentation mode, Gita marks a separation between different levels of text. Singing is not talking and Gita is not the author of these words. But, unlike Khane Baltser, Gita integrates ideas from her ghetto songs into the fabric of her narration. The Yiddish language of the songs does not enclose a haunted or a holy idea, but an accessible set of concepts, which are not too far off from Gita’s present-day expressive system. For example, when the interviewer asks Gita to depict the Jewish ghetto police, Gita begins describing various police activities and then says, “I remember a song, to give you a picture of how things looked then.” She then performs, “Heykher man” (“Tall Man”), a piece about a Jewish policeman who is “a tyrant,” who “insults, shouts, and curses” the Jews going through the gate, yet “wants to become a poet.”71 The song urges this “tall man” to have sense and consider that the tables will one day turn. When the song is over, the interviewer asks Gita if this “tall man” figure was a real person. Gita answers, “Yes, he would stand at the gate, holding a blackjack and doling out beatings. He would say, ‘better our beatings than the Germans’.’ But their blows [those of the Jewish police] also hurt.” While Gita treats the song as a textual artifact, she also uses the song for explanatory purposes, something that helps her denote what she still finds relevant about the Jewish police. She still stands behind the message of the song. Gita sings another, more extensive ghetto song, printed in Fun letstn khurbn under the title “Nit ayer mazel” (“Not Your Luck,” or “Hard Luck”). In this instance, there are even more levels of integration be-

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tween the quoted text and Gita’s narration. The first verse of the song tells of two boys who approach the work inspector asking for a day off. In the refrain, which always starts out with some variation of “nit ayer mazl,” the work inspector turns down the boys’ request: Nit ayer mazl Fray tsu zayn. Shtepn, kinder [FLK: khevre], muz men geyn.72 Der [FLK: a] fuler aynzats muz morgn zayn. —Der “fuler aynzats.” Dos iz der gantser tsol vos me darf hobn afn aerodrom. It’s not your luck To get off free. Off to work, kids, is where you must go. The full count must be met tomorrow. — The “full count.” That’s the total number that you have to have at the airport. Gita stops singing in the middle of this refrain to rephrase its contents. Later, Gita interrupts herself again, Zi veyst az fun flugplats bashtimt nit dem tam. —Flugplats, dos iz der aerodrom. She knows there’s no sense going to the flugplats (airport). —Flugplats, this was the airfield. Gita stops singing to offer a more commonly used term for “airfield.” Both of these momentary interruptions, done for the sake of terminological explanation, communicate an expectation that the rest of the song is understandable, both thematically and lexically. “Aynzats” and “flugplats” are exceptions. Moreover, Gita’s readiness to interject conveys irreverence toward the text, a porousness of boundary and a sense of commensurability between the content of the song and her own words. When Gita has finished singing the song, she continues to discuss its contents without pausing for a breath. “That was the way it was, with vitamin [literally ‘vitamin’; figuratively, ‘special connections’]. Whoever had vitamin had it easy. Whoever didn’t have vitamin, of course, had it bad.” She

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then offers an intricate explanation of haves and have-nots in the Kovna ghetto. The song merges with the content of her narrative, and her testimonial voice today blends with the authorial voice in the song. Beyond the fluidity between quoted song and narrated explanation, Gita’s framing of the song points to a shared convention in treating such texts. At one point, this same song refers to “der vaysinker hitl ” (the white hat).73 Gita inserts, “This was a German, the vayse hitele.” Here again, Gita calls attention to the song as a chronicle of real ghetto personalities. In a similar manner, another Yiddish-speaking witness, Meishe Geguzhinskis, when discussing his work at the airfield, tells, “There was the vaysinker hitel who was a terrible bandit, who would beat the Jews with a stick in his hand.”74 Adopting a strikingly similar explanatory tone, the editors of Fun letstn khurbn add a footnote at the end of the song “Nit ayer mazl,” noting that the “white hat” was “the nickname of an overseer, a thief in the Kovna airfield.”75 These contemporary witnesses, Meishe and Gita, present the relevance of this “white hat” persona in the same manner as one another and the same manner as the journal editors in 1948. It may not be surprising that Yiddish-speaking witnesses can literally understand the words of a song from the Kovna ghetto and expect the same of their eventual listeners. What is striking, however, is that these late-twentieth-century witnesses dwell on the same specificities as did the editors of the postwar journal. Not only do they highlight this same nicknamed character that features prominently in the lyrics but they gloss his identity in a nearly identical manner. Thus, testifying in Yiddish, even in the 1990s, seems to guide the witnesses toward long-standing conventions of quotation and gloss, used for recounting and interpreting these events as early as the 1940s. Aside from the performance of ghetto songs within the testimonies, there is another very clear method through which Yiddish-speaking witnesses quote Yiddish in Yiddish. From time to time, witnesses pause their narration and take on the voice of a lexicographer, explaining a particular word or phrase. In drawing attention to these terms, the witnesses point out a gap between the Yiddish language used during the war and the language they use for speech today. A technique arose amid English-language witnesses, like Samuel Owic, who inserts Yiddish alongside other foreign phrases into his testimony, and then defines them, laying bare the constant need to translate in order to witness. When Yiddish-speaking wit-

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nesses point to certain words as evidence of the event, there is a distinctive sense of fluidity between artifact and explanation, between sensibilities of the Holocaust period and ideas that are useful and meaningful today. Consider the different uses and definitions of the term malekh. The word, which literally means “angel,” is here designated to mean “a person paid to work in place of someone else in the ghetto.” Since the term is in loshn-koydesh, the “sacred” or Semitic element of Yiddish, it may have also had the additional advantage of being incomprehensible to German ears. Five different witnesses in this Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology reference the term.76 Three of these witnesses mark the word as interesting, in some way different from their language of narration and in need of a definition. Gershon Shuster, for example, tells: People had to get a stamp when they went to the work office, that said that they had worked at the airfield, that they had been there. But they themselves did not want to go. There was such a profession in the ghetto for children to be a [pause] malekh. That’s what they used to call it [smiles]. This meant that a young boy, about thirteen or fourteen years old, would go to work in place of an adult. Gershon elevates the status of this word through intonation and pacing. He comments explicitly on the fact that the word is from “then.” Confirming the alterity of the term, Gershon immediately and independently offers a definition. We can find a highly similar treatment of the term in the testimony of Echyoshas Mosshovitchus: e c h y o s h a s : Children didn’t have to go to work. But there was such a thing as a [leans forward, smiles] malekh [pause]. In this case, the interviewer intervenes and asks the witness for an explanation, seemingly in response to Echyoshas’s body language and intonation: i n t : Meaning? e c h y o s h a s : The one that didn’t go to work had to take a malekh. The one that goes for him, says his first and last name and goes in his place. Now, the question arises, how did people have money to pay him?

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The term leads into an exposition of work-barter systems in the ghetto, in which Echyoshas adopts a self-ethnographic stance. Echyoshas appears convinced that the intricate ghetto-barter system, terminology included, can and should be understood. While both of these witnesses introduce the term malekh in the form of quotation, of uncovering an artifact, they then both proceed to use the term in narrating their own stories. Gershon, following his definition of malekh, goes on to say, “I was also such a malekh. I went in place of someone else to work. I would eat the soup at that person’s house and bring the loaf of bread home.” Likewise, Echyoshas, minutes after defining the term says, “I went to the airfield as a malekh. I used to be able to steal potatoes there.” The term shifts from being the object of curiosity, of archaeological or ethnographic inspection, to a comprehensible tool of narration; the witnesses both recognize that the idea of being or calling someone a malekh is odd, but then they integrate the idea into their contemporary vocabulary as narrators. Two other witnesses, Meri Gotler and Doba Rozenberg, use the term malekh without comment at all. Meri Gotler, for instance, says quite matter-of-factly, “I used to go as a malekh to the airfield in order to get a sandwich.” In these cases, they give no indication that the word is odd, inferring full comprehension. If we consider these contemporary Yiddish-speaking witnesses in dialogue with one another, they show the possibility of seeing the term from two standpoints—as a remnant of the event and as a tool for thinking and speaking today. There is another important quality in the way the term malekh arises— that of playfulness, pride in the resourcefulness of the practice and enjoyment in the act of explanation. Both Gershon Shuster and Echyoshas Mosshovitchus smile when introducing the word and seem to take pleasure in drawing out their glosses on it. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” their faces seem to say. Adding additional insight to the term, Gita Bargman smiles and leans toward the interviewer before announcing, “There was a story with a malekh.” She offers a long definition of the term, very similar to those cited above, at the end of which, she smiles once again, chuckles, and says, “All those who were in the ghetto know what a malekh is [emphasis added].” That is, knowing the significance and definition of this Holocaust-specific code word is a sign of belonging. Remarkably, Gita’s

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phrase is in the present tense—people like her “know” the word—locating herself in a social group connected not only through a common past but through a shared way of discussing it now. The same sense of insider wordplay clearly emerges in Israel Kaplan’s postwar lexicon as well. In the second issue of the journal, which appeared in 1946, Kaplan lists malekh in the category of “besere layt oder prominentz” (higher-ups, or people of prominence), where he defines the word as part of a cluster of related terms: If, by chance a vitamintshik [person with connections] had to go even for one day to a bad work group, he would do so through a malekh. For a piece of bread or a few potatoes, a replacement could be found for all forms of hard labor. At the appearance of such a malekh, the other workers would immediately go up to find out from him who was his got [God].77 Particularly striking is the comic ending, Kaplan’s well-timed punch line about discovering the angel’s “God,” his master. As in the oral testimonies from the end of the twentieth century, Kaplan contextualizes the word in a lengthy description of clever dealings at the workplace, and of the unspoken social hierarchies in the ghetto, a preoccupation found throughout the Yiddish language materials from both periods.78 Kaplan and the later oral witnesses share both a repertoire of thematic concerns as well as comic sensibilities. Thus, it seems that witnesses testifying in the 1990s incorporate Khurbn Yiddish in a manner that is part of a long-standing, small-scale collective conversation. The fact that they can point out certain Holocaust words as interesting or different than the language of contemporary narrative demonstrates a very basic but meaningful act of semantic separation. Their pragmatic tools for making this separation seem to be part of an in-group dialogue, one that changed only subtly over time and one that relies on vast amounts of shared knowledge, knowledge that has been circulating informally, in song, speech, or small-scale written publications. The purpose of quoting both songs and words seems less to reveal something unknown than to renew the connection among this collective. They rehearse their shared particularity through these “hot spots” of insider knowledge. For this reason, Holocaust code words can

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also be used without quotation marks or explanatory comments: The assumed, habitual listener was usually not that far removed from this special Khurbn Yiddish terminology. In a sense, inserting Yiddish terms and texts from the Holocaust serves the opposite purpose in the Yiddish corpus as it does in the English: In that setting, Yiddish marks the speaker as an outsider, as different from the listener. Here, the language of “then” is introduced in order to affirm the witness’s likeness to others. If we recall Beatrice S.’s success story in overcoming Yiddish in order to fit in, here the witnesses retrieve material that bares both their particularity and their Holocaust history in order to show that they are normal, to assert the existence of a group that includes them. As in the Hebrew corpus, the use of Yiddish quotation in Yiddish is ritualized and standardized. In both ecologies, there is a structured way of quoting language from the past, one that places them in a Jewish group of some sort. But rather than telling a common story of progress away from Yiddish, here quotation implies a history of gradual cultural adjustment and continuity in symbolic resources. Narrating Yiddish in Yiddish: Multilingual Expectations Witnesses who testify in Yiddish in Lithuania tend to not tell a story of language transformation, but rather one of alternation, switching between different languages throughout their lives. In this framework of stable polyglossia, they treat Yiddish as a natural, self-evident means of communication in Jewish contexts, one that they learned as a matter of course as children and find equally unremarkable as a language of testimony today.79 These witnesses are often irreverent toward the language, mixing in Russian and even Lithuanian words occasionally,80 using colloquialisms that could be considered slang, without concern for preserving the purity of the language or approximating a written register.81 This sense of static multilingualism, in which Yiddish is a practical language among others, becomes problematic when the witnesses depict the present day. In these segments of their testimonies, a discrepancy emerges between their impression of the Yiddish language as fixed in function and the much-altered state of its speakers, Lithuanian Jews. There are a variety of ways in which the witnesses negotiate this incongruity without resolving it.

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In discussing prewar life, few witnesses from this ecology take an interest in the Yiddish language itself. When asked what languages he knew before the war, Gershon Shuster answers, “Nu, languages. The first thing was Yiddish. I studied Ivrit [Modern Hebrew] in school, so then I could speak Hebrew. Since I lived and I live in Lithuania, I speak Lithuanian well. There were a lot of Russians in Lithuania, so I know Russian well. Then I know a little Polish and a little German.” Yiddish is listed first among the many relevant languages, and with no explanation necessary. The additional languages are acquired simply through exposure (with the exception of Hebrew, which he learned in school, also without much ado). Most importantly, Gershon moves seamlessly into the present tense when speaking of his lingual abilities: The languages he knew before the war are the same languages he knows now. It is not surprising then that he does not narrate any changes in his language use throughout the rest of his narrative: In place of a language biography, he presents a fixed language system, different sides of which he activates on different occasions. The idea of Yiddish as self-evident also appears in an exchange between the Shoah Foundation witness Leia Tsalzon and her interviewer, Chaim B., toward the start of the testimony.82 i n t : What was the language of your elementary school? l e i a : It was a Yiddish one. i n t : Everything was in Yiddish? l e i a : In Yiddish. i n t : Arithmetic? l e i a : In Yiddish. While the interviewer seems fascinated with the idea of Yiddish as a language of instruction for all subjects, Leia finds it unworthy of comment. She displays impatience with the questions about language use in general. Asked what language she spoke when living in Memel, the northern, historically German-influenced area of Lithuania that was under German control until 1923, Leia answers, “Nu, if it was a Lithuanian, we spoke Lithuanian. And if it was a German, we spoke German. We understood.” Leia presents a natural relationship between language and ethnicity, both of which she expects to be multiple. When Leia goes into hiding with a Lithuanian family for most of the war, she describes her language switch

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as easy and automatic. “I spoke good Lithuanian. . . . In a small shtetl, you speak a lot of Lithuanian.” Likewise, Leia recounts her return to Yiddish after the war, when she married a Jewish man, as an equally natural switch. There is no sense of transformation in her language narrative, but constant movement within a fixed system of ethnic and linguistic difference. Other survivors who hid among non-Jews in Lithuania during the war similarly recall lingual rotations rather than a process of masking, then disclosing identity through language (recall the stories about Yiddish that Gideon Shub shares). Shmuel S. maneuvered in and out of different Lithuanian households during the war.83 He explains his ability to do so quite simply: “I looked like a Lithuanian and I spoke like a Lithuanian.” While playing the part of a Lithuanian and speaking their language, he also returned to visit his mother from time to time and lived in the Shavl ghetto for almost a year. He entered and exited these different language environments without recollected effort. When Shmuel enlists in the densely Jewish Sixteenth Division of the Red Army84 after the liberation of Shavl, he describes his language system as having remained much intact: “I spoke Yiddish among Jews, Lithuanian among Lithuanians, and Russian was the official language.” Shmuel recalls a stable repertoire of languages and stable criteria for deciding when to speak which one and with whom. Surprisingly, Yiddish is even cast in a similarly stable light in the testimony of Braine S., who married a non-Jewish man in 1937 at the age of twenty-three.85 As a result of her marriage, Braine’s parents were forced to move out of their hometown and did not speak to her for several years. Braine became largely integrated into Lithuanian culture. Nonetheless, she recalls that she continued speaking Yiddish after wedding her Lithuanian husband: “I worked among Jews. I met up with Jews. Jews in the market.” She tells that after they were married for several years, her husband learned a bit of Yiddish, which eventually convinced her parents to allow him into their house for the first time. During the war, she, like Shmuel S., maneuvered between a variety of rural hiding places and the Shavl ghetto. Beyond physical movement, her survival strategy depended upon chameleonlike integration into each linguistic environment. Even after the war, when Braine returned to live among rural Lithuanians in

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Radvilishik, she emphasizes that Yiddish remained a part of her routine thanks to visits with her sister in Kovna. The trajectory of Braine’s life, a story of leaving her family and entering another ethnoreligious society early in life, would seem to invite a narrative of language conversion. But she too finds a way to frame her language biography as one of continual code-switching. But the question still remains: How does this framework of static polyglossia work when relating to the present day? Such a query returns us to the overarching tension between the fracturing event of the Holocaust and the physical and lingual continuity of this ecology of testimony. In these English and Hebrew narratives, the survivor’s speech signifies the destination of personal transformation, the result of, or the solution to, upheaval. There is no such language destination in the Yiddish testimonies. Witnesses express the expectation that language in general, Yiddish included, should continue to work as it has in the past. At certain moments, they reveal that this expectation is not fully aligned with their present-day reality.86 Mendel G., for example, maintains that the same multilingual system remained applicable in all phases of his life—before, during, and after the war.87 He relates as self-evident that, in the 1950s, he spoke Yiddish to Jewish coworkers at his factory job as well as to his first wife because she was, in his words, “a proper Jewish woman [a rikhtike yidishe froy].” That is, the language continued to be instinctively and unremarkably bound to Jewish ethnicity even after the war. In the very same manner, Mendel explains the rules of communication in his Kovna neighborhood today, within his large apartment building specifically: “If he is Lithuanian, then I speak to him in Lithuanian. If he is a Jew, then I speak to him in Yiddish.” Mendel presents his criteria for language use today as obvious, static, and in keeping with earlier parts of his life. But then he admittedly runs into trouble when trying to exemplify how he applies this system today. Though he and his current (second) wife converse almost entirely in Yiddish, he complains that he has no Jewish neighbors anymore: “But over there lives a Lithuanian, and over there another one. It’s all Lithuanians here. Who am I supposed to speak to [in Yiddish]?” Since Mendel’s view on languages is static, there is no way to describe the new linguistic landscape of his neighborhood today as anything but flawed, out of sync

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with his polyglossic expectations. He has not reached a biographical telos through language transformation. Rather, he depicts the linguistic present day as a rather awkward deviation from a timeless set of rules. Another witness, Hirsh P., offers a straightforward picture of language continuity after the war: In Vilna the whole time, even today, the whole time we spoke in Yiddish among ourselves. On the trolleybus in Yiddish. On the bus in Yiddish. We were not ashamed. That’s why we know Yiddish. If we hadn’t spoken Yiddish, then we would have forgotten. So the whole time we spoke only Yiddish. He calls attention to the sound of his current voice in Yiddish, fluent and assured—shadowless, we could say—as proof of this continuity.88 Hirsh’s narration of continuity is, in one sense, coherent and logical. He lists a group of friends in Vilna that he had known from his student days before the war and with whom he served in the Lithuanian division of the Red Army. As many witnesses do in this corpus, Hirsh speaks of an ongoing community conversation among Jews who survived the war and stayed in Lithuania. Yiddish is a cornerstone of his conception of this continuous, postwar “we.” But when prodded further about Yiddish conversation in his immediate circles, this same “we” begins to thin out. He tells that his wife, of non-Jewish Russian origin, whom he married after the war, only understood a bit of the language, and the same is true of his daughter. He describes his practice of delivering an annual speech in his hometown of Vilkomir to commemorate the annihilation of the Jewish community there. “I give a speech in Yiddish and in Lithuanian. . . . I always start in Yiddish, even though there are only a few that understand.” In the end, Hirsh finds a symbolic place for the language today, which is outside of everyday conversation. This final picture, in which he uses Yiddish for ceremonies, contradicts his initial, overriding statement of continuous and normative use of the language, as well as the idea of stable polyglossia as a whole. The interpretive framework of alternation and gradual change bears inconsistencies and internal contradictions, like that of language transformation and overturning. Yiddish is thus, of course, not a superior

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language in which to relay a life story or witness the Holocaust. As in any symbolic system, there are qualities, events, or ideas that are not voiced. On the one hand, details of daily life during the period of imprisonment and violence can be more easily revealed in staying close to the language of experience. At the same time, this proximity limits the speakers’ ability to point out what has, in fact, changed in the wake of this atrocity and over the course of their life histories. What is important in scrutinizing the use of language in contemporary testimony is to show the very tight correlation between language biography and historical imagination. Yiddish-speaking witnesses who stayed in Lithuania articulate an expectation that language is to be multiple rather than progressive. They expect to switch between native and non-native, Jewish and non-Jewish tongues. Within their Yiddish language, they can also move between Khurbn Yiddish and more mundane registers of the language. These witnesses approach geography, the topic of the next chapter, in a parallel manner— envisioning the same sites as both dark reminders of the past as well as mundane spaces of the present day. This sense of fluidity is a poetic quality of the testimonies in this corpus as well as a way of interpreting history. There is less emphasis on sharp overturnings and radical progressions away from one identity, toward another. Challenging the idea of the Holocaust as a discreet “foundational”89 or “transvaluational” event, these witnesses draw very porous boundaries between different periods of their lives, between their voices and their sensibilities at different moments.

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5 PLACES AND NON-PLACES

At the end of Iankel Zelbovich’s testimony, the interviewer and all participants involved decided to pack up their equipment and take the testimony to the street.1 Instead of staying in the witness’s home, with a camera positioned at medium range from the seated speaker, the standard setup of the Shoah Foundation testimonies, they filmed the final tape of the testimony “on location.”2 Traveling about sixty miles from Iankel’s current hometown of Vilna to nearby Kovna, they filmed him speaking into a microphone while standing in front of the buildings in which he was nurtured and educated and then later imprisoned and assaulted. One can understand the participants’ temptation to leave the house: Their current physical surroundings, also the subject of Iankel’s testimony, would seem to invite this kind of aberration from the original cinematic model. The studio or domestic interior setting seems far more appropriate for witnesses testifying in locales distant from the sites of their narratives. The indoor “talking-head” frame minimizes the setting of the present and draws emphasis to the historic spaces emerging from the spoken word. Iankel’s testimony, a break in the routine, draws our attention to how much Holocaust testimonies have to say about the world map—through the witness’s story, the participants’ conversational dynamics, as well as the physical staging of the recording. For witnesses testifying in America or in Israel, their story progresses through time and space together, leaving Lithuania behind as a place that can only be reconstructed verbally. 202

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The look of the testimony on-screen, an enclosed memory chamber, emboldens this trajectory of disembedding, of having been physically and spiritually “unmoored”3 by the events described. In such cases, then, there is some kind of harmony between historical narrative and cinematic space. For witnesses testifying in Lithuania, however, there is no clear correlation between “there and then” versus “here and now.” Thus it was both physically and conceptually feasible for Iankel and his crew to step outside and conclude the testimony by remembering on location. Notions of place are, in fact, a controversial topic in Holocaust discourse, and for good reason. Scholars from a range of fields have stressed that the way a person fits her body into the physical world correlates with—and shapes—the way she gives that world meaning. In literature, Bakhtin teaches, “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”4 People define themselves and their worldview precisely in the way that they show time and place to intersect in narrative, in a chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin calls it. Articulating this same parallel with regard to ethics, Charles Taylor writes, “Orientation in moral space turns out to be similar to orientation in physical space. We know where we are through a mixture of recognition of landmarks before us and a sense of how we have traveled to get there.”5 In the realm of memory, Mary Caruthers has brought our attention to the medieval mnemonic practice of “memory houses,” in which abstract ideas were envisioned as different rooms in a house. Behind this practice, Caruthers writes, was the idea that thoughts “require an abode,” for “the embodied cannot be known without a place.”6 If spatial orientation is crucial to one’s ability to narrate, to cast moral judgment, to recall information, and to have an inner life—then a major rupture in human values should somehow express itself spatially, geographically. Indeed, scholars often refer to problems of place when defining the Holocaust as trauma or transvaluation. They have enlisted images like “an abyss,”7 “a black hole,”8 “eine andere Lokalität” (another locality), “a primal scene,”9 “a blank page,”10 and “a lost spatial center”11 for this purpose. While not identical, these metaphors all evoke a cluster of similar qualities— emptiness, absence, foreignness—which create a geographic register for the Holocaust that is separate from that of normal life.12 To claim that the Holocaust created “non-places”13 is to define the event as

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somehow unknowable, unnavigable morally, in excess of human memory, and a sharp rift in Jewish subjectivity. For other scholars in the field, the idea of the Holocaust as a “nonplace” is a dangerous trope. They suggest that such motifs obscure the materiality of violent events and mystify human suffering.14 There have been many recent efforts to counteract the image of foggy, “haunted”15 Holocaust geography. For instance, Tim Cole collaborated with geographer Alberto Giordano to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) of the Budapest ghetto, representing everything from population clusters to movement patterns according to the most updated parameters of data.16 In a similar spirit, the Shoah Foundation launched a map function in 2012 that allows the viewer to follow the precise longitude and latitude of the witness at every moment of the testimony (fig. 4).17 On many viewing platforms, this digital map appears beside the image of the elderly “talking head,” competing with the human face for attention, or at least offering new guidelines through which to receive it. These maps, despite their purely technical appearance, represent one phase in another social, interpretive intervention.18 They constitute an effort to reemplace and reincarnate Holocaust narratives, to show how these events happened on an empirical topography, to a material body. My goal in this chapter is not to create a perfect synthesis between these two conflicting approaches, but to show the types of maps and voids that the witnesses plot out in their own words and physical actions on the recordings. We should start with the observation that, in terms of human perception, non-places are real. Scenes of radical spatial disorientation appear in survivor narratives from all three settings under examination here. The idea that the Holocaust created a geographic rift is not merely the cant of theorists but an outcome of many survivors’ embodied experiences of extreme violence. The most sophisticated attempts to link physical topography with a verbal account of ghetto and camp imprisonment should not and cannot circumvent a witness’s assertion that, at certain points, there was no such connection. At the same time, this observation about placelessness cannot stand alone, since it does not give us enough vocabulary to discuss all that these narrators do with place. Holocaust witnesses are engaged in verbal map-work throughout their testimonies, and their stories contain much

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Fig. 4. The Shoah Foundation viewing screen, showing Hana Golani’s testimony alongside a digital map of her journey.

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more than climactic moments of disorientation. The recordings begin with different versions of prewar geography, pictures of original home spaces, early life, and Jewish society in Eastern Europe. The wartime segments contain a variety of spatial settings, some more disorienting than others. In narrating postwar life, witnesses recount homecoming, dispossession, and the reconstruction of social sensibilities. It is through this whole “narrative cartography”19 that witnesses make a statement about what the Holocaust did to place. This story includes but is not limited to placeless moments. On a more subtle level, these testimonies also suggest that there is more than one kind of black hole. Witnesses in all three testimony clusters may point to moments in which they do not know where they are. But they give different contours to “nowhere” according to criteria of what places ought to look like and how they ought to behave in them. In this sense, the perception of being disoriented implicates a specific cultural place-lens that has gone missing. For witnesses testifying in Israeli and North American settings, their physical environments seem to support narratives of transformation. A witness’s sense that something about himself and the world has radically changed can be affirmed by the surrounding scenery, which is, in fact, very different than the one into which he was born. Though all journey narratives of some sort, the North American English-speaking and Israeli-Hebrew settings give witnesses different models of discussing the space-time progression. These two ecologies foster different expectations about the kinds of places witnesses should remember best: interior domestic scenes, or clubhouses, synagogues, and schools. The degree to which geographic names and formal cartography should enter the witness’s language is another point of contrast between testimonies from these two groups. Lastly, as final destinations, Israel and the United States each evoke their own repertoire of ideals about immigration and home building—the spatial dimensions of recovering from catastrophe. Witnesses testifying in Yiddish in Lithuania have substantially different mnemonic options and pressures. In this setting, progression in time is not matched by movement in space; images of origin and destination overlap. Even dark places—ghettos and shootings pits— can intermingle with the geography of the every day. This sense of stability in place

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penetrates many elements of these witnesses’ testimonies and is one of the features that renders them nontransvaluational. Indeed, in this corpus, the way that space responds to history is so very different from our usual parallel between progress and movement, it will require extensive analysis to be understood on its own terms.

Knowledge and Agency in Geography, Hebrew-Israeli Testimony Describing geographic sensibilities in Israeli society, Zali Gurevitch distinguishes between “little places”—mere physical locales—and “the Big Place,” a site with elevated symbolic meaning: “Ha’aretz [the land, that is, Israel] is an idea of a collective. Our engagement with Ha’aretz is an engagement with ourselves, with a dialogue about ourselves as Israelis. Ha’aretz is what we will call the Big Place.”20 As Gurevitch points out, Ha’aretz is not only a physical destination but a way of making oneself Jewish vis-à-vis places. In these Holocaust testimonies, geography is a crucial parameter for evaluating the self and the body politic at any moment in history. To reach Israel, to become a member of the Big Place, is indeed a telos that witnesses reach toward, in various ways.21 But witnesses also assign importance to the places they encounter throughout, long before they set foot in Ha’aretz. The topic even shapes conversational pragmatics: Participants sometimes talk about the map as a way to make their own conversation great, monumental. Uttering precise geographic information aloud for the recording raises the register of the testimony and connects their singular, face-to-face endeavor with a larger, official map of Jewish history. In terms of narrative, Israeli witnesses are offered a framework of clear geographic progress, of moving from a lesser home to a better home, from Lithuania as a serviceable locale for Jewish life to Israel, the monumental site of belonging. However, some witnesses insist that they could not fulfill this plan smoothly. Survivors narrate segments of the Holocaust in such a way that disrupts their agentive relationship to place. Emerging from this estranged space after the war, these survivors use geography to rethink their way of life. As they set their sights on Israel as a destination, the rest of the world map becomes sensible once again, but cast in a new

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light. While arrival in Israel is a monumental move, their earlier home never disappears. “Eretz Sham” (There Land), to use the phrase of David Grossman’s Momik, remains a distinct component of the new home, one that helps define Israeli belonging by way of comparison.22 Hana Golani’s Imperfect Journey At the start of her testimony, the interviewer asks Hana Golani where she was born.23 Hana answers informatively: “I was born in Lithuania. Lithuania is one of the three Baltic States. I was born in Tavrig, which is on the border of Germany.” She portrays her birthplace as an objective place on the modern map. Later, at the request of the interviewer, Hana even adds the distance in kilometers between the two towns, as well as her exact address, “on the corner of Shilel and Kirdakas.” None of these geographic coordinates will enter Hana’s narrative or become a reference point for later discussion: Yet both participants are happy to have this very precise information sounded out loud. The speaking of geographic information seems valuable in the way it shapes their conversation and Hana’s authority as a witness. To name these places aloud is also an act of community. Sharing geographic data with the young Israeli listener strengthens the great archive that connects them. Hana delves into a long description of the two towns in which she grew up—Riteve (Rietavas) and Tavrig (Taurage˙), evaluating their traits as she would for a person. She depicts Riteve as “a wonderful town [‘ayara nehederet]”—a single entity, with a collective spirit. She renders the place a locus of traditional Jewish practice and values: “In Lithuania, most of the Lithuanian Jews were religiously observant [shomrei mitsvot]. In Riteve, all the more so. Jews knew each other. They helped one another.” She goes on to describe communal organizations to help the poor and to feed Yeshiva students. If we call the protagonist of Hana’s narrative “the Jewish body politic,” then Riteve is its first incarnation. Riteve carries the promise of another place, implying that a journey is supposed to unfurl at some point in the future. Hana relates that “Many pioneers left for Israel from Riteve” and that a Keren Kayemet (Jewish National Fund) box was passed around in the homes of the town. Likewise, she recalls an aunt in Tavrig who “did needlepoint images of Eretz Yisrael according to her imagination.” Hana relates that there were many

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Zionist youth organizations in the town, though she missed the opportunity to join because of the Soviet invasion in 1940. Crucial to the history of these towns is their ongoing, fluctuating relationship with an idea of Israel. Hana’s treatment of geography begins to shift when the war breaks out. Her family attempts to flee Lithuania. Having left home, Hana describes motion rather than place, mentioning a series of distances between sites and vague descriptions of running “on the main road” and “on the side road.” Upon return from their unsuccessful flight, her family moves to the nearby city of Shavl, where all Jews were forced into the ghetto. “On the first of September, we moved into the poor area, to Vilnius Street. On one side there was ghetto Kavkaz and on the other side Traku.”24 Though crowded and destitute, Hana still shows the ghetto to be mappable, a point on a landscape that she understands. From her vantage point of ghetto imprisonment, Hana begins to pronounce the death of the places around her. “A woman arrived from Riteve. She said that no one was left alive.” The names of mass-shooting sites multiply in this segment of her narrative, replacing the Jewish communities as the new primary features of the landscape. Another major change in Hana’s geographic lens occurs when she tells of being deported to the Stutthof concentration camp, after nearly three years of imprisonment in the Shavl ghetto and in a nearby military clothing factory. Hana recounts, “In June of 1944 we were loaded onto a train and we traveled toward the unknown [’el habilti noda‘ ].” Switching to the passive voice at this moment, she also introduces the idea of a metaphorical, nonphysical destination. She defines the horror of this destination through her inability to know it. The deportation thus entails not only a physical movement away from the familiar territory of Lithuania, but also a change in how she processes and recalls her surroundings. When the train stops, Hana describes a scene of shouting and chaos. She then reveals the name of her destination, but only through a tentative comparison: “If there is a hell on the face of the earth [gehenom ‘al pnei ha’adamot], that is Stutthof.” She repeats this metaphor with full certainty several minutes later, this time asserting, “That was hell on the face of the earth.” Her literary overtones—inserting phrases like “the unknown” and “hell on the face of the earth”—mark a certain elevation

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in register when describing the camp locale. If this is a black hole, then it is a Big Black Hole, a monumental site of darkness. The interviewer seems to note Hana’s loss of geographic coordinates. Directing her back toward a knowable cartography, the interviewer asks: i n t : Where is Stutthof located? h a n a : On the Danzig corridor. i n t : What is the nearest city? h a n a : It seems to be the city of Danzig [sarcastically]! At earlier points in her testimony, Hana cooperated with the inter viewer’s request to perform geographic knowledge for its own sake. Now, however, Hana mocks such ritualized geographic inquiries, using sarcasm to unveil the rules of the game: The interviewer persistently requests to know location specifics but does nothing with this knowledge. Moreover, Hana insists that the physical environment of Danzig (Gdan´sk), the place we can locate on a map or visit today, does not relate to her experience of Stutthof, the camp: “The place is pastoral and beautiful on the coast. There is a lake. You can see a lake. There’s clean, golden sand. But we were inside the camp.” She protests equating the knowable place—what “you can see,” what can be recorded through empirical cartography— with her memory of the location as a camp prisoner (fig. 4). Hana becomes only more adamant about this distinction as her narrative progresses. Transported to a satellite of Stutthof, she describes the site simply as “darkness.” When the interviewer requests to know the name of this satellite camp, Hana becomes abrasive: “I don’t know the name. It was a field in no place [sham haya sade beshum makom].” Though Hana demonstrated superior geographic precision earlier in the testimony, she has now become forceful in her claim of not knowing. Two things must not escape our attention about this exchange: First is the specifically epistemic nature of this breakdown. Hana’s complaint is about the convention of naming. Her method of connecting speech to space breaks down when public, official knowledge does. Being lost is not a private, psychic affair. Second is the way in which this breakdown emerges through Hana’s own language. She is the one that objects to cartographic narration as usual. There is something about this place-break that she considers necessary to include on the spoken record.

