Embodied memory: the formation of archived audiovisual holocaust testimony in the United States

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content  

EMBODIED MEMORY: THE FORMATION

OF ARCHIVED AUDIOVISUAL HOLOCAUST

TESTIMONY IN THE UNITED STATES

by

Noah Shenker

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Noah Shenker

 

ii
ii 

Dedication

To my parents Dr. David and Judy Shenker and to my grandparents Rabbi
David and Aviva Polish, who have provided me with the love, support,
and intellectual guidance to pursue this work.

 

iii
iii 

Acknowledgments

There are several people who I would like to thank for their indelible influence
not only on this work but also on my professional and personal development over the
years. I recognize that the condensed format of these acknowledgements falls short in
conveying the full extent of my thanks, though I hope that the following words will in
some small way express the depth of my gratitude.
I thank Michael Renov, whose patient, generous, and insightful guidance over
these many years has shaped both the formation of this dissertation and my development
as a scholar. In his own scholarship and in his consultation on this project, he has always
reminded me to keep my eyes and ears trained on the ethical aspects of any mediated
exchange and to always be sensitive to the texture of individual experience when
analyzing the institutional landscapes of testimony. I would also like to thank Janet
Walker, whose eloquent work on issues of trauma have had a formative influence on my
own scholarship, particularly as I grapple with questions of maintaining a historical
investment in Holocaust testimonies without jettisoning a concern for the vicissitudes and
subjectivities of individual memory. Furthermore, her personal guidance and advocacy
for this project have been instrumental to helping me maintain my footing when my
confidence seemed to be depleted. To Paul Lerner, I extend my sincere thanks for his
warm encouragement of my project and for setting such a wonderful example in both his
scholarship and pedagogy. While he and I work in different fields, his influence

 

iv
iv 

on this dissertation and on my development as a scholar goes beyond those disciplinary
lines. I would also like to extend my profound gratitude to Priya Jaikumar, who in the
midst of very difficult circumstances joined my committee and offered incredibly keen
insights that will inevitably shape the course of converting this dissertation into a book
manuscript. And to Anne Friedberg, who while ultimately unable to participate on my
committee, nonetheless played a vital role in the formation of this dissertation through the
example of her scholarly rigor.
I am also thankful to several friends and colleagues. In particular, Dan Lurie,
whose friendship and support, not to mention his own circuitous course in life, have
helped me to navigate my winding route through academia and to maintain my sanity
along the way. I would also like to thank Chris Cooling who has always been there to
help me step back from my work and keep things in perspective, sharing many good
laughs and tears along the way. And to Dan Leopard, Heidi Cooley, David Bressler, and
Mariana Baltar, who have provided not only camaraderie but also rich intellectual
discussions and contributions. Moreover, this project would never have taken its final
form without the intellectual exchanges and friendships cultivated during my fellowship
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly the strong relationships
that I was able to forge with Daniella Doron, Paul Jaskot, and Eran Neuman.
This dissertation also hinges on the funding and support of several institutions and
their staffs. The Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship provided me with access to
the resources of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, including not only the

 

v
v 

material holdings of that institution, but also its wonderful staff members and
administrators who went above and beyond in taking the time to meet with me and
discuss my research. I am also thankful for fellowships and grants provided by the
Council on Library and Information Resources, the USC Annenberg Fellowship, and the
Holocaust Educational Foundation. Without the support of these organizations I would
never have been able to spend extensive time working at each of the three sites for the
case studies in my dissertation. With that in mind, I would also like to extend my sincere
gratitude to the faculty and staff of each of the three institutions examined in my
dissertation: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, the Fortunoff Video Archive for
Holocaust Testimonies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I owe much
of my work in this dissertation to the time, resources, and input provided to me by the
people who are passionately committed to the work of memory carried out by those
institutions. Those archivists, staff and faculty members, and administrators include
(though are not limited to): Joanne Rudof, Stephen Naron, Debra Bush, Joan
Ringelheim, Elizabeth Hedlund, Raye Farr, Lisa Yavnai, Avi Patt, Jeff Carter, Edna
Friedberg, Ann Millen, Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Ellen Blalock, Susan Bachrach, Douglas
Greenberg, Douglas Ballman, Crispin Brooks, Karen Jungblut, and Ari Zev.
I would like to conclude these acknowledgements by thanking those who have
been particularly privy to the challenges and rewards that have manifested throughout the
course of this project and my personal development as a whole. I earlier mentioned
Daniella Doron, to whom I am eternally grateful for our immersing conversations held in

