Oral History and the War

This moment, which can be described as a passage of memory, strikes me as being particularly important. This book is a clear testament to this, and is itself marked by it. It is founded upon biographical accounts of ‘witnesses’ – former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. I have listened to, and recorded, the greater part of these stories myself. The remaining ones were taped in the same period and all the recordings were eventually stored in the archive, where they were made available for further research and subsequent, different interpretations. The stories have remained, whilst most of my Interviewees are now dead. I can remember the meetings with them well, and my memory of these encounters is also recorded herein, alongside their own autobiographical memory. Subsequent commentators, should there be any, will be free of my personal experience of these meetings. By re-reading/rehearing/watching these accounts, they might thus see more, and see it more emphatically. Yet, for the very same reason, they may remain blind to certain aspects of importance to me.

There is yet another instance of the slide – or shift – of memory, of which this book is a token. Although strictly connected with the aforementioned phenomenon, it is specific to and very much embedded in the local Polish context. After all, the concentration camp experience was recounted in Poland long ago – narrated, in the first place, by surviving inmates. It was they who wrote memoirs, submitted testimonies and reported on their experiences. And, it was they, primarily, who wrote historical studies and contributed to the development of sites of memory in former camp locations. They also formed an important group that, to a significant extent, helped shaped what is known today in Poland as history-based politics. This group was also, incidentally, one the most prone to political manipulation. One method by which this was done was through the construction of a narrative of the Lager (as the camps were known in German) experience that excluded the annihilation of Jews. Although Holocaust victims were taken into account when it came to calculating the statistics of victims, this was done in such a way that, while remaining silent about the uniqueness of the Jewish experience in the camps, it allowed for its dilution among the ‘millions of victims of various nationalities’, with Poles at the fore.

Today, those distortions are fortunately, at least to a considerable degree, part of the history of the collective memory (and collective oblivion). The Holocaust experience has since been clearly articulated, reported and recounted. Moreover, this has been done not only by the few remaining survivors, although many of them have told their stories and also as part of oral history projects. A further contribution has been made by those who interpret their stories, including younger scholars using a contemporary language. Long denied, marginalised, and falsified, the story of the extermination of the Jews is today beginning to take on a distinct, comprehensible, and attainable shape – to those, naturally, who are willing to hear it.

Meanwhile, the story of the non-Jewish, other-than-Holocaust camp-related experience – of concentration camps, rather than extermination camps, to use the symbolic and simplified, but important, differentiation – remains an ‘old narrative’, one that dates back to ‘those years’, namely the early years of the post-war period. This story, once told by political prisoners, was set within a different culture of memory. It is rather awkward to listen to today and the language those narrators were accustomed to is now little understood. It all seems rather well known, exhausted in scholarly terms, unattractive in terms of research, or out of fashion. Hence, few are willing to contemplate this particular camp experience, even briefly. Even fewer are prepared to try and retell it anew, using a more contemporary and, perhaps, more comprehensible language.

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The starting point for this present study is, therefore, my own involvement as an interviewer for the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (MSDP) and other oral history projects. I emphasise this point in order to highlight two important aspects.

First, the central point of reference in all my analyses are the meetings held with former Lager inmates and their autobiographical stories, which I listened to (and, subsequently, read the transcripts, reheard the sound recordings, watched the video recordings). These meetings and stories come before any analysis. Therefore, I endeavour, to the extent that I am capable, to acknowledge and respect the subjectivity of my Interviewees, and their ability to interpret and give sense and meaning to their own experiences. Any of my own interpretations, with similarities and differences acknowledged and generalisations constructed, are built upon those primary interpretations, as referred to in the quoted fragments of the accounts.

A number of oral history projects, and all those I have participated in and contributed to, are of a documentary, rather than a research, nature. Yet, they remain open to research, and encourage further research; in particular, qualitative research.

My reading of the narrative autobiographical interviews with former prisoners may be classed as a qualitative analysis of content. Such analysis refers to several research perspectives, none of which I approach in a dogmatic fashion, while I shun a completely consistent application of the recommendations of any of them. My main inspirations are rooted in two sources. The first is the biographical sociology of Norman Denzin and Fritz Schütze. In particular, I take advantage of Schütze’s concept of trajectory, as one of the main biographical processes. The others is theoretical reflexion as part of the oral history concept, especially in ‘the most sociological’ concept of oral history, as represented, for example, by Michael Frisch, Paul Thompson, Daniel Bertaux and, especially, Michael Pollak, an author virtually unknown in Poland. With the oral autobiographies under analysis, I pose the questions of what is recounted, and how is it recounted. Thus, I refer to the known distinction proposed by Ingeborg Helling: biography as a means versus biography as a topic, whilst not espousing either option in this polarity. Rather, I attempt to combine both of these approaches.

I am interested in the experience of my Interviewees’ time in the concentration camp, as seen through their autobiographical accounts, the (hi)stories of their lives. My assumption is that the only access we have to their camp experiences of ‘there and then’ is (inter)mediated by the narrative here-and-now. Yet, the latter is not a simple representation of the bygone; on the contrary, it becomes embroiled in multiple contexts of social relevance, such as (but not only): the context of individual and collective/group memory; the context of identity; defining the interview situation by those questioned (and by the researcher himself/herself); and, the very course of the interaction. In analysing the autobiographical situations of former inmates, I attempt to recognise these contexts. Thus, the core of this study is based on attentive reading, listening and watching of the stories told by my Interviewees.