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From this remembered site of alienation, Hana begins to rethink her relation to the world map. She recalls deciding in the camp, “I did not want to go back to Lithuania.” She senses that her journey is irreversible, though she does not yet know where she would or could go next. This is a question that she considers only after liberation, when she sees herself once again on a knowable, mappable topography. She recounts her postwar journey through named cities of Europe. “We heard that the war ended and so we traveled to Warsaw.” From Warsaw, she and a group of other women traveled to Krakow, and from Krakow to Feldafing. Constantly pulled forward from one location to the next, Hana begins to see her final destination with more clarity at a Dror Hakhshara (Zionist youth-training collective) in Rosenheim. There, she tells, “We got the atmosphere of Ha’aretz.” She recovers her geographic bearings precisely as she solidifies her plan to move to Palestine. Hana narrates her much-anticipated moment of aliyah with specificity of both time and place: “We arrived in the Haifa port in April 1947.” Paralleling and surpassing the humanlike qualities that she earlier assigned to Riteve, Hana recalls interactions with her new landscape as if with a new companion: i n t : How was your encounter with Ha‘emek Hamehulal [Yizrael/Jezreel Valley]? h a n a : We were filled with joy. i n t : Did you go swimming in the Kineret? h a n a : In the Kineret and in the Yarden. The connection between Hana and Israel as a place parallels the kinlike connection between her and a new society of people. In an exchange with the interviewer, both participants perform their solidarity out loud, by together confessing to their emotional investment in the landscape. h a n a : Until this day, my heart still skips a beat when I come down from Tiveria and I see the valley. i n t : Mine too. This new place demands a higher standard of communal dedication than before, and Hana rebukes those who do not live up to it. She even criticizes a well-known Israeli musician for having been, at the time, an

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unfriendly kibbutz member. Beyond acting as a backdrop to recuperation, the place signifies a value in and of itself, the principle around which the new community gathers. Hana’s idea of Lithuania, generalized into a conception of “Europe,” is crucial to the way she understands this new home. She tells of a recent tour she took through Europe: “On the train I got goose bumps, thinking of Stutthof.” Israel and Europe engender opposing but equally visceral reactions from Hana: One place makes her heart skip a beat, and the other makes her skin crawl. These physical reactions are consonant with her big ideas about home and exile: “I know that every people has a homeland, and we need one too—so that they won’t throw us out anymore in that way, so that they won’t humiliate us anymore in that way.” The profound contrast between there and here is about peoplehood, a political idea that she feels and knows through her body. The Public Spirit of the Prewar Home Transformed and renewed, the Jewish society that these witnesses depict in Israel defines itself in part through an idea of its previous homes, as well as its sites of rejection. Thus, the places of prewar life should not disappear from their life stories but should be recalled and mapped. In many testimonial exchanges about prewar life, there appears to be a performative value in reciting geographic specifics: Witnesses share spatial coordinates in order to say something about the testimony rather than to convey information. Consider the start of Hinda Katsanovski’s testimony: i n t : Where were you born? h i n d a : In Aniksht [Anykšcˇiai]. i n t : Where is that? h i n d a : In Lithuania. i n t : Were there districts in Lithuania? h i n d a : That was in the Utyan district. i n t : What were the other large cities in the area? h i n d a : Ponevezsh, Utian [Panevežys, Utene]. i n t : Can you describe the town in which you were born? h i n d a : Very colorful. There were rivers on either side. i n t : Can you say the names of them? h i n d a : The Vilija and the Anikshta.25

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As the interviewer puts it, “saying the names” is of great importance. Despite the care they have taken in sounding out this geographic information, neither Hinda nor the interviewer repeat any of these names or refer to these spatial parameters again. For instance, the interviewer does not repeat the name of Hinda’s birthplace, Aniksht, but refers back to it simply as “the town in which you were born.” Nonetheless, both participants implicitly concur that there is virtue in reciting such geographic specifics: Place knowledge bolsters the collective archive and affirms the witness’s ability to know and control her past. What matters most about the place is what the Jewish inhabitants do with it. Witnesses rarely dwell on the site as object-world, but connect the town name and its geographic coordinates to a collective spirit— what the participants refer to as “activities in the city [pe‘ilut ba‘ir]”26 or “organized community [kehilah me’urgenet].”27 Almost immediately after the conversation cited above, Hinda Katsanovski transitions into these categories, proudly listing the names of the youth movements and schools in Aniksht. i n t : Was there activity in the city? [haita pe‘ilut ba‘ir?] h i n d a : The whole city center was basically in the hands of Jews. [. . .] There were a great many youth organizations. Hashomer Hatza‘ir. Beitar. There were also Communists. There was also a Hebrew school, Tarbut. There was a school for the stricter religious children, Yavne. And there were a lot of synagogues. The narrated map highlights organized Jewish cultural activity. Listing this range of institutions signifies the polity’s civic potential, its ability to fashion places according to a collective vision, to the extent allowed by Diaspora conditions. Not all Israeli witnesses speak fondly of their prewar hometowns. The tone of their depictions can also range into shades of disdain and embarrassment. Yosef Ben-Ya’akov describes his place of origin: “I was born in Lithuania, in Kražiai. The Jews nicknamed it Kruzh.”28 Separating official and Jewish nomenclature, Yosef hints from the start that the Jewish presence in that town was always tentative, subsidiary. As a collective whole, he depicts the town as backward and in decline. “It was a little town. . . . There were mostly old people, very few young people.” He tells that the school had three different levels in one class and that his street had no

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name. Yosef also measures the weakness of the prewar town by its paltry contribution to the future. “There were only a few individuals who made aliyah. . . . I calculated it one time, about forty people who managed to make aliyah before the war.” Though the town is weak and decrepit, Yosef still acknowledges Kruzh as an early attempt at making a body politic and sets the place in relation with the future in Ha’aretz. Mapping Estrangement in Israeli Testimonies Even when Israeli witnesses infuse their prewar depictions with an expectation of transformation, they do not show themselves moving toward this telos exactly according to plan. Rather than migrating directly from a lesser home to a better home, they veer off from their place-time progress at some moments when relating the war years.29 Discussing such a rift in the map out loud, they impose a limit on their ability to know and shape landscape through collective will. Not unlike Hana Golani, Yocheved Aryeh depicts her arrival to Stutthof: “We reached a new hell.”30 Yet another witness, Shoshana Murchik, says of her arrival to this camp, “Here, we saw death right before our eyes.”31 Describing the place as “death”—an event or a concept—Shoshana does not call it Stutthof until later, at the interviewer’s request. Sometimes this shift in geographic orientation comes to our attention through a confrontation or misunderstanding between interviewer and interviewee. Sa’adyah Bahat suddenly changes the rules of dialogue when narrating deportation from the Vilna ghetto:32 s a ’ a d y a h : Then we went out to the gathering point. i n t : Do you remember where it was? s a ’ a d y a h : No. In earlier parts of this testimony, Sa’adyah has shown remarkable spatial acuity and has engaged the interviewer on every detail. Here, he curtly denies her even a guess as to where this gathering point may have been. Following this retreat from his normal standard of geographic knowledge, Sa’adyah relates a collective experience of losing physical bearings. Loaded onto the train, the crowd began to discuss their whereabouts: We started going back and forth. They knew the direction to Ponar. Then we turned to the north. Crying erupted. “They’re

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taking us to Ponar!” Then back north: “Oy! It’s okay, they’re not taking us to Ponar!” This whole business of taking us to Ponar or not took up some time. Though Sa’adyah depicts the crowded passengers as agentive, trying to understand their travel route, the attempt proves futile. He dismisses the collective discussion as “this whole business” and caricatures their shouts in the third person. Loss of spatial knowledge is central to his memory of this phase of the war. Some witnesses in the Israeli conversation are not satisfied depicting themselves as dwelling nowhere. At times, they insert a sense of physical grounding in these Holocaust segments through the use of a flash-forward, or prolepsis. For instance, Sa’adyah Bahat makes two chronological jumps when recalling his deportation to and imprisonment in concentration camps. In the midst of describing the first train deportation from Vilna, Sa’adyah inserts, “I never saw the train car at Yad Vashem, but there is the same thing in Washington.” Likewise, after moving from Soski to Vaivara: “The whole city is in flames. It was indescribable. . . . We got to the camp Klooga. Then there’s the famous picture from the Shoah: One layer of people, with one layer of wood.”33 Sa’adyah announces that he is drawing knowledge of these locations from later iconography, right at the crux of his Holocaust narration. He gazes at his Holocaust experience through visual knowledge that he has gained in contemporary Holocaust museums. The witness Yafah Zusman also inserts a flash-forward: i n t : [. . .] What kind of a camp was it? y a f a h : As far as I remember it was a transfer camp. As far as I know. I hear that there were non-Jews there as well. In fact, we were there a year ago. They showed us a laundry. [. . .] i n t : Was there a crematorium there? y a f a h : We saw it. We were there a year ago. My husband photographed everything. The pits, everything. That was next to Danzig.34 In attempts to answer questions about the place of Stutthof, Yafah defers to her recent visit. According to the witness’s own narrative terms, she must shift her chronological standpoint in order to describe Stutthof

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physically. These witnesses invoke a future in which these strange places work as monuments, as sanctified objects that make greatness out of suffering and tell a story of survival. The prolepsis not only promises the participants that they will eventually make sense of concentration camps but that they will build this common sense together, as a group. This particular solution to the challenge, splicing into the future, is thus not only monumental, in a very literal sense, but also communal. Witnesses gesture toward this future landscape in different ways. Unlike the other witnesses discussed so far, Yosef Ben-Ya’akov remained in Lithuania throughout the duration of the war. Thus, in the central chapter of his story, he takes us into the natural world rather than a train car or concentration camp. Wandering through the Lithuanian landscape as an abandoned young child, he depicts the forests and rural homes in which he hides as strange, unreal places. He uses generic, almost folkloric terms to designate his whereabouts: “this place,” “in the forest,” “behind the forest,” “to a farm,” “to a village.” Yosef even tells a story in which the forest seemed haunted. In the fall of 1941, he ran from the woods where Jews were being lined up and shot. No matter how far he ran, Yosef recalls, the screams of Jewish victims remained crisply audible, as if he were still right beside the shooting pit. A nearby farmer’s dog even began to bark, as if he too were bothered by the voices. Having vividly dramatized this haunted atmosphere, Yosef then explains the scene meteorologically: “In Lithuania, there is something very interesting. The air is wet there. The trees pick up voices and sounds and carry them great distances. There is no phenomenon like that in Israel.” Yosef designates the strangeness as an objective and explicable phenomenon: The oddity is thus kept outside him. This is an alienation that science can explain. Setting forth Israeli nature as the standard of ecological comparison, Yosef simultaneously inserts a subtle prolepsis, a vision of his future, functional landscape. Place-Epiphanies and Failed Homecomings In emerging from the Holocaust, witnesses in this corpus do not simply return to the same world map they once knew. Once they begin to find their bearings, they see that the European landscape has taken on a different meaning for them. Most importantly, home is no longer home. One important way that these witnesses can recover their geographic orientation after the war involves a kind of place-epiphany, in

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which Lithuania appears to them as having changed. Hana Golani comes to this realization about Lithuania in absentia, without physical contact with the territory itself. For her, and witnesses with a similar postwar biography, they reevaluate Lithuania from a distance, often from the vantage point of a displaced persons camp, and move forward. But in some cases, witnesses travel back to Lithuania after the Holocaust. They face the physical reality of their old home but interpret it according to their new rules of geographic understanding. In these scenes—which have an accidental feel, as if moving backward on an odyssey—the place becomes material proof of the violence committed, forcing them to leave and to start a new life. Yocheved Aryeh narrates her return to Vilna with her mother after the war, speaking with singsong repetition and a sense of epic expectation: We returned to Vilna, on an impossible journey [derekh lo derekh], with permission but with no way to travel— on trains, on all kinds of trains—until we reached Vilna. There the truth came out. Really. We saw what they did with us. We saw what was done with everything. It was that hard. Face-to-face with her former hometown, Yocheved experiences a sense of revelation. The streets somehow allow Yocheved to see the crime committed to “us,” to the Jewish people, as a material reality. Continuing with the idea that the city forces the truth into plain sight, Yocheved and her mother find shelter in a house, which was “abandoned and dirty. It was horrible.” The repulsive physical conditions of this temporary abode again foster revelation: “Then it was made known to us: All that had once been is now gone and will not come back. [Ve’az noda‘ lanu shehakol haya velo yahzor.]” She and her mother tried to enter their former house, but the non-Jewish woman living there would not let them in. “This was not the place for us.” Yocheved and her mother then moved from Lithuania to Poland and, after three years, to Israel. The city shut her out. This ejection from Vilna sets the witness’s transformation in motion, clarifies the meaning of what transpired during the Holocaust, and shows her how history must henceforth progress. Another Israeli Hebrew-speaking witness, Kalman Perk, finds his antihomecoming to Kovna so important, he narrates it twice.35 The first time, he tells:

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After I liberated myself and crossed the front and so forth, I ran to see what happened in the ghetto. There was still the smell of fire, even though three or four weeks had passed since. But the smell was still there. [. . .] Many were burnt. Of course, I ran to my friend’s place. Then truly [be’emet] I saw three burnt bodies: one big, one smaller, and one even smaller. I understood that that was my friend and his family. Noach . . . That is really a vivid [haya] image that remains with me from there. The corpses of Kalman’s friend and his family form the new center of the city, the place he runs to as a matter of course. This most gruesome evidence of violence replaces precisely what Kalman had most valued in Kovna—the youthful buoyancy of his peers, now brutally decimated. He calls attention to the materiality of this discovery, the event of violence reified in sight and smell. The city has not disappeared; it has begun to stink. Much later in the testimony, Kalman retells the same scene, this time emphasizing his agentive role amid the rubble: “In my great insolence [behutspati haraba] I went to our houses. There were non-Jews living there and everything was taken. [. . .] I went in and said, ‘This is my house.’ End of story. I settled there [hitnahalti shama].” Kalman treats his family’s former home unsentimentally, as an instrument of shelter. He reclaims not only his family’s prewar property but their ghetto apartment as well: “I raided/invaded [palashti] that apartment. There was some food there.” Crucially, he depicts himself acting not upon people— former perpetrators do not interest him in the slightest—but on the place. Beyond a return to agency, the language Kalman selects almost casts his actions in a belligerent light, a characterization that is antithetical to homecoming. As such, he insinuates that the place does not belong to him in any permanent or meaningful sense. His aggression or impertinence toward the place serves merely as a means of temporary survival. Indeed, after sharing several unsatisfying encounters with surviving Jews in Kovna, Kalman announces, “Then I decided that I’m continuing my trip. I’m going to Israel.” Though Kalman’s decision to make aliyah is hardly a surprise, his reencounter with postwar Kovna physicalizes the demand for change.

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Survivors Making Aliyah The sheer amount of time dedicated to narrating aliyah and adjustment in Israel in the context of Holocaust testimonies is striking. It is generally much greater than the amount of discussion allotted for a parallel move to America. In testimonies recorded by Yad Vashem, the organization includes the dates of aliyah as one of the basic, searchable biographical criteria in the catalog. If survivors wait decades to make aliyah, the testimony must cover all the years leading up to that point, whereas otherwise, witnesses describe only a few cursory postwar years. The introduction of Israeli place names creates a moment of communitas at the end of these testimonies: The language of geography—in its Hebraic combination of Jewish, European, and Middle Eastern references—now finally coincides with the language of narration. Israeli place names also strengthen the bond between witness and interviewer: No matter how much witnesses complain of difficulties in absorption to Israel—which some do36—the place introduces poetic and social unity on screen. For instance, Sa’adyah takes care to name the stations of his inclusion process: “The impression of Hadar haKarmel and everyone is Jewish, even policemen [cries].” He lists an extensive number of sites by name, including Petah Tikva, Mahane Yehuda, Geva, Yeshuv Eilat, Bab El-Wad.37 The interviewer and the assumed listener are now expected to understand these geographic references from just a quick mention. Whereas earlier, there was an absolute inequality of knowledge, one giving the other a geography lesson, one who knew how to pronounce place names, and one who stumbled; now both parties are equal authorities on the landscape under discussion. Israeli Hebrew-speaking witnesses vary in how they cast the relationship between Lithuania and Israel; but such a relationship is widely thematized.38 Expressing reverence and longing for her birthplace, Bat Sheva Levitan cries at the end of her testimony, “Such a shame about my town. [Haval ‘al ha‘ayarah sheli]. Such a shame about all the towns.”39 She helped her sister write a book in Hebrew about Kelm, their prewar home, resurrecting it through loving, anthropomorphic description.40 On the opposite end of the spectrum, Yosef Ben-Ya’akov insists, “I became a new person [in Israel]. What happened there, happened there.” Even in such

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a tidy rejection of “there,” Yosef puts the two places in relationship with one another, one actively replacing the other. In their very different readings of Lithuania, Bat Sheva and Yosef both keep the place extant and significant, even from this new vantage point on the map. This parallels the manner in which witnesses in this corpus treat Yiddish, the language of the past, as an extant, known, and useful counterpoint to the language of the present. Metamorphosis, reinventing the body politic, has clear spatial markers in this ecology. Becoming a new person, becoming a new people, and moving to a new place all go hand in hand. Knowledge of and collective agency over place are what make the location homelike. As in other themes, there is a ritual framework through which one can enact this transformation in a testimonial exchange. Even when witnesses go off the map, insisting on absolute disorientation, one can detect their social lens: Dark places are dark in a specific, monumental, and communal manner. Aliyah segments sound and feel like a proper ending, thanks to the harmony between place names and the language of narration, as well as between participants on screen. Moreover, their stories bring geography and geographic loyalties to the foreground as a topic for open, public discussion and evaluation.

Topography from the Inside, English-Language American Testimony On the back cover of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I, two overlapping maps appear.41 One depicts Nazi Europe in menacing shades of green, brown, and purple. The death camps are marked with a skull-andcrossbones sign. Locations are scaled according to their significance in the protagonist’s story, with smaller cities like Bielsko, Sosnowiec, and Cze˛stochowa pictured as equal in size to Warsaw and Łódz´. In the corner, Spiegelman splices in a red-and-yellow inset of a smaller neighborhood, bearing the title “Rego Park, N.Y.” Prominently enlarged on Carlton Street is a picture of Vladek’s house; we are able to see the windows, garage, and domestic features in this drawing, details important to the plot of the novel. To embolden the message of the maps, Spiegelman also overlays a picture of the father-son memory scene—Vladek gesticulating

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Fig. 5. Mapping the family story, from the back cover of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS I: A Survivor’s Tale.

and looking intently down at his grown son, who stares right back at him. The angle of the father-son gaze parallels the vector from Auschwitz to Carlton Street. The face and eyes, windows on the soul, appear as our map key.42 The family drama gives the landscape its contours, and locations take on relevance insofar as they inform the father-son exchange (fig. 5).43 This is the horizon of meaning and expectation onto which witnesses venture when they testify here in the 1990s. Conversations revolve around the house, which is saturated with information about the narrator’s development and is a topic most effective in earning the listener’s attention. We can see a mental or psychic map much more clearly than a political one; camps and ghettos are disorienting on the inside. After having survived and moved to the new world, Lithuania becomes more of an absence—rather than a tangible manifestation of wrong, as in many Israeli

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testimonies. Their old home reappears in dreamlike tones, rather than as a crisp symbol of where Jews should not be. While witnesses in Israel often look to the Diaspora as a communal counterpoint, America relies on no such contrasting predecessor.44 Gita Taitz: Shelter and Exile In her testimony, Gita Taitz makes place a private, spiritual matter. She opens the recording with a rapid summary of her prewar life: “My name is Gita Taitz, and I come from a little Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania.” She mentions her father’s variety store, downstairs from her house, Hebrew gymnasiums, skating ponds, and vacations on the nearby riverfront in Panemunis. Amid this informational sketch, Gita’s house becomes the focus of her spatial depiction: “I had a bedroom, nice big kitchen, two bathrooms, big verandas. It was a nice, sunny apartment.” She goes on to detail the furniture that, she adds, was similar to what one might see in New York today. She infuses this interior scene with a sense of familiarity, comfort, and continuity— despite the changing outside world. Even if the listener can envision nothing about the city of Kovna, he can conjure up an image of Gita inside her home. The most important place in the whole house is the desk next to the radio, which is her quiet, personal spot: “This was the place where I prepared myself for school.” Pictures of public spaces are sparing. Even when depicting the street, Gita gives us the chance to see it from her individual perspective: “We lived in a gentile neighborhood. It took me a half an hour to walk to school. I had, like, a portfolio that I carried.” Kovna, indeed, does not appear as a unified, anthropomorphic organism, the embodiment of the Jewish body politic, but as the site of select enclosures that inform Gita’s person. The outbreak of war dismantles Gita’s domestic space: Moving into the Kovna ghetto, she tells, “We had to leave our piano and our furniture. We took a wagon and a horse. My mother had a dowry for me, with pots and pans and linens. Later on they took that away.” Yet the impression of her quiet study space follows her into the ghetto period. Describing her work in the harsh outdoors at the Kovna airfield, Gita tells, “I never did anything except play the piano. Here it was wintertime, it was cold. Sometimes I worked at night too.” In losing her physical shelter, Gita changes her terms of narration, focalizing public spaces and urban landmarks that 45

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did not receive attention earlier. She mentions the name of the district, “Vilijampole˙, Slobodke,” several times, as well as their new street, “Mindaugo”; the gathering place, “Demokratu˛”; and the gestapo headquarters in the “Saugumas.” With this increased presence of the cityscape, Gita gives the impression that the outside world has encroached on her private one, upsetting the balance between indoors and outdoors. Already in her narration of the Kovna ghetto, Gita begins to articulate a sense of spatial estrangement. She refers to the ghetto through the metaphor of “Dante’s hell” situating herself on a landscape of mythic horror. The metaphor appears again later in Gita’s depiction of Stutthof. Having marked the place with literary metaphors, Gita zooms in on her sensations of vulnerability and gives us the feeling of what it was like to be in this place as a young child with her mother. In Stutthof, Gita and her mother were separated during a selection and Gita’s mother was moved to another bunker. Without considering the danger of such an act, Gita sets out to find her: “I started to run, like a ghost, like a ghost between people. . . . I didn’t know where she was taken. I was just running and I saw barracks.” Gita depicts a haunted atmosphere in the camp. But rather than commenting on the oddity of the place, Gita assigns the alien quality to herself. She is the one that becomes an apparition here. Placelessness, then, becomes a psychological rather than an epistemological breakdown. In Gita’s reaction to this ghostly environment, we see an underlay of her normative place world. She gravitates toward the indoors of Stutthof, where her mother remains throughout the day, unable to work: “I didn’t know where I was and I found my mother in one of these places. I didn’t go out for a while. I didn’t go to appells [roll calls]. I didn’t go to work. To go to work was important. [. . .] To be separated I was scared.” Once reunited with her mother, Gita is willing to disobey the rules and risk punishment to stay indoors with her. She elaborates: “We were afraid to go out at night to the bathroom. We had to go in this place. We had a little pot. And my mother got sick and she had diarrhea and you can imagine, without anything.” Though revolting, Gita and her mother find this indoor space still preferable to the outside. The horror of the camp takes on a shape that faintly duplicates Gita’s public-private distinction of earlier.

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Following liberation, Gita, who survives along with her mother, begins to reintroduce a cartographic orientation, including her postwar locations of Deauthelau, Łódz´, and Munich. From this standpoint of transitional geography, Gita treats her previous landscape of belonging with silence: i n t : Did you ever go back to Lithuania? g i t a : I don’t want to mention about Lithuania. They were too cruel to us. Like the Hebrew-Israeli witnesses discussed, Gita undergoes a kind of “place-conversion,” in which she must seek a new moral order in space. But, instead of deploring Lithuania for the hostile truth embodied within its landscape, she aims to omit the place from speech. Gita invites us to view her internal life in a way that parallels this spatial arrangement: “I have a certain department for my hard times. I don’t want to cry all the time.” Her distinction between silenced and voiced places refers simultaneously to physical and psychic topography. Within Gita’s own language, she theorizes a connection between postwar geography and her postwar emotional composition. The United States of America provides a “department” for recovery. Describing her decision to move there as pragmatic rather than idealistic, Gita tells, “Israel was very close to our hearts, but we wanted to go to the United States. Our uncle had left us an inheritance there.” Arriving in New York, Gita relates a family drama through domestic addresses. “We lived on Eighth Street. [My aunt] thought it was too good for us to live on SeventySecond Street, where she had an apartment. She was a lawyer and she was very high up, and she said [about Gita and her mother], ‘They just came from the camps. They have nothing.’” Gita felt that she and her mother, ragged refugees, embarrassed her well-established aunt on Seventy-Second Street. What disappoints Gita about her new place is less the site itself than the hurtful family relations it stages. The body-land connection is not a priority for her. The place-world does not rehabilitate Gita, either. Once settled into New York, she builds a new home through spiritual practice, dedicating herself to synagogue life. Descriptions of Gita’s involvement in The Mount Sinai Jewish Center, her children’s religious education, and their familial Jewish observance are what restore Gita’s subjectivity—the equivalent of swimming in the Kineret for Hana Golani.

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As a summary of her testimony, almost an epilogue, Gita violates her own rule and brings up the name of Lithuania one more time. In a concluding reflection about the Holocaust and human values, she recalls Lithuania as a site of prejudice: “I hope no one will have to go through this again. . . . We built Lithuania, and yet you couldn’t be a policeman there.” One sentence later, she contrasts the prejudice there to the humanism here—“Here the church does good things.” She divides the map based on a difference of values, distinguishing between places of prejudice and places of tolerance. She concludes this discussion with the important declaration: “I was born a Jew, and that is the way I will die.” That is, according to Gita’s self-understanding, her core identity remains stable, regardless of location. The difference between Kovna and New York is that the latter place allows her to be more of herself, grants her the freedom to be authentic. The new place is most significant in the way that it allows her to say “I.” Lithuania Out My Bedroom Window If it is important for a testimony to start from the beginning, to assess the origins of selfhood before that self was violently destroyed, then there is special value in depicting the childhood home. One American Shoah Foundation witness, Ellen Zitkin, remembers domestic space much better than urban or national geography.46 Asked to spell out the name of the city at the start of the testimony, she recites hesitantly, “K-A-U-N-A-S,” then chuckles out loud. Something seems awkward about drawing out the name of this far-off, obscure location on tape. Going on, she recalls almost nothing of street life, clubs, and schools. By contrast, Ellen shows ease and interest in sharing details from within her home: “There was a big bedroom for my parents . . . something like a sitting room. It was a fairly large apartment and a bathroom [laughs]. We had a bidet, which was quite modern at that time.” Later, she adds details: “I enjoyed being in the garden. I think it had a chestnut tree. I always liked chestnut trees very much. There was a big ‘double garage’ you would call it. Like a barn.” The home is almost transtemporal and teaches us about Ellen’s personality, while the outside is context-dependent and reflects an external reality that no longer exists. The internal space is thus much more relevant to what Ellen is expected to do as a witness. In their

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temporal plasticity, such domestic depictions also help make her narrative accessible to a contemporary listener— enabling allegory or comparison as plausible interpretive outcomes. Witnesses in this English-speaking American ecology work differently with the parallel tensions of indoors versus outdoors, self versus context. Jack Arnel mentions many institutions and public locales in Vilna—far more than Gita Taitz or Ellen Zitkin do: “Jewish teacher’s seminaries,”47 “Perlman’s cheder” where he studied, “Beitar,” “the Real Gymnasium.”48 Nonetheless, it is from the vantage point of Jack’s home that these places can best be interpreted. Taking the interviewer on a verbal tour, Jack moves from the courtyard to the staircase and into the apartment. Finally, he arrives at the domestic center: “My sister and I shared a bedroom when we were little. The windows in the back of the apartment faced into a garden and a Russian church.” The interviewer asks him to stay with this image: “What was your relationship to the orthodox church?” Jack answers, “Absolutely wonderful” and recounts how one priest, Father John, would rest a ladder on his window in order to let him down to play. Jack’s depiction of interethnic friendship gains status as truth when considered from the right vantage point, from the inside looking out. Finding Oneself in No-Place When looking at prewar segments of testimony, Israeli and American witnesses seem to work with very different chronotopes, notions of place/ time intersection. The contrasts are subtler when looking at depictions of wartime geography from these two different testimonial settings. There are English-speaking American witnesses who convey that they lose spatial bearings during advanced stages of the war, paralleling similar moments in the Israeli testimonies. It is important to note this basic commonality: Rarely do witnesses from either of these ecologies simply continue mapping their travels fluidly throughout the ghetto and camp periods. Still, a finer grade of observation reveals different types of spatial estrangement, which relate to other concerns in the witnesses’ ecology. From the outset, the personal-allegorical framework places fewer expectations of official cartographic knowledge on the witness. The cessation of geographic knowledge thus creates less of a stir between interviewer and witness when working within this framework.

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Bronia Sultanik, for example, repeatedly recalls feeling lost, beginning in the ghetto period and continuing up until liberation.49 But she treats this placelessness in an understated way: I remember I came in after standing for a whole day in the square or wherever it was. ... So we went out and just went wherever they took us. ... This was like, one place for a week, then transferred to another place, another barn, another digging of ditches [all emphases added]. Bronia’s vocal tone is unconcerned, rather than ironic. She presents her lack of geographic awareness during the war almost as a given. In keeping with her frankness about “being taken,” about loss of agency, so too does she appear unembarrassed by stating that she did not understand her physical whereabouts. The interviewer never presses her to clarify these vague locations, complying with Bronia’s focus on personal space over political cartography. When disorientation becomes an issue of discussion in this setting, we can see more of an emphasis on problems of sensual perception, visual especially, rather than cartographic knowledge. Note how the matter of disorientation arises in the Fortunoff testimony of Boris A.: i n t : What do you remember from Dachau? b o r i s : I was just at the end. You cannot see too much. You have to stay in the place where you are.50 The interviewer does not request geographic coordinates or names, but in the spirit of personal-experiential narrative, seeks information on Boris’s perspective, his capacity to reconstruct sense-memories of the site. In response, Boris articulates his disorientation as a matter of what “you” can and cannot see, personalizing this perceptual limitation. The lack of tension in such placeless moments may, at times, also build into a specific stance toward victimhood, one that differs from the tacit disapproval or embarrassment at getting lost, which I pointed out in the last corpus. In testimonies from the Hebrew-Israeli environment,

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the idea of losing one’s bearings works against a Zionist ethos of Jewish agency and self-maintenance despite hardship. As an additional problem for Israeli witnesses, detaching one’s experience from an empirical map makes the testimony more private, less suitable for the communal records and thus less valuable to a national archival project. By contrast, to lose agency, or to remember having lost it, is not so embarrassing in these personal testimonial conditions. In fact, as an authentic and perhaps cathartic expression of their experiences as victims, those witnessing in an English-speaking American ecology may even see virtue in admitting to having been “no-place.” Take note of how Jack Arnel positions himself in the landscape in the following story from the very end of the war, around the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945. Jack and his father are being transported westward in a train evacuation from the camp. Under American missile fire, the German soldiers allowed Jack, his father, and other prisoners to escape into the woods. After running for several rainy days, Jack and his father awoke one day to silence. We started walking. We didn’t know where to walk. We wound up in a little village over there. And out of the village came a German. He was in a uniform, one tall German, and he came to us and asked us what we were doing here. We told him we lost our way and all that, and he says, “You can’t come in here, you can’t go here” he says. “Go away from here and make sure you don’t come back again.” And we did, we walked away, but as we were walking, somehow, without any direction, without knowing how, we came all around and back to the same spot, and he caught us a second time. He caught us a second time and he started shouting and yelling at us. He took out his pistol and he put his pistol right at my temple, right over here. And my father, my father dropped to the floor, pleading and begging him with tears in his eyes. “Please don’t shoot him. He is my son. Please, we only didn’t find our way.” And somehow he said, “All right. This is your last chance.” He says, “You better go and disappear out of here. I don’t want to see you again.