 

vi
vi 

the lounge chairs of our shared office space at the Holocaust Museum. It is during those
discussions that not only my dissertation, but also our close relationship, were cemented.
She has been an unending source of support, scholarly example, and joy—not to mention
very careful and close reading—and has sustained me throughout this very difficult
process.
I am also indebted to my loving family, including my parents Dr. David and Judy
Shenker, as well as my sisters Abby and Amy. They have defined patience and
understanding through these many years, particularly considering the several paths I have
explored before arriving at this juncture. They have always showed love and support
under very difficult circumstances and continue to provide me with the foundation upon
which this work, my future scholarship, and my personal development will continue to
rest. And I cannot help but think of those endless hours as a child, sitting with my father
as he combed over my writing on yellow legal pads, ensuring that each word and
sentence was carefully considered. Both that experience and my father’s tireless work
ethic continue to shape my scholarship, as does the resourcefulness and persistence
personified by my mother. And finally, I am guided by the memory of my grandparents
Rabbi David and Aviva Polish, who instilled in me a passion for intellectual inquiry and
intense ideological and political debate forged at their Shabbat dinner table.

 

vii
vii 

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The “Frame Conditions” of Testimony 52
in the Fortunoff Archive

Chapter 2: The Institutional Origins of Testimony 164
in the Holocaust Museum

Chapter 3: The Production and Circulation of Testimony 260
by the Holocaust Museum

Chapter 4: The Cinematic Framing of Testimony 372
by the Shoah Foundation

Conclusion 487

References 529

Alphabetized Bibliography 539

 
 
viii
Abstract
This dissertation examines how the interrelationship between institutional and
individual practices mediates video testimonies of the Holocaust, revealing that formal
practices and institutional infrastructures influence not only the process of testimonial
production but also a testimony’s reception. In doing so, it extends the existing range of
scholarship on archived Holocaust testimony, which has primarily explored its ethical,
narrative, and psychoanalytic dimensions. Such analysis is particularly urgent given the
expansion of Holocaust testimony archives in recent years in anticipation of the passing
of the survivor community and the transition from living memory to postmemory. The
dissertation will serve as a critical intervention for considering how survivor testimonies
are preserved for future generations that will have no direct access to witnesses.
This study focuses on three archives and memorial sites in the United States: the
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum, and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Each site embodies distinct yet
intersecting institutional histories and approaches to the collection of testimony. That is
not to suggest, however, that their archival structures somehow determine the meanings
and use value of their respective holdings. While certain infrastructures serve to advance
representational preferences, the spontaneous and fragmentary dimensions of personal
memory sometimes impede any integration with or subordination to archival preferences
for using testimony. By examining specific interviews in relation to their institutional

 
ix

frameworks, this study demonstrates how the traumatic registers of memory often disrupt
the particular itineraries of institutions gathering video accounts of witnesses.
Ultimately, this dissertation argues that with the emergence of postmemory, it is
essential to cultivate new methodologies and approaches to collecting and transmitting
testimonies that train our sensitivity to their lived, physical origins as well as to
institutional practices. Testimony can never be reduced to its empirical historical content
or raw visceral impact. Thus, this dissertation will investigate testimony as an
individually and institutionally embedded and embodied practice framed by a diverse
range of aims and preferences.

 
1

Introduction
This examination of how the interrelationship between institutional and individual
practices mediates the process of witnessing extends the existing range of scholarship on
archived Holocaust testimony, which has primarily concerned its ethical, narrative, and
psychoanalytic dimensions.
1
Furthermore, most of this critical inquiry focuses on the
one-to-one transferential dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewee. It rarely
extends to an analysis of how formal practices and institutional infrastructures are
brought to bear not only on the process of testimonial production but also on
dissemination and reception. This area of examination is particularly pressing given the
expansion of Holocaust testimony archives in recent years in anticipation of the passing
of the survivor community and the epistemological and ethical transition from living
memory to postmemory.
2
This prospect makes it all the more urgent to examine how
experientially charged testimonies of the Holocaust will be resuscitated in the absence of

1
A wealth of scholarship deals directly with issues of archived Holocaust testimony. A
few noteworthy examples include Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins
of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Henry Greenspan, On Listening
to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998);
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Geoffrey Hartman, The
Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
1996). Although formative works on the subject, they focus primarily on testimonial
exchanges between interviewer and interviewee, and rarely explore the manner in which
testimonies are framed by institutional, cultural, and formal practices.