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The book is structured into three sections. The first section covers theoretical (as well as practical) contexts of relevance to my core research work, which I have grouped into two chapters.

The fourth chapter stands out against the structure of the book –a deliberate strategy, as emphasised by the chapter’s title, that refers to the narratives of female survivors of Mauthausen. I consider these narratives for a while. At the MSDP, we have recorded only three accounts in Poland of former women prisoners. None of these recordings was conducted by me personally. All these female Interviewees were sent to the camp as part of the so-called Warsaw transports, deported during the Uprising. Thus, their stories can be seen as part of the third specified group. By singling them out, my intent is to expose the specificity of the female experience of the camp, and of women’s autobiographical narratives. The reason behind this digression is not just a ‘gendered’ reading of these accounts, building on the category of cultural gender. The biological sex is no less important, as the women particularly suffered sexual violence when in the camp and very soon after the liberation. Allow me to inoffensively uphold this differentiation, though I do realise it is not always obvious.

The typology outlined above forms, intentionally, an introduction to the crucial, third section of this study. Here I analyse three biographical interviews, interspersing my interpretive commentaries throughout with extensive extracts (transcripts). Each of these narratives belongs to one of the three types noted above, but the case studies do not illustrate a preceding argument, nor are they meant to. Instead, they are, or, in any case, ought to be, self-contained research studies intended to reveal the diverse mechanisms for the construction of autobiographical narratives by my Interviewees (in a sense, together with me, as these accounts have developed in a situation of conversation, interaction, and exchange). These mechanisms range from the macro-social through to the interactional.

I have selected three out of some thirty interviews for my analytical purposes. That each of them belongs to one of the three types I have recognised answers the question as to why I selected three stories, but it does not yet tell why just those particular ones. This choice is not easy to rationalise: the researcher’s intuition has prevailed over a strict analytical procedure. Still, the choice is not completely random. The three interviews are not the ‘best’ of all those I have conducted with former Mauthausen prisoners. Nor are these accounts the longest or particularly ‘favourite’ ones. Yet, they do seem characteristic to me, typical and representative, to an extent – needless to say, in terms of so-called phenomenological, rather than statistical, representativeness. Having read several dozen transcripts, I eventually found these to be relatively ‘dense’, not just in terms of the number of episodes evoked and the multiplicity of biographical experiences, but also on the level of their interpretation, the richness of the meanings given to them by the narrators. This is not to say that these particular accounts offer, in a condensed form, all the elements that are dispersed across the other ones. The fact is, though, that much can be found in them.

My endeavours are centred on exposing, zooming in and commenting on the fragments of the narratives which answer the question of what the Interviewees actually remember and how they remember it. Moreover, how they interpret it, and what are the values, convictions and vision of the world that make up their frames of reference. The key motif that reoccurs across all the analyses, not just of the three specified case studies, is the attempt to recognise the position and importance of the camp experience within the context of the ‘full’ biographical story. This, in turn, encourages questions about the ways in which the narrators cope with this experience, about how it is integrated within the remainder of the autobiography, about its interpretation and the biographical sense and meaning added to it – or meanings added to it by different Interlocutors, or by one Interlocutor at different moments within the story.

Another important characteristic of these analyses is that I discuss not only the interview transcripts as recorded in writing but also the audio and, occasionally, video recordings. Exploring beyond the area delineated by the written text broadens the spectrum of the meanings analysed. The other broadening factors are the elements of participant observation, which give a clearer idea of the interview situation and of the circumstances accompanying its formation: the making of a ‘witness’ and his (or her) ‘testimony’. Furthermore, the analytical scope is expanded to include the specific moments within the accounts – including moments of interrupted narration and moments when silence falls. This focus on the narrative ‘here-and-now’ is not just a trace of my interactionistic inspiration; it also comes as a consequence of the aforementioned methodological choices. Indeed, methodological issues are the recurring thread in multiple moments throughout the three case studies researched.

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This study would have never been written if not for our Interviewees, the former prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp system, whose stories we have recorded. I thank all of them – not only for the cordiality and openness with which they received our inquiring presence but also for the great effort of memory that they deigned to make in order to tell us about their experiences, especially the toughest, camp-related ones. There is no doubt that for most of them this involved an enormous and, in many cases, deliberate effort.

‘Our’, not ‘my’ Interviewees, I have deliberately said although the present analyses are basically based upon the recordings I personally made, I have also used and quoted the interviews carried out by my colleagues from the KARTA Centre, with whom I worked on the MSDP project. I have taken advantage of their efforts and not only in a direct manner, by quoting extracts from the interviews they recorded or transcribed. No less important and inspiring for me, though more difficult to grasp, were the discussions we had after the recording sessions, during which we shared our experiences from our meetings with the Mauthausen survivors. I thank them for this collaboration. A special word of thanks is due to Katarzyna Madoń-Mitzner, who has supported me in my efforts since the first recorded account.

I owe especial thanks also to Professor Hanna Palska, the supervisor of my doctoral thesis, which formed the basis for this study, for unremittingly upholding my conviction that I should be following my own experience and researcher’s intuition, rather than any codified research method. Without her invaluable support and confidence, I would have found myself even more embroiled in methodological doubts – rather than following the voices of the subjects researched, and recounting my own experience of this venture.