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And so we thanked him, and I got up and we ran. We ran with all our last might, and we ran back, and we thought that we were going away from this place. But believe it or not, it happened a third time [witness’s vocal emphasis]. Jack depicts himself at the mercy of this inexplicable landscape. The forest acts upon him in this moment, controls him, in a manner parallel to the German soldier who holds him at gunpoint. While Jack comments on the implausible quality of the story, he expresses no shame at this loss of agency in relation to the natural environment. Compare this story to that of Yosef Ben-Ya’akov, who explains his disorientation through science, by pointing out the strange physical properties of the Lithuanian woods; here Jack offers no external explanation for getting lost. He describes nothing in the forest that might give rise to his confusion. The problematic landscape is left alone, thematically. Instead, we are made to encounter questions about Jack and his father: What kind of mental state could have caused them to return to the space of oppression again and again? Did years of subjugation train their bodies to ignore personal will? Do they somehow fear freedom? Jack’s tone is not one of self-mockery but of bafflement. Also significant is the readily metaphoric quality of narration: The landscape appears almost universal, inviting a transfer of meaning from the physical to the mental, and from the particular to the allegorical. Again, the interviewer does not interrupt this six-minute segment but gives time and attention to Jack’s detailed recollection of disorientation. Redrawing the Postwar Map: Lithuania Goes Missing As in the last corpus examined, witnesses testifying in English in North America recall encountering a new world map when they emerged from camps and hiding places after liberation. To explain why home is no longer home, witnesses evoke images of absence and deletion. Asked if she ever returned to Lithuania, Luba Bielas responds, “Never. What for?”51 Betty Goodfriend, deliberating on where to settle in the postwar years, says, “I knew I didn’t want to go back to Lithuania. I wanted to go forward. . . . There was nothing for me in Lithuania.”52 With Lithuania behind her, the place becomes vacuous, containing “nothing.” Such

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images of emptiness differ from Kalman Perk and Yocheved Aryeh’s depictions of postwar Lithuania, reappearing as a dark, fully visible and corporeal manifestation of the truth. For Mira B., who makes her way back to Vilna after the war, the city has not become repulsive or hostile, but frighteningly incomplete.53 She frames her postliberation return to Vilna as a search for the Green Bridge—a famous landmark connecting the once-Jewish suburb of Shnipishok (Šnipiškis) to Vilna, just over the Vilija (Ne˙ris) River, which appears prominently in Jewish literature and urban lore of Vilna.54 Mira explained that she arrived at the train station, which is on the opposite side of town from the river. She decided: “I am going to walk all the way. And I am going to walk through the former Jewish quarters. And if I meet Jews in Vilna, fine. . . . If I don’t meet any Jews from here to the Green Bridge, I will walk up to the Green Bridge, where I grew up, and I will jump straight into the Vilija, and this will be the end.” As Mira walks through Vilna toward the Green Bridge, she does in fact encounter Jews and even a newly organized Jewish Community Center as well as a Jewish orphanage. But none of the Jewish survivors she meets supplies the feeling of return that she seeks. So suicide is imminent. “And as I walk to the river,” she says, “I am shocked. There is no Green Bridge. The Green Bridge was gone! It was bombed. There was some makeshift bridge. There was no Green Bridge. I had no place to jump from.” It is not the sight of blackened corpses or hostile gentiles that repel her from the place. Rather, it is the fact of the missing bridge, an incapacitating absence, which convinces Mira that her previous home is no longer homelike. The bridge had been bombed by the Wehrmacht in 1944, was rebuilt in 1952, and still stands today under the same name, “Green Bridge,” in Lithuanian, Želasias Tiltas. But, from Mira’s perspective, the bridge was erased forever. This is also the impression that remains with another witness who emigrated to the United States shortly after the war. Samuel B. recalls that his mother had planned to jump off the Green Bridge: “Only the bridge, this famous bridge where my mother wanted to jump but had no courage— did not exist anymore.”55 The shared topos of the missing Green Bridge, a physical absence that inhibits suicide, raises a number of intriguing questions: Would it have been better if the bridge had still

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stood, allowing the survivors to jump? Or, in line with Jean Amery’s reflections on suicide, do these scenes show people so de-selfed that they cannot even elect to die?56 Neither witness answers these questions. But both activate the postwar cityscape toward such queries about the paralyzed ego. A witness who testified nearly ten years after the two quoted above, Joan Bonder, has a chance to revisit the scene of erasure in her hometown.57 After the war, she was baffled by the absence of her grandparents, whom she expected to find at home in Vilna. This absence repels her from the place: “Our goal was to leave Vilna. There was nothing for us there.” Still, Joan recounts, she spent decades wondering if she might have made a mistake. Perhaps she could still find her grandparents somewhere in the city. For this and other reasons, she decided to return to Vilna in 1989 with a group of survivors. Her narration has a dreamlike quality as she returns to look for what she lost: We went to find my grandparents’ house. We drove and we drove and we drove. There was no house. The house was knocked down. In place of the house, there was a big skyscraper. Maybe a ten-story building put in that place. I was crushed. I was just crushed. Finally I realized it was only a dream. It was not reality. Upon her second encounter, the absent house proves that her past life has truly evaporated. In the context of the testimony as a whole, the missing house finalizes Joan’s transformation or self-realization process. She presents this finality as a relief and a step toward mental health. Joan overcomes Vilna by admitting its vacuity. The way that witnesses emphasize spatial disappearances has very specific consequences on their biographical and historical trajectories. What came before the Holocaust vanishes, becomes inaccessible or “melts” (to use a metaphor that is particularly apt in the context of American immigration stories) imperceptibly into one’s new identity. The erasure of certain places parallels their feeling that the Yiddish language has also been erased or concealed. The place and language of the past do not remain in contradiction or conversation with the world of the present but become somehow detached and muted, qualities that participants point out and discuss. This provides another window onto the distinction between

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a national metamorphosis story, in which the previous landscape of the body politic remains present and available to its members as a reminder of lessons learned, and a therapeutic narrative, in which past places offer material for self-reflection, which is at once intimate and contextually plastic. Coming to America: The Freedom to Heal Like arrival in Israel, migration to North America signifies more than a simple location change. The move demarcates the beginning of “the rest of one’s life,” the end of the Holocaust era, and the initiation of a new identity. However, the renewal that America fosters differs from the one that survivors seek in Israel. More precisely, the relationship between America, as a place, and the recovery process differs: America serves as a means rather than an end. Instead of enlisting the place itself, with named specificity and topographical concreteness as the fruits of redemption, survivors speak of post-Holocaust America as a locus of freedom, where they are at liberty to rehabilitate themselves by their own will. New York city appears as the backdrop to Gita Taitz’s rediscovery of religion, the proper “melting pot,” as she calls it. Jack Arnel speaks of his arrival to the place with more reverence and gratitude: I can still remember the trip on the train toward New York. With all the glitter and all the lights. I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life. When we got off I was ready to go down on my knees and kiss the ground [chokes up]. We have arrived in New York. The ground he hopes to kiss is not heavy with traditional symbolism and communal obligations, but luminous, glittery, new. Expounding on the attributes of the place that helped revive him, Jack recalls, I got enough education to stand on my own two feet, and it was so wonderful. The liberty, the freedom to choose what I want to do. The school was there. Anything I wanted, I wasn’t used to it. I’m most grateful to the U.S. and all they did on our behalf. It is through freedom, through choice, that this site engenders rehabilitation. Expressing gratitude toward the United States—the place is a “they”—Jack casts it as distinct from himself, a generous patron rather

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than an intimate partner. Jack does not mention specific locales or physical features but treats the United States as a notional space that allows flourishing. Clearly, “Jack” is a name the witness received upon immigration. Yet the witness does not discuss this shift as part of his arrival; what interests the witness is not how “Yasha” became “Jack” in America but how he became a successful, functioning person in this new environment. In this sense, the place does not create him anew but allows him to become a fuller, healthier, more authentic version of himself. The transformation that the United States fosters is not the progression from one culture to another but rather from wounded to healed. As he says, I tried to get myself into a normal mode of life. I have no formal education. I was twenty years old. But four years in Feldafing without any schooling, four years of suffering during the war has made its mark, and I have to fight it. His wife, he tells, proved a great help in overcoming the “fear and the leftover from the Second World War,” because “She was an American. She was not a survivor from the other side.” If the “other side” remains a presence in America, it is in the form of the wound, which he continues to battle. To clarify the way that America can work as a redemptive symbol, we should look at a testimony in which it does not.58 Morris Lapp treats his new home differently than does Jack or Gita. First of all, he does not discuss “America” at all, but only various immigrant-populated neighborhoods in New York. We found out there was mostly Jewish people in Coney Island and Brighton. [. . .] I went into UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration]. I say I want to stay here. My wife is crying, she’s lonesome. She cannot speak the language. We heard there’s Jewish people over there, friends from Feldafing. So they gave me fifteen cents for carfare and thirty-five dollars for a week or two. We took a cab and went to Coney Island. Morris depicts Coney Island as a concrete location, one that simulates the contexts in which he had previously belonged. In this same neighborhood,

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Morris found work in an electrical appliance shop, with a Yiddishspeaking owner. He continued to work there until the time of the testimony in 1996. Rather than seeking integration in America, Morris and his wife found a geographic microcosm that would allow them to stay close to their earlier, Old World identity. Morris does not end his testimony on a redemptive note, but instead concludes by observing that aging is much harder than he ever expected. He invites his wife to join him on camera for the last moments of the footage. We see him struggling with her dementia, which he attributes to severe beatings that she received in a concentration camp. The outcome of his life story is not healing but ongoing injury. There is some poetic correlation between how Morris depicts postwar geography and his postwar fate: Just as he shows Coney Island to be an incomplete rearrangement of his old culture, so too does he show himself to be rearranged rather than realized or redeemed. These Hebrew-Israeli and English-speaking American frameworks give witnesses somewhat different narrative tools for articulating the connection between biography and place. They differ in lens, admitting different orders of information into their memories. Yet testimonies from both of these ecologies tell stories of place that are based around catastrophe and refounding. These are the main axes through which time and space interact. Spatial distance is a material sign that the world of today differs profoundly from the one into which they were born. The physical scenery encourages witnesses to notice and give meaning to the transformative strains of their remembered lives.

Speaking in and of the Place, Yiddish-Lithuanian Testimony In 1997, Grigory Kanovich, a Russian-language Jewish writer who built his career in postwar Lithuania before moving to Israel in 1993, published a novel entitled Park zabytikh evreev (The Park of Forgotten Jews). As its title implies, the novel inquires into the spatial parameters of memory, focusing on the regular meetings of a group of friends in Bernardinu˛ Park, in the center of Vilna in the late and post-Soviet years.59 The park, once a bustling center of Jewish recreation, is now home to just a few “forgotten” members of this group. Yet within the space of the park, the

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friends create a fully populated memory-world of their own, whose marginality or statistical insignificance poses no limits to imagination. As literary critic Harriet Murav puts it, discussing Kanovich and other postwar Soviet Jewish writers: “[T]he Jewish home is found in the former Pale of Settlement, where it is neither a wasteland nor the site of full plentitude and unbroken tradition, but rather something in between.”60 There are vast differences between Kanovich’s writings and the oral testimonies studied here, which were given by people who shared the author’s social milieu in Lithuania. Kanovich’s choice of the Russian language and print media expand his possible audience of reception, enabling his stories to stretch far beyond the territory that he describes and, for many years, inhabited. His novel, thus, quotes a locally bound memory conversation, transporting it into another realm rather than participating in it. Nonetheless, Kanovich draws our attention to at least one special feature of these Yiddish-language, oral testimonies: History accumulates in places. The same or nearby sites are connected to a range of chronological phases and types of events. The physical environment helps narrators combine or shuttle between historical perspectives, muddying the borders between them. If, in the last two clusters of testimony I discussed, an interviewer might pick up after the break with the question “Where were we?” in reference to both place and time, here geographic movement does not index the passage of time. In the Yiddish-language Lithuanian setting, the informative, utilitarian potential of geographic sites is much greater: The places discussed still “make sense,” and thus the witnesses may use them to explain the nuts and bolts of their narratives. As a result, narration is often much more physically grounded, embedded— doubling and supporting the social and linguistic embedding I have pointed out in this cluster with regard to other themes. Narrators here have the option of using places to inform, to conjure up a topographical version of their stories. But that does not prevent them from doing other, less practical things with local place names. Quite often the details—street names and addresses, in particular—seem to serve no explanatory purpose in the narrative. At least the frequency and centrality of these place names outweighs their potential to advance the plot. Places have a performative value in this setting as well, despite their increased capacity to inform.

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As performance, place names enable witnesses to relive their connection to specific sites, to remind one another of their shared repertoire of memories, and their distinct, subnational way of belonging to the place.61 Importantly, this place connection is not achieved through experiential narration, the “take me there” sensibility that emerges from Englishlanguage American testimonies or through the use of a political cartography as among Israeli testimonies. Rather, these Yiddish-Lithuanian witnesses animate “small places” through the invocation of local knowledge. The kind of details highlighted relate to objects and sites that are knowable through habitual encounter—the provenance of oral exchanges. This kind of place-talk works for almost all narrative segments that occur in Lithuania. For those witnesses who relate imprisonment in concentration camps outside of Lithuania, mostly in Estonia, Latvia, East Prussia, and Germany, their local knowledge ceases to serve them in the same way and their place-lens changes at these points. Rather than elevating the camps to sublime or monumental loci of darkness, the witnesses deflate the idea of the camps— describing them as ugly, concrete physical structures. In these segments, witnesses emphasize small, low places close to the body. They recall themselves surviving in these camps by “dreyen zikh”62—“wriggling through” the squalor, finding some kind of fluidity in the cramped environment. Iankel Zelbovich on Location Here we can return to the final tape of Iankel Zelbovich’s testimony, which served as a provocation to the topic of place at the start of this chapter. Setting it in the context of this corpus, in conversation with his peers, the footage still remains rather unusual. On-site testimony was filmed only four other times in the Shoah Foundation in Lithuania, and most witnesses spend the duration of the testimonies sitting at home, as they do in other countries.63 Of the witnesses that I interviewed in this setting, there were a few energetic individuals who invited me to walk outside to see something they were describing. Most, however, were satisfied depicting important local sites from home, as if I had already been there. What is important about Iankel’s on-site excursion is thus not its representativeness but its possibility. He dramatizes a potential that exists for all witnesses in this setting all the time: to collapse normal and catas-

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trophe space, to define certain sites as vessels of both memory and daily life. Even those who remain at home for the duration of the recording have lived for years with the potential of encountering prewar and Holocaust spaces as an everyday occurrence.64 What Iankel does with these locales in the span of his thirteen-minute conclusion opens a window onto what spatial stability does to Holocaust memory over time. The first outdoor scene shows Iankel standing in front of the building that was once his father’s kloyz (prayer house). Instead of delivering a snapshot impression associated with the spot, the site inspires Iankel to summarize his whole life story from birth up until the present day. Changing angles at the same kloyz, Iankel retells his life story yet again— a third time. The place cannot stand still in time. Just this one building serves as the “abode,” to recall Caruthers’s memory houses, for a range of thoughts, events, and phases of life. Iankel also uses the kloyz to describe other nearby sites, such as the Kedainer work camp and Vilna, and other people—his sisters and brothers. The kloyz building is so deeply embedded in a matrix of places and people that Iankel cannot describe the structure in isolation. The visual frame in which Iankel stands is a far cry from the pastoral emptiness that appears in Claude Lanzmann’s shots of Poland in his film Shoah. It also contrasts the tidy time-machine effect sought in historical films like The Pianist or Schindler’s List.65 Alongside Iankel, the camera captures trash cans, cars, and electrical boxes. Passersby walk through the scene without taking note of the camera. The frame conjoins the dull and the dirty with this hallowed prayer house. No one participating in this filmic venture appears bothered by this blending of sacred and profane. Furthermore, what the camera captures is much less the prayer house itself than the street scene on which it was and is located. The shot works to remind the viewer of the milieu in which the prayer house is situated, rather than to create a sensual experience of entering or dwelling within it. Iankel and the crew then move to the site of a grassy field near the Vilija (Ne˙ris) River. He points to a ground behind him. “On the twenty-third of June, 1941, the Lithuanian murderers led out the great rabbis from the yeshiva. They were shot right here.”66 On this site, the landscape serves as evidence of the crime about which Iankel speaks. The camera

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zooms in on the grass beneath Iankel’s feet—as if one could still find evidence in the earth that could confirm what the witness tells. This shot even resembles those taken by postwar Soviet investigations, in which witnesses look to their physical surroundings as material proof. The way that Iankel uses this place forensically—to build an accusation and prove a point— demonstrates the constative, informative possibilities of place when speaking in this setting: The places described are assumed to be real, accessible, and known and thus may be used as evidence, rather than as metaphor (fig. 6). The way that Iankel addresses the landscape forensically also conveys his connection to other people. Still on the shooting scene, he explains, “I was not here at the time of the shooting, but the neighbors . . . on Meseninku˛ Street, Krišcˇiukaicˇio Street, they showed me where they were shot.” What gives him the authority to relate this event is not an eyewitness standpoint but the account of neighbors. What renders these neighbors authoritative is their street addresses. The names “Meseninku˛” and “Krišcˇiukaicˇio” signify their close physical proximity to the event—located in the blocks between the yeshiva and the river—and thus their validity as witnesses. The enunciation of these same names, which appear countless times throughout the testimonies from this corpus, is thus also a social action. To utter them calls into being a network of people who also understand and identify with these small place names. We should

Fig. 6. Witnessing on location, from the testimony of Iankel Zelbovich.

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note the difference between uttering the name “Krišcˇiukaicˇio” versus “Auschwitz,” or even “Dachau” or “Vilna” as shorthand for a repertoire of memories. Here, the places that speak the best are the ones that arise in neighborly conversations rather than in international history books. In the last scene of Iankel’s “on-site testimony” experiment, the witness and crew travel to the Ninth Fort, a former army stronghold outside of Kovna that the Nazis used as a site of mass execution. There, the camera takes a long, still shot of the abstract monument built on the site, as well as several memorial plaques in different languages. As an official commemorative location of international standing, the Ninth Fort has been groomed to exclude the aesthetically profane. In keeping with the tidily mown grass and angular monument, the behavior of the witness changes on camera. Iankel begins by saying, “I was here,” as if the fact of former contact with the site, of having been contained within it, is itself surprising and worthy of comment. For some reason, he also slips out of Yiddish and into Lithuanian in this initial shot. He then dons a yarmulke and, on the verge of crying, recites Kaddish for the family members he lost there. Iankel explains, “I come here every year to commemorate the death of my family.” This site of mass killing is somehow on a different register of significance than the nearby city, in which he stands at ease. Yet the Ninth Fort is still accessible, real, and within reach; he requires no tour guide, travel agent, or class trip in order to see it. All of Iankel’s twentieth century, including its darkest moment, can be touched in one day’s journey. There seems to be a looping effect between the physical reality of Lithuania—a site that is close to places of the past in sheer metric distance— and the memory ethos that developed among this group of survivors, who construct the place as a hybrid of normal and terrible. As Bachelard writes, our places “are in us as much as we are in them.”67 Even when witnesses in Lithuania remain seated in their houses, the potential to access the places they describe shapes their approach to depiction. What is more, an awareness of this physical proximity of pre-Holocaust and Holocaust sites has molded their memory conversations for decades and has thus become integral to their narrative repertoire. Beyond geographic circumstance, their ideas of place also connect to larger ideas about ethics, victimhood, and social existence.68 As in a natural ecology, it is impossible

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to say which is stronger, the material fact of the landscape or habitual human approaches to it. Place Names as Identity Cards So great is the informative capacity of Lithuanian place names, that some witnesses in this corpus find it unnecessary to mention much else about their prewar years. An extreme case of this parsimony appears in the testimony of Ishaiyahu Matusevicius.69 He never mentions the city, let alone the country in which he was born. Skipping over countless layers of contextualization, Ishaiyahu immediately animates a very small territory of geographic relevance—the Jewish neighborhood of Slobodke, which outlies Kovna—and an ongoing, intimate relationship with it. “My father was a hired man in a mill. On Jonengu Street,” he tells. “We had our own house in Slobodke.” Ishaiyahu attempts to move on to other topics, implying that “Jonengu Street” or “Slobodke,” as words, will give the listener all he needs to know about the kind of life Ishaiyahu led as a child. When asked if he belonged to a religious family, the witness employs the same shorthand technique: “My father would go to the Choral Synagogue in Kovna, on Alexandrovitch Street.” The synagogue coordinates have answered the question in a compact way. Some witnesses in this corpus devote more time and words to depicting prewar places. In the richest, most expansive of these segments, conversations tend to gravitate toward the street, the courtyard, and the neighborhood. If, among the Israeli witnesses, we discussed a public city-spirit as the main object of prewar place description, and the domestic realm as the spatial center of the American testimonies, in this setting it is the environment in between public and private enclosures that takes primacy. Fania B. speaks for over two hours about prewar Vilna.70 To describe how her family settled into the city when she was a small child, she tells: [W]e moved to an apartment on Basanavicˇius. In those days Szabad71 lived in the same house . . . two courtyards over, a house that is still standing. My father started working in the Jewish technical school later, on Gdanskii Street. The street is now called Islandu˛. Even when relating the establishment of her family’s home, Fania describes it in relation to homes of neighbors, extended family members,

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and community figures. Likewise, she characterizes her father’s workplace not through Jewish institutional history but by designating its position on the street. Her use of the courtyard (hoyf/heyf) as a unit of measurement recalls the many prominent depictions of the hoyf in the Yiddish literary canon.72 While implicitly referring back to texts written long before the prewar moment she is describing, Fania also uses these same places to point forward. Including the street’s current Lithuanian name, she brings these sites into the present, closing the gap between her “prehistory” and the mundane context of present narration. Fania Ioneson, a witness with a very different biography and set of interests than Fania B. (despite their shared first name), also takes the street and the courtyard as her primary vantage point.73 Locating her first house precisely, she tells, “We lived first on Ukmerge˙s Plentas, number seventy-three. But the same apartment on the same street was changed to be Savanoriu˛ Prospect ninety-seven. And when the Russians arrived it became Krasnyi Armeiskii Prospekt.” In detailing the name changes on her home street, Fania Ioneson summarizes the political shifts that occurred between her birth in 1929 and 1940. The space in which she witnesses these changes is not the youth-movement clubhouse or another site of official political education, but the street surrounding her house. The spatial positioning implied through street names is literalized in her narrative. She tells of the day that the Red Army tanks entered Kovna in 1940: “Everyone went outside. . . . I stayed out until late at night. I sat with my brother on chairs or on boards outside and watched.” Fania remembers herself on the cusp between the domestic and the political, and emphasizes the informal impact of political events. Interestingly, Fania Ioneson’s details do not build into an overarching “idea of place.” Interviewer questions about “Kovna” as a unit, like “What did Kovna look like then?” fall flat in the conversation. Rather than making Kovna into a “Big Place,” a monumental, unified spirit, Fania prefers to engage multiple, microlocalities—“small places” to return to Zali Gurevitch’s terms. Because her narrative cartography stays, spatially, close to ground level, it might be tempting to define it as utilitarian, a chronicle with no interpretive angle. But then we should note how many times Fania speaks place names that add nothing to her story in terms of plot. For instance, she tells that as a young girl she went to work “in a factory near Donelaicˇio Street. It’s a little bit near Kalniecˇiu˛,74 what was once there.”

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In locating her family’s synagogue, she relates, “It was Vaisiu˛—no! No! Varduvos Street. From Lukšio Street you have to walk up a little ways.” Regarding a certain dance she attended after the Soviet incorporation of Lithuania in 1940, she tells, “There was the Choral Synagogue, a little bit ˇ iurlionio, near Laisve˙s Alleja.” In these higher. On the street that is near C moments, Fania seems to discuss the location for its own sake, taking pleasure in the sounding out of local knowledge. She calls into being a group of people who can follow these cross-chronological intricacies and who connect themselves to these names through a similar combination of memory and mundane use. Holocaust Places I: The Outbreak of War and Ghetto Period A Yiddish song from the Vilna ghetto called, “Di zelbe gasn un tramvayen” (The Same Streets, the Same Streetcars) describes the sorrow of seeing one’s cityscape under Nazi occupation: The same streets, the same streetcars: Numbers eleven and four. For others, there are squares and boulevards. For you, just that neighborhood. . . . What does that writing on the sign mean? Why can’t we walk any farther?75 The lyrics depict a painful change in the way that urban space is regulated. The speaker feels restricted and cramped in a place where movement had earlier been pleasurable, meaningful. But as the title points out, these restrictions hurt the author precisely because he sees Vilna as “the same” place it was before the war. This Yiddish folksong shares some aspect of the attitude toward the ghetto as place in the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology. The witnesses do not shift geographic registers when discussing their hometowns and cities under occupation but approach them through the same geographic sensibility as they applied to prewar life. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius uses street names to explain why his family was saved from the Slobodke pogrom: “They didn’t go through our house because the pogrom only happened on Yurberiker Street. . . . Our house was on Krišcˇiukaicˇio.” He can use the street names to explain causality, to orient the listener, because he

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presents Kovna as still remaining Kovna. Two siblings, who testify separately, Gershon Shuster and Gita Bargman,76 tell the story of their family’s imprisonment in the small ghetto of Kovna, which was liquidated on the early date of October 4, 1941, by detailing the construction of fences and the Krišcˇiukaicˇio Bridge. The war has not inaugurated a new map key in their stories, and thus they can explain their experience through a pointby-point topographic comparison. Naming ghetto sites seems to be a performative, social act as well as an explanatory device. Viewing survivors of the Kovna ghetto as an example, they almost all mention the following locales in narrating the outbreak of war and ghetto period:77 (1) Paneriu˛ Street;78 (2) Krišcˇiukaicˇio Street;79 (3) bridges of Kovna: Jurbarko (Krišcˇiukaicˇio/ Vileišis), Aleksoter (Vytautas), Panemoner (Panumene˙);80 (4) the ghetto fence and gate;81 (5) the airfield;82 (6) Demokratu˛ Place;83 and (7) “the hill” leading up to the Ninth Fort.84 There is some agreement among witnesses in this corpus regarding which places “speak” the most in the ghetto period: border spaces, and sites on the outskirts between the ghetto and the outside world. It is as if each of these places contains a set of stories— or type of story—that the witnesses have grown accustomed to sharing over the years. The names not only help denote the event described but also reenact conversations about the event ever since (fig. 7). In all of the above cases, I have referred to representations of ghettos, of urban spaces during the Holocaust years. Witnesses who hid in the Lithuanian countryside faced different narrative demands, but are clearly in conversation with their urban peers.85 For instance, Khatzkel Zak relates an intricate story of running from pursuers and falling into a frozen stream. He waited in the stream for his assailants to leave, then he climbed out and, as he tells it, “I had to walk six hundred meters through the woods until I arrived at my neighbor’s house, Rackauskas.” Far from the world of fables found in the other two groups, Khatzkel depicts the woods as concrete, socially shaped, and navigable. Shmuel S. takes his map work one step further toward forensic argument. He repeatedly mentions the shootings in a forest called “Ilgoji Lova.” He protests emphatically, “There is no official map that says that Jews were shot there.”86 Shmuel suggests that his insider knowledge of both the event and the land should correct official cartography, announcing the crime on

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Fig. 7. Yiddish-language map of the Kovna ghetto drawn by cartographer and survivor Ya’akov Perecman, printed in displaced persons camp Feldafing, 1948. The map features all of the same streets mentioned in recent oral testimonies (Fun letstn khurbn no. 9, 1948).

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the map of the country. Alone much of the time during the war, Shmuel has a greater explanatory burden than those who were in the ghettos and who witnessed events together. Shmuel’s place-talk is more about settling open scores than evoking a community of rememberers. Holocaust Places II: Deflating Concentration Camps Abroad The ghettos, woods, labor camps, and hideouts of Lithuania materialize as mappable, functioning places in these Yiddish-language Lithuanian testimonies. Even when they become the sites of annihilation, the cities remain the same cities and the woods remain the same woods— navigable and accessible to this day. But the same cannot be said of camps outside of Lithuanian national territory. When reflecting on their lives as a whole, witnesses define camp imprisonment as having been fundamentally different from other periods. One witness uses geography to underscore this distinction: “I, Gita Bargman, was born in 1923 in Kovna, and I’ve lived my whole life in Kovna, except for the time during the German occupation when the Germans forced me out of Kovna.” Others in this corpus echo similar sentiments. Fania Ioneson steps off her textured social map when recalling the transport to Stutthof: “We didn’t know where we were going, but we knew that we were going to death.” This represents, of course, an important point of commonality with witnesses from the other two settings. Here too survivors remember a connection between loss of subjectivity and loss of spatial orientation— and that this occurred in an especially acute manner in or around concentration camps. But crucially, witnesses in this corpus negotiate such memories of estrangement in ways that do not contribute to a transvaluative narrative. This distinction regarding the type of estrangement that concentration camps cause and the victim’s options for observing and reacting to it is therefore worth dwelling on: It brings us into the heart of our questions about how non-places require a social grid and how extreme dehumanization can be remembered as something other than transformative. In the other two clusters, witnesses convey that physicality alone cannot capture the meaning of the most extremely violent environments. English and Hebrew speakers allow the concentration camp, and the feeling of placelessness they remember from it, to connote something

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larger—the meaning break at the center of their life stories, the Holocaust as a whole, the turning point of Jewish history. I have pointed out distinctions in what these metaphors entail in the two different settings. But the conceptual significance of the place, the elevation or opening toward metaphor, emerges as common ground between the Hebrew and English depictions studied. Being nowhere coincides or catalyzes a kind of place conversion for narrators looking back from Israel and North America. Within or emerging from these non-places, they recall seeing the whole map differently. In this Yiddish-Lithuanian corpus, witnesses do not elevate the camp non-place in these manners. They detract attention from this tear in the map on the level of narrative structure, by dedicating more discussion to local violence that occurred in Lithuania than to the foreign concentration camps. But even when the witnesses do describe the camps at length, they tend to do so in a manner that deflates the entity to its physical architecture and to a mundane language register. There is no Bilderverbot, no sacred ban on images, and one may attempt to depict a physical object as is—with fewer cues toward metaphorical interpretation.87 Additionally, witnesses present themselves reacting differently to the camp universe. Focusing on the “near sphere,”88 on spaces close by, witnesses recall themselves maneuvering through small crevices of the encampment. The prominently heard idiom dreyen zikh, “to wriggle around,” captures the spatial-ethical doubling in these camp segments. Consider this cluster of motifs—from spatial estrangement, deflation to the lowly physical realm, and survival by dreyen zikh as they appear in the testimony of one witness from this setting, Gershon Shuster. He begins to relate his deportation from the very familiar territory of Kovna, starting at the Aleksot work camp outside the city. “The Germans encircled us and led us out of the camp, from Aleksot through the city up to the train.” From this familiar and informative topography, Gershon recounts a sense of disorientation on the departing train: “They started moving us. We didn’t know where, though we knew it was to Germany.” Likewise, his first impression of Stutthof points toward the unknown: “We came to Stutthof concentration camp. We were encircled by kapos. We did not yet know what kapos were.” He stresses that the scene was incomprehensible at the moment it happened, that he must use knowledge anachronistically in order to describe the moment. Though keeping a

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straightforward, even tone, Gershon’s transport and entry into the camp mark a change into a different kind of place, one that rattled his knowledge system upon entry. What follows in his testimony is a deflation of this unknown entity, toward the bluntly physical realm: “We were in Stutthoff for five days. On the fifth day, they took us farther. [. . .] They brought us to Lager Two, I and my father. They led us into tents in the beginning, Finnish tents. They were made out of cardboard.” Instead of funneling his imagery toward an abstract commentary on the place, Gershon focuses increasingly on the tactile and the tangible. He engages the architecture of the tents in a manner that stays the listener’s imagination, asking us to remain with the object as object rather than engage his perspective on it. The only detail that allows the imagination to travel elsewhere—the fact that the tents were “Finnish”—again relates merely to their construction model, a reference that circles attention back into the camp architecture. He continues: “That was in the summer. In the winter they dug out huts from wood, then covered them with earth.” In a flat tone, Gershon moves his narrative attention from physical structure to physical structure, rather than from the object to idea, or from object to personal perspective. He offers little room for metaphor. Gershon describes himself reacting to this environment by wriggling through spaces and situations with small maneuvers. Other witnesses introduce this strategy already in the ghetto segment of their testimonies, and so it is not totally novel to camp narration.89 Here, when applied to camp survival, Gershon enlarges the importance of this wriggling mechanism with the repeated idiom “dreyen zikh,” literally, “twisting oneself.” Gershon tells: “Nu, however much you could wriggle around, you did it [Vifl me hot gekent zikh dreyen, hot me zikh gedreyt],” and later: “You wriggled however much you could [Me hot zikh gedreyt vifl me hot gekent].” The idea of wriggling permeates Gershon’s depiction of himself in this disorienting yet highly material place. It helps him dramatize the way he interacted with the camp as a place and as a system. “In Lager One, it was the same thing—they dragged us to work. But I figured that if I didn’t start taking risks [rizikirn] I won’t hold back.” He intricately recalls how he snuck into a field to steal potatoes, then “crawled back in” [arayngekrokhn] to his place of work, “ran in” to the woods [arayngelofn] to steal cabbage, “rushed down under” into a cellar [aruntergekhapt] to

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steal supplies. The large lexicon of vivid, specific motion verbs employed to depict these maneuvers directs emphasis toward low, inward, sneaky movements. Even the event of liberation, which allowed Gershon to slither out of this oppressive environment in a final way, has an element of dreyen zikh in his telling. The first thing he and his peers do once liberated is to descend into basements in a nearby town to “lug out” [aroysshlepn] potatoes. Inflicted immediately with dysentery, Gershon renders his recovery through the same poetic: “I crawled out [bin aroysgekrokhn] of the illness.” Gershon speaks simultaneously about multiple kinds of slithering—maneuvering through small places, maneuvering through the rules, maneuvering around fate. In all of these senses, this slitheriness is something he clearly wishes to share about himself as a camp inmate. Other witnesses from this setting put similar motifs to work in depicting concentration camps:

marking estrangement The impression that something went spatially awry upon arrival in concentration camps is a memory that I have pointed out among English- and Hebrew-speaking narrators. This topos arises in this cluster of testimonies as well. Note Meri Gotler’s first picture of Stutthof and its similarity to other narrations of this moment: “We arrived there by ship. On the occasion of the fiftieth year anniversary of Stutthof, I noticed that there is actually a sea right there. It was just awful. There was nothing to describe there and nothing to tell.”90 She declares that Stutthof, as recalled through the eyes of a prisoner, was a kind of non-landscape. Not describing is the best way to describe the way she saw it then. It is only in retrospect that she grasps its proximity to the sea. This observation is almost identical to the way that Hana Golani, the Israeli-Hebrew narrator, decries the very same site’s detachment from the normal physical map. Another Yiddish-speaking witness, Rivka Geler, echoes a similar spatial disconnection between the Estonian Goldfields camp and its environs: It was a beautiful place. All around and around it was very beautiful. Because Germans lived there in their houses all around. [Makes circling gestures with her hand.] And we were on the inside. They shoved us in, and it was just a fine misfortune [a guter umglik].91

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She enlists body and voice to dramatize the distinction between the beautiful outside and dark inside.

deflation Already in Rivka’s ironic concluding phrase “a fine misfortune” we sense that the camp—as a locus of horror and estrangement— does not require hushed tones and cautious wording but can be broached through low-register dryness, even humor. To the same effect, Ishaiyahu Matusevicius intersperses aural wordplay throughout his description of the multiple concentration camps in which he was a prisoner. He starts using “shm-” words, what linguists call shm-reduplication, which is considered low style in Yiddish and has the effect of satirizing the topic at hand.92 “This was called Goldfields. We arrived there in January. There, there was no water no shmater [nit keyn vaser, nit keyn shmaser]. ... There was no electricity, no shmectricity [nit keyn elektre, nit keyn shmektre]. ... I wanted to go with the healthy, not with the sick, not with the shmick [nit mit di kranke, nit mit di shmanke]. Rather than treating these dark places as an enigma, Ishaiyahu takes on a derogatory air. These instances stand out, since Ishaiyahu only uses shmwhen discussing the camps. In effect, he reduces the depravity of these places to something lowly and crude. In Ishaiyahu’s case, deflation is a matter of tone, a message he connotes through his voice, body language, and diction, toward the topic of camps as a whole. Others deflate the camp differently, by boiling the site down to its physical elements. Note how Echyoshas Mosshovitchus lingers on the material realm as the very meaning of the Dachau camp: i n t : But what was the name of the camp? e c h y o s h a s : The name of the camp was Dachau. What was called Dachau was the crematorium. Dachau was like this: The place that was called Dachau was a small camp, Dachau, where they burnt people. But we came to Lager One.93

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Importantly, Echyoshas shows no trepidation in defining the place. He can use the simplest of language, without literary, bureaucratic, or psychological allusions in order to state definitively what Dachau “was.” His chain of equations continues from one physical object to another, with no elevation toward metaphor, no transfer of meaning to an outside realm. Of course, concreteness and simplicity in tone should not be taken for mimetic purity or factuality. “Dachau” arguably consisted of much more than the crematorium: the central camp included bunkers, camp administration buildings, workshops, construction projects, barbed wire, and medical laboratories. Likewise, the means of extermination never consisted of just “burning.” In Dachau, prisoners were usually hung, shot, or starved prior to having their bodies cremated there.94 Yet Echyoshas focuses on the most tangible, locatable, and architecturally present element of the death.95 Thus it is not that Echyoshas “gets it right,” while other witnesses, who speak more perspectivally or abstractly, miss the point. Rather, in his confident definition, he descends toward its simplest and most physical element; he calls attention to the part of the camp that is most “there” and sets aside more amorphous elements. This pull toward the object world gives his camp segment a nonsacral sensibility. Fania Ioneson also deflates the camp into a concrete physicality, soon after she mentions her disorienting arrival. “They stood us across from the crematorium. They stood us eight in a row.” Led into the bathhouse, Fania offers more of such physical description: “There was a long, long, hall. [. . .] We thought it was a gas chamber. That’s what was written. There the floor starting caving in, starting wobbling. We thought that any second the gas was coming out.” The group then discovers that they are only there to take a bath. Rather than discussing the sensation of relief upon such a discovery, Fania goes on: “From that big room, you know, that room smelled of gas. [. . .] We were taken into another big room with a big iron heater.” Physical objects take precedence over perspective in Fania’s rendering. Though these same events— entering a room to shower, thinking it was a gas chamber—appear in most depictions of Stutthof internment, there is rarely such a sustained attempt to narrate them as a chain of material encounters. The remainder of Fania’s narration of camp imprisonment follows suit, describing her bunks and work sites with a similar inclination toward material detail.