2
For further discussion of postmemory see Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images:
Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the
Holocaust, ed. and with an introduction by Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2001). I am using the term postmemory here to distinguish between a
moment of living memory, in which physically present witnesses, however few in
 
2

living witnesses, and how their pedagogical and commemorative potential will be
activated beyond the boundaries of archives and museums. Rather than suggesting that
the testimonies of living survivors delivered in person at museums and other spaces are
somehow raw accounts in contrast to their framed audiovisual renderings, this
dissertation underscores how efforts by archives and museums to channel the immediate,
embodied resonances of traumatic memory subject both forms of witnessing to
interrelated mediating forces.
3
A central premise of my project is that the lived presence
of even one remaining survivor intensifies our ethical responsibility to bear secondary
witness. While the call to remembrance will outlast survivors, there will be a dramatic
ontological and epistemological shift when all that remains are the recorded physical
traces of their experiences. My work will serve as a critical intervention for considering
how the bodily authority and immediacy of survivor testimonies are preserved and
reconfigured for generations that are without access not only to survivors, but also to
those who have even met survivors in their lifetime.
With these concerns in the foreground, this dissertation examines how the
institutional histories and practices of commemorative sites shape the conditions for
channeling audiovisual Holocaust testimonies. It focuses on three archives and memorial
 
number, exist to attest to experiences of the Holocaust, and an impending moment when
only recorded traces of those witnesses will remain.

3
I am grateful to Michael Renov for his discussion of “embodied memory,” which I
incorporate into the title and body of this dissertation. I first came across his engagement
with that term in the following conference paper: Michael Renov, “The Work of
Memory in the Age of Digital Reproduction” (paper presented at the Visible Evidence XI
Conference, Bristol, UK, December 16-19, 2003). Renov utilizes it as a compelling term
for describing the individual texture of testimonial subjects that can often work against
the more universalizing dimensions of an interview protocol.
 
3

sites in the United States: the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (or
Fortunoff Archive) at Yale University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
(or Holocaust Museum, USHMM, or simply the museum), and the USC Shoah
Foundation Institute (or Shoah Foundation). Each of these three sites represents quite
distinct yet at times intersecting institutional histories and approaches to the collection
and dissemination of testimony. That is not to suggest, however, that the archival
structures of the sites in question somehow determine the meanings and use value of their
respective holdings. While certain infrastructures serve to advance representational
preferences, the spontaneous and fragmentary dimensions of personal memory are not
always easily integrated with or subordinated to archival preferences for neutral,
positivistic modes of cataloguing and pedagogical segmentation. By examining specific
interviews in relation to their institutional frameworks, I hope to demonstrate how the
traumatic registers of memory often disrupt redemptive and linear modes of gathering
testimony.
I will argue that in anticipation of the paradigmatic and complete shift from
living memory to postmemory of the Holocaust, it is essential to cultivate infrastructures
and approaches to collecting and transmitting testimonies that train our sensitivity to their
lived, physical origins as well as to their institutional practices. Fundamental to
inheriting Holocaust survivor memory is the recognition that the face, body, and voice of
the testimonial subject provide a necessary interpersonal and ethical groundwork for
social responsibility, but that they also work in conversation with an array of archival
infrastructures. Testimony can never be reduced to its empirical historical content or raw
 
4

visceral impact. Rather, it is an individually and institutionally embedded and embodied
practice framed by a diverse range of aims and preferences. In that sense, we—as post-
Holocaust generations—do not receive testimonies as fixed capsules of memory but as
constantly contested, evolving, and living memorials.
Critical Scope and Intervention
Since the end of World War II, there has been persistent tension between
particularistic and more universalizing notions of how to represent and mobilize the
Holocaust in America. Nonetheless, these events have by now inarguably assumed an
integral role in how the Jewish community frames its collective identity. As Holocaust
memory has become more socialized within the United States, survivorship has assumed
a central position in the American Jewish community, with survivors serving pivotal
roles in commemorative and pedagogical discourses by embodying its moral authority
and historical authenticity. On account of the geographic, as well as temporal, distance
of the Nazi Holocaust—what James Young refers to as the absence of a “topography of
terror” in the United States—survivors have been central to constructing an interpersonal
bridge to the events, allowing their experiences of genocide to be integrated into the
collective memory of a country far removed from the catastrophe.
4

Alan Mintz, in his book Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory
in America, argues that in prominent forms of commemorating the Holocaust within the

4
James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 283.

 
5

United States, the survivor emerged as a source of expertise and authenticity, lending
legitimacy to representations of the events and helping to forge interpersonal connections
between audiences and historical subjects.
5
Mintz suggests that the Americanization of
the Holocaust became more formalized in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter
established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, mandating the creation of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This political event converged with the airing in
1978 of the popular NBC miniseries Holocaust, which reached 120 million viewers.
6

Henry Greenspan, in his essay “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of
Holocaust Consciousness,” also makes the now common assertion that 1978 was a
defining year in Holocaust consciousness in this country. In doing so, he emphasizes
how at a time of expanding survivor testimony projects, including the forerunner of the
Fortunoff Archive, survivors assumed particularly crucial roles in establishing the
Holocaust in collective American memory.
7
Greenspan investigates a certain tendency in
Holocaust discourse within the United States to mobilize survivors metonymically—to
have individual witnesses stand in for the whole of the survivor community—
representing archetypal victims while at the same time being celebrated as redemptive
heroes. Whereas Greenspan saw the period before the late 1970s as a moment marked by

5
Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 13.

6
Ibid., 23.

7
Henry Greenspan, “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust
Consciousness,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 45.

 
6

a general sense of guilt, revulsion, pity, and fear associated with broaching Holocaust
survivor memory, he contends that the following period saw the emergence of
“celebratory” and “psychiatric” discourse—a paradoxical notion of survivors as
embodying “ongoing life and ongoing death.”
8
However, he contends that while
survivors are called upon to “bear witness” in the traditional sense of leaving their legacy,
the act of testimony increasingly trumps careful listening in favor of public celebrations
of witnessing in and of itself, rather than its personal details.
9
Greenspan strongly
supports investment in the specificities of survivors’ lives and memories, a task I hope to
accomplish by exploring the various layers of labor, both individual and institutional,
some constructive and some limiting, that are enacted during the practice of audiovisual
Holocaust testimony.
Annette Wieviorka, in her essay “The Witness in History,” refers to the current
moment as the “Era of the Witness,” with Holocaust memory and survivors serving a
central role in the emergence of testimonial culture.
10
She provides a brief assessment of
the development of Holocaust survivor culture after WWII, noting that survivors did not
form coherent social groups in the U.S., Europe, or Israel until the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in 1961-62.
11
Wieviorka argues that this trial elevated the Holocaust to a

8
Ibid., 59.

9
Ibid., 62.

10
Annette Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer
2006): 386.

11
Ibid., 388-389.

 
7

central aspect of Jewish identity, signaling the survivors’ “admission to the public
sphere” and having a momentous pedagogical impact: “For the first time, a trial explicitly
set out to provide a lesson in history. For the first time, the Holocaust was linked to the
themes of pedagogy and transmission…but above all, the Eichmann trial marks the
advent of the witness.”
12
Wieviorka makes the important point that in contrast to the
Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann case was based heavily on both written documents and
oral evidence from victims—with the testimonies serving to provide a living immediacy
and embodied charge that could not be captured in documents. This living valence is
what characterizes her view of the potential of Holocaust testimony in that the
“immediacy of these first-person accounts burns through the ‘cold storage of history.’”
13

Wieviorka is also interested in the emergence of new testimony projects and
archives, specifically the forerunner of the Fortunoff Archive in 1978 and the Survivors
of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg after
the release of his critically acclaimed film Schindler’s List (1993). She is “troubled” by
the emergence of each of these projects on the heels of a watershed popular media event,
respectively the Holocaust miniseries and Spielberg’s film. She finds the influence of
Schindler’s List more distressing, however, insofar as she thinks that the Shoah
Foundation, in contrast to the Fortunoff Archive, values transmission over the centrality
of the survivor: “Whereas the founders of the Yale archive insisted on focusing on the
survivor’s sense of having lived on ‘another planet’…the Spielberg project is based, to