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slipping inside the camp physically, dreyen zikh Witnesses in the Yiddish-Lithuanian corpus show themselves integrating into camps physically, rather than rising above them or looking inward. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius, whom the camera reveals to be a large man, draws attention to his ability to make himself small in the Latvian and Estonian concentration camps in which he was imprisoned. He tells how he slipped away from his group as they left Klooga at the end of the war: I ran away from the group and went into the camp. I went up into an attic [demonstrates with his hands]. I crawled down [aropgekhrokhn] into the boards, between rafters. I crawled under [aruntergekrokhn] there, and I thought that at night I would crawl out [aroyskrikhn] and into the woods. That was my plan. [. . .] I crawled under [aruntergekrokhn] this board and held myself there, I don’t know; with my head and my neck I crawled down. But I couldn’t get my feet in, so I covered them up like this [covering himself with his arms]. Employing variations on the verb “to crawl,” which he doubles through physical pantomime, he points toward tactile knowledge as his main survival skill at this crucial moment. In dedicating so much time and attention to these intricate crawling motions, Ishaiyahu asks us to see them as the center of his story: The best response to victimhood, he seems to say, the one he would like us to know about, involves slipping into small crevices, going under the radar of his fate. A similar spatial-ethical doubling is striking in the testimony of another witness, Echyoshas Mosshovitchus. He recalls himself moving from one small, cramped, dirty place to another. We may divide the camp segment of his testimony according to these small spots, marked in italics: (1) Standing beside his mother in line for the initial selection at Stutthof, Echyoshas slipped away from her and found his way to a small kiosk near the train station, where he met another runaway boy. “We were hiding there. We saw that the German woman threw away trash. A big bin. Let’s see what kind of trash it has in it. . . . We ate well and stayed there all night.” (2) From the area behind the kiosk, Echyoshas and the other boy ran to an

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empty train car. There again they placed themselves amid waste and were able to eat. (3) The train soon transported them to Dachau (Camp One), where Echyoshas was able to slip between the prisoners and find his father. He was soon, however, rounded up with all the rest of the children and locked into a crowded barrack. (4) From this enclosure, Echyoshas once again ran away and somehow found his father’s barrack. There he hid in the bathroom. (5) Afraid of being caught, he then ran “near the kitchen.” As he relates, “Behind the kitchen are trash cans, so I crawl into one [krikh arayn]. I would occasionally lift up the lid for a little air.” It is as if Echyoshas tries to make himself a part of the architecture, to find whatever small crevice authority cannot see. Echyoshas does not present his crawling into trash cans and bathrooms as embarrassing or degrading. This is what he, as a prisoner, ought to have done. As narrator, he does not pry open the significance of leaving his mother or the other children behind through his various escapes. In fact, Echyoshas appears proud of his ability to wriggle through the terrain. Here we see a kind of embeddedness, of making oneself a part of one’s surroundings, physicalized in bodily memory and cast as a legitimate, agentive reaction to oppression. There is even a satirical aura to his described movements, of the weak laughing at the strong, by wriggling out of his grip. The camp depictions I have been pointing to in this corpus lack the eventness, the metaphoric possibilities that are readily available in parallel moments in English and in Hebrew. There is no mention here of “hell” or “ghosts.” The interviewers do not press the witnesses to pause and reflect on these places, and we find no extensive, dreamlike sequences. In their aura of smallness, however, these depictions do connote a certain self-perception and a social imaginary. They are not simply raw, factual chronicles. What accumulates subtly, through the redundancy of poetic implication, bodily gesture, tone, and narrated vignettes is a message about smallness and survival. The motif of dreyen zikh is a prime point of intersection for these different vectors of meaning. To appreciate the poetic specificity of this phrase, we can compare it to its closest parallels in the Hebrew-Israeli testimonies studied. Consider the term “to maneuver,” letamren, which appears

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in the testimony of Gideon Shub in Dachau: “I started to maneuver [Hithalti letamren]. I stopped being the good boy that does what he is told.” In a bare-bones literal sense, Gideon uses a phrase quite similar to dreyen zikh. In its primary definition in the Even-Shoshan Dictionary (the Hebrew equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary), letamren means “to take certain actions in order to get out of a situation or to find a more comfortable solution.” But both the physical and sociological connotations of the Hebrew letamren set it apart from dreyen zikh. Its root (tov-mem-reish-nun) implies a rising motion: To maneuver/letamren is “to get out” by means of elevation, an etymology that is given meaning in its contemporary cultural usage.96 The dictionary lists a secondary definition of the word: “to carry out a military drill for the sake of combat tactic training.” In the dictionary’s literary example, taken from the work of Benjamin Tammuz, a writer of Gideon’s generation, the two connotations appear simultaneously.97 Even the banal term “to overcome,” lehitgaber similarly pairs survival with a rising motion. Think of Yafah Zusman in Stutthof: “The main thing was to overcome [Ha‘ikar lehitgaber].” Likewise, we can note a poetic similarity in the act of “maintaining,” a verb used in Israeli witness Kalman Perk’s statement: “We maintained [shamarnu] mutual fairness. In one phrase you could call it ‘the human image’ [tselem enosh].”98 “To maintain” is to keep away from the surrounding situation, to conserve or protect. These verbs tie a specific kind of physical orientation to acts of victim agency: stepping over, remaining apart or above the place is how one survives. Through wriggling and crawling, dreyen zikh, Yiddish-Lithuanian witnesses claim agency in the opposite manner: emphasizing their ability to move within the camp, to integrate themselves into its loopholes. Wriggliness—as ethos, as poetic, and as a mode of connecting oneself to history—takes on further weight when we consider how it relates to these witnesses’ postwar histories in Soviet Lithuania. Unrelated to Holocaust memory, anthropologist Dale Pesmen notes the centrality of words related to the verb krutit’sia—the Russian equivalent of dreyen zikh—in the lexicon of late and post-Soviet culture from at least the 1970s onward.99 This word cluster captures the valued skill of “wriggling one’s way through the System,” demonstrated by the common expression “If you want to live (or survive), you’ve got to krutit’sia.”100 These Lithuanian

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Jewish Holocaust witnesses may draw from this trope. The question is not about the “source” of the motif: These witnesses are not simply grafting a recent speech trend onto their memories, since the phrase dreyen zikh predates both the Soviet and Holocaust periods.101 The point is that their testimonial ecology, an accumulation of conversations and lived experiences over the years, guides them to animate this specific spatialbodily-ethical motif in memory. In a related, more general manner, the striking emphasis on wriggliness—as a mood, a metaphor, and a kinetic practice—speaks to the marginal position of these witnesses on the contemporary cultural map: As Jews who remained in Lithuania after most survivors left, as minorities in a minor country, the concept of being small, of making dignity from a place under the radar, is a framework that may be applicable to a wide number of situations. Returning to Lithuania American and Israeli witnesses narrate postwar recovery in a way that is indistinguishable from processes of emigration. What makes their narrative cartographies transvaluational or catastrophic, therefore, is not only the way that Holocaust places appear in wartime segments but also the way the world map looks in subsequent years: contaminated or drained of its former meanings, awaiting reinvention. On the occasions when witnesses recall physical return to Lithuania after the war, they confront this transformation as a physical reality. The landscape appears as an embodiment of the dark truth or an uncanny absence, which makes homecoming impossible. By contrast, Yiddish-speaking witnesses in Lithuania recall their return to this country as a homecoming, albeit an imperfect one. Postwar Lithuania appears as a real, functioning place following its liberation in 1944. The landscape is familiar and navigable. Witnesses resurrect their practice of speaking with place names and a microgeographic sensibility in these segments. Even if the precise street names they inhabit change slightly, streets still have names, and those names still help the witness situate herself physically and socially. We hear more about bridges, streets, and buildings that are still there, often in a different form, than those that are not. Their depictions of postwar landscape amplify the tone of nonconversion, of stability of self, in these stories.

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Crucially, this method of reinscribing belonging onto the geography of postwar Lithuania is not always applicable. Indeed, even when witnesses’ overriding message about return to Lithuania is one of revival and rehabilitation, they often leave black holes in their surroundings. Such places, varying in their definition and location, represent sites that do not become reintegrated into the witnesses’ postwar idea of normalcy. That is, in very close proximity to the hubs of homecoming and continuity, Lithuania also contains topoi of darkness. At no point in the Yiddish-Lithuanian corpus of testimonies does the use of street names appear more shared and coded than in narrating the return to Lithuania. In these segments, the stories of survivors coming out of different wartime experiences—from hiding, from concentration camps, and from evacuation— converge toward several sites of urban reunion. For instance, the street name Laisve˙s Aleja (pronounced “aley” in Yiddish) keeps reappearing.102 Gita Bargman relates that she felt skeptical about returning to Lithuania under Soviet rule. But once she does arrive, Laisve˙s revives her sense of belonging: “In Kovna, I found a girlfriend. [. . .] I was walking on Laisve˙s and I heard her calling me. I have a look. It’s her! My friend with a small child, three months old. We got a room together.” The street works as an entryway into shelter, both physical and social. The presence of the baby renders the site one of renewal and kin-making. Another witness, Meri Gotler, attributes her eventual adoption into a foster family to a series of encounters, which occur while “walking on Laisve˙s.” Doba P. returns from refuge in Saratov to find that Jews emerged “fun yener velt” (from the world beyond) as she walked on Laisve˙s. The name stands in for a specific postwar social process, rather than simply a street location.103 Postwar return stories to Vilna are fewer in this ecology because Vilna Jews were repatriated as Polish citizens in 1946 and could thus easily leave Lithuania right after the war.104 Nonetheless, for those who did return or move there from other Lithuanian cities after the war, the place seemed to work in a similar manner. The way that these “Vilner in Vilna” portray the city after the war directly contrasts the motif of “the missing Green Bridge” found in testimonies of English-language narrators. These witnesses train their eye on what is present rather than absent in the postwar city. Borekh K. enthusiastically describes Jewish holidays in the 1950s at

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the khorshul (Choral Synagogue), the one remaining synagogue in Vilna after the war.105 “On Jewish holidays, so many people used to come to shul on Rosh Hashana, Passover, Khanuka, Shvues. So many people came on the holidays that you couldn’t get in the door. People would stand outside, it was that packed.” Nina K. recalls Jewish get-togethers on the Vilija River.106 Fania B., a Vilner who survived the war as a partisan in the nearby Rudnicki Forest, tells of chance reunions on “what is now Gedimino Prospect.”107 The phrase is echoed by Fania Ioneson, who tells a long, involved story about reuniting with her sort-of-sister Michle by “walking on Gedimino Prospect, as it is called now.” Notably, these witnesses connect these place names to the present day, layering differing time periods together on these same, densely storied sites. The overriding message of the postwar return stories in this corpus is one of revival and renewal— on the site of Lithuania. The idea that overcoming the Holocaust requires travel does not apply in this corpus on the whole. These witnesses refashion the same place images, names, and modes of conversation that arose earlier in their narratives to create a postwar habitus of belonging. Be that as it may, the question remains: Where does darkness reside for these witnesses? How could witnesses, so cognizant of local histories, disregard the violence that occurred on the sites in which they currently dwell? Witnesses in this group do show different ways of emplacing the horror of the Holocaust in Lithuania. For some, the symbolic distinction between cities and towns is significant. Meri Gotler treats the big city of Kovna as a site of revival but speaks of her nearby hometown Yonave (Jonava) in a different light: “I came back and I found no one. Not one relative [fraynt]. All my relatives were killed in Yonave. Everyone immediately. . . If I were to have stayed in Yonave, I would have died, too.” As she tells it, Jewish Yonave died in its entirety, as a whole, whereas Kovna allows room for gradual rebuilding. Likewise, Doba P. narrates her rehabilitation in postwar Kovna, Vilna, and Lithuania in general in a forthright manner. By contrast, however, she resists discussing her particular town of origin, the shtetl Zhezhmir (Žiežmariai), as she encountered it after the war. When pressed, she shouts, “There were no Jews [there]! Someone would have to pay a million for you to sleep over one night in the shtetl.” She situates Zhezhmir, the place most intimate to her from

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before the war and the one most directly connected to her own family’s destruction, in a different geographical category from the rest of the country. This distinction, between destroyed shtetl and livable city, death site and life site, seems to work on a continuum in this corpus. The most challenging cases of geographic integration appear in the testimonies of survivors who remained in the smaller towns in which they were born or raised, right up until the moment of testimony. I interviewed two such individuals: Braine S. who remained in Radvilishik (Radviliškis) and Israel B., who remained in Vilkomir (Ukmerge˙).108 Before the war, there were around four thousand Jews in Vilkomir, comprising roughly 40 percent of the total population. Though only a small handful of them survived and returned after the war (Israel mentioned around five), Israel did not find his choice to return and remain in Vilkomir strange or worthy of comment: i n t : Why did you want to remain in Ukmerge˙? i s r a e l : I was born in Ukmerge˙. i n t : Yes, but if your father, mother, sister, and brother were killed here . . . i s r a e l : I was born here. I arrived here [after the war]. I brought my wife and a child here. I found an apartment. I started working. Israel draws his reasons for settling there from both the pre- and postHolocaust contexts: The place suited him both because he was born there and also because it was economically practical after the war. Israel does not ignore the Holocaust chapter of Vilkomir. He addresses the place’s violent history by tracking down specific local perpetrators. He says that he was able to live there after the war because, “all those who shot [Jews] ran away into the forests.” Though not interested in politics per se, Israel envisions the town as safe and hospitable in a way that aligns him with Soviet power. Israel relates, “They [Soviet security] shot and brought down thirty bandits [banditn]. They brought them into Ukmerge˙. They thought that their families would try to come and take them, so they left their bodies lying out for three days.”109 The recurring image of perpetrators’ bodies laid bare for public display in the town is

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significant: Israel sees his home as having been “won back” temporarily when the enemies’ guilt is physically manifest in the urban space. In his lens, punishing the guilty is part of homecoming. Still, the place does not stand still in time, and its violent past is never sealed off completely. Israel goes on to tell that in the 1960s some of these same perpetrators (he offers various arguments as to why he is assured of their guilt) returned to the town after having received political amnesty.110 Once these men are back, Israel recalls running into one local perpetrator on a regular basis walking about town. “When he would see me on the street, he would cross to the other side. He was afraid. I would tell him, ‘I’m going to shoot you one day.’ Then he disappeared. They say it was the NKVD.” In other words, Israel integrates the violence of the place into his way of life there after the war, through his encounters on the street. The character of the place changes with political shifts in a dynamic that still continues until the present day. In some ways, witnesses from this setting divide up the country of Lithuania like witnesses in Israel or America divide up the globe: separating deathscapes from spaces of renewal. But it seems inaccurate to say that these witnesses’ symbolic maps of light and darkness represent miniature, condensed versions of those depicted from abroad. The geographic contiguity between sites of life and sites of death becomes a matter of symbolic proximity as well: The darkness of Holocaust memories may enter into the realm of the quotidian, and vice versa. Places manifest different levels of meaning, which the witnesses activate or suspend with greater fluidity. That is, the nature of the distinction itself differs: Death sites and life sites are not divided by oceans but by highways, and not by a revolution in values but by certain painful adjustments. Lithuania can become a better home for a certain number of years and then regress the following, making the site’s violent history more or less present in the landscape at different moments. For American and Israeli witnesses, distinctions between “here” and “there” accomplish a range of symbolic tasks, which invite interpretation beyond the physical realm. In both clusters, there are strange, disorienting, and vanished places that separate two drastically different periods of life and dramatize an unhinging of meaning that happened in

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between. Witnesses ask us to look at these non-places according to different standards—a knowledge gap or a psychic overturning. But their stories depend on this locus of fracture to make sense. Geography, however, does not serve as a stage of transformation in the Yiddish-Lithuanian ecology. While there are strange and dark places, the witnesses invest in demonstrating the continuity of the place as their autobiographical through-line. They depict history accumulating in certain sites rather than erasing them. Places in Lithuania straddle chronological periods, containing different kinds of memories, with varying degrees of fluidity between them. Conceptually, these distinctions in narrative maps speak to two broadly different kinds of Holocaust memory— one in which catastrophe is tidily periodized and separated from ordinary life, and one in which a painful past is integrated into a more varied concept of the present day.

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The much-praised transfigurations concocted by Franz Kafka pale beside the unthinkable metamorphoses perpetrated by the Third Reich on the childhoods of my cousin and of my friend, to enumerate only two. —Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

Long before these audio and video testimonies were recorded, and long before the author Philip Roth wrote the above reflection, Hannah Arendt asserted a connection between human metamorphosis and the Holocaust—from the perspective of its Nazi instigators. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt attributes the rise of Nazism to a desire for self-reinvention among young Germans of the interwar years (the “front generation,” as she terms them), a drive for change “so great that it outweighed in impact and articulateness all earlier attempts at a ‘transformation of values,’ such as Nietzsche had attempted.”1 According to Arendt, the Nazis’ quest for regenesis informed their particular modes of subjugating and tormenting people. Camps were designed to “transform men into mere ‘uncomplaining animals,’”2 “transform the human personality into a mere thing,”3 and “fabricate a new type of species.”4 While Arendt had good reasons to identify and emphasize a regenerative thrust in the Nazi project,5 it is far more difficult to say how the perpetrators’ quest for violent transformation spread into the experience of their Jewish victims. The testimonies studied here address this question, from a standpoint that is instructive, because it is belated: These witnesses judge the transformative impact of their misery after many years have 260

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passed, as part of a long biographical trajectory. From this chronological perspective, they speak to the ways in which the Holocaust has accumulated meaning over time. In a comparative light, these testimonies show a massive refounding of identities, an overturning of values, to have been a potential outcome of wartime suffering, but one that had to be activated through postwar interpretation and living conditions to become a reality.6 In these testimonies, witnesses do not address the question of metamorphosis through yes or no answers but in the very fabric of their testimonies—through their approaches to the interview process; their recollections of friends, family, and enemies; the ways that they move in and out of different languages; and the maps that they create in order to chart their journeys. Moreover, witnesses address this question as part of a conversation with other people, things, words, texts, sights, sounds, and political events that have surrounded them ever since. Now is the time to consider how these varied themes, explored in the previous chapters, relate to one another and, as a whole, to the question of transvaluation. The English-language American ecology guides participants toward the experiential and the allegorical. This means that witnesses are most drawn to two kinds of information: that which describes events from an internal, sensory perspective, and that which makes events universally instructive, pitting different human tendencies against one another. Within this framework, intimate family memories help witnesses define the good. Healthy emotions tie individuals into families and families into a flourishing society. This logic also works in reverse. The family base also provides the most accessible and somehow most truthful arena in which to investigate the damage done by the Holocaust; violence tore apart the family unit, crippled its survivors psychically and socially, which in turn destroyed Jewish society. From this point on the map, in North America, it seems like an abuse of privilege to invest too much testimonial energy in accusing individual perpetrators— especially those from the smaller country of Lithuania. Rather than building a case against specific people or ethnonational groups, witnesses seem more confident in blaming antisemitism and hatred for the atrocities they endured. In this testimonial framework, transvaluation should be locatable in experience— discovered by recollecting bodily sensations, images, decisive

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choices, or conversations that continue to resound. Even when witnesses do not highlight a core sensational or emotional breaking point that rendered previous meanings untenable, the genre makes the listener hungry for such a climax. Not revealing the origin of the wound, not conveying an experience of sharp loss that changed everything, may read as a silence. This change might have ramifications in lifestyle, location, and language—all of which matter as symptoms of a change in the soul. There is no pressure to evaluate these changes as cultural praxis, to endorse past or future programs for the Jewish people. Thus, the place and language of prewar life, Lithuania and Yiddish, become relevant in this testimonial scene largely as vessels for talking about something else, something bigger: Yiddish is the native tongue of latent memory, and Lithuania embodies a piece of oneself that has gone missing. Discussions about this change over time can become confessional in tone. Witnesses recall having masked the traces of this transformation on their persons—their accents, origin stories, physical and social defects—and then, possibly, revealing them to family and friends when the time was right. Sometimes there is a loss of equilibrium in this testimonial ecology: One witness, Mira B., dedicates too much talk to the power play of world leaders and thus irritates her interviewers, who are in search of vivid, sensual depictions of experience.7 Another witness, Esther Ancoli, speaks too quickly and too dryly about a place she calls a “camp” and creates discomfort around her use of the title.8 In a most disconcerting moment of testimonial conflict, Matis Finkel defies the generous, allegorical approach to perpetrators.9 He makes direct accusations against named people and a named country and, in doing so, virtually annuls his social standing as a witness. More subtly, some witnesses challenge the rules of the personalexperiential genre merely by acknowledging that such rules do—implicitly— exist. Thus, for example, when Meir Vilnai-Shapiro points out how the “nuclear family” has become the focus of the interview, he distances himself from the topic, if only for a moment.10 While interviewers, witnesses, and institutions in this English-language American ecology show reverence toward spontaneous expression, such moments show that certain types of spontaneity, those that lead to specific topics and narrative modes, are more valued than others.

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The Hebrew-Israeli ecology produces communal memory that announces itself as such. This genre of testimony, in its monumentalized, ritualized aspects, allows the listener to see the work of collecting, of unifying stories into one archive, an act that is inherently virtuous and that strengthens the body politic— even if it reveals some friction among its members. Tension between interviewer and witness is nothing to be ashamed of in this setting: It is a sign of shared investment and equality of strength among all those participating in the process. If interviewers in this setting are more explicit about imposing narrative discipline on testimony, there is also more opportunity for friendly sparring, moments when witnesses contest the guidelines offered them. Thus, when a venerated witness, Kalman Perk, firmly rejects his interviewer’s suggestion that favorable genetics helped him to survive, the interviewer conveys no sense of offense or surprise at his rebuff.11 In another testimony, Hana Golani scoffs at the interviewer’s request to constantly keep an empirical map in sight, refusing to produce camp coordinates that she could have never known.12 This moment of friction calls into question the logic of the interviewer’s geographic queries, but it also builds further emphasis toward the communion, the social harmony that the interviewer and the witness demonstrate at the testimony’s end. While spats like theirs serve to reify the strength on both sides of the camera, a different, more uncomfortable mood emerges when Cila Kogan insists, time and again, that she is and remains weak, a victim that never benefited from communal ingathering in Israel.13 Rejecting repeated and varied invitations to make her own pain monumental, Cila shows the limits of testimony as a ritual of inclusion in this setting. Change— of values, of citizenship, of language and of place—is something that is easy to discuss in this Hebrew-Israeli ecology because it is deemed a necessary and constructive development. As a member of the polity, each witness should testify to a kind of conversion process, in which he or she commits to disembedding from a Jewish culture framed by Yiddish language and Lithuanian geography and reembedding in a new one framed by Hebrew language and Israeli landscape. In a way, this conversion narrative keeps Yiddish and Lithuania relevant in the present, as avenues through which to compare these two stages of Jewish

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life. Witnesses actively recollect and reassess these elements of their old cultural milieu in order to explain how and why they ran their course. As a result, the relationship between then and now is not based on allegory, but on progress, one stage of history leading, imperfectly, into another. The march of history works imperfectly because of a certain contradiction that many of the testimonies call to the surface: The collective metamorphosis that their stories must tell is both inevitable and shocking at the same time. Witnesses infuse early memories with an expectation of change in Jewish life and yet, in certain moments, convey some kind of terror or bafflement at the way that this change unfolded. Jewish political enfranchisement in Lithuania was on the one hand doomed to fail, but also shown to be wholly possible, through memories of political and civic activism in the decades prior to WWII. This same duality applies to perpetrators of the Holocaust. They are on the one hand irrelevant to the story—non-Jewish neighbors who are just behaving as history predicted—but also the agents of monumental betrayal, whose wrongdoing demands repeated acknowledgment. That is, this Hebrew Israeli genre of testimony invites two trajectories of transformation into a single life story: the optimistic vision of Jewish self-reinvention through political sovereignty, and the painful arc of Holocaust loss—two trajectories that nearly but never entirely coincide. The imperfection of this overlap, the way in which Jewish history’s predictable outcome was somehow surprising, is what constitutes an unhinging of meaning in this context. It is most difficult to locate and characterize transformation among the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies. For decades after World War II, these witnesses lived with the possibility of calling people, places, and things by the same names as they had before and during the war. The two main drives behind their testimonial genre— collective record-keeping and forensic accusation—both require a material attachment to the local context of the events narrated. There would be little value in evoking the names, addresses, and jobs of neighbors of the 1930s if that neighborhood did not still serve as a benchmark of normalcy on some level. Likewise, accusing individuals and defending oneself against their rebuttals is the preoccupation of someone still embedded in the social and judicial context of Holocaust crimes. This landscape of continuity also gives shape to the witness’s speech: The Yiddish language does not serve as a metaphor

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for buried memory or a measure of the polity’s progress over time, but as a vehicle for describing and interpreting a world the speaker still inhabits. Rather than recovering from the Holocaust through immigration, transformation, and redemption, witnesses see their language and their landscape as having shifted only in small increments since the atrocity. Outliers in this ecology include witnesses with a prewar revolutionary commitment, like Rive S. and Meishe Geguzhinskis.14 Since these dedicated Communists had been awaiting a utopian overturning since the time they were young, they are more willing to portray the Holocaust as an overturning of the opposite sort. Others, like Leia Tsalzon, frustrate the testimonial process simply by questioning its value to them: Why narrate my life to a tape recorder or video camera if the best memorypartners are those who already know my story?15 When she questions the value of narration for its own sake, the interviewer in front of her has no ready answers. Indeed, Yiddish-language Lithuanian testimonies require a different analytic vocabulary for discussing the pain of victimhood. With a baseline understanding of symbolic stability, recalling the Holocaust leads more to expressions of anger, accusation, dissatisfaction, or clever endurance than to personal or political reinvention. It is more fruitful to think of change over time in terms of integration or alternation, rather than transvaluation: Words, places, and people contain both quotidian and atrocious associations, one beside the other. There are pockets of contradictions in this genre of Holocaust testimony as well: For instance, at what point, chronologically and conceptually, does a bandit change from being the perpetrator of a massacre to an unpleasant neighbor? When does the physical territory of the former ghetto produce memories of starvation, and when can it offer a functional conduit of travel? These testimonies generate their own fissures and unanswerable questions, though the participants do not give these silences any special truth-value. In sum, this comparison speaks not only to the Holocaust as an event—its transformative potential, which became a reality for survivors who emigrated into new environments—but also calls into focus an important, often overlooked aspect of the so-called Era of the Witness, the moment in which these sources were created. The global expansion of witness testimony did not just increase the number of individual voices

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captured on tape but in fact led to an encounter between different notions of what those voices should sound like, and what they could say. In traveling abroad, North American testimony-takers initiated a process of cultural translation, one that required the implicit adjustments and input of local participants—interviewers and witnesses alike—in order to be implemented. That is, rather than simply “personalizing” Holocaust representation, as scholars have long asserted, testimony projects of this era also transported notions of “the personal” and “the historical” across geolingual borders. This book has been an attempt to learn from certain elements of witness testimony that, as part of this transport process, did not and do not travel easily from one ecology into another: those modes of recalling, explaining, evaluating, and living with events that make sense only on a local level. If, in some ways, the Era of the Witness was also an era of translation, then the previous chapters can also be seen as an inventory of “untranslatables,” to borrow a term from literary critic Emily Apter.16 Each item in this inventory of untranslatables, each point of difference between these three clusters of testimony, disturbs a different assumption about the universality of victimhood. These untranslatables reveal what is lost when we study contemporary witnessing from a monolingual perspective—by ignoring the original language in which testimony is recorded, by studying the entire global archive through one language corpus, or, most pertinently, by trying to sift testimonies from across the globe through a single interpretive vocabulary, be it the lens of trauma and therapy or political agency and resilience. In deflating efforts to establish a “universal semiotics of suffering,” these untranslatable elements also serve as speed bumps against overly expedient modes of receiving Holocaust testimonies.17 Contemporary means of institutional travel and of testimonial dissemination—thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union, to video, and then to digital technology— afford the consumer of testimonies a feeling of boundless, speedy access to the pain stories of others. But the testimonies studied here reveal a slower spirit of conversation, in which local memory practices, shaped over the course of decades, are what give people the tools to tell and hear one another’s pain. There is thus a dissonance between the exchanges that these testimonies record and their platforms of circulation. In attempting to fly

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over the barriers of language and place too quickly, whether for the sake of data collection in research or emotional and moral education for the public, we mute much of what the testimonies have to say. In sum, these untranslatable points show us that monolingual or expediently global perspectives can efface certain types of knowledge about the Holocaust, as well as about the witnesses who recall this event. But the areas of untranslatability that arise between these testimonies are not only valuable as roadblocks but as new opportunities for insight. They shed new light on the mutually influential relationship between material wartime events and the subsequent processes of titling them, prioritizing them, and giving them meaning. Specifically, they show how postwar processes of emigration, resettlement, and language changes are what enable people to understand the Holocaust as a Jewish catastrophe, that is, as a revolution of values. On a much simpler level, these untranslatable points challenge us to learn less familiar languages of pain and visions of history, ones that come from outside the centers of the contemporary Jewish cultural map. To accept this challenge is to take responsibility for the global reaches of recent testimonial ventures, to make their encounters with different ecologies meaningful beyond territorial coverage, and, thereby, to bring more witnesses into the “threshold of the visible”18 and the hearable.

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APPENDIX 1 WITNESS AND TESTIMONY LIST

An asterisk (*) indicates a testimony quoted directly in the book. All others were examined to gain a broader impression of the corpus.

I. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library (Material quoted with permission of the archive. Only the first initial of last names is included in these catalog listings, in order to protect privacy. Collection abbreviated in citations as FVA).

Recorded in North America, in English A., Boris. Interview T-1208. FVA (Massachusetts, USA, 1988).* A., Yitzhak. Interview T-4130. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 2001). B., Eva. Interview T-1101. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1988). B., Mira. Interview T-257. FVA (New York, USA, 1984).* B., Samuel. Interview T-618. FVA (Massachusetts, USA, 1985).* E., Bela. Interview T-722. FVA (Texas, USA, 1985).* F., Hanna. Interview T-18. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1980); Interview HVT-971. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1987). F., Ralph. Interview T-110. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1980).* F., David and Sonia. Interview T-185. FVA (Virginia, USA, 1980). H., Suzanne. Interview T-2603. FVA (New York, USA, 1993).* M., Sonia. Interview T-221. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1979).* P., Sonia. Interview T-2298. FVA (Texas, USA, 1997).* S., Ivar. Interview T-1092. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1988).* S., Shalom. Interview T-190. FVA (Virginia, USA, 1980). S., Beatrice. Interview T-72. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1982).* Z., Abram. Interview T-1972. FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1993).

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Recorded in Hebrew, in Israel A., Kalman. Interview T-3869. FVA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1996). A., Lipa. Interview T-1842. FVA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1989, 1990).

Recorded in Yiddish, in Argentina L., Paja. Interview T-1406. FVA (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1990).

Recorded in Russian, in Belarus D., Grigorii. T-360. FVA (Minsk, Belarus, 1995).

II. USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education (Catalog lists witnesses’ first and last names. The Visual History Archive is abbreviated as VHA. For those interviewed by the author as well as by the VHA, only the first initial of the last name is used. The author gratefully acknowledges the USC Shoah Foundation for allowing us to use transcripts of the following testimonies. For more information: http://sfi.usc.edu/).

Recorded in English, in North America Almos, Marsha. Interview 3391. VHA (Ontaria, Canada, 1995).* Alter, Jane. Interview 3596. VHA (Illinois, USA, 1995).* Ancoli (Ancoli-Barbash), Esther. Interview 43872. VHA (New York, USA, 1998).* Anolik, Charles. Interview 10016. VHA (Iowa, USA, 1997).* Arnel, Jack. Interview 19111. VHA (New York, USA, 1996).* Baltser, Khane. Interview 9031. VHA (Florida, USA, 1995).* Barowsky, Irv. Interview 39227. VHA (California, USA, 1998).* Bielas, Luba. Interview 13106. VHA (Florida, USA, 1996).* Blocher, Ruth. Interview 39418. VHA (Connecticut, USA, 1995).* Bonder, Joan. Interview 399. VHA (New Jersey, USA, 1994).* Bratt, Esther. Interview 36788. VHA (Pennsylvania, USA, 1997). Clevs, Arnold. Interview 1202. VHA (Illinois, USA, 1995).* Finkel, Matis. Interview 11454. VHA (Florida, USA, 1996).* Firestone, Renee. Interview 151. VHA (California, USA, 1995). Goodfriend, Betty. Interview 16350. VHA (Georgia, USA, 1996).* Kaplan, Solomon. Interview 24935. VHA (New York, USA, 1997).* Lapp, Morris. Interview 23244. VHA (New York, USA, 1996).* Owic, Samuel. Interview 6137. VHA (New York, USA, 1995).* Sultanik, Bronia. Interview 13237. VHA (New York, USA, 1996).* Taitz, Gita. Interview 9483. VHA (New York, USA, 1995).* Vilnai-Shapiro, Meir. Interview 9613. VHA (New York, USA, 1996).* Zitkin, Ellen. Interview 13577. VHA (Rhode Island, USA, 1996).*

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Recorded in Hebrew, in Israel Aryeh, Yocheved. Interview 22405. VHA (Jerusalem, Israel, 2012).* Bahat, Sa’adyah. Interview 38423. VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1997).* Baron, Shlomo. Interview 25694. VHA (Rehovot, Israel, 1997).* Ben-Ya’akov, Yosef. Interview 44978. VHA (Holon, Israel, 1998).* Golani (Golany), Hana (Hanah). Interview 48686. VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998).* Katsanovski, Hinda. Interview 42388. VHA (Kibbutz Eilon, Israel, 1998).* Levitan, Bat Sheva. Interview 31986. VHA (Ramat Gan, Israel, 1997).* Lusky, Irena. Interview 16735. VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1996). Migdal, Leah. Interview 37280. VHA (Kiryat Byalik, Israel, 1997). Murchik, Shoshana. Interview 13763. VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1996).* Nissenba’im, Shmu’el. Interview 28499. VHA (Holon, Israel, 1997). Porat, Rivkah. Interview 24915. VHA (Ra’anana, Israel, 1996).* Shub, Gideon. Interview 42970. VHA (Bat Yam, Israel, 1998).* Ulman, Miriam. Interview 25806. VHA (Rehovot, Israel, 1997).* Zusman, Yafah. Interview 40715. VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1998).*

Recorded in Yiddish, in Lithuania Bargman, Gita. Interview 23136. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* B., Fania. Interview 23417. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996).* Feldman, Liuba. Interview 13071. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1995).* Geguzhinskis, Meishe. Interview 13698. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996).* Gotler, Meri. Interview 10250. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* Ioneson, Fania. Interview 31841. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997).* Lemkinas, Khatzkelis. Interview 41212. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1998). Matusevicius, Ishaiyahu. Interview 11342. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* Rabinovich, Bella. Interview 13475. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* Rozenberg, Doba. Interview 9896. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* S., Shmuel (Smuelis). Interview 13032. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1995).* Shuster (Susteris), Gershon (Gersonas). Interview 11694. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* Tishmanene, Basia. Interview 18014. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996).* Tsalzon, Leia. Interview 17658. VHA (Šiauliai, Lithuania, 1996).* Voronova, Mariia. Interview 17652. VHA (Šiauliai, Lithuania, 1996).* Zak, Khatzkel. Interview 12694. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).* Zelbovich, Iankel. Interview 47587. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1998).* Zinger, Polina. Interview 9374. VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996).*

Recorded in Yiddish, in Israel Geler, Rivka. Interview 45805. VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998).* Idels, Genia. Interview 25964. VHA (Ra’anana, Israel, 1997).* Minin, Dvorah. Interview 28443. VHA (Be’er Sheva, Israel, 1997).*

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Mosshovitchus, Echyoshas. Interview 37561. VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1997).* Sardenitzkas, Tuvia. Interview 19266. VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1996).* Tzentziper, Yenkel. Interview 15735. VHA (Lod, Israel, 1996). Zilber, Shayteh. Interview 27396. VHA (Be’er Sheva, Israel 1996.).

Recorded in Yiddish, in North America Dimant, Nechama. Interview 37630. VHA (Ontario, Canada, 1998). Grand, Minna. Interview 7853. VHA (California, USA, 1995). Monoshevich, Chave. Interview 459. VHA (California, USA, 1996). Urison, Dobe. Interview 35542. VHA (Montreal, Canada, 1997). Yoffi, Rachmil. Interview 47676. VHA (New York, USA, 1998).

Recorded in Lithuanian, in Lithuania Z., Ruvin. Interview 4645. VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1995).

III. Yad Vashem Video Testimony, Yad Vashem Archives— the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Israel (Catalog lists witnesses’ first and last names. For more information: http://www .yadvashem.org)

Recorded in Hebrew, in Israel Haim, Ofer. Interview VT 2635. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2000).* Kaplanski, Luba. Interview VT 6580237. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007).* Kogan, Cila (Karpuch). Interview VT 7427. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007).* Levin Rozenkranz, Sara Sonia. Interview VT 6771388. Yad Vashem (Tel Aviv, Israel, 2007). Perk, Kalman. Interview VT 4408626. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005).* Wolf, Ze’ev Galpern. Interview VT 6445398. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007).

Recorded in Yiddish, in Israel Cohen, Tsipora. Interview VT 3961. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2002). Minlis, Mordechai. Interview VT 3163. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2001). Segal, Hana. Interview VT 2479. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999). Siniuk, Chaim. Interview VT 2478. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999).* Zemsker, Moishe. Interview VT 10401. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2010).*

IV. Interviews with the Author (These interviews show first name and last initial.)

Recorded in Yiddish, in Lithuania A., Shimon. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, October 20, 2004). B., Fania. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November, 11, 2004).*

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B., Israel. Interview with the author, HPG (Ukmerge˙, Lithuania, March 24, 2005).* B., Shakhne. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 7, 2004). B., Yankl. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 14, 2005). F., Grigorij. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, April 5, 2005). F., Izaak. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 2, 2005). F., Mina. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 11, 2004). F., Yankev. Interview with the author, HPG (Šiauliai, Lithuania, April 6, 2005). G., Cilia. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2, 2004). G., Chaim. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, December 3, 2004). G., Mendel. Interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 14, 2005).* G., Berl. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January, 19, 2005). G., Shimon. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 12, 2005). K., Borekh. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 28, 2005).* K., Getsel. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 12, 2005).* K., Ilya. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 1, 2005). K., Itzhak. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 27, 2005). K., Menashe. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 25, 2005). K., Nina. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, December 13, 2004).* K., Rive. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2005).* K., Zalmen. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 4, 2004). L. Israel. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 6, 2004). L. Yoisef. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 16, 2004). M. Isaac. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, April 17, 2005). M. Yasha. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 4, 2004). M., Rokhl. Interview with the author, HPG (Švencˇionys, Lithuania, April 3, 2005). N., Meir. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 8, 2004). * P., Doba. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2005).* P., Feyge. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 28, 2005).* P., Hirsh. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 7, 2005).* R., Izaac. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 27, 2005). S., Braine. Interview with the author, HPG (Radviliškis, Lithuania, April 5, 2005).* S., Boris. Interview with the author, HPG (Šiauliai, Lithuania, March 2, 2005). S., Chaim. Interview with the author, HPG (Šiauliai, Lithuania, April 11, 2005). S., Chaja. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 6, 2005). S. Michael. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 11, 2005). S., Mishe. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 4, 2004). S., Rive. Interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, March 11, 15, and April 11, 2005).* S., Sheyne Nechama. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 24, 2005). S., Sholom. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, October 15, 2004). S., Shmuel. Interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 7, 2005).* V., Genie. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, April 13, 2005).

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Z., Leah. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, April 7, 2005).* Z., Ruvin (Edmundas). Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 27, 2005). Z., Zlata. Interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 2, 2005).

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APPENDIX 2 GENERAL TIMELINE OF THE HOLOCAUST IN LITHUANIA

Phase One

Period of Intense Local Massacres and Ghettoization

June 22, 1941

German Army invades Lithuania as part of its surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Approximately 8,500 Jews escape from all areas of Lithuania to unoccupied Soviet Union. A wave of pogroms and shootings follows, with around 20,000 victims by the end of July.

August/ September 1941 November 1941

Jews are forced into ghettos.

Phase Two

The Quiet Period

December 1941– March 1943

German policy shifts its focus from mass annihilation to forced labor for this stretch of time. Jews in ghettos experience relative stability.

Phase Three

Period of Ghetto Liquidation and Reorganization of Ghettos as Camps

April 1943

German authorities begin to destroy ghettos of Lithuania or convert them into concentration camps. There are 19,000 Lithuanian Jews still alive on Lithuanian soil under Nazi occupation at the start of this month. The majority of them are either sent away or killed before the Red Army begins liberating areas of Lithuania from the middle of July onward.

July 1944

More than 150,000 Jews killed by November 1941. More than 40,000 survive in ghettos.

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Phase Four

Period of Foreign Concentration Camps and Local Lithuanian Liberation

July/August 1944

Lithuanian Jews are transported to concentration camps outside of Lithuania, mainly to Stutthof and Dachau, with their respective subcamps. Jews from unoccupied Soviet Union begin to return to Lithuanian territory. Dachau is liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, Stutthof by the Soviets in May. Out of the 203,000 –207,000 Jews who stayed in Lithuania after the German invasion of 1941, less than 5 percent remained alive in May 1945: Between 7,000 –8,000 are liberated in German territory and another 1,700 in Lithuanian territory, among them 900 partisans.

August 1944 May 1945

Source: Yizhak Arad, “The Murder of the Jews in German-Occupied Lithuania,” in The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, ed. Alvydas Niekžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, and Darius Staliu ¯ nas (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 175 –204.

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APPENDIX 3 TIMELINES OF VILNA, KOVNA, AND SHAVL GHETTOS

Vilna: Approximately 70,000 Jews in March 1941 September 17–19, 1939 Red Army invades Poland, occupying Vilna. October 10, 1939

Vilna area is incorporated into Lithuania. Pogroms ensued at the end of October, perpetrated mostly by local Poles.

August 3, 1940

Lithuania is annexed to the Soviet Union.

Phase One

Period of Intense Local Massacres and Ghettoization

June 22, 1941 June 24, 1941

Heavy bombing on Vilna. Several thousand Jews escape. German occupation of Vilna. Abductions, anti-Jewish decrees are emplaced in the following days.

July 3 – 4, 1941

Germans instruct Jewish community leaders to form Judenrat.

July 11, 1941

Mass shootings begin at Ponar.

August 31– September 3, 1941

Great Provocation Action (Di Groyse Provokatsie), approximately 4,000 taken to Ponar.

September 6, 1941

All Jews ordered to enter two ghettos. Ghetto One imprisons 29,000, and Ghetto Two, 9,600. Another 3,300 Jews taken to Ponar.

September 15, 1941

Approximately 1,300 Jews from Ghetto One are killed.

October 1, 1941

Yom Kippur Action (Yun-Kiper Aktsie), between 3,700 and 4,000 Jews taken from both ghettos and shot. About one hundred are released after interventions.

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October 3 – 4, 15 –16, and 21, 1941

Ghetto Two is liquidated. Between 8,500 and 8,700 Jews killed.

October 24 –midNovember 1941

Yellow permit holders gathered, all others subject to arrest. Operation is repeated in November. Approximately 6,800 taken to Ponar (Gele Shayn Aktsie).

December 22, 1941

Killing of 400 Jews, which marks the end of the major killing operations. Up until now, 33,000 Jews killed; 20,000 Jews remain in the ghetto.

Phase Two

Quiet Period

Early 1942 – spring 1943

Of 20,400 ghetto inhabitants, 14,250 are registered as workers by June 1943, working both inside and outside the ghetto walls.

January–April 1942

Cultural projects initiated, including ghetto theater.

January 21, 1942

Partisan Organization, FPO (Fareynikter Partizaner Organizatsie), underground established.

Phase Three

Period of Ghetto Liquidation and Reorganization of Ghettos as Camps

June 21, 1943

Himmler orders the liquidation of the remaining ghettos in the east, establishing concentration camps instead.

July– end September 1943

1,150 Jews, among them 750 FPO members, left for partisan units in the woods.

September 23, 1943

Final liquidation of ghetto, where approximately 10,000 Jews had remained: 1,600 Jews sent to Estonia; 1,400 –1,700 to Latvia; 3,200 –3,500 are killed in Ponar and Sobibor. 2,600 Jews remain in four separate camps in Vilna: HKP 562 (Heeres-Kraftfahr-Park 562), Kailis, Kriegslazarett, and Gestapobrigade.

March 27, 1944

Children’s Action (Kinder Aktsie) in local camps, with more than 200 victims.

Phase Four

Period of Foreign Concentration Camps and Local Lithuanian Liberation

July 2 –3, 1944

Local camps liquidated, some prisoners escape into woods.

July 13, 1944

Vilna liberated by the Red Army.

Sources: Gai Miron and Shlomit Shulhani, eds., Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of Ghettos During the Holocaust, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2009), 878 –889; Mark Dvorzhetski, Yerushalayim d’ Lite in kamf un umkum: Zikhroynes fun Vilner geto (Paris: Yidisher folksfarband, 1948), 497–500.

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Kovna: 32,600 Jews in January 1941 Phase One

Period of Intense Local Massacres and Ghettoization

June 23, 1941

Provisional Lithuanian government established in the city, which seeks alliance with Nazi Germany.

June 24, 1941

Germans occupy Kovna.

June 25 –26, 1941

Lithuanian nationalists, inspired by German forces, carry out a pogrom in Slobodke suburb, killing approximately 1,000 Jews.

June 27, 1941

Massacre of Jews carried out in Lietukis Garage, killing approximately 50.

Late June– early July 1941

Anti-Jewish decrees emplaced. German Einsatzkommandos and local helpers seize Jews daily. Approximately 5,000 Jews killed at the Seventh Fort. Women are raped and few released.

Mid-July 1941

Jews are ordered to enter a ghetto in Slobodke by August 15.

August 5, 1941

Jewish Aeltestenrat established with Elkhanan Elkes at its head.

August 15, 1941

Kovna Ghetto is sealed, with 29,760 inhabitants. It is divided into a large and a small section, connected by a bridge.

Second half of August, beginning of September 1941

Search for valuables inside the ghetto by German and Lithuanian police.

Second half of September 1941

Regular work brigades, including thousands of Jews, are from now on sent daily to Aleksotas to construct an airfield.

September 26, 1941 1,200 –1,600 Jews killed at the Ninth Fort. October 4, 1941

Small ghetto is liquidated, taking 2,000 lives, including more than 140 Jewish orphans, as well as patients and personnel in the Jewish Hospital. Surviving Jews transferred into large ghetto.

October 28, 1941

Jews gathered on Demokratu˛ Square. 9,200 Jews seized and killed at the Ninth Fort, called the Big Action (Groyse Akstie). Approximately 17,500 Jews are left in the ghetto.

Phase Two

Quiet Period

Winter 1941–fall 1943

There are major workshops established within ghetto walls. Smaller deportations and killing operations take place.

Throughout 1942 –1943

Jews transferred from ghetto to work camps in the region, mostly Palemonas, Jonava, Ke˙dainiai, Kaišiadorys, and Babtai. 279

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APPENDIX 3

Phase Three

Period of Ghetto Liquidation and Reorganization of Ghettos as Camps

Mid-September– October 1943

Ghetto is turned into Kauen concentration camp, officially on October 25, 1943, under the authority of the SS. 16,000 Jews are in the ghetto on the eve of this change. 2,000 Jews deported to work camps in Estonia, 362 to Riga. 760 Jews unfit for work sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Deportation Action (Iberzidlungs Aktsie).

Late November– December 1943

5,000 Jews transferred to live on-site at work camps on the outskirts of the city. 8,000 remain within the former ghettocamp. Many inhabitants focus on creating underground hideouts.

March 27, 1944

Children’s Action (Kinder Aktsie). 1,300 remaining children, elderly, and sick seized from ghetto

Phase Four

Period of Foreign Concentration Camps and Local Lithuanian Liberation

July 8, 1944

6,100 Jews deported to Stutthof and Dachau by train and barge; 1,900 taken to Auschwitz via Stutthof. Ghetto is dynamited and burned to the ground, killing the vast majority of 2,000 Jews in hiding.

August 1, 1944

Kovna liberated by the Red Army. Approximately 500 –700 Jews survive with the partisans and in hiding; 2,300 –2,500 in concentration camps in Poland and Germany.

Sources: Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of Ghettos During the Holocaust, 290 –299; Yosef Gar, Umkum fun der yidisher Kovne [The Extermination of the Jews of Kowno] (Munich: Union of Lithuanian Jews in the American Zone in Germany, 1948), 1–6.

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Shavl: 6,600 Jews in Summer 1941 Phase One

Period of Intense Local Massacres and Ghettoization

June 26, 1941

Germans occupy city. Germans and local nationalists seize and imprison Jewish residents; more than 700 Jews shot by mid-July.

End of August 1941

Anti-Jewish decrees emplaced. 5,500 Jews are moved into two ghettos: the slum neighborhood of Kavkaz (Kaukazas) and the quarter Traku˛. More than 500 Jews, labeled unfit for work, are killed.

September 1, 1941

Both sections of the ghetto officially closed and surrounded with barbed-wire fence. The Jewish Delegation organizes internal ghetto life.

September 6 –12, 1941

Children, elderly, and intelligentsia rounded up, taking between 800 and 1,000 victims. 4,700 – 4,800 Jews settle in the ghetto.

September– October 1941

Labor organized in Frenkel leather factory, in an airport outside the city, and in workshops. About 800 –900 Jews begin living with and working for farmers in nearby villages. Jews from neighboring towns trickle into the ghetto.

Phase Two

Quiet Period

May 1942

First transport of hundreds of Jews taken to local labor camps: Radviliškis, Bacˇiu¯niai, and Re˙kyva. Jews taken to Linkaicˇiai camp in various transports.

July–August 1942

Massada underground organization established in ghetto.

Phase Three

Period of Ghetto Liquidation and Reorganization of Ghettos as Camps

Summer 1943

Security tightens in the ghetto, where approximately 4,800 Jews are living.

September 26, 1943

SS takes control of the ghetto and it is officially renamed “Konzentrationslager Kauen, Abteilung Schaulen.”

September– October 1943

Jews sent to labor camps in the area: mainly Zokniai Airport, Linkaicˇiai, Dauge˙liai, Pavencˇiai, and Akmene˙. The 1,200 inhabitants of the former ghetto Kavkaz are relocated to Traku˛ and labor camps.

281

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APPENDIX 3

November 4–5 1943

Children’s Action (Kinder Aktsie) takes away 574 children and 190 elderly in Shavl, with additional victims in Dauge˙liai and Pavencˇiai camps.

Phase Four

Period of Foreign Concentration Camps and Local Lithuanian Liberation

Early July 1944

Jews are returned to Shavl from surrounding labor camps.

July 15 –19, 1944

Camps liquidated; 5,000 Jews transported to Stutthof and to Dachau.

July 27, 1944

Red Army liberates Shavl. German counterattacks continue in the area.

Sources: Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of Ghettos During the Holocaust, 705 –708; Eliezer Yerushalmi, Pinkas Shavli: Yoman migeto lita’i (1941–1944) [Pinkas Shavli: A Diary from a Lithuanian Ghetto (1941–1944)] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and Musad Bialik, 1958), 31–347.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Gita Taitz, Interview 9483, Visual History Archive (hereafter VHA), Shoah Foundation (New York, USA, 1995); Liuba Feldman, Interview 13071, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). Given that the topic of this book is the transfer of knowledge between places and languages, and between writing and speech, the spelling of geographic locations is necessarily a complex matter. In order to give primacy to my sources, I use the Yiddish names of locations within Lithuania, including the Lithuanian names in parentheses at the first use. Yiddish place names are transliterated according to YIVO (Yidisher vizenshaftlekher institut / Institute for Jewish Research) transliteration guidelines, except when an alternate transliteration is especially widespread, as in “Vilna” and “Kovna.” In quotations, I follow the witness’s pronunciation of the place name, and in citing references, I follow the publisher’s spelling. 2. This definition draws from the way “ecology” has been used by scholars in a range of fields. Felix Guattari identifies “social” and “mental” ecologies, in addition to the “environmental” in The Three Ecologies (New York: Continuum, 2008), 28. The “ecological” perspective in folklore, as a geographic, linguistic, and chronological environment that surrounds and shapes a traditional narrative, is explored in Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Ecotypes— Theory of the Lived and Narrated Experience,” Narrative Culture 3, no. 1 (2016): 110 –137. Alexander Beecroft applies the term to world literary studies in An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Verso Books, 2015). Jacob Katz uses it to describe the influence of shared Jewish living conditions in Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 132. 3. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23. 4. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

283

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NOTES TO PAGES 3–7

Issue raised in Alan L. Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 23. 5. Yosef Ben-Ya’akov, Interview 44978, VHA (Holon, Israel, 1998). 6. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (The Lawbook Exchange [1944] 2005), 32 – 42. See also A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture and the Concept of Genocide” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7. Jacob Katz, “Was the Holocaust Predictable?” in The Holocaust as Historical Experience, ed. Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1981), 23 – 41, here 33. 8. Laub in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992), 74. The term is originally Nietzschean. 9. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), xxvi. 10. Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6. 11. David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), x–xi. 12. Mintz, Hurban, 23, and Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 72 –75; David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 9; David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and a Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 18. 13. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dina Porat, Israeli Society, the Holocaust and Its Survivors (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008); Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust 1946 – 1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009); David Cesarini and Eric J. Sunquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012). 14. Carol A. Kidron, “Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian-Canadian Genocide Legacies,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 6 (2012): 723 –754; Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 292 –297. 15. The archive was originally called the Holocaust Survivors Film Project and renamed in 1987. See Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 20. 16. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 96 –146. 17. Daniel Levy and Natan Szneider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

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(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1–22; Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan, eds., Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (New York: Berghan Books, 2015). 18. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1926] 1950, 1992). 19. Jeffrey K. Olick, “Is Social Memory Studies a Field?” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22 (2009): 249 –253; Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2003), 50 –74. 20. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Volf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). In the introduction (3 –10), these scholars argue that not enough sociological thinking has been brought to Holocaust studies in general. See also Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). 21. A prime example of the first use of testimony has been laid out by Christopher Browning in Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (New York: Norton, 2011), and of the second use by Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 22. Michal Givoni, “Humanitarian Governance and Ethical Cultivation: Médecins sans Frontières and the Advent of the Expert-Witness,” Millennium-Journal of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2011), 43 –63; Vanessa Pupavac, “Pathologizing Populations and Colonizing Minds: International Psychosocial Programmes in Kosovo,” Alternatives 27 (2002): 489 –511; Kelley McKinney, “‘Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence’: Testimony, Traumatic Memory, and Psychotherapy with Survivors of Political Violence,” Ethos 35, no. 3 (2007): 265 –299. 23. This echoes what Deborah Dwork writes about the benefits of “narrative truth” as learned from oral history in Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), xxxvi–xxxix. 24. David Roskies, “Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing,” Poetics Today 35, no. 3 (2014): 225 –301. 25. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Anika Walke, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), shows a new way to connect Holocaust history and Soviet history through oral narrative. Jeffrey Veidlinger also explores the memories of Jews who have lived through these two periods on the same Ukrainian soil in In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 26. Hana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Jewish Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 27. Laurence J. Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (New York: Routledge, 1996), 173 –198, here 175. 28. Dovid Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture (Vilnius: Balto Lankos, 2004), 13.

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29. Dov Levin, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews of Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000), 43. Among the excellent studies of this history, see Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943); Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the 18th Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Izraelis Lempertas, Litvakes (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2005); Mordechai Zalkin, Miginzei Vilna: Te’udot historiyot letoldot yehudei Lita (Be’er Sheva, Israel: Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2001); Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (Liverpool, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012); Eliyahu Stern, The Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 30. The most comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust in Lithuania to date is Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941– 1944 (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011). 31. Yitzhak Arad, “The Murder of the Jews in German-Occupied Lithuania,” in The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, ed. Alvydas Niekžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, and Darius Staliu¯nas (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 175 –203. 32. For examples of contradictory stances on culpability for local violence, compare David Baniker and Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky, Expulsion and Extermination: Holocaust Testimonials from Provincial Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011), 26, with Saulius Sužiede˙lis, “Thoughts on Lithuania’s Shadows of the Past: A Historical Essay on the Legacy of War,” Vilnius: Lithuanian Literature, Culture, History 6 (1999), 177– 208, here 194, as well as Boleslovas Baranauskas and Kazys Rukše˙nas, eds., Documents Accuse (Vilnius: Gintaras, 1970), and Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 27– 48. 33. Regarding postwar and present-day memory politics, compare Saulius Sužiede˙lis and Šaru¯ nas Liekis, “Conflicting Memories: The Reception of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” in Bringing Darkness to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 319 –351, to the articles published on the blog of Dovid Katz (defendinghistory.com), as in “Jewish Community and Union of Ghetto Survivors Speak Out Again on Harassment of Holocaust Survivors Who Joined the Resistance,” by Shimon Alperovich and Tuvia Jafet, posted September 1, 2008. 34. Anna Lipphardt, Vilne: Die Juden aus Vilnius nach dem Holocaust. Eine transnationale Beziehungsgeschichte (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 107–162. 35. See Web site of Igud Yotsei Lita, http://www.lithuanianjews.org.il, accessed May 26, 2016, as well as Anna Lipphardt, “Post Holocaust Reconstruction of Vilne, ‘The Most Yiddish City in the World,’ in New York, Israel and Vilnius,” Ab Imperio 4 (2004): 167–192. 36. Sidney Goldstein and Alice Goldstein, Lithuanian Jewry 1993: A Demographic and Sociocultural Profile (Jerusalem: Harriman Institute for Contemporary Jewry, 1997), 8 –9.

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37. Dov Levin, Baltic Jews under the Soviets 1940– 1946 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1994), 328 –334. 38. Borechas K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 28, 2005); and Nina K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, December 13, 2004). I include only the first initial of interviewees’ last names when they are persons interviewed by myself or the Fortunoff Video Archive. See also M. Chersonskis and M. Grodnikiene, The Fiftieth Anniversary of Jewish Amateur Art Collectives (Vilnius: Jewish Community of Lithuania, 2006), 19 –24. 39. Goldstein and Goldstein, Lithuanian Jewry, 8 –9. 40. Web site of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, http://www.lzb.lt, accessed August, 2012. On Jews in the context of other ethnic minorities in Lithuania, see Natalija Kasatkina and Tadas Leoncˇikas, Lietuvos etniniu˛ grupiu˛ adaptacija: Kontekstas ir eiga [Adaptation of ethnic groups in Lithuania: Context and process] (Vilnius: Eugrimas, 2003), 239 –281.

Chapter 1. Bad Testimony 1. Felman in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992), 5. 2. Beth A. Berkowitz, Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107– 112; Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes, “Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media” in Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 112 –132. 3. Paul Ricoeuer, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. L. S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 129; Paul Lipton, “The Epistemology of Testimony,” History and Philosophy of Science 29, no. 1 (1998): 1–31; Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2005), 121. 4. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 1–7. 5. The South American testimonio serves as one example. See John Beverly, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Doris Sommer, “Not Just a Personal Story: Women’s Testimonios and the Plural Self,” in Life Lines: Theoretical Essays on Women’s Autobiography, ed. Celeste Schenck and Bella Brodzki (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 107–130. 6. John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” in Frosh and Pinchevski, Media Witnessing, 23; John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Taurus, 2000). 7. James Olney, “Introduction,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 33. 8. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 4.

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9. Estelle C. Jelinek, ed., Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Sidonie Smith, A Poetic of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). 10. John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). He makes especially interesting use of Ulric Neisser’s “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge” (22); Ulric Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988) 35 –59. 11. E.g., in Yitshak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Ktav Publishing, 1981), and in Dov Levin, Baltic Jews under the Soviets 1940– 1946 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1994), the interviewer is never cited or acknowledged when discussing survivor testimony. 12. Critical voices include Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today, 27 no. 2 (Summer 2006); Thomas Tresize, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 13. Laub in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 68, 57–74. 14. Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010), 45. See also James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 122 –171. 15. As M. M. Bakhtin writes, “Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances,” from Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 89. 16. Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 169. 17. Laurence J. Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (New York: Routledge, 1996), 173 –198, here 175. 18. See Erving Goffman’s idea of “frameworks” in Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1974). Ball’s, Kirmayer’s, and Goffman’s approaches all counter claims like that of Kushner. In “Holocaust Testimony,” Kushner calls Felman, Laub, and Langer “naïve” for “failing to acknowledge how the interviewees often strive to fit into the genre expected of them” (11). This accusation mischaracterizes genre as the product of manipulation and reduces social memory to a conscious effort to appease at the moment of conversation. 19. Hans Robert Jauss and Elizabeth Benzinger, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History 2, no. 1 (1970): 12. See also Katie OwensMurphy, “Trope Theory, Cane, and the Metaphysical Case for Genre,” Genre 46, no. 3 (2013): 239 –263. 20. Elizabeth Tonkin, in Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), argues that genre is especially crucial for oral interlocutors, since they lack the weight of print as an immediate sign of credibility (40 – 41).

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21. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 113 –115, 125; Jessica Wiederhorn, “Holocaust Testimony,” Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald Ritchie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 248 –251. For an overview of these institutional practices and comparison to those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, see Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), esp. 56 –111. 22. Joanne Rudof, “Shaping Public and Private Memory: Holocaust Testimonies, Interviews and Documentaries,” International Journal of the Audio-Visual Testimony 1 (1998): 123 –130, here 125; Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 145. 23. “Topical Questions,” Shoah Foundation institutional archives, documents updated April 2004, pp. 3, 6. 24. Rudof, “Shaping Public,” 126. 25. Conversation with the author, HPG, August 30, 2012, New Haven, CT. 26. Irene Kacandes, “You Who Live Safe in Your Warm Houses: Your Role in the Production of Holocaust Testimony,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 209; discussed in Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 93. 27. “Topical Questions,” 3. 28. Ibid., 2. 29. Amit Pinchevski, “The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (2012) 142 –166, here 143. 30. David Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1949), xviii–xix. See also Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 31. Carol Meyer, “Till Human Voices Wake Us” (master’s thesis, Columbia School of Social Work, 1949). Contextualized in William B. Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (London: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 19 –85. 32. Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945– 1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Rachel Deblinger, “In a World Still Trembling: American Jewish Philanthropy and the Shaping of Holocaust Survivor Narratives in Postwar America (1945 –1953)” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2014). 33. John Hersey, The Wall (New York: Knopf, 1950). 34. Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30 – 40. 35. William G. Niederland, “The Problem of the Survivor: Part I, Some Remarks on the Psychiatric Evaluation of Emotional Disorders in Survivors of Nazi Persecution,” Journal of Hillside Hospital 47, no. 10 (1961), 233 –247; William G. Niederland,

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“Psychiatric Disorders among Persecution Victims: A Contribution to the Understanding of Concentration Camp Pathology and its After-effects,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 139, no. 5 (1964), 458 – 474. For a timeline of this research, see Wenda Focke, William G. Niederland: Psychiater der Verfolgten: Seine Zeit, Sein Leben, Sein Werk: Ein Porträt (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 1992), 427– 433. 36. Henry Krystal, ed., Massive Psychic Trauma (New York: International Universities Press, 1968). 37. Nanette C. Auerhahn and Dori Laub, “Annihilation and Restoration: Posttraumatic Memory as Pathway and Obstacle to Recovery,” International Review of Psycho-analysis (1984), and Dori Laub, “Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74 (1993), 288. Citing earlier research from the 1960s and 1970s, Laub and Auerhahn point to 1984 as a turning point in survivor trauma research. 38. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 113. 39. Michael Andrew Bernstein, “Homage to the Extreme: The Shoah and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe,” Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 1998, 6. 40. Diner, We Remember, 296. 41. Alvin Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory,” in American Jewish Yearbook: 2001 (New York: American Jewish Congress, 2001). 42. Ellen Zitkin, Interview 13577, VHA (Rhode Island, USA, 1996). 43. Charles Anolik, Interview 10016, VHA (Iowa, USA, 1997). 44. Mira B., Interview T-257, Fortunoff Video Archive (hereafter FVA) (Connecticut, USA, 1984). 45. Training sessions with Dana Klein began in 1984. Self-evaluation, which involved viewing and critiquing one’s own work as interviewer, was introduced later, according to institutional notes around 1987. (Written correspondence with Joanne Rudof, March 6, 2004.) 46. Ruth Blocher, Interview 39418, VHA (Connecticut, USA, 1995); Ruth shares similar jokes about Soviet soldiers. 47. Shlomith Rimon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Methuen, 1983), 54. 48. Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics (New York: Random House, 1954), I.3.1– 42 (31–35). Since witnesses in this context were also visually exposed to modern criminal forensics through the war-crimes exhumations in the Soviet period, my use of the term also overlaps with that of Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg and Portikus, 2012). 49. Carole Dornier, “The Poetic of the Meaningless Detail in Witness Narratives about the Reign of Terror During the French Revolution,” lecture in conference Trauma Testimony Discourse, February 23, 2011, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. 50. Indicative of its engaging content, Lawrence Langer analyzes parts of Mira B.’s testimony in Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 154 –157.

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51. Esther Ancoli, Interview 43872, VHA (New York, USA, 1998). Listed in some places on VHA database as Ancoli-Barbash. 52. “Videographer Guidelines,” p. 7, and “Interviewer’s Guidelines,” p. 11, USC Shoah Foundation Web site, http://sfi.usc.edu/explore/collecting_testimonies, accessed April 8, 2014. 53. Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” in Quarrel and Quandary (New York: Random House, 2000), 74 –102. 54. Gai Miron and Shlomit Shulhani, eds., Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of Ghettos During the Holocaust vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2009), 639, lists Radviliškis as a ghetto. At another point, the same encyclopedia refers to the place as a camp, to which Jews from the Shavl ghetto were sent (708). The postwar journal Fun letstn khurbn (FLK) lists both “Radvilishok” and “Radvilishoker-melkeray [dairy]” as camps, FLK, no. 3 (1946), 94. 55. On the role of concentration camps in contemporary American Jewish culture, see Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 36 –84. 56. Dina Porat, Israeli Society, the Holocaust and Its Survivors (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 103 –132. 57. Dov Levin, Historian’s Testimony: A Collection of Oral History Abstracts (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013), 9 –14. 58. Gule Ne’eman Arad, “The Shoah as Israel’s Political Trope,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 192 –216, esp. 194 –197. 59. E.g., Jose Brunner, “Mishpat Eichmann bein historia legeneologia,” Zmanim 98 (2007), 70 –81; Leora Bilsky, Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann (New York: Schocken Books, 2004); Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 2011). 60. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 114. 61. Ne’eman Arad, “The Shoah,” 207. 62. Now called the Museum of the Jewish People. 63. “A Yale University and New Haven Community Project: From Local to Global,” p. 5, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Web site, library.yale.edu/ testimonies/about/history.html, accessed April 13, 2014. 64. Nathan Beyrak, interview with the author, HPG, April 24, 2014, G’dera, Israel. 65. See, e.g., the transcripts of Kalman A., Interview T-3869, FVA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1996). 66. Iris Berlatzky, “Introduction” in Catalogue of Video Testimonies (Record Group VD/ 1– 200), ed. Iris Berlatzky (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1994), 4. 67. The Israeli Holocaust professional, as teacher and guide, is treated in Don Handelman Nationalism and the Israeli State (New York: Berg, 2004), 171–199; Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of National Identity (New York: Berghan Books, 2008), 86.

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68. Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25; Katriel updates these observations for younger generations in Tamar Katriel, Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004). 69. Handelman, Nationalism, 177. 70. Hana Golani (also listed as Hanah Golany), Interview 48686, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998). 71. Cila Kogan (Karpuch), Interview VT 7427, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007). 72. See also Julia Lerner and R. Feldhay, eds., Rusim beYisrael: Hapragmatika bahagira (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2012), and Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaia, Ex-Soviets in Israel: From Personal Narratives to a Group Portrait (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007). 73. This is in contrast to survivor immigrants who chose to testify in Russian or in Yiddish, discussed in the section that follows. 74. On the historiography of Jewish partisans, including the Israeli approach, see Michael R. Marrus, “Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary History 30 no. 1 (January 1995), 83 –110. 75. Fialkova and Yelenevskaia, Ex-Soviets, discuss Russian-speaking immigrants and non-Jews in a similar light, pp. 129 –156. 76. In another case, newcomer Ze’ev Galpern Wolf and his interviewer admit to language-based misunderstandings but maintain a friendly atmosphere, Interview VT 6445398, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007). 77. Luba Kaplanski, Interview VT 6580237, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007). 78. Rive K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2005). 79. Hirsh P., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 7, 2005). 80. Getsel K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 12, 2005). One plaque commemorates each of the ghettos, and another commemorates the Yellow Permit Action (Gele Shayn Aktsie), as listed in Genrikh Agranovskii, Viln’ius: Po slyedam litovskovo Yerusalima (Vilnius: Yevreiskii muzei im. Vilenskogo Gaona, 2011), 623. 81. Zvi Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R., ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 14 – 42; Kiril Feferman, Soviet Treatment of the Holocaust (1941– 1964) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 2000). 82. Saulius Sužiede˙lis and Šaru¯nas Liekis, “Conflicting Memories: The Reception of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” in Bringing Darkness to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 323. 83. Solomon Atamuk, Juden in Litauen. Ein geschichtlicher Überblick vom 14. bis 20. Jahrhundert, trans. (from Lithuanian) Grigori Smoliakov (Konstanz, Germany: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 2000), 223 –228. Most famous among them was the diary of the child survivor Masha Rolnikaite, originally written in Yiddish and published un-

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der the title I Must Tell in Lithuanian in 1963, then in Russian translation in 1965. On Holocaust-related films of the 1960s, see Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 82 –90. 84. Vytautas Toleikis, “The History of the New Lithuanian Jewish Community,” in Polin: Jews in the Former Grand Duchy of Lithuania Since 1772, vol. 25, ed. Šaru¯ nas Liekis, Antony Polonsky, and ChaeRan Freeze (Liverpool, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 407– 416. 85. Ellen Cassedy, “ ‘To Transform Ourselves’: Lithuania Looks at the Holocaust” in Liekis, Polonsky, and Freeze, Jews in the Former Grand Duchy, 381. 86. See Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Verseus Aurelius, 2003), 336 –384, and Lukasz Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi Occupied Areas of the U.S.S.R., 1941– 1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 35. 87. Testimony as accusation was also a narrative model for nongovernmental Jewish-led projects as, e.g., in the testimonies collected by Leyb Koniuchovsky, who began as part of a group of Jewish leaders who met regularly in Kovna in 1945. Yosef Gar, Viderklangen: Oytobiografishe fartseykhenungen, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hamenora, 1971), 29 –30. Yad Vashem, file 0.71. 88. We see instances of Jewish testimony in ChGK documents from Kaunas, 1945 (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f.7021, op.128, d.212, l.[2, 23]), in the NKVD/KGB investigations from 1948 (Lietuvos Ypatingasis Archyvas (henceforth LYA), F. K-1, ap. 58, b. 4776/3 [51–56]), from 1949 (LYA F. K-1, ap. 58, b. 13332/3 [53 –58]), in 1960 (LYA f. 1167 [181–186]), and in 1982 (LYA F. K-1, ap. 46, b. 1182 [316 –318]). 89. LYA F. K-1, ap. 46, b. 1167 [181–186]. 90. Solomon Atamuk, Juden in Litauen, 215. 91. Mark Tolts, “Yiddish in the Former Soviet Union Since 1959: A StatisticalDemographic Analysis.” Paper presented at the conference “Yiddish in the Contemporary World,” University of Oxford, April 19 –21, 1998 (rev. as of May 4, 2012), 5, 7, partly published in Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds., Yiddish in the Contemporary World (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 1999), 133 –146. 92. Basia Tishmanene, Interview 18014, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996). 93. The Lithuanian Jewish writer Grigory Kanovich depicts such informal Jewish gatherings in Son ob izcheznuvshem Yerusalimye, online novel, available at http:// www.antho.net/library/kanovich/dream.html, last accessed September 1, 2015. 94. Feyge P., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 28, 2005), worked as a hairstylist with a Jewish partner in Vilna. Berl G., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 19, 2005); and Khatzkel Zak, Interview 12694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996), recalled Jewish coworkers as taxi drivers. Getsel K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 12, 2005), a butcher, recalls Jewish clientele in Vilna.