12
Ibid., 389.

13
Ibid., 390.

 
8

the contrary, on the desire to show ‘ordinary people, people who have returned to
‘normal’….”
14

This position reflects a recurring strain of scholarly commentary on the
intersections between audiovisual Holocaust testimony and popular culture, one that
reinforces certain hierarchies between more rarefied and more widely accessible
collections of those sources. It also speaks to a larger aversion in academic discourse on
Holocaust memory to the Americanization of the Holocaust, or the importation of events
from the Holocaust by, and adapting them to, the cultural narratives, institutions, and
political contexts of the United States. Rather than embrace the social and pedagogical
possibilities of this phenomenon, Wieviorka is concerned about loss of the specificity of
survivor experience. For her, and others who critique the Americanization of the
Holocaust, the popularization of survivor identity through film and television, while
leading to the increased presence of the Holocaust in American life, has not increased
knowledge of the events, but rather imbues the historical experiences with lessons of
redemption, hope, and tolerance.
This argument has become rather entrenched over the past decade, with scholars
such as Peter Novick in his work The Holocaust in American Life, arguing that since the
1970s Jewish culture in the U.S. has shifted towards a focus on victimization during the
Holocaust as a source for communal renewal. This shift has positioned survivors as the
primary educators and interpreters of Holocaust history.
15
Novick contends that making

14
Ibid., 392-393.

15
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin
 
9

survivors represent Jewish suffering, endurance, and memory encourages a
homogenizing rather than a diversified vision of the Jewish community. From his
perspective, survivor testimonies should be more commonly used as evocative texts
rather than as rigorous historical sources.
Tim Cole makes similar arguments in Selling the Holocaust, which argues that the
Americanization of the Holocaust has reinforced a tendency to seek tidy resolution and
redemption in dealing with events of the past, in the process keeping contemporary
suffering at a distance.
16
Cole has further argued that films and archives associated with
popular American representations of the Holocaust, including Schindler’s List and the
Shoah Foundation, are invested in precisely that kind of redemptive project, manifested
in what he sees as troubling forms of experiential, visceral modes of representation.
I share many of these concerns regarding the potential for homogenizing
Holocaust memory. However, my dissertation will show that even in some of the most
institutionally and culturally centralized and popularized sites of Holocaust testimony—
the Shoah Foundation and Holocaust Museum among them, as well as the less
popularized Fortunoff Archive—there is never a monolithic embodiment of Holocaust
memory along the lines discussed by Novick, Cole, and others. While it is true that each
of these institutions exhibits its own particular preferences for redemption or anti-
redemption, catharsis or fragmentation, they are in the end only preferences—one among
 
Company, 2000), 201.

16
Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is
Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 2000), 14.

 
10

multiple sets of factors that shape the formation of Holocaust testimony and memory in
the U.S. Novick and Cole assume a monological rather than dialogical dynamic of
testimony that privileges the determinative agency of the institutions they critique. My
dissertation, while acknowledging the various institutional impulses to unify and redeem
Holocaust memory, also calls attention to the individual testimonial subjects and the
ways in which their accounts often contest the aims of their respective repositories.
While there are understandable concerns with preserving both the historical and
personal specificities of Holocaust experience, audiovisual testimony presents an
opportunity for a constructive and ethical mediation of traumatic memory. Geoffrey
Hartman, the literary scholar who serves as project director of the Fortunoff Archive,
expresses some skepticism regarding the proliferation of Holocaust representation,
remarking in his book The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust: “Our
sense of what is real is mediated by the media, by electronic phantoms that extend the
confusion of reality and propaganda, or place events on the same level.”
17
For Hartman
the implications of that leveling effect are profound in terms of how future generations
are bound—absent first-person encounters—to receive historical memory in mediated
forms. He recognizes that educators will play an increasingly crucial role in “replacing
eyewitness transmission” of historical events, but he urges them to guard against what he

17
Geoffrey Hartman, “Introduction: On Closure,” in The Longest Shadow: In the
Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 7.