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95. E.g., witness Doba Rozenberg refers to Polina Zinger and Meri Gotler, both of whom gave testimony to the Shoah Foundation. Continuing the chain, Meri Gotler refers to yet another witness from this group, Echyoshas Mosshovitchus. Doba Rozenberg, Interview 9896, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Polina Zinger, Interview 9374, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Meri Gotler, Interview 10250, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, Interview 37561, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1997). 96. Personal correspondence with Ilya Lempertas, October 4, 2012. 97. “Outreach Flier” on Shoah Foundation Web site, http://sfi.usc.edu/explore/ collecting_testimonies. Note that in the earliest years of the Fortunoff project, the coordinators sought witnesses through local community organizations as well (library .yale.edu/testimonies/about/history.html). 98. Personal correspondence with Ilya Lempertas, October 4, 2012. There were a total of 120 interviews conducted through the Shoah Foundation in Lithuania, 20 of which were in Yiddish. This is a disproportionate number relative to other countries. See Alina Boethe, “Shoah Testimonies as (Dis) Oriented Memories” in (Dis) Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, ed. Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2014), 73 –92, here 83. 99. Annette Wieviorka discusses these genres as precursors to contemporary testimony, Era of the Witness, 27. 100. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.10.1– 40 (63 –68). 101. Fania Ioneson, Interview 31841, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997). Fania tells that she moved to Israel in 1990, though it is not clear where she currently lives, since the interview was taken in Vilnius. 102. “Topical Questions,” 8. 103. Khatzkel Zak, Interview 12694, VHA, segment 80. 104. This was the observation of the local coordinator. Personal correspondence with Ilya Lempertas, October 4, 2012. 105. Eakin, How Our Lives, 43 –98. 106. Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 290; Robert Skloot, “Lanzmann’s Shoah after Twenty-Five Years: An Overview and a Further View,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012), 261–275, here 264 –265. 107. James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 168. 108. Recording Yiddish songs of aging Jews in contemporary Eastern Europe seems to have also been important to the “AHEYM” oral history project, www.aheym.org, accessed May 6, 2014. 109. Leia Tsalzon, Interview 17658, VHA (Šiauliai, Lithuania, 1996). 110. Žemaicˇ iu˛ (Samogitian) and Aukštaicˇ iu˛ (Aukštaitian) are the two main dialects of the Lithuanian language, each with subdialects. Aukštaicˇ iu˛ is the base for standard Lithuanian and is spoken in the central region. See “Modern Lithuanian,” Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 17th ed., 2013, ethnologue.com, accessed March 5, 2014.

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111. Fania B., Interview 23417, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996); Fania B., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 11, 2004); Shmuel (Smuelis) S., Interview 13032, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1995). Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the witness’s name as he refers to himself (Shmuel) and the way it is cataloged, often with a Lithuanian suffix (Smuelis). In such cases, I use the witness’s version within the body of the text and cite the official spelling in the footnote. Shmuel S., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 7, 2005). In addition to these two sets of double testimonies, Ruvin Z. testified to the Shoah Foundation in Lithuanian, whereas I interviewed him in Yiddish. Ruvin Z., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 27, 2005); Ruvin Z., Interview 4645, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1995). 112. See “Mass Murder of Šiauliai Jews in the Ilgoji Lova Forest,” Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania, holocaustatlas.lt/LT/, accessed March 20, 2016. 113. Fania B., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 11, 2004). 114. Yiddish language testimonies in North America present a different picture. Based on my observations, witnesses employed a distinct American-Yiddish idiom that differs substantially both from the Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies and from the English-American corpus. Demographics can serve as a partial explanation: Between 1989 and 1998, about 769,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union moved to Israel, when the total population at the time was 6 million. In the United States, by contrast, newcomers from the former Soviet Union composed only 13 percent of the Jewish population in this same time period. 290,000 former Soviet Jews moved to the United States, a country of 250 million. “The Post-Soviet Jewish Emigration.” Paper presented at the European Population Conference, Helsinki, Finland, June 2001, 7–9 tables 5, 8. That is, during the period in which these interviews were collected, Israel was far more densely populated by newcomers from the former Soviet Union, than was the United States. In Israel, immigrants remained in close geographic and social proximity to one another, which may have helped preserve their previous linguistic and narrative habits. Regarding Lithuania, specifically, a far greater number moved to Israel than to the United States in the 1970s and 1990s, as is shown in Sidney Goldstein and Alice Goldstein, Lithuanian Jewry 1993: A Demographic and Sociocultural Profile (Jerusalem: Harriman Institute for Contemporary Jewry, 1997), 8. Whatever the reason for this distinction, I will not include Yiddish-American testimonies in this study, since these texts would essentially require the consideration of a fourth corpus of comparison. 115. Related issues discussed in Julia Lerner, Tamar Rapoport, and Edna LomskyFeder, “The Ethnic Script in Action: The Regrounding of Russian Jewish Immigrants in Israel,” Ethos 35, no. 2 (2007): 168 –195. 116. Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, Interview 37561, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1997). 117. Genia Idels, Interview 25964, VHA (Ra’anana, Israel, 1997). 118. Aside from the two referenced above, the other “Yiddish-Israeli-Lithuanian”

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testimonies that I examine here are Tuvia Sardenitzkas, Interview 19266, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1996); Dvorah Minin, Interview 28443, VHA (Be’er Sheva, Israel, 1997); Rivka Geler, Interview 45805, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998); Chaim Siniuk, Interview VT 2478, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999); Moishe Zemsker, Interview VT 10401, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Lithuania, 2010). 119. I am indebted to Geoffrey Hartman for this observation and phrase.

Chapter 2. Solidarity 1. Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler, eds., Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Penguin Books, 1995); Holocaust, directed by Marvin Chomsky, fourpart television series (United States: NBC, 1978); Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 2 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986 –1991); Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six Out of Six Million (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006); Hakayits shel Aviya [Aviya’s summer], directed by Eli Cohen, produced by Gila Almagor and Eitan Even, film (Israel, 1988); David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (New York: Picador, 1989); Amir Gutfreund, Our Holocaust, trans. Jessica Cohen (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2006). 2. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Avner Holtzman, Tmuna lenedeg ‘einay (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), esp. 135 –179. 3. Carol A. Kidron, “Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 6 (2012): 723 –754. 4. In this sense (although not in others), the Hebrew and especially Yiddish genres of testimony resemble the second characteristic of minor literature in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. They write, “In major literatures . . . the social milieu serve[s] as a mere environment or background,” whereas in minor literatures, “the family triangle connects to other triangles.” 5. Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 34. 6. On the creation of postwar memory idioms in Yiddish- and in Hebrewspeaking communities, see David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and a Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 75 –124. 7. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 8. He defines this key term as knowledge that “presents locally to locals a local turn of mind.” 8. David Shneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), describes the importance of “biogenetics” in American kinmaking: “Parent and child may disown or disinherit one another, but they remain parent and child as biology prescribes,” 21. 9. Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 39.

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10. Suzanne H., Interview T-2603, FVA (New York, USA, 1993). Suzanne’s testimony was conducted as part of a satellite project in New York City, run by the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Her interviewer, Naomi Rappaport, worked extensively for the Shoah Foundation as well. 11. Allan Young, “Bodily Memory and Traumatic Memory,” in Past Tense: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996), 89 –102. Young shows the genealogical (historical) connection between bodily memory, inherited physical traits, and traumatic memory in the developments of medicine and psychiatry. This historical clustering of ideas loosely parallels this witness’s grouping of medical and emotional traits. 12. Shmerke Kaczerginski, Khurbn Vilne (New York: Tsiko Publishing, 1947), 336 – 337. As Kaczerginski explains, fur was considered an asset to the German war effort on the cold, eastern front. Thus, this factory was kept open after the destruction of the ghetto and considered a privileged place to live and work. See also Gai Miron and Shlomit Shulhani, eds., Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of Ghettos During the Holocaust (hereafter YV-EG), vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2009), 889. 13. In fact, HKP was destroyed just ten days before the Red Army marched into Vilna in July 13, 1944. Several hundred Jews managed to escape from the camp. Kaczerginski, Khurbn Vilne, 332; YV-EG, 889. 14. Ivar S., Interview T-1092, FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1988). Ivar was born in Memel (Klaipeda), and his family moved to Kovna in 1939 as Hitler advanced into this northern region. 15. Ellen Zitkin, Interview 13577, VHA (Rhode Island, USA, 1996). 16. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 43 –79. 17. Meir Vilnai-Shapiro, Interview 9613, VHA (New York, USA, 1996). 18. Betty Goodfriend, Interview 16350, VHA (Georgia, USA, 1996). 19. Sholem Aleichem, “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,” in Kleyne mentshele mit kleyne hasoges, Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem (New York: Sholem Aleichem Folksfond, 1920), 68, 66, first published 1902. 20. Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 21. This resembles the Yizkor-Bikher genre. See Jonathan Boyarin and Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schocken Books, 1983). 22. Alexei Yurchak uses the parallel term in Russian, svoi, to describe sociality among the last Soviet generation, in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 102 –114. As with eygene, Yurchak defines svoi as a flexible, constantly negotiated kind of closeness. 23. In Nachum Stutchkoff ’s Yiddish language thesaurus, Der oyster fun der yidisher shprakh (New York: YIVO, 1950), the term eygene or eygener receives a double listing, appearing both as a synonym for “relative” (239. Korev, p. 134) as well as for “friendship” (552. frayndshaft, p. 622).

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24. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Introduction” to Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (New York: Schocken, 1995), xii–xxxvi; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography” in Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 166 –211. 25. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 55. 26. Doba Rozenberg, Interview 9896, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 27. Ru¯ta Puišyte˙, “Yurbarkas” in Kholokost na territorii SSSR, ed. Il’ya Al’tman (Moscow: Respen, 2009), 1125. 28. Doba Rozenberg, “Pre-Interview Questionnaire,” Interview 9896, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 29. Judith Buber Agassi and Myrna Goldenberg have pointed out a similar kind of replacement family in Birkenau and Ravensbrück, calling these clusters “camp sisters” or “camp daughters.” Kenneth Waltzer traces a similar phenomenon among teenage boys in Buchenwald. Indeed, what is distinct and relevant here is not Doba’s claim that such a group existed, but the centrality she accords them, as well as the way that she treats them in parallel with earlier kin arrangements. Judith Buber Agassi, “‘Camp Families’ in Ravensbrück,” in Life, Death and Sacrifice: Women and Family in the Holocaust, ed. Esther Hertzog (Jerusalem and New York: Gefen Publishing House, 2008), 327–340; Myrna Goldenberg, “Memories of Auschwitz Survivors,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 327–340. Kenneth Waltser, “Moving Together, Moving Alone: The Story of Boys on a Transport Auschwitz to Buchenwald” (lecture at École normale supérieure, December 5 –7, 2012). 30. Khatzkel pronounces the name “Sukian.” 31. Khatzkel Zak, Interview 12694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 32. Fania Ioneson, Interview 31841, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997). 33. See: “Sofia Markovna Gurevitch” in Lerer yizkor-bukh: Di umgekumene lerer fun Tsisho-shuln in Poyln, ed. H. Kazan (New York: Marstin Press, 1954), 90 –91. 34. Meri Gotler, Interview 10250, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 35. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius, Interview 11342, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 36. Chaim Siniuk, Interview VT 2478, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999). 37. See “Khane” and “J. Harefuler” in Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 20 –51, 344 –379. 38. Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 27. 39. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 223 –228, notes that the most popular parties among Jews of independent Lithuania in the interwar years were Ahdes

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(Agudat Yisrael), General Zionism, and the Folkists. The Haluts was most popular among Jews of Lithuanian shtetlekh. Based on the reports of Jewish emissaries from Palestine, independent Lithuania seemed to have a more strongly Zionist character than interwar Poland (231). A significant portion of the Lithuanian Communist Party was made up of Jews, though most Lithuanian Jews were not involved in non-Jewish parties. See also: Yahdut Lita, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1959), 189 –246. 40. Rive S., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, March 11, 15, and April 11, 2005). 41. Meishe Geguzhinskis, Interview 13698, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996). 42. Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 340 –359; Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 43 –95. 43. On the confluence of survivor memory and Communist ideology, see also Anika Walke, “Memories of an Unfulfilled Promise: Internationalism and Patriotism in Post-Soviet Oral Histories of Jewish Survivors of the Nazi Genocide,” Oral History Review 40, no. 2 (2013): 271–298. 44. As Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no.1 (Spring 1998), writes, “Because the rise in antisemitism under successive authoritarian governments was not expressed in specific measures or policies, surviving Lithuanian Jews of the prewar generation often speak nostalgically about the Smetona days, even though the coup began the process of isolating and marginalizing the Jewish community,” (30). Within the testimonies examined here, we can find an example of such a positive view of Smetona in Luba Bielas, Interview 13106, VHA (Florida, USA, 1996), who says, “The Lithuanians had a very good president, Smetona,” as well as Matis Finkel, Interview 11454, VHA (Florida, USA, 1996), and Solomon Kaplan, Interview 24935, VHA (New York, USA, 1997). 45. She seems to be referring to the Sholem Aleichem School. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and After the Holocaust, vol. II (hereafter EJL), ed. Shmuel Spector (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), 606. 46. Suburb of Kovna with a densely Jewish population. Lithuanian: Viliampole˙. 47. Hirsh P., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 7, 2005). 48. Getsel K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 12, 2005). 49. Similarly, Jeffrey Veidlinger found that many of his interviewees prioritized the social aspects of political activity in interwar Soviet Ukraine, in In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 105 –106. 50. Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 21– 42. 51. A politicized imagining of the Jewish body politic involves what Don Handelman calls “bureaucratic logic” in Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events (New York: Berg, 2004), 19 – 48.

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52. Kalman Perk, Interview VT 4408626, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005). 53. “Holocaust Survivor Escapes from Cattle Car,” Yad Vashem, http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=A5kqZd1IAKw, last accessed August 20, 2017. His biography is also summarized in a book dedicated to the Lechi military group: Lehi anashim: sipur hayehem shel 840 lohamim velohamot (Tel Aviv: Yair Publishing, 2003), 705. 54. Discourse on Israeli culture often alludes to a shared psychic life, as in Amos Elon, Israelis: Founders and Sons (London: Redwood Press, 1971), 228. For instance, he writes about the ongoing conflict in Israel: “We know that it is no small matter to live under a constant threat of annihilation; but such knowledge is invariably vague. Some suspect the price may be high, but no one knows the exact amount paid by Israelis in psychological entanglements, debilitating repressions, compensations, and illusions, dangerous and otherwise.” See also Amia Lieblich, Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 29. 55. On this event, see Aru¯nas Bubnys, “The Holocaust in Lithuania: An Outline of the Major Stages and their Results,” in The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, ed. Alvydas Niekžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, and Darius Staliu¯nas (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 205 –221. 56. Part of the Tarbut network, founded by Dr. Moshe Shvabe. See EJL II, 606. 57. Gilad Padva, “Dmut haPolania betarbut haYisraelit,” Davka: eretz yidish vetarbuta 6 (2009), 4 –7. 58. Short for Lohamei heirut Yisrael [Fighters for the Freedom of Israel], an underground military organization in the British Mandate of Palestine, founded by Avraham Stern. Zvi Frank, Lehi: Me’ayn l’an 1940– 1949 (Tel Aviv: Khadkel, 1992), 25 –37. 59. Bat Sheva Levitan, Interview 31986, VHA (Ramat Gan, Israel, 1997). 60. Shoshana Murchik, Interview 13763, VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1996). 61. John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 86, referring to Ulrich Neisser. 62. Gideon Shub, Interview 42970, VHA (Bat Yam, Israel, 1998). 63. Smadar Shiffman, “Motherhood Under Zionism,” Hebrew Studies 44 (2003): 139 –156. Tamar Hess explores gender and autobiographical narration in “The Confessions of a Bad Reader: Embodied Selves, Narrative Strategies, and Subversion in Israeli Women’s Autobiography,” Prooftexts 27, no. 1 (2007): 151–187. 64. Yocheved Aryeh, Interview 22405, VHA (Jerusalem, Israel, 2012). 65. Luba Kaplanksi, Interview VT 6580237, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999).

Chapter 3. The Victim-Perpetrator Encounter 1. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 139 –140; quoted in Christopher Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimonies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 42. 2. Browning, Collected Memories, 43. 3. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man: Remembering Auschwitz, trans. Ruth Feldman (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 3.

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4. Ibid. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1951), 439. This is also a central thesis of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992), as well as Boaz Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” New German Critique 85 (2002): 107–130. 6. As Jean-François Lyotard writes, “I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.” The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. 7. Yizhak Arad, “The Murder of the Jews in German-Occupied Lithuania,” in The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, ed. Alvydas Niekžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, and Darius Staliu¯ nas (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 175 –203. 8. Jews from the Vilna region discuss Poles substantially in their testimonies. Some witnesses also discuss Belarussians, Estonians, and Latvians as important categories of people in work camps. Since each ethnic category that arises in the testimonies requires independent consideration, I limit my analysis to Lithuanians and Germans. The topic of Soviet power, often ethnicized and referred to as “Russian” (di rusn, di rusishe makht) receives attention in this chapter in so far as it relates to matters of wartime perpetration. 9. Shmuel calls it a dorf, a village. 10. Shmuel S., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 7, 2005). Shmuel (Smuelis) S., Interview 13032, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). To distinguish which of Shmuel’s testimonies I am citing, I mark “Shmuel S., HPG” or “Shmuel S., VHA” herein. For interviews drawn from multiple sources, like this one, I follow the more conservative citation guidelines and include only the first name and last initial. 11. Shmuel S., HPG. 12. Ibid. 13. “The body of a crime. The body (material substance) upon which a crime has been committed, e.g., the corpse of a murdered man, the charred remains of a house burned down. In a derivative sense, the substance or foundation of a crime; the substantial fact that a crime has been committed.” Black’s Law Dictionary (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1951), 413. 14. Shmuel S., HPG. 15. Doba Rozenberg, Interview 9896, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 16. Khatzkel Zak, Interview 12694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 17. Listed in Fun letstn khurbn (FLK) 5 (1947): 73, as Akmian or Akmene˙. Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941– 1944 (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), records 250 Jews sent to the lime pits of Akmene˙ in August/September 1943 (671). Eliezer Yerushalmi, Pinkas Shavli: Yoman migeto Lita’i (1941– 1944) [Pinkas Shavli: A diary from a Lithuanian ghetto (1941–1944)] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and Musad Bialik, 1958), first mentions the camp in his diary entry on September 30, 1943 (275).

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18. Shmuel S., VHA. 19. In the summer of 1941 Soviet prisoners of war and Jews were sent to work and live on Lithuanian farms in response to a concern about labor shortages for the fall harvest. Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, 666 –668. 20. The word “or” is in Yiddish in the VHA recording. When testifying to me, Shmuel includes only the name Juozas at this moment: “A boy shouted ‘uncle.’ In Lithuanian, that’s ‘Uncle Juozas, why?’” 21. Laub in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 82, based on Martin Buber, The I and the Thou (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1953). 22. Shmuel S., VHA. This is the single instance in which a significant narrative event appears in one version of his testimony, that given to VHA, and not in the other. 23. E.g., Il’ya Ehrenberg’s article from June 24, 1942, in Krasnaia Zvesda, entitled “Kill,” discussed in Jeffrey Burds, “Sexual Violence in Europe in WWII, 1939 –1945,” Politics and Society 37 no. 1 (2009), 49 –50. 24. In a follow-up conversation, neither Shmuel or his wife could recall such an event having ever taken place; interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, June 16, 2014). 25. From September 1941, approximately two hundred Jews from the Shavl region were sent to work at Zokniai. Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, 1180; FLK 5 (1947): 73. 26. Shmuel S., VHA. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. As noted, Shmuel identifies himself as having been born and raised in Kalniuk, which he considers distinct from the larger city of Shavl. 30. Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 16. 31. Chaim Siniuk, Interview VT 2478, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999). Chaim testifies in Yiddish in Israel, having moved there in 1995. He emphasizes ethnic identity in a forensic framework, like his peers who remained in Lithuania, even though the interviewer never encourages this discussion. 32. In “The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender Identities in Concentration Camps,” Monika Faschka explores how, in survivor memory, sexual violence reinforced gender identity and thus differed from faceless violence. In Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, ed. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 77–94. Psychologist Ruth Seifert argues against connecting wartime sexual violence with physical lust in “The Second Front: The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars,” Women’s Studies International Forum 19 (1996): 35 – 43. Dagmar Herzog discusses the complex connection between sex and mass violence in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–15.

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33. In terms of both content and perspective, Chaim’s account of rape at the Seventh Fort closely resembles that of Peshe Kagan, 1947, O.71/116/3552407, p. 3, Leyb Konichovsky Collection, Yad Vashem Archives; as well as Yitshak Nemenchik, “Der zibiter fort,” FLK 7 (1948): 58 –70. Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, also cites the testimony of a German medic, Heinrich Hippler, though it includes no explicit mention of rape (328). 34. Gershon Shuster (Gersonas Susteris), Interview 11694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). Gersonas is referred to as “Gershon Shuster” in the text, as this Yiddish form is how he refers to himself consistently on the recording. 35. Hirsh P., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 7, 2005). 36. Mariia Voronova, Interview 17652, VHA (Šiauliai, Lithuania, 1996). 37. Events of ritual murder charges, followed by anti-Jewish unrest, were reported throughout the late 1930s. Darius Staliu¯nas, “Anti-Jewish Disturbances in NorthWestern Provinces in the Early 1880s,” East European Jewish Affairs 2 (2004): 126; Vygantas Vareikis, “Anti-Semitism in Lithuania,” in Liudas Truska and Vygantas Vareikis, The Preconditions of the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism in Lithuania (Vilnius: Margi Raštai: 2004), 119 –171. 38. The word “pogrom” has a long history and was in use in the interwar Lithuanian Jewish press. E.g., a Yiddish language article in Di yidishe shtime from December 1, 1922, is titled “About Jewish Pogroms in Lithuania,” cited in The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews of Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000), 259. As an earlier example, pogromsthik appears in Russian language sources to describe the perpetrators of the pogroms of 1881–1882. John Klier, Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881– 1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially 48 –54. 39. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius, Interview 11342, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 40. In Yiddish writings of the war years from other locations, bandit is also used to refer to Germans. E.g., Zalman Gradovskii, In hartz fun gehenem: A dokument fun Oyshvitz zonder komando (Jerusalem: Dfus Galor, 1977), 49. In the contemporary Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies examined here, the term is reserved only for locals. 41. Soviets used the term bandit in an official capacity. In 1944, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs to Lithuania, N. Kruglov, established an antipartisan intelligence unit of the NKVD called the Osobii Banditskii Otdel (Special Bandit Unit). Vytas Stanley Vardys, “The Partisan Movement in Postwar Lithuania” in Lithuania Under the Soviets: Portrait of a Nation, 1940– 1965 (New York: Praeger, 1965), 104. 42. Rive K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2005); Mendel G., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 14, 2005). 43. Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Verseus Aurelius, 2003), 348 –349; Saulius Sužiede˙lis and Šaru¯nas Liekis, “Conflicting Memories: The Reception of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” in Bringing Darkness to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 330 –331. 44. Leah Z., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, April 7, 2005). 45. See Alexander Harkavy, Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary (New York:

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Schocken Books, 1988), 22, as well as Nahum Stutchkoff, Der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh [Thesaurus of the Yiddish language] (New York: YIVO, 1950), entries 236, synonyms for “non-Jew,” and 251, words relating to the “agriculture” (168, 214). 46. Doba P., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2005). 47. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 65. 48. Dvorah Minin, Interview 28443, VHA (Be’er Sheva, Israel, 1997). 49. In Stutchkoff ’s thesaurus, it is listed next to haydamak (Ukrainian rebelmarauders), both synonyms for “thieves” (483). It is also a synonym for “murderer” (190). 50. Bella Rabinovich, Interview 13475, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 51. Meishe Geguzhinskis, Interview 13698, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996). 52. Sara H. Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 158. 53. Genia Idels, Interview 25964, VHA (Ra’anana, Israel, 1997). 54. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Temple of Earth Publishing, 2008), 14a, 32b. 55. See also Haya Ostrover, Lelo humor hayinu mitabdim (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1991). 56. Dan Diner, “Problems of Periodization and Historical Memory,” New German Critique 53 (1991): 165. 57. Michael Andre Bernstein, “Homage to the Extreme: the Shoah and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe,” Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 1998, 6. 58. Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 36 –84. 59. Marsha Almos, Interview 3391, VHA (Ontario, Canada, 1995). David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and a Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), x–xii, suggest distinctions between Canadian and American Jewish Holocaust memory, though these concerns do not appear central for these testimonies. 60. Esther Ancoli (Ancoli-Barbash), Interview 43872, VHA (New York, USA, 1998). 61. Jack Arnel, Interview 19111, VHA (New York, USA, 1996). 62. Philosopher Kelly Oliver articulates the importance of this topic: “[T]he speaking subject is a subject by virtue of address-ability and response-ability. Address-ability and response-ability are the roots of subjectivity, which are damaged by the objectifying operations of oppressions and subordination.” Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 7. 63. Gita Taitz, Interview 9483, VHA (New York, USA, 1995). 64. Boris A., Interview T-1208, FVA (Massachusetts, USA, 1988). 65. Betty Goodfriend, Interview 16350, VHA (Georgia, USA, 1996). 66. Solomon Kaplan, Interview 24935, VHA (New York, USA, 1997). 67. Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, 497.

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68. Arnold Clevs, Interview 1202, VHA (Illinois, USA, 1995). 69. Irv Barowsky, Interview 39227, VHA (Los Altos, California, USA, 1998). 70. Bela E., Interview T-722, FVA (Texas, USA, 1988). 71. Matis Finkel, Interview 11454, VHA (Florida, USA, 1996). 72. Erik H. Cohen, Identity and Pedagogy: Shoah Education in Israeli State Schools (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 182. 73. Ruvik Rosenthal, Milon haslang hamakif (Israel: Keter Publishing, 2005) 236, 329. 74. The initiative of Shimon Ochian (Likud-Beiteinu), Robert Iltov (LikudBeiteinu), Dov Lipman (Yesh Atid), and Meir Shtrit (Hatnua), proposed on July 15, 2013. Document 485294 of the 19th Knesset, 2, http://www.knesset.gov.il/private law/data/19/1515.rtf, accessed August 21, 2017. The proposition sparked much press and debate, most notably Etgar Keret’s piece, “Sometimes, ‘Nazi’ is the Right Word,” New York Times, January 17, 2014. 75. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 112. 76. Lawrence Douglas , The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 135 –137. 77. Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. 14, 134. 78. Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 137. 79. Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) points out parallel narratives of Jewish self-reliance in the face of other catastrophes (3, 8). 80. Sa’adyah Bahat, Interview 38423, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1997). 81. Sa’adyah’s original last name. 82. Ofer Haim, Interview VT 2635, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2000). 83. Adi Ofir, ‘Avodat hahove: Masot el hatarbut haYisraelit b‘et hazot (Israel: HaKibutz HaMeuhad, 2001), 12 –13. Ofir focuses on the quality of inconsistency throughout his moral critique of the “Holocaust religion.” 84. Kalman Perk, Interview VT 4408626, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005). 85. Yocheved Aryeh, Interview 22405, VHA (Jerusalem, Israel, 2012). 86. Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians, 353. 87. Hana Golani, Interview 48686, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998). 88. Yisrael Ya’akov Yuval, “Hanakam vehaklala, hadam veha‘alila,” Tsion 58, no. 1 (1993): 33 –90. 89. In 1908, a rabbi is quoted in a Zionist newspaper saying “Dam shel yehudi rusi hefker hu” [The blood of a Russian Jew is ownerless], speaking of a young boy who was killed in an antisemitic attack. “Mi‘arei hamedina,” Ha-Zman (Petersburg and Vilna), January 22, 1908, p. 3. 90. E.g., Ariel Sharon is quoted as having said, “Dam yehudi eino hefker beshum makom” [Jewish blood is not illegitimate anywhere], Ma’ariv, May 7, 1980, 3. On

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contemporary usage, see the right-wing political group’s Facebook page entitled “Dam yehudi eino hefker,” he-il.facebook.com, accessed February 9, 2014. 91. In The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), Alvin Rosenfeld points out the dangers of allegory and comparison in Holocaust memory (in general, 33 –50; regarding Lithuania, 244 –245). Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), suggests that trauma paradigms blur the line between victim and perpetrator, 297. 92. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). In his well-known article, “Exile Within Sovereignty: Toward a Criticism of ‘Shlilat haGalut’ in Israeli Culture,” Theory and Criticism 5 (1994): 119, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes, “In the educational program that prepares [Israeli students] for their exams, the Shoah is in fact taught as in conjunction with the history of Zionist settlement. . . . By contrast, the history of Nazism is taught in disconnection from the Shoah, as part of the exam on the history of the 20th Century.” See also Idit Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially 91–126. 93. Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1. 94. Ibid., 94. 95. Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians, 343 –384, cites correspondence between Jewish and Lithuanian organizations beginning in 1945, in which accusations of Nazi collaboration were met with different forms of rebuttal, a dynamic that developed over the decades.

Chapter 4. Accent as Archive 1. Sonia M., Interview T-221, FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1979). 2. Berry Levinson, Avalon, Tristar Pictures, 1996; Gurinder Chadha, What’s Cooking?, Trimark Pictures, 2000. See Samir Dayal, “Multiculturalism with Transnationalism: Food Scenes as Contact Zones,” in The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music, ed. Rocío Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 153 –172. 3. See Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. 3 –13, and Kathryn Hellerstein, “Yiddish Voices in American English,” in The State of the Language, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Bruce Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 182 –201. With regard to Yiddish echoes in Hebrew literature, see Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish Writing in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), xxi; Shachar Pinsker, “The Language That Was Lost on the Roads: Discovering Hebrew through Yiddish in Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction,” Journal of Jewish Identities 7, no. 1 (2014): 129 –141; Allison Shachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially her discussion of Brenner and translation, 59, 73 –83; Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), especially 141–180.

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4. In analyzing speech, I follow social semiotic researchers, who consider accent and style as parts of “the metasign, whose function is to sustain difference and cohesion, and to declare the ideology of a group.” Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 82. 5. Felman in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992), 213, points out that the voice calls into focus the persistent element of translation in testimony. Felman focuses primarily on translation between levels of cognition or ontology, whereas I focus on translation between languages. 6. This is what Charles Sanders Peirce calls an “index”: a sign that “in its individual existence is connected with that object” (in this case with the event, the Holocaust). “That footprint that Robinson Crusoe found in the sand, and which has been stamped in the granite of fame, was an Index to him that some creature was on his island. [ . . . ]” See “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” in Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 2014), 251–252. 7. I mean “tone” both in the colloquial sense of a character of sound as well as that employed in Peircean semiotics, a sign that consists in a quality of feeling, a possibility. Charles Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” in Hoopes, Peirce on Signs, 26 –29. 8. Israel Bartal, “From Traditional Bilingualism to National Monolingualism,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 141–150; Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Shachter, Diaspora, 121–151. 9. I am adapting Cathy Caruth’s title phrase in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 10. Dan Miron, The Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry (London: Toby Press, 2010), 298. 11. Uri Zvi Grinberg, Kelev bayit (Tel Aviv: Hedim, 1929), I.2. More examples in Sholem Lindenbaum, “Shirat Uri Zvi Grinberg beyidish veyahas habikoret eleya ve’elav,” in Yehuda Fridlander, Uri Zvi Grinberg: Mivhar maamarei bikoret ‘al yetzirato (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974), 241. See also Elazar Elkhanan, “The Price of Remorse: Yiddish and the Work of Mourning in Jacob Steinberg’s Hebrew Poetry,” In geveb (September 2015). 12. Avot Yeshurun, Sha‘ar knisa, sha‘ar yetsia (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz hame’uhad, 1981), 85. See Amos Noi, “‘Al haposhim: ‘yahndes lo lishkoah’? Iyun bemila ahat shel Avot Yeshurun,” Teoria uvikoret 41 (2013), 203. 13. Gilad Padva, “Dmut haPolania betarbut haYisraelit,” Davka: eretz yidish vetarbuta 6 (2009): 4 –7. E.g., a 2011 television commercial introducing a new spicy (and thus supposedly non-Ashkenazi) flavor of Beigel Beigel pretzels featured a shtetl family, huddled together in a dimly lit room, marveling at the culinary innovation of these snacks and speaking a language intended to be Yiddish. At the advertisement’s climax, the family’s buxom mother shouts with wonder, “Oykhel, mit tam!?” [Food, with flavor!?]. See “Beigel beigel dakim dakim beta‘amim,” https://m.youtube.com/

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watch?lc=Mdk6I57JbsCNUuXI_yG_5L8MwExfrAr_g8ORVtH1jAw&v=-AayI6Hvkto, accessed February 11, 2016. 14. Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 83. Katriel points out that Hebrew speakers (around the time these interviews were taken) imagine the Yiddish word takhles, like the Arabic borrowing dugri, as a poetically appropriate term for informal, candid speech. 15. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23. 16. Miriam Ulman, Interview 25806, VHA (Rehovot, Israel, 1997). 17. Rivkah Porat, Interview 24915, VHA (Ra’anana, Israel, 1996). 18. Ibid., segment 18. 19. Kalman Perk, e.g., explains how knowledge of major wartime events outside helped him escape toward the frontline. Kalman Perk, Interview VT 4408626, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005). 20. A widely circulated daily Yiddish newspaper printed in Kovna between 1919 and 1940. Ironically, the newspaper actually began as the organ of the General Zionists and carried a Hebrew-language supplement in the 1920s, though such an association is not present in this conversation. Dov Levin, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews of Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000), 152. 21. Hana Golani, Interview 48686, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998). 22. In Tshukat hehalutsim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009), 80, Boaz Neumann points out a nearly identical cluster of oppositions at work in the historiography of the Halutsim and Zionism in general, which aligns Yiddish with femininity, tradition, Diaspora, myth, and Hebrew with masculinity, secularism, Israel, and history. Though he asserts that this Oedipal scheme misses major elements of Halutz cosmology, his choice of the model as a point of departure speaks to its strength in contemporary Israeli thinking. 23. Yafah Zusman, Interview 40715, VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1998). 24. Shlomo Baron, Interview 25694, VHA (Rehovot, Israel, 1997). 25. Ofer Haim, Interview VT 2635, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2000). 26. Amos Goldberg, “Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 122 –141, explores the impact of the yellow star and the tattooed number on Jewish victims’ self-perceptions. In a way, the Yiddish language becomes a part of this cluster of identity markers, which have been given new, oppressive meaning by the Nazi regime. 27. Gideon Shub, Interview 42970, VHA (Bat Yam, Israel, 1998). 28. Cila Kogan (Karpuch), Interview VT 7427, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007). 29. Kalman Perk, Interview VT 4408626, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005). 30. Il’ya Al’tman, ed., Kholokost na territorii SSSR (Moscow: Respen, 2009), 833. 31. Ruth Wajnryb, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2001) 174.

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32. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 160. Alan Rosen analyzes Yaffa Eliach’s position on English in The Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 11, as well as Alan Rosen, “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus,” Prooftexts 15 (1995): 249 –262. Dorothy Rabinowitz describes various ways survivor-immigrants understood the distinction between Yiddish and English in New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America (New York: Universe, 1976), 18, 242. 33. Anita Norich notes that English-language American-Jewish literary writings foreground a “metaphoric sense of displacement, focusing on psychic disjunction and alienation” in the wake of the Holocaust. Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture During the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 8. 34. We should also consider the difference of timing: The first Fortunoff interviews were conducted in 1979, fifteen years before many of the Shoah Foundation testimonies included in this study were completed. Within these fifteen years, the population of Yiddish-speaking American Jews declined and the language became less heard and expected. Thus, the participants may have simply avoided discussing the language out of fear that it would alienate the eventual listener. However, as Norich, Discovering Exile, 141, points out, in these very years, symbolic investment in the language may have actually become stronger. Thus, there is no simple way to “predict” the relative focus on Yiddish based simply on circumstance alone. See also Joshua Fishman, “Mother Tongue Claiming in the United States Since 1960,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 50 (1984): 21–99. 35. Khane Baltser, Interview 9031, VHA (Florida, USA, 1995). 36. Both the words gabbay (synagogue helper) and rov (rabbi) are words in the Yiddish language that are of semitic, or loshn koydsh, origin. Thus, they could be considered either Hebrew or Yiddish, though Khane speaks of them in the context of Yiddish. 37. She also incorporates foreign terms for two thematically neutral words, farflantsn (to plant) and vrasplokh (unawares—in Russian). 38. For the sake of accurate transcription, I note distinctions between an earlier printed version of the text and Khane’s performance. Fun letstn khurbn (FLK) 10 (1948): 141–142. 39. Following this line, there are four stanzas printed in FLK that Khane does not sing on the recording. 40. An additional line appears in FLK that Khane does not sing, “A shkhite gemakht iber dayne shof” [Your sheep have been brought to slaughter]. 41. See David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and a Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 48 – 49, and Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21–98. 42. On the journal, see Ada Schein, “‘Everyone Can Hold a Pen’: The Documen-

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tation Projects in the DP Camps in Germany,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 103 –134, and Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 130 –131, 215. 43. Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–19. Seidman’s reading of Wiesel’s self-translation has provoked debate. Most recently, Alan Astro, “Revisiting Wiesel’s Night in Yiddish, French and English,” Partial Answers 12, no. 1 (2014): 127–153, has traced all of the responses to Seidman and faults her with a “strong misreading” of the texts (129). 44. See the discussion of Matis Finkel’s testimony in chapter 3. 45. Regarding the shift of genre, see Leah Wolfson, “Is There Anything Else You Would Like to Add? Visual Testimony Encounters the Lyric,” South Atlantic Review 73, no. 3 (2008): 86 –110. Likewise, Felman in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 271, writes about the use of songs in contemporary Holocaust testimony creating “an encounter (a collision) with the actuality of history.” 46. “Pre-Interview Questionnaire” for Khane Baltser, “Interviewer’s Comments,” 18, Shoah Foundation, organizational archives. 47. Jane Alter, Interview 3596, VHA (Illinois, USA, 1995). 48. She pronounces the word for a Jewish ritual slaughterer according to a small Northern Lithuanian dialect, whereas in standard Yiddish it would be called a shoykhet. 49. See parallel moment in the testimony of Cila Kogan, discussed in chapter 1. 50. Samuel Owic, Interview 6137, VHA (New York, USA, 1995). 51. “Thin,” in fact, does not capture the extremity of oysgedart, which Weinreich translates as “haggard, emaciated.” Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 784. 52. David Roskies, “Through a Lens, Darkly,” Review of Holocaust Testimonies by Lawrence Langer, Commentary, November 1, 1991, 58 –59. 53. Others have made the connection between mother language and psychological truth much earlier. David Boder, who recorded Holocaust testimonies on phonograph in 1946, insisted on recording the victim’s oral speech in his or her chosen language, which was sometimes Yiddish, in order to show the signs of trauma on speech. See The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 205 –207. 54. Beatrice S., Interview T-72, FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1982). 55. Ralph F., Interview T-110, FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1980). Though just outside the borders of contemporary Lithuania, I include this witness from Kobilnik since the town was part of Lithuania during the war and is written about and remembered in connection to the Vilna region, their partisan activities in particular. This very witness, in fact, is mentioned in Shmerke Kaczerginski, Khurbn Vilne (New York: Tsiko Publishing, 1947), 12. See also Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941– 1944 (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 1474. 56. Litvak Yiddish dialect, thus antlayfn instead of antloyfn.

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57. “This grave was implanted by our enemies, on the day after Yom Kippur 1942, from which we and others in the picture managed to escape.” 58. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Vintage, 2000), 115. 59. Sonia P., Interview T-2298, FVA (Texas, USA, 1997). In part, Sonia’s greater interest in using and discussing Yiddish may relate to the fact that Sonia lived in South Africa after the war, before moving to the United States. The date of her move is not stated in the testimony. 60. We can also find a nearly identical formulation in an essay about Yiddish in a volume of psychoanalytic essays on Holocaust witnessing, under a section called “Traces.” Arnold Richards, “Witnessing the Death of Yiddish Language and Culture: Holes in the Doorpost,” in The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust, ed. Nancy R. Goodman and Marilyn B. Meyers (New York: Routledge, 2012), 267. 61. As is noticeable elsewhere in the book, Lithuanian Yiddish dialect speakers typically do not use the neuter form. Thus, every noun becomes feminine (di ) or masculine (der), even when standard Yiddish prescribes neuter (dos). 62. Betty Goodfriend, Interview 16350, VHA (Georgia, USA, 1996). 63. Solomon Kaplan, Interview 24935, VHA (New York, USA, 1997). 64. This may relate to the shifting terms of American Jewish identification: Having first become interested in claiming ethnic status in the 1970s (Norich, Discovering Exile, 141), by the late 1990s American Jewry had developed a much more intricate and self-conscious conversation about identification strategies, which included debates over Yiddish. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 184 –203, traces a highly articulate, public debate about how Yiddish should or should not be a part of contemporary identity. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 208 –261, identifies a similar trajectory of developments with Holocaust consciousness. It is this spirit, where identity is debatable and assessable, Yiddish and Holocaust memory alike, in which Betty and Solomon make their comments. 65. Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish, 91. 66. Sergeui Oushakine, “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Post-Soviet Russia,” Europe Asia Studies 25, no. 6 (2000): 994, and “We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not Crazy: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” Russian Review 66 (July 2007): 451– 482. 67. Genie V., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, April 13, 2005). 68. Wolfson, “Is There Anything Else . . . ?,” 106. 69. Gita Bargman, Interview 23136, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 70. “Nit ayer mazl,” FLK 8 (1948): 90 –92; “Baym geto toyerl,” FLK 7 (1947): 96 – 97; “Yidishe brigades,” FLK 7 (1947): 95 –96. 71. The song “Heykher [hoykher] man” does not appear in FLK, though it does appear in Yosef Gar, Umkum fun der yidisher Kovne [The extermination of the Jews of Kowno], (Munich: The Union of Lithuanian Jews in the American Zone in Germany, 1948), 411– 412, who credits N. Markovski with the lyrics.

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72. Additional line in FLK: “Nito keyn urloyb, redt zikh nit ayn” (There’s no vacation, don’t fool yourselves). FLK 8 (1948): 90. Also in Gar, Umkum, in an abridged form, 409 – 410. 73. Lithuanian Yiddish dialect for noun gender. 74. Meishe Geguzhinskis, Interview 13698, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996). 75. FLK 8 (1948): 92. The editors also insert a footnote for fuler aynzats, almost precisely in the place where Gita inserts an explanation while singing. 76. Gita Bargman, Interview 23136, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Meri Gotler, Interview 10250, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, Interview 37561, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1997); Doba Rozenberg, Interview 9896, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Gershon Shuster (Gersonas Susteris), Interview 11694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 77. FLK 2 (1946): 65. 78. As in the song, “Nit ayer mazl,” discussed earlier. 79. Mark Tolts has examined the available statistical data on Yiddish speakers in the USSR, between 1959 and 1989. He notes that the highest share of Yiddish speakers in the USSR in 1989 was found in Lithuania (37.7 percent of the country’s Jewish population), with an especial density of Yiddish speakers in Vilna. These witnesses’ assertions of speaking Yiddish long after the war are therefore not far-fetched. Tolts, “Yiddish in the Former Soviet Union Since 1959: A Statistical-Demographic Analysis.” Paper presented at the conference “Yiddish in the Contemporary World,” University of Oxford, April 19 –21, 1998 (rev. as of May 4, 2012), 5, 7. 80. E.g., Fania Ioneson describes her grandfather, “Er iz nit geven in gantsn grob, nor tshut tshut” [He wasn’t all that fat, but just a bit (last phrase in Russian)]. Fania Ioneson, Interview 31841, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997). 81. Witnesses frequently disregard gender distinctions in definite articles, as in, bizn brik (should be biz der brik). Tuvia Sardenitzkas, Interview 19266, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1996). 82. Leia Tsalzon, Interview 17658, VHA (Šiauliai, Lithuania, 1996). 83. Shmuel (Smuelis) S., Interview 13032, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 84. Dov Levin, “Yidn in der Litvisher divizie vi a zeltene militerish-natsionale dershaynung,” in Der veg tsum nitsokhn (Tel Aviv: Veterans Council by the Association of the Lithuanian Jews of Israel, 1995), 19 –22. 85. Braine S., interview with author, HPG (Radviliškis, Lithuania, April 5, 2005). 86. This sense of ambiguity regarding Yiddish today most clearly arises in the testimonies I collected, since contemporary language practice was a topic about which I inquired explicitly. In the Shoah Foundation testimonies taken in Yiddish in Lithuania, there is often little discussion of the present day. 87. Mendel G., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 14, 2005). 88. Hirsh P., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, March 7, 2005). 89. Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6.

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Chapter 5. Places and Non-Places 1. Iankel Zelbovich, Interview 47587, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1998). 2. None of the original written instructions for videographers or interviewers mentions outdoor or mobile scenes. See “Interviewer Guidelines” and “Videographer Guidelines,” USC Shoah Foundation Web site, http://sfi.usc.edu/explore/ collecting_testimonies, accessed April 8, 2014. Ari Zev, Director of Administration of the Shoah Foundation, recalls that the decision to allow and even encourage onlocation additions to the testimony came about gradually. As the foundation gathered more testimonies from survivors living in European and former Soviet countries, they saw the potential for filming survivors near historical sites in the vicinity of their homes (personal conversation, May 1, 2014). Lithuanian Regional Coordinator, Ilya Lempertas, does not recall how his team first began filming survivors outside their homes (personal correspondence, May 6, 2014). The Shoah Foundation index lists 138 Jewish survivor testimonies that include “location video footage,” many of which are from survivors living in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. 3. “Unmoored” is the term employed to describe the “movement across time and space” of Holocaust memory in Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 3. 4. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 5. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 91–92. 6. Mary Caruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 91. She is citing Hugh of St. Victor. 7. Michael Bernard-Donals, “Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy,” in Witnessing the Disaster, ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 213. 8. Dori Laub in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992), 65. 9. Shoshana Felman (referring to Freud with both of the previous two terms) in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 256. 10. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 16. 11. Barbara Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 69. 12. Felman in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 262. 13. I borrow the term “non-places” from Marc Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). 14. Andrew Charlesworth, “The Topography of Genocide,” in Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 216 –253; Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–17.

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15. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 143. 16. Alberto Giordano and Tim Cole, “On Place and Space: Calculating Social and Spatial Networks in the Budapest Ghetto,” Transactions in GIS 15, no. 1 (2011): 143 –170. 17. Shoah Foundation Web site, “places” search, http://www. vhaonline.usc.edu/ geosearch/geoSearch.aspx, accessed March 23, 2014. 18. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I. B. Taurus, 2012), 169 –182. 19. Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. 20. Zali Gurevitch, ‘Al hamakom (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1992), 23. 21. On place in Israeli identity, see Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, eds., Grasping Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Hanan Hever, “Mapping Literary Spaces: Territory and Violence in Israeli Literature,” in Mapping Jewish Identities, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 201–219; Karen Grumberg, Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 22. David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (London: Vintage Books, 2010), 1–86. In this edition, Betsy Rosenberg translates the phrase as “Over There,” e.g., 13. 23. Hana Golani, Interview 48686, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998). 24. Names used for the two ghettos of Shavl. See The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and After the Holocaust, ed. Shmuel Spector (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), vol. 3, 1175. 25. Hinda Katsanovski, Interview 42388, VHA (Kibbutz Eilon, Israel, 1998). 26. Bat Sheva Levitan, Interview 31986, VHA (Ramat Gan, Israel, 1997); Gideon Shub, Interview 42970, VHA (Bat Yam, Israel, 1998). 27. Cila Kogan (Karpuch), Interview VT 7427, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007); Luba Kaplanski, Interview VT 6580237, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007). 28. Yosef Ben-Ya’akov, Interview 44978, VHA (Holon, Israel, 1998). 29. Echoing literary observations of DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 179. 30. Yocheved Aryeh, Interview 22405, VHA (Jerusalem, Israel, 2012). 31. Shoshana Murchik, Interview 13763, VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1996). 32. Sa’adyah Bahat, Interview 38423, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1997). 33. Photograph available through United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media _ph.php?ModuleId=0&MediaId=2009, accessed August 8, 2017. 34. Yafah Zusman, Interview 40715, VHA (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1998). 35. Kalman Perk, Interview VT 4408626, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005). 36. As in Kalman Perk, Hana Golani, and Cila Kogan. 37. Bab El-Wad (in Hebrew, Sha‘ar Hagay [Gate of the Valley]) is a point on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which became an important battle site in the War of 1948.

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38. Some have noted an increasing warmth and nostalgia toward the shtetl as memory in Israeli. See Gideon Oferet, Hashiva el hashtetl: Hayahdut kedimui ba’omanut (Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik, 2011). 39. Bat Sheva Levitan, Interview 31986, VHA (Ramat Gan, Israel, 1997). 40. Ida Markus-Karabelnik, Kelm-etz karut (Tel Aviv: Dionon, 1993). 41. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 42. Exemplifying the discursive reception of this map, Marilyn Reizbaum writes of it, “If you move off that map of Rego Park several blocks to the north and east, you will come to the building I grew up in with my survivor Polish parents, where my mother still lives and where, on occasion, in a rather unsystematic effort, my sister and I, in our own (dis)guises, record laboriously and prosaically my mother’s story.” Reizbaum reads the map “with the grain,” using it to think about personal identity. Marilyn Reizbaum, “Surviving on Cat and Maus,” in Silberstein, Mapping Jewish Identities, 122 –144, here 138. As a striking contrast that coheres with my observations, compare her essay with the highly political terms employed by Hanan Hever to assess Israeli literary geography in this same volume of essays. Hever in Silberstein, Mapping Jewish Identities, 201–219. 43. See also James Young, “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 666 –699; Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17– 41. 44. A debate between two scholars studying second-generation roots-trips supports the distinction I propose between Israeli dark presence versus American absence: Arlene Stein “Trauma and Origins: Post-Holocaust Genealogists and the Work of Memory,” Qualitative Sociology 32 (September 2009): 293 –309, versus Carol Kidron, “Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of CoPresence in the Holocaust Past,” Annals of Tourism Research 41 (2013): 175 –194. 45. Gita Taitz, Interview 9483, VHA (New York, USA, 1995). 46. Ellen Zitkin, Interview 13577, VHA (Rhode Island, USA, 1996). 47. It seems he is referring to the YIVO Jewish Teachers Seminary; see Cecile Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 38. 48. Jack Arnel, Interview 19111, VHA (New York, USA, 1996). 49. Bronia Sultanik, Interview 13237, VHA (New York, USA, 1996). 50. Boris A., Interview T-1208, FVA (Massachusetts, USA, 1988). 51. Luba Bielas, Interview 13106, VHA (Florida, USA, 1996). 52. Betty Goodfriend, Interview 16350, VHA (Georgia, USA, 1996). 53. Mira B., Interview T-257, FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1984). 54. Though Mira did not mention it, this same Green Bridge appears prominently in Yiddish literature and in Jewish memory writings of the place—di grine brik. E.g., Moishe Gurin, Di grine brik (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Peretz Farlag, 1966); Avrom Sutzkever, Griner akvarium (Tel Aviv: Hebrew University and Committee for Yiddish Culture in Israel, 1975), 227–275.

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55. Samuel B., Interview T-618, FVA (Massachusetts, USA, 1985). 56. Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 29. 57. Joan Bonder, Interview 399, VHA (New Jersey, USA, 1994). 58. Morris Lapp, Interview 23244, VHA (New York, USA, 1996). 59. Grigory Kanovich, Park zabytikh evreev (New York: Chasidic Art Institute, 1997). 60. Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 248. See also Mikhail Krutikov “Prostranstvo pamyati Grigoriya Kanovicha,” in Grigory Kanovich, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v piati tomakh, vol. 1 (Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 2014), 9 –37. 61. In parallel to Keith H. Basso, “‘Speaking with Names’: Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 2 (1988): 99 –130, here 106. 62. As translations of dreyen zikh, Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), offers, “turn, revolve, rotate; whirl, spin; wriggle, wind, twist” (145). In addition to similar motion verbs, Nahum Stutchkoff, Der oyster fun der yidisher shprakh [Thesaurus of the Yiddish language] (New York: YIVO, 1950) also offers metaphoric synonyms appropriate to this context: handl (dealings), metod (method), zayn tsekrigt (to be in a quarrel), (806). 63. Aside from Iankel’s testimony, there are two Russian-language testimonies from Lithuania with “location video footage,” as well as that of Fania Ioneson, by chance Iankel’s sister. 64. Jeffrey Veidlinger comments on how long-term interaction with the sites of prewar Jewish life informs memory in In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), xxii. 65. Shoah, Claude Lanzmann (France: New Yorker Films, 1985); The Pianist, Roman Polanski (Poland: Universal Pictures, 2002); Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg (USA: Universal Pictures, 1993). 66. Referring to the Slobodke Yeshiva. In Khurbn Lite (New York: Modern Linotype, 1951), 35 –37, Rabbi Ephraim Oshri also dwells on this date in detailing the destruction of the Slobodke Yeshiva. 67. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xxxvii. 68. The archive includes on-site footage taken with survivors who live, and have long lived, far from Holocaust locations but who make a return journey especially for the testimony taping. In those cases, the significance of the place differs. See Janet Walker, “Moving Testimonies,” in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, ed. Jakob Lothe et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 269 –291. 69. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius, Interview 11342, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 70. Fania B., Interview 23417, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996). 71. Tsemakh Szabad (1864 –1935) was a legendary doctor and educator in Vilna and father-in-law of Max Weinreich; Dovid Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture (Vilnius: Balto Lankos, 2004), 297.

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72. See Sasha Senderovich, “Introduction” to Moyshe Kulbak, Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), ix. 73. Fania Ioneson, Interview 31841, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997). It is merely by chance that these two witnesses, cited closely together in the text, share the same first name. 74. Name of street is unclear. It could also be Ke.stucˇ io Street. 75. Unknown author from the Vilna ghetto, “Di zelbe gasn un tramvayen,” I.1–2, II.1–2, 5 –6, in Lider fun di getos un lagern, ed. Shmerke Kaczerginski (New York: CYCO, 1948), 31–32. 76. Gershon Shuster (Gersonas Susteris), Interview 11694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Gita Bargman, Interview 23136, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 77. Many of the survivors who stayed in Lithuania and chose to testify in Yiddish were from Kovna. 78. Gershon Shuster; Gita Bargman; Tuvia Sardenitzkas, Interview 19266, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1996); Doba Rozenberg, Interview 9896, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Chaim Siniuk, Interview VT 2478, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 1999); Iankel Zelbovich; Ishaiyahu Matusevicius. 79. Tuvia Sardenistkas; Rivka Geler, Interview 45805, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998); Doba Rozenberg; Meri Gotler, Interview 10250, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Basia Tishmanene, Interview 18014, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996); Iankel Zelbovich. 80. Meri Gotler; Doba Rozenberg; Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, Interview 37561, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1997); Tuvia Sardenitzkas; Liuba Feldman, Interview 13071, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1995). 81. Echyoshas Mosshovitchus; Genia Idels, Interview 25964, VHA (Ra’anana, Israel, 1997); Tuvia Sardenitzkas; Liuba Feldman. 82. Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, Gita Bargman, Rivka Geler, Liuba Feldman, Doba Rozenberg, Meri Gotler. 83. Ishaiyahu Matusevicius, Gita Bargman, Gershon Shuster. 84. Chaim Siniuk, Fania Ioneson, Gershon Shuster, Iankel Zelbovich. 85. Khatzkel Zak, Interview 12694, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); Shmuel (Smuelis) S., Interview 13032, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1995). 86. Since the time of Shmuel’s testimony, the site has at least been added to the Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania (holocaustatlas.lt/LT/) under the listing “Mass Murder of Šiauliai Jews in the Ilgoji Lova Forest,” accessed August 8, 2017. 87. In History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), Dominick LaCapra avers that Lanzmann’s Shoah “affirms a Bilderverbot, a prohibition on images, with respect to images” that considers the incarnation of concentration camps idolatrous (100, 104). 88. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 220. 89. As in the ghetto segment of Liuba Feldman’s testimony. 90. Meri Gotler, Interview 10250, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996). 91. Rivka Geler, Interview 45805, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998).

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92. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, “Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns,” Journal of Language Contact, varia 2 (2009): 40 –67, here 49. 93. Echyoshas Mosshovitchus, Interview 37561, VHA (Rishon Letsion, Israel, 1997). 94. A gas chamber was constructed at Dachau, but scholars have found no evidence that it was used to take lives. See “Dachau Main Camp” in USHMM Encyclopedia (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009) vol. 1, 442 – 448, here 444. 95. An emphasis on “burning” also appears in Binem Heller’s poem, “Mayn shvester Khaya” [My sister Chaya], in Zey veln ufshteyn (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Farlag, 1984), 22. The climax of the text falls on the line “A daytsh hot in treblinka zi farbrent” [A German burnt her in Treblinka]. 96. This observation does not rely upon a Sapirian-Whorfian notion of linguistic determinism. The spatial connotations of l’tamren derive as much from its culturalhistorical usage as from its root and sound. Oswald Werner, “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 7 (1994): 3656 –3662. 97. Avraham Even-Shoshan, Hamilon hehadash (Jerusalem: Kiryath Sefer, 1970), 2875. Even-Shoshan lists a usage example from Benjamin Tammuz, Trilogia—Haye Elyakum, Besof ma‘arav, sefer hahazayot (Tel Aviv, Keter, 1988), 47. “I maneuver [ani metamren] and hide between the sheds.” The narrator is “maneuvering” in order to avoid excessive social interactions in an army base, playing with the literal and metaphoric inflections of the verb. 98. “To maintain” is also an important notion in Ofer Haim’s camp segment. 99. Dale Pesmen, Russia and Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 189 –207. 100. Ibid., 189. 101. In Yisrael Kaplan’s glossary of Holocaust Yiddish, Dos folksmoyl in Natsi-klem (Munich: Central Commission of Liberated Jews in the American Zone in Germany, 1949), 23 –31, there is a whole section dedicated to slippery dealings. 102. In addition to the four instances discussed in this chapter, there are seven other Yiddish testimonies in which Laisve˙s Aleja appears in the context of return: Echyoshas Mosshovitchus; Doba Rozenberg; Chaim Siniuk; Gershon Shuster; Mendel G., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, Lithuania, February 14, 2005); Polina Zinger, Interview 9374, VHA (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1996); and Ishaiyahu Matusevicius. 103. According to two witnesses, there was a temporary shelter for Jewish survivors on Laisve˙s 25. Jewish survivors may have also frequently passed through Laisve˙s Aleja on their way to the Choral Synagogue, which served as a meeting point. Rivka Geler, Interview 45805, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998); Echyoshas Mosshovitchus. 104. Sidney Goldstein and Alice Goldstein, Lithuanian Jewry 1993: A Demographic and Sociocultural Profile (Jerusalem: Harriman Institute for Contemporary Jewry, 1997), 8. 105. Borekh K., interview with the author, HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, February 28, 2005). The synagogue is also known as Taharat hakodesh.

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319

106. Nina K., interview with the author HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, December 13, 2004). 107. Fania B., interview with the author HPG (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 11, 2004). 108. Braine S., interview with the author HPG (Radviliškis, Lithuania, April, 5, 2005); Israel B., interview with the author, HPG (Ukmerge˙, Lithuania, March 24, 2005). 109. Regarding this NKVD tactic with bodies, see George Reklaitis, “A Common Hatred: Lithuanian Nationalism During the Triple Occupation 1939 –1953” (PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2003), 213 –214. 110. There was a Soviet decree issued in 1955 offering amnesty “for Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945” with the exception of those convicted of murder or torture of Soviet citizens. For Lithuanian citizens, this amnesty went into effect in March 1956. Lukasz Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi Occupied Areas of the U.S.S.R., 1941– 1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 40.

Conclusion 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace [1951], 1973), 328. Arendt’s notion of transformation is discussed in Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (2009): 236. 2. Arendt, Origins, 439. 3. Ibid., 437. 4. Ibid., 438. 5. In A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), Alon Confino shows that Germans of the Nazi Era participated in public practices that conveyed a similar drive for regenesis—like burning the Bible (27–55) and refashioning public space to exclude any Jewish presence (88 –98). 6. As Marc Nichanian writes, in response to earlier discussions on the writing of genocide history, “The fact constitutes itself as such at the very moment of the giving (donation) of sense, of historical sense.” Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 70. 7. Mira B., Interview T-257, FVA (Connecticut, USA, 1984). 8. Esther Ancoli (Ancoli-Barbash), Interview 43872, VHA (New York, USA, 1998). 9. Matis Finkel, Interview 11454, VHA (Florida, USA, 1996). 10. Meir Vilnai-Shapiro, Interview 9613, VHA (New York, USA, 1996). 11. Kalman Perk, Interview VT 4408626, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2005). 12. Hana Golani, Interview 48686, VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998). 13. Cila Kogan (Karpuch), Interview VT 7427, Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel, 2007).

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14. Rive S., interview with the author, HPG (Kaunas, March 11, 15, and April 11, 2005); Meishe Geguzhinskis, Interview 13698, VHA (Vilnius, Lithuania, 1996). 15. Leia Tsalzon, Interview 17658, VHA (Šiauliai, Lithuania, 1996). 16. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso Books, 2014). I refer primarily to her invocation of “unstranslatability as a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of worldliterary endeavors,” 3. 17. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 18. Jacques Rancière, Figures of History (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 31. Appropriately, he uses this phrase to argue that the mere existence of an image is not enough to render its subject visible, and he uses concentration-camp photography as one example.

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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Fig. 1. Tereska. Photograph courtesy of David Seymour-Chim/Magnum. For more information, see www.davidseymour.com. Fig. 2. Zivia Lubetkin. Photograph courtesy of Ghetto Fighters House Museum/ Israel Photo Archive, 21078. Fig. 3. Zhager exhumation. Photograph courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (Lietuvos Ypatingasis Archyvas, LYA), F. K-1, ap. 58, b. 45006/3, t. 1, p. 273. Fig. 4. Hana Golani (Hanah Golany) and map. Image courtesy of USC Shoah Foundation. Interview 48686. VHA (Haifa, Israel, 1998). For more information: http://sfi.usc.edu. Fig. 5. Book back cover, copyright © 1986 by Penguin Random House LLC; from Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission. Fig. 6. Iankel Zelbovich. Image courtesy of USC Shoah Foundation. Interview 47587. VHA, 1998. For more information: http://sfi.usc.edu. Fig. 7. Kovna ghetto map, drawn by Ya’akov Perecman. Image courtesy of Perecman family.

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INDEX

accent, 13, 39, 104, 156 –157; as part of metasign, 307n4; Yiddish accents in English-American testimony, 171–188; Yiddish accents in Hebrew-Israeli testimony, 159 –163 Agassi, Judith Buber, 298n29 agency, 42, 43, 146, 159, 266; collective, 220; dreyen zikh (“wriggling through”) strategy and, 253; independence, 103; Jewish agency as ‘amida, 141; Jewish self-reliance, 149; loss of, 227; political agency, 165; progression from helplessness to, 162; return to, 218; transfer of, 99; Yiddish language and, 169; Zionist ethos of, 228 Ahdes (Agudat Yisrael), 298 –299n39 AHEYM oral history project, 294n108 Akmener (Akmene˙) work camp, 113, 301n17 Aleksot work camp, 246 aliyah, 96, 100, 104 –105, 145, 218; Brichah movement and, 167; delayed, 168, 169; metamorphosis and, 219 –220; removal of Yiddish speech, 162, 307n22; time and place associated with, 211–212 Aliyah Bet, 103 allegory, 21, 23, 30, 135, 261; experiential detail and, 33; “figural plasticity” and, 125; witness defiance of, 140. See also personal-allegorical testimony

Almos, Marsha, 126 –130, 131 Alter, Jane, 177 American soldiers, at Dachau, 178 Amery, Jean, 231 Ancoli, Esther, 29 –33, 136, 262 Anolik, Charles, 24 antisemitism, 45, 67, 127–130, 133, 134, 299n44 Apter, Emily, 266 Arab-Israeli War (1948), 146, 314n37 Arad, Yitzhak, 11 Arendt, Hannah, 154, 260 Arnel, Jack (Yasha), 131, 136, 152, 226, 232 –233 Aryeh, Yocheved, 104, 149 –150, 214, 217, 230 Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, 12 audio testimony, 6, 20, 58, 78 Auschwitz, 73, 239 authenticity, 38, 157, 159, 164, 183 autobiography, 15 Aviya’s Summer [Hakayits shel Aviya] (film, 1988, dir. Cohen), 65 Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry (Hebrew University), 35 Bachelard, Gaston, 239 Bahat, Sa’adyah, 214 –215 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 203

323

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324

INDEX

Ball, Karyn, 16 Baltser, Khane, 171–173, 176, 177, 189 bandits (banditn), 113, 119, 120 –123, 136, 265; mentioned in Yiddish song, 173, 176; postwar interactions and, 138; Soviet usage of term, 303n41 Bargman, Gita, 189 –192, 194 –195, 243, 245, 255 Baron, Shlomo, 163 Barowsky, Irv, 137 Barthes, Roland, 183 Bauer, Yehuda, 78 Beitar Movement, 95, 96 –97, 102, 226 Belarussians, 301n8 belonging, 66, 75 –76, 78, 82, 120; eygene (“one’s own”) and, 86; geographic, 89; ideological challenge to eygene model, 89, 92, 94; individual struggle and, 100; Israel as monumental site of, 207; temporal rupture and, 106 Ben-Ya’akov, Yosef, 3, 5, 213 –214, 216, 229; metamorphosis in Israel, 219 –220; pre-Holocaust Litvak legacy and, 13 Bergson, Henri, 124 Bernstein, Michael Andre, 125 Beyrak, Nathan, 36, 46 Bielas, Luba, 229 bigotry, 133 –136, 140 Bildverbot (ban on sacred images), 246, 317n87 biography, 126, 159, 217; autobiography, 15; of family members, 126; language and, 184, 197, 199, 201; place and, 234; relational, 56 Birkenau, 298n29 black hole, Holocaust as, 203, 206, 210, 255 blood-libel (ritual murder) charges, 120, 303n37 Boder, David, 20, 310n53 body: body language of witnesses, 8, 17, 161, 249; corpus delicti (body of a crime), 112, 139, 301n13; description of victims, 139; facial expressions, 8; sensememory, 30, 56, 180. See also sensation

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Bomba, Abraham, 57 Bonder, Joan, 231 Brichah (Zionist emigration underground), 11, 167 Browning, Christopher, 107 Budapest ghetto, 204 Bund, 163 Butrimonys massacre, 49 camera, testimonies and, 1, 57, 160, 265; camera as witness, 15; camera crew in witnesses’ houses, 61; invisible fourth wall and, 54; prohibition against turning off camera, 31; zooming in, 182 –183. See also video testimony Canada, Lithuanian Jews in, 11–12 Carter, Jimmy, 23 Caruthers, Mary, 203, 237 Catholics, 33 Cesarini, David, 4 children, 114, 115, 120; children’s camp, 145; of Holocaust survivors, 156, 170; Yiddish language and, 165 –166 chronotope, 203, 226 Clevs, Arnold, 136 Cole, Tim, 204 collaborators, local, 10, 41– 42 collective-forensic testimony, 5 –6, 17–18, 46 –60; as documentary, 155 communal footnoting, 142, 149, 151 communal-monumental testimony, 5, 17–18, 37, 108, 141 communism, 79, 91, 213, 265; challenge to eygene paradigm, 89, 95; Jews associated with, 119; Komyug (Komsomol), 93, 95; Lithuanian Communist Party, 299n39. See also Soviet Union communitas (collective belonging), 38, 39 concentration camps, 9, 74, 109, 215, 320n18; deflationary descriptions of, 249 –250; dreyen zikh (“wriggling through”) as survival strategy in, 251–254; German perpetrators in, 124; motifs in depiction of, 245 –254; negation of human subjectivity in, 144; spatial estrangement of, 248 –249

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INDEX

Confino, Alon, 4, 319n5 consensus-making process, 152 contingent details, 28 –29, 33 conversion, 3, 263; language and, 162, 199; nonconversion, 254; place-conversion, 224, 246 corpus delicti (body of a crime), 112, 139, 301n13 courtyard (hoyf/heyf ), 121, 226, 241 Dachau concentration camp, 73, 103, 123, 136, 227, 318n94; deflationary description of, 249 –250; dreyen zikh (“wriggling through”) as survival strategy in, 252, 253; Landsberg-Kaufering subsidiary, 132; liberation of, 228 –229; memories and name of, 239; MünchenAllach labor camp, 178, 179 Danzig (Gdan´sk), 210, 215 Death March, 83, 165 deflation, 249 –250 DeKoven Ezrahi, Sidra, 313n10, 314n29 dialects: Lithuanian, 60, 294n110; Lithuanian Yiddish, 310n48, 311n61; PolishYiddish, 62 dialogue, testimony as, 16, 109, 140; dialogue reconstruction, 27; geographical knowledge and, 214 –215; in-group, 195; internal versus external dialogue, 68; place and, 207; reconstruction of, 27, 68; victim-perpetrator dialogue, 147 Diaspora, 144, 161, 213, 222 Diner, Dan, 125 Diner, Hasia, 4, 23 disbelief, 4, 5 displaced persons, 11–12, 190, 217; Feldafing camp, 244; LIFE magazine photos of children, 21, 22 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 141–142 Dornier, Carole, 28 Douglas, Lawrence, 15 dreyen zikh (“wriggling through”), as survival strategy, 236, 246, 247, 251–254 dugri speech (“straight talk”), 38 Dwork, Debórah, 8, 285n23

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325

East Prussia, 236 ecology (oikos), 3, 7, 13, 66; defined, 2, 283n2; family and, 75 education, 12, 76, 86; folkshul, 90; Hebrew language and, 96, 97; Jewish versus Polish schools, 67; Talmud Torah schools, 40; Yiddish language and, 163 Eichmann, Adolf, trial of (1961–1962), 35, 140, 141 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 154 Einsatzgruppen (order police), 11, 136 Eliach, Yaffa, 170 embeddedness concept, 84, 187, 235, 237, 264; disembedding, 102 –103, 146, 149; dreyen zikh strategy and, 252; social imaginary and, 79 emotion, 84, 261; emotional economy, 71, 130 enemy, definitions of the, 9 –10 Engel, David, 4 English language, 75, 77, 157–158 English-language/American testimonial ecology, 5, 25, 95, 152, 199; on concentration camps, 245 –246; connection of biography and place, 220 –234; “Freudian family” model and, 65; Holocaust as crisis of values, 125 –140, 144; nuclear family and therapeutic imagination, 66 –78; on perpetrators, 108, 109; personal-allegorical mode and, 5, 17, 18 –34; spontaneous expression in, 262; temporal rupture in, 96; Yiddish words and accents in, 157, 170 –188 Ereda (Estonian work camp), 82, 87 escapes and escape attempts, 98 –99, 128; from Dachau, 228 –229; soldier’s voice recollected, 129 Estonia/Estonians, 82, 87, 145, 236, 301n8 estrangement, mapping of, 214 –216, 223, 226, 246, 248 –249 ethnicity, 5, 66, 109; intimacy with perpetrators through, 117–119; language and, 197; of perpetrators, 110, 301n8; transcended through political ideology, 94 Etsel military underground, 103

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326

INDEX

evacuation, of Jews to Soviet Union, 50, 255 experiential-allegorical genre, 108 eygene (“one’s own”), 66, 78 –79, 97, 112, 296n7; defined, 79, 297n23; HebrewIsraeli testimonies compared with, 100, 103; people included in, 84 –87; political ideologies and, 88 –95; portrayal of enemies and, 110 Eyshishok (Eišiške˙s), town of, 10 family, 27, 65, 120; eygene (“one’s own”) network and, 66, 78; “Freudian family” model, 65; “Holocaust family,” 65; national history connected to, 96 –101; nuclear family, 66 –78, 88, 92, 186, 262; “Polish mother” typology, 98, 103 –106; politics of, in prewar Lithuania, 101–102; replacement families, 298n29; separated in Stutthof, 166 –167; silence about parents, 87–88; torn apart by violence, 261. See also eygene (“one’s own”) “fascists” (use of the word), 110, 117 Feldman, Liuba, 1–3, 5 –6, 13 Felman, Shoshana, 14, 35, 42, 141 Fiddler on the Roof, 79 “figural plasticity,” 125. See also Bernstein, Michael Andre Finkel, Matis, 138 –140, 262 flash-forward (prolepsis), 215 –216 Fletcher, Angus, 23 Folkists, 299n39 forensics, 28, 48, 50, 108, 123, 264 Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (Yale University), 6, 18 –19, 21, 67; interviewing procedures, 25; peak activity of, 37; testimony recorded in Israel, 36; Yiddish shadow in testimony and, 170, 171, 179 –184, 309n34 Frank, Anne, 31, 65 Friedländer, Saul, 4 Fun letstn khurbn (journal), 175, 190, 192 Geguzhinskis, Meishe, 89, 92 –95, 123, 192, 265 Geler, Rivka, 248 –249

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gender, 2, 302n32; language and, 161, 312n73, 312n81; “Polish mother” stereotype, 98, 103 –106, 159 genocide, 3 genre, testimonial, 17, 18, 288n18; oral interlocutors and, 288n20; tested on different audiences, 60 –63 geography, 10, 67, 96, 201, 245, 259; accident or circumstance of, 66, 90; domestic space versus urban/national, 225; “haunted,” 204; knowledge and agency in, 207–220; postwar, 224, 234, 255; prewar home and geographical coordinates, 206, 212 –213; transitional, 224; wartime, 226. See also place German language, 130, 131–132, 178, 197 Germans, 44, 51, 107, 141, 180 –181; camp officials, 108; cruelty of, 153 –154; escape allowed by German soldiers, 228 –229; “front generation” of interwar years, 260; hazy representation of, 110, 123 – 125; killed by Russian (Soviet) forces, 117; Lithuanian collaborators and, 119; postwar generations of, 129 –130; Soviet forces and German civilians, 145; uniformed, 10, 24 Germany, 53, 56, 236 Gerul (Geruliai), 105 Gestapo, 80, 223 ghettos, 9, 12, 110, 143, 245; intermingled with everyday geography, 206; workbarter systems in, 194 Giordano, Alberto, 204 Göcke, Wilhelm, 135 Golani, Hana, 38, 153 –154, 162 –163, 186, 224, 248; geography and imperfect journey of, 208 –212; interviewer’s guidelines and, 263; place-epiphany of, 217; Shoah Foundation digital map of journey, 205 Goldenberg, Myrna, 298n29 Goldfields concentration camp (Estonia), 248, 249 Goodfriend, Betty, 76, 134 –135, 152, 186 –187, 229 Gotler, Meri, 86 –87, 88, 194, 248, 255, 294n95

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INDEX

Greenspan, Henry, 16 Grinberg, Uri Zvi, 158 –159 Gross, Jan, 107 Grossman, David, 208 Groysie Aktsie [Big Action] (1941), 55, 82, 87, 88 Guattari, Felix, 283n2 Gurevitch, Zali, 207, 241 Haim, Ofer, 146 –147, 150 –151 Halbwachs, Maurice, 7 Haluts, 299n39, 308n22 Hashomer Hatza‘ir (Hashoymer Hatzair), 90, 96, 213 “hearsay,” 20, 28 Hebrew language, 3, 5, 28, 104, 197; educational institutions and, 96, 97; Even-Shoshan Dictionary, 253, 318n97; masculinity associated with, 159, 308n22 Hebrew-language/Israeli testimonial ecology, 8, 63, 89, 199; communalmonumental mode and, 5, 17, 34, 34 – 46, 263; on concentration camps, 245 –246; family histories and, 66, 296n4; hindsightedness in, 153; Jewish body politic and, 66; knowledge and agency in geography, 207–220; on letamren (“to maneuver”) strategy, 252 –253, 318nn96 –97; on love in the family-nation, 95 –106; on perpetrators, 108, 109, 140 –155; presentness of information, 152; temporal rupture in, 96, 103, 104, 106; Yiddish words and accents in, 157, 158 –170 Hersey, John, 21 Hever, Hanan, 315n42 Heydrich, Reinhard, 140 “Heykher Man” [“Tall Man”] (song), 190 hindsightedness, 153 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 72, 129, 130, 136, 161 HKP (Heeres Kraftfahr Park) labor camp, 69, 71, 297n13 Hollywood films, 21 Holocaust, 1, 8, 261; as catastrophe, 2 –3, 70, 73, 159, 234, 267; courtroom testimony in trials related to, 15; culpability of perpetrators, 108; frame-breaking

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327

quality of, 147; as historical meaning break, 3 – 4; museums devoted to, 215; near annihilation of Lithuanian Jews, 11; “second Holocaust,” 121, 137; sociality and, 97; as transvaluation, 10, 201, 202; as trauma, 203 Holocaust (television miniseries, 1978), 65 Holocaust survivors: aliyah (immigration to Israel/Palestine) of, 219 –220; in American media, 21; mental and social well-being of, 20; suicide among, 230 –231; “survivor syndrome,” 21; Yiddish language in America and, 184 –188 homecoming, 84, 206, 217–218, 254 humor, 124, 133, 145, 249 Idels, Genia, 63, 124 identity: American Jews and Yiddish, 187–188, 311n64; disclosure of, 185; double, 186; Jewish identity, 72, 76, 180, 187; switch from one to another, 201; unclaimed, 158 ideology, 79, 84, 88, 99, 106 If This Is a Man (Levi), 108 Ilgoji Lova forest, 61 I Must Tell (Rolnikaite, 1963), 292 –293n83 indexical sign, 307n6 intimacy, 21, 60, 139, 232; in family relationships, 68, 77, 99, 261; in marriage, 91; between perpetrators and victims, 110 –125, 144, 147 Ioneson, Fania, 50 –51, 85, 86, 294n101, 316n63; deflationary description of Stutthof, 250; on deportation to Stutthof, 245; on postwar return to Lithuania, 256; street and courtyard as vantage point, 241–242 irony, 111, 124, 128, 145 Israel, 3, 84, 138; communication style in, 38; as a contemporary center of Jewish life, 8; Holocaust taught in education system, 140, 306n92; Lithuanian Jews in, 11; Museum of the Jewish Diaspora [Beit Hatfutsot] (Israel), 36; Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, 35; notion of shared psychic life of Israelis, 200n54; as place of belonging,

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328

INDEX

Israel (continued ) 207; proposal to ban Nazi symbols, 140 –141; Soviet Jewish immigration to, 295n114; testimonies delivered in, 5, 6, 9, 12; young-male community built in, 104. See also aliyah Israelis: Founders and Sons (Elon), 200n54 Jewish body politic, 66, 148; absent from testimonies, 75; “bureaucratic logic” and, 299n51; eygene imagining of, 84; mother figures and, 103; postHolocaust transformation and, 186; response to aggression, 141 Jewish Community of Lithuania, 13, 47 Jewish tradition, 3, 15, 76 Jockush, Laura, 4 Judenrat (Jewish council), 81, 181–182, 184 Kaczerginski, Shmerke, 47, 297n12 Kafka, Franz, 260 Kailis fur factory, 68, 69, 71, 297n12 Kanovich, Grigory, 234 –235, 293n93 Kaplan, Israel, 175, 195 Kaplan, Solomon, 135, 136, 187 Kaplanski, Luba, 39, 45 – 46, 104 –106 kapos (prisoner functionaries), 108, 140, 246 Kassow, Samuel, 88 Kastner trial (1955), 35 Katriel, Tamar, 38 Katsanovski, Hinda, 212 –213 Katz, Dovid, 285n28, 286n33, 316n71 Katz, Jacob, 3 – 4 Kedainer work camp, 77, 237 KGB (Soviet Committee for State Security), 49 Kidron, Carol, 4 –5 Kinder Aktsie [Children’s Action] (1944), 69, 97 kinship, 64, 66, 76; “biogenetics” and, 296n8; communism and, 91; kinmaking process, 71; tzuzamen (“together”) concept, 77, 78 Kirmayer, Laurence, 16 Klaipeda, 13, 152

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Klein, Dana, 290n45 Klooga concentration camp, 215, 251 knowledge, local, 55, 60, 236, 242; eygene (“one’s own”) and, 66; “small places” and, 236; topography and, 62 Kobilnik (Kobyliki, Narach), 181, 182, 310n55 Kogan, Cila, 39 – 44, 165, 263 Kohner, Hanna Bloch, 21 Koniuchovsky, Leyb, 293n87 Kovna (Kaunas), 1, 13, 52, 89, 96, 202; childhood home in, 225 –226; Choral Synagogue, 240, 242; failed homecoming to, 217–218; Groysie Aktsie [Big Action] (1941), 55, 82, 87, 88; Hebrewlanguage education in, 163; Laisve˙s Aleja street, 256, 318nn102 –103; liberated from Nazi control, 100; Ninth Fort, 243; political youth movements in, 90; rabbi beheaded in, 134; Red Army entry into (1940), 241; Seventh Fort, 87, 118; survivors’ postwar return to, 255. See also Slobodke (Vilijampole˙) neighborhood Kovna ghetto, 23 –24, 53, 69, 77, 97; deportation from, 147–149; description of living conditions in, 172; eygene (“one’s own”) collective in, 81; haves and have-nots in, 191–192; Jewish police in, 190; killings in, 73; Ninth Fort, 239; map of 244; religious life in, 72; role of Lithuanian collaborators, 118 –119; shared morale of ghetto inhabitants, 97; songs from, 173 –176, 189, 190 –192; spatial estrangement in, 222 –223; transportation to Stutthof from, 97–98 Krause, Kurt, 135 –136 labor camps, 9, 77, 245 LaCapra, Dominic, 75, 317n87 language, 7, 13, 157; ethnicity and, 197; language conversion, 162, 199; language switch in testimony, 114 –115, 118; multilingual expectations, 196 –201 Lanzmann, Claude, 57, 237, 317n87 Latvia/Latvians, 113, 236, 301n8

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INDEX

Laub, Dori, 4, 16, 21, 122, 171; American witnesses’ use of Yiddish and, 181, 182; on failure of “I-Thou” relationship, 126; on historical reality of the Holocaust, 115; in Israel, 36; on “second Holocaust,” 121 Lejeune, Philippe, 15, 24 Lemkin, Raphael, 3 Lempertas, Ilya, 49 –50, 313n2 Levi, Primo, 108 Levin, Dov, 35 Levitan, Bat Sheva, 101, 219, 220 Leys, Ruth, 4 –5 Liebman, Charles, 141–142 Liekis, Šaru ¯ nas, 47 Life Is with People, 79 Linkaicˇiai camp, 32 Lithuania, 5, 6, 8, 66; antisemitism in, 26; disappearance from postwar map, 229 –232; German-influenced area of, 197; German invasion (1941), 11, 110; Holocaust commemoration in, 47; independence (1990), 12; Jews remaining in or returning to, 201; political parties in, 298 –299n39; in postwar Soviet Union, 253; Soviet annexation (1939) of, 9, 30, 90 –91, 93, 242; survivors’ postwar return to, 168 –169, 254 –258 Lithuanian Activists Front (LAF), 91, 120 Lithuanian Jewish Cultural Society, 47 Lithuanian language, 47, 50, 118, 165, 197–198; dialects of, 60, 294n110; Lithuanian words in Yiddish testimony, 196 Lithuanians, 44, 51, 142; Jews sheltered by, 33, 165, 197; victimization under Soviet occupation, 155 Lithuanians, as perpetrators, 41– 42, 125, 141, 237, 261, 306n95; antisemitism and, 128, 130; bigotry versus human values, 133 –136; collaborators amnestied by Soviet decree, 258, 319n110; concrete description of, 110; convicted in Soviet war crimes trials, 49; evidence marked by perpetrators, 130 –133; guilt on chronological continuum, 120 –123; Jews evicted from homes, 143 –144;

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329

killed by Soviet security forces, 257– 258; as military opponents, 142, 146, 147–149; neighbors, 111, 112, 127; partisans, 42, 177; perpetrator as common knowledge, 149 –155; victims’ intimacy with, 117–119; white bands worn by, 91, 117, 123; witness’s rage at, 138 –140 Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews), 10 –13, 175 Lost, The (Mendelsohn, 2006), 65 Lo Tafchidunu ship, 103 Lubetkin, Zivia, 34, 34 Luria, Simkhele, 111–112 Lyotard, Jean-François, 301n6 martyrdom, 15, 153 mass shootings, 11, 118 material objects, memory and, 65, 186 –187 matrix, social, 60, 78, 79 Matusevicius, Ishaiyahu, 87, 120, 240, 242, 249, 251 Maus (Spiegelman, 1986 –1991), 65, 220 –221, 221 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 93, 95 mediation, 50, 170 Memel (Klaipe˙da), 72, 197 memory, 16, 18, 48, 52, 59, 77; blend of past and present sensibilities, 158; bodily, 297n11; childhood, 31; collective memory, 7; emotional, 39; family photographs and, 65; family stories and, 220 –221, 221; Holocaust in excess of, 204; landscape of, 10, 16; language and, 8; memory habits, 44; memory houses, 203, 237; memory-work, 35 –36; nuclear family as memory lens, 67–72; pain memory, 152; personal experience and, 24; place and, 237, 239; private and communal, 39; on-screen, enclosed memory chamber, 203; sense-memory, 30; shock of inevitable change and, 264; two kinds of Holocaust memory, 259; untranslatable, 170; veridical, 73; Yiddish and memory retrieval, 180, 262 mental health, 20 metamorphosis, 149, 154, 219 –220, 232 Meyer, Carol, 20

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INDEX

Minin, Dvorah, 122, 152 Mintz, Alan, 4 Miron, Dan, 66 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 140 monumentalization, 43 – 44 monumental testimony, 155, 216 Mosshovitchus, Echyoshas, 62, 63, 193 –194, 249 –252 Murav, Harriet, 235 Murchik, Shoshana, 101–102, 103, 214 names: “good names,” 112; of local perpetrators, 112 –113; people titled by place names, 79; place names, 213, 236, 238 –239; of witnesses, 295n111 narration, 67, 189, 220 Nazis, 110, 135, 140 –141, 239, 260, 319n5 neighbors, 96, 97, 142, 265; attacks by, 11; authoritative accounts of, 238; betrayal by, 137; prewar relations among, 111–112 Neumann, Boaz, 308n22 New York City, 232 –234 Nichanian, Marc, 155, 319n6 Niederland, William, 21 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 260 “Nit ayer mazel ” [“Not Your Luck” or “Hard Luck”] (song), 190 –192, 312n75 NKVD (Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), 49 Norich, Anita, 309n33 North America, testimonies from, 5, 6, 8, 261; expectations of Holocaust memory and, 9; Litvak organizations and, 12 nostalgia, 76, 299n44, 315n38 Nuremberg Laws, 140 Nusach Vilne (New York), 12 Ofir, Adi, 147, 305n83 Oliver, Kelly, 304n62 Operation Shylock (Roth), 260 oral-history projects, 35, 294n108 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 260 otherness, violent rejection of, 110

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Our Holocaust (Gutfreund, 2006), 65 Oushakine, Sergeui, 188 Owic, Samuel, 178, 192 Ožalas, Jonas, 151 Palemon (Palemonas) work camp, 87 Pale of Settlement, former, 235 Palestine, 100 –101, 145, 211 Palmach, 145 Park zabytikh evreev [The Park of Forgotten Jews] (Kanovich), 234 partisans: anti-Soviet “forest brothers,” 121; Jewish, 9, 12, 187; Lithuanian collaborators/perpetrators described as, 42, 177; as sacred category, 42 Passover, 31, 256 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 307n6 Perecman, Ya’akov, 244 Perk, Kalman, 96 –101, 102, 104, 308n19; on deportation from Kovna ghetto, 147–149; failed homecoming to Kovna, 217–218; on father’s last words in Yiddish, 167; postwar Lithuania and, 230 perpetrators, 107–109, 141, 264; communal footnoting and, 142; intimate accusation in Yiddish-Lithuanian testimony, 110 –125; as military opponents, 146 –149; motivations of, 119. See also Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, as perpetrators personal-allegorical testimony, 5, 17–18, 226 –227 personal experience, 28, 29, 39, 262; in American Holocaust discourse, 21; narration and, 56, 59; negotiation and, 33; rejected in favor of history, 27; truth value placed on, 20 Pesmen, Dale, 253 photography, 183, 320n18 Pianist, The (film), 237 Pinchevski, Amit, 20 pinkeysim (community records), 50 place, 145, 157; embodied knowledge and, 203; motifs in depiction of concentration camps, 245 –254; “non-places” of Holocaust, 203 –204, 226 –229,

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INDEX

245 –246; outbreak of war and ghetto period, 242 –245, 244; place-epiphanies, 216 –217; place names as identity cards, 240 –242; “saying the names” of, 213 pogroms, 11, 110, 120, 303n38 Poland, 27, 107, 180, 217, 237; Polish Jews, 83; political parties in, 88, 299n39; Vilna under Polish rule, 26 Poles, 67, 107, 110; antisemitism and, 130; goods stolen from Jews by, 131; as perpetrators, 150 Polish language, 144, 197 “Polish mother” typology, 98, 103 –106, 159 political parties, 88 –95, 298 –299n39 Porat, Dina, 4 Porat, Rivkah, 160 –162, 166, 167–169, 173 prisoners of war, 59, 302n19 prolepsis (flash-forward), 215 –216 psychoanalysis, 20, 180 psychotherapy, 20, 73, 186 Rabinovich, Bella, 123 Radvilishik (Radviliškis), town of, 30, 167–168, 199; as “ghetto” or “camp,” 32, 291n54; survivors remaining in, 257 rape, wartime, 118, 303n33 Rappaport, Naomi, 297n10 Ravensbrück, 298n29 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 306n92 Red Army, Soviet, 92, 93, 100, 116; in flight from German advance, 111; Sixteenth (Lithuanian) Division, 115, 198, 200 Rego Park, N.Y., 220, 221, 315n42 Reizbaum, Marilyn, 315n42 religion, 91, 163; Jewish holidays, 255 –256; Kaddish recitation, 239; kloyz (prayer house), 237; loss of faith, 154; rediscovery of, 232 revenge stories, 115, 116, 117, 146; messianic motif and, 153; rage in witness testimony, 139 –140; rejection of revenge, 136, 145; sentiment of revenge in Yiddish song, 175 Riga, 111

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331

righteous gentiles, 33 Rolnikaite, Masha, 292n83 Rosenthal, Ruvik, 140 Roskies, David, 4, 180 Roth, Philip, 260 Rozenberg, Doba, 80 –84, 112 –113, 194, 294n95, 298n29 Rudof, Joanne, 19 Russian language, 47, 52, 57, 188, 197; expanded audience of reception and, 235; as official language of the Red Army, 198; Russian words in Yiddish testimony, 196; testimonies in, 50 Russians, 110 Sa’adyah, Bahat, 142 –146, 147 Schindler’s List (film), 237 science, 216, 229 Search, The (film, 1948, dir. Zinnemann), 21 See Under: Love (Grossman, 1989), 65 Seidman, Naomi, 175, 310n43 self-evaluation, 290n45 selfhood, 59, 225 semiotics, Peircean, 307n7 sensation, 13, 18, 39, 152, 250, 261, 262; of catastrophe, 73, 75; of nonpersonhood, 132, 149; of powerlessness, 109; selfgenesis and, 80; of victimhood, 108; of vulnerability, 223 Seventh Fort, 87, 118 sexual abuse, 129 Shavl (Šiauliai) German army entry into (1941), 59, 146; Kalniuk (Kalniukas, Kalnelis) subsection, 111, 130, 302n29; liberated from Nazi control, 115, 117; prewar Jewish life in, 39 – 40 Shavl ghetto, 9, 39, 59 –60, 103, 113, 291n54; “blue passports” in, 161–162; guards in, 51; in hiding from roundup in, 164; Lithuanian guards in, 122; public hanging in, 153 –154; rural hiding places and, 198; work-camp system, 113 Shenker, Noah, 284n15, 289n21 Shoah (film, 1985, dir. Lanzmann), 57, 237, 317n87

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INDEX

Shoah Foundation, USC, 18, 23, 85; digital maps, 205; “Future Messages,” 136; Institute for Visual History and Education, 6; interviewing procedures, 25; location video footage, 236 –240, 238, 313n2; peak activity of, 25, 37; questionnaire used by interviewers, 19 –20, 36, 82, 176; testimony recorded in Israel, 36 –37; Visual History Archives, 1; witnesses sought by, 50, 294n97; Yiddish shadow in testimony and, 170 –179, 309n34 Sholem Aleichem, 78 shooting pits, 114, 150 –151, 152, 216 shtetl, 79, 80, 114, 307n13; “death of the shtetl,” 78; nostalgia for, 315n38; political parties in, 299n39 Shub, Gideon, 102 –103, 104, 164, 165, 198, 253 Shukian (Šaukienai), town of, 85 Shuster, Gershon, 118 –119, 193, 303n34; on deportation to work camp, 246 –248; on dreyen zikh idiom, 246, 247; on languages, 197; on life in Vilna ghetto, 243 Shvabes Hebrew gymnasium, 97–98, 200n54 Shvekshne (Švekšna), town of, 59 silences, 5, 159, 265 Siniuk, Chaim, 87, 117–118 Six-Day War (1967), 35 Slobodke (Vilijampole˙) neighborhood, 85, 223, 240, 316n66; bandits (banditn) in, 91; pogrom in, 242 Smetona, Antanas, 89, 90, 299n44 Snyder, Timothy, 285n25 social imaginary, 2, 7, 65, 252; embedded, 79; nuclear family as, 71 Sofia Gurevitch School, 86 solidarity, 64, 65, 88, 211 songs, 58, 173 –176, 189 –190, 294n108; “Heykher Man” (“Tall Man”), 190; “Nit ayer mazel ” (“Not Your Luck” or “Hard Luck”), 190 –192, 312n75; political party songs, 95; “Di zelbe gasn

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un tramvayen” (“The Same Streets, the Same Streetcars”), 242 South America, testimonies in, 6 Soviet Union, 9, 47, 151; annexation of Lithuania, 9, 30, 90 –91, 93, 242; collapse of, 7, 125, 266; easing of restrictions on Jewish emigration, 12; German invasion (1941), 26; jokes about Soviet soldiers, 27, 29, 290n46; Litvaks in unoccupied territory of, 12; postwar Lithuania, 255; as “Russia” or “Russians,” 91–92, 301n8; Yiddish language spoken in, 12, 49, 312n79. See also war crimes investigations, Soviet space, 202, 203; loss of spatial knowledge, 215; prewar home and geographical coordinates, 212 –213; of shelter and exile, 222 –226; space-time progression, 206; spatial estrangement, 223, 226, 248 –249. See also geography; place Special State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the German Fascists and their Accomplices (ChGK), 48 – 49 speech acts, 14 Spiegelman, Art, 220 Stalin, Joseph, death of, 12 Stern Gang (Lehi), 100 –101 Stutthof concentration camp, 1, 38, 39, 53, 54; arrival in, 214; contradictions of German bureaucratic authority in, 124; crematorium, 127, 215; Death March from (1945), 128, 165; deportations to, 168, 209 –210; descriptions of, 215 –216, 223, 247; dreyen zikh (“wriggling through”) as survival strategy in, 251–252; family bonds and, 77, 83, 84, 103, 104; physical reactions to memories of, 212; transportation from Kovna ghetto to, 97–98, 148, 245 subjectivity, 7, 204, 304n62; “empathic listener” and, 16; intersubjectivity, 63; loss of, 245; negated in concentration camps, 144 suffering, semiotics of, 266

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INDEX

suicide, 230 –231 Sultanik, Bronia, 227 survival mechanisms, 178 “survivor syndrome,” 21 Sutkus, Juozas, 151 Sutzkever, Avrom, 47 Sužiede˙lis, Saulius, 47 synagogues, 13, 40, 77, 206; attendance in the ghetto, 43; in Lithuania, 240, 242, 256; in the United States, 224 Szabad, Tsemakh, 240, 316n71 Taitz, Gita, 1–3, 5, 131–134, 226; personal-allegorical testimony of, 5; pre-Holocaust Litvak legacy and, 13; rediscovery of religion, 232; on shelter and exile in America, 222 –225 Tammuz, Benjamin, 253 Tavrig (Taurage˙), town of, 38, 208 –209 Taylor, Charles, 2, 79, 203 television, language of, 54 testimony: as accusation, 293n87; “bad testimony,” 18; contingent details, 28 –29, 33; defined, 14; as dialogue, 16; kinship and, 71; location video footage, 316n63; modes of, 5 –6; monumentalized, 35; pacing of interviews, 28, 30 –31; scenes versus summaries, 28; “talking head” frame, 202; testimonial genres, 17 therapeutic narrative, 232 This is Your Life (television show), 21 Tishmanene, Basia, 49, 52 –59, 62 Tolts, Mark, 312n79 translation, 40, 160, 177, 307n5; conceptual, 186; between ecologies of testimony, 140; failures in, 44; untranslatability, 170, 266, 267, 320n16 transvaluation, 5, 6, 10, 106, 261–262; allegory and, 23; change over time and, 265; defined, 4; Litvak legacy and, 13; Yiddish song and, 189 trauma, 203, 266, 306n91; critics of trauma theory, 4 –5; modeled in American media, 21, 22; signs of trauma in speech, 310n53; transmission

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333

through generations, 65; traumatic index, 20 Treblinka, 57 Tsalzon, Leia, 52, 58 –60, 197–198, 265 Tsukerman, Itshak, 34 Ukrainians, 51, 110, 114, 304n49 Ulman, Miriam, 159 –162 United States: as a contemporary center of Jewish life, 8; Holocaust survivors in, 220 –221, 221, 224, 232 –234, 315n42; Lithuanian Jews in, 11–12; Soviet Jewish immigration to, 295n114 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 23 Vailes, Abe, 80 Vaivara work camp, 82, 87, 104, 145 Veidlinger, Jeffrey, 299n49, 316n64 veridical consensus, 150 video testimony, 15, 34, 54, 159, 260, 262, 266; location video footage, 237–238, 238, 313n2, 316n63; as new format, 50, 78; personal experience and, 19, 30; psychoanalysis and, 20; public familiarity with, 72; “witnessing the witness” in, 58; Yad Vashem and, 6, 36, 37 Vilkomir (Ukmerge˙), 119, 120, 200, 257 Vilna (Vilnius), 13, 62, 121, 202; Choral Synagogue, 256, 318n103; German invasion (1941), 68, 136, 143; Green Bridge, 230 –231, 255, 315n54; as “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” 10; Jewish Museum, 47; in late and post-Soviet years, 234; prewar life in, 25, 226; Soviet invasion (1939), 25; survivors’ postwar return to, 217, 232, 255; transfer from Polish to Lithuanian rule (1939), 26; Yiddish language in, 200, 312n79; YIVO research institute, 88 Vilna ghetto, 62, 131, 147; deportation from, 214; Jews looted of belongings en route to, 152; liquidation of, 68 –69, 97; place names in, 242 –245, 244; song from, 242 Vilnai-Shapiro, Meir, 76, 77, 262

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INDEX

Vlock, Laurel, 181 voice: crippled voice of speaking subject, 131, 304n62; of German soldier, 129; “soldier-voice” testimony, 146 –149, 151; translation and, 307n5; Yiddish maternal voice, 169 Voldemaras, Augustinas, 90 Wajnryb, Ruth, 170 Wall, The (Hersey, 1950), 21 Waltzer, Kenneth, 298n29 Wannsee Conference, 140 war crimes investigations, Soviet, 47– 49, 48, 290n48 Wehrmacht (German army), 11, 135 Wieviorka, Annette, 6 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 306n3, 314n19 Wolf, Ze’ev Galpern, 292n76 Yad Vashem Archives, 6, 35, 36, 39, 215; canonized Holocaust knowledge in, 149; interviewers from, 45; YouTube channel, 96, 98 yandes (“soft, compassionate values”), 159 Years of Extermination, The (Friedländer), 4 Yellow Permit Action (Gele Shayn Aktsie), 292n80 Yeshurun, Avot, 159 Yiddish language, 10, 47, 77; America narrated through, 184 –188, 311n64; decline among American Jews, 309n34; dialects, 62, 310n48, 311n61; enclosed in German, 178; erasure or concealment of, 231; femininity associated with, 158, 161, 183, 308n22; idioms, 125; as Jewish identity marker, 164, 308n26; “Khurbn Yiddish” (disaster Yiddish), 188, 196, 201; latent memory and, 262; Lithuanian place names in, 283n1; malekh (“angel”), 193 –195; mother associated with, 158 –159, 163; orality tradition of, 8; past generations associated with, 166; shm-reduplication satire, 249; as sign of truth, 179 –184, 310n53; songs in, 173 –176, 189 –192, 242; in the Soviet Union, 12, 49, 312n79; in the United

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States, 234; working around Yiddish in English-language testimonies, 171–179; Yiddish accent in English, 156 –157; Di yidishe shtime [The Jewish Voice] (newspaper), 161, 308n20 Yiddish-language/Lithuanian testimonial ecology, 1, 8, 87; collective-forensic mode and, 5, 17, 46 –60, 138, 154 –155, 264; on concentration camps, 246; on eygene (“one’s own”), 78 –95; family histories and, 66, 296n4; gradual shifts emphasized in, 106; intimate violation of local milieu, 144; Jewish body politic and, 66; multilingual expectations, 196 –201; on place-names and locations of the Holocaust, 234 –259; recorded in Israel, 63; recorded in Lithuania, 6, 58, 61, 62, 63; recorded in North America, 295n114; transformation in, 264 –265; transplanted, 63; traumatic silence in, 124; victim-perpetrator dialogue, 147 Yiddish-language testimonies, on perpetrators, 108 –109; hazy representation of Germans, 123 –125; Holocaust embedded in neighborhoods, 111–117; intimacy through ethnicity, 117–119; Lithuanian guilt on chronological continuum, 120 –123 YIVO research institute, 88 yizker-bikher (memory books), 50 Yom Kippur War (1973), 35 Yonishik (Joniškis), shtetl of, 114, 151 Young, Allan, 297n11 Young, James, 57, 170 youth culture, political, 88, 96, 104, 184 Yurberik (Jurbarkas), 80, 84 Yurchak, Alexei, 297n22 Zak, Khatzkel, 51–52, 85, 120, 243; on equation of Jews and Communists, 119; on naming of victims and perpetrators, 113 “Di zelbe gasn un tramvayen” [“The Same Streets, the Same Streetcars”] (song), 242 Zelbovich, Iankel, 202, 236 –239 Zhager (Žagare˙) massacre (1941), 48, 85

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INDEX

Zhezhmir (Žiežmariai), 256 –257 Zinger, Polina, 294n95 Zinnemann, Fred, 21 Zionism, 11, 26, 42 – 43, 95 –96; Dror Hakhshara (youth-training collective), 211; ethos of Jewish agency, 228; family relations and, 96, 98 –99, 101–102, 104;

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335

General Zionism, 299n39; national personality and, 103; political parties and, 90, 95; sociality and, 88; Yiddishists and Bundists in opposition to, 163 Zitkin, Ellen, 23 –24, 25, 72, 73 –75, 87, 225 Zuckerman, Ghil’ad, 318n92 Zusman, Yafah, 163, 166 –167, 169, 215, 253

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