 
11

terms “anti-memory”—or the relativization of the Holocaust and the fostering of
forgetfulness through sentimentality.
18

Yet Hartman is both critical and encouraging on the use of media technology for
Holocaust testimony. On the one hand, he fears that the increasing obsession with
visualizing the Holocaust and the reliance on technologically oriented encounters will
nurture a more passive, redemptive, and less critical pedagogy. Although Hartman
doubts that popular visual texts are able to represent the Holocaust—he even argues that
public memory is under assault in the ever-expanding “media age”—he does not reject
the utility of visual representation altogether. Indeed, he envisions video testimony of
Holocaust survivors as an ideal venue for creating a “counter-cinematic form” that will
resist the historical amnesia associated with mass media.
19
Thus, in the face of what
Hartman views as the distorting effects of popular representation, he has committed
himself to the work of the Fortunoff Archive with the hope of presenting more authentic
and personally invested portrayals of the Holocaust.
Hartman echoes these ideas in his essay, “Darkness Visible,” which emphasizes
that visual representation of the Holocaust is important less for the knowledge it transmits
than for keeping the historical events out in the open. That is not to suggest that he is
equally accepting of all materials dealing with the events. To the contrary, Hartman
advocates for a rigorous and refined approach to sifting out which texts are most

18
Ibid., 10.

19
Ibid., 12.

 
12

appropriate as sources of remembrance. Ultimately, Hartman contends that video
testimony, along with the philosophically and theoretically informed documentaries by
such directors as Claude Lanzmann, are best suited as pedagogic vehicles since their
sheer density provides a forum for working through the complexity of historical and
personal memory.
20

Hartman’s scholarship on Holocaust testimony is particularly germane to my own
work, given his emphasis on the layers of performance and mediation that shape the
process. As he notes: “While the video testimonies have an unusually direct emotional
impact, they are mediated by frame conditions.”
21
These frame conditions include having
survivors speak in languages other than their mother tongue and being interviewed in a
time and place that is far removed from the historical events. My dissertation adds to
those language and temporal/spatial considerations, the frame conditions that are
constituted by the institutional cultures and media practices of the archives working in
conversation and often in conflict with individual witnesses. It does not isolate the
infrastructures and conditions of testimonial production and reception, but rather
examines those elements in dialogue with the linguistic, imaginative, gestural, and other
strains of performance in individual testimonies.
While Hartman recognizes that testimony can be a shattering experience, he
nonetheless contends that witnesses who speak in their own voices, “rather than through

20
Hartman, “The Longest Shadow,” in The Longest Shadow, 22.

21
Geoffrey Hartman, “The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction,” Poetics Today
27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 250.

 
13

the seemingly impersonal or neutral narrators,” can generate a “restitutive” and
potentially healing dialogue, although “the spirit in which the testimony interview is
conducted” is crucial to the generation of meaning.
22
He contends that the method
adopted by the Fortunoff Archive grants the necessary agency and initiative to the
interviewee, rather than to particular institutional or research preferences: it is an “open-
ended interview” meant to elicit a free flow of memory.
My dissertation argues that—whether it is the Fortunoff Archive, the Holocaust
Museum, or the Shoah Foundation—the agency’s interview methods are never neutral,
rather they are embedded in particular sets of institutional histories and methodologies.
Just as Hartman argues for the importance of developing spaces where witnesses can be
free to express themselves and where audiences can be “trained to hear” those
testimonies, we must also draw attention to other figurative and literal voices that enter
into the dialogue—including the presence of the interviewer and the general tendencies of
the archive.
23
Hartman eloquently reflects on the possibility that video testimony will
allow audiences to see and hear witnesses working through the process of memory
retrieval—engaging with the mediations of time, space, and language. As he reminds us,
by having survivors and witnesses share their stories, they are forging both personal and
social bonds with us as audiences to their memory—compelling us to inherit their legacy
with a sense of ethical responsibility. While it is true that, in Hartman’s words, a

22
Ibid., 251 and 254.

23
Ibid., 255.

 
14

testimonial archive can serve as a “living monument of retrieved voices,” I argue that
their holdings are also a window into the infrastructures that help construct the voices.
24

In his persuasive examination of contemporary artists such as Art Spiegelman
who grapple with the aftermath of the Holocaust, James Young has argued that
testimonial archives can fuse their representational strategies with open, perhaps even
self-reflexive acknowledgment of the processes and limits that shape their endeavors.
Barring that deliberate turn in institutional authorship, we as users and critics of these
testimonial projects perhaps can ourselves listen and watch closely for the unintended,
yet revealing ruptures that express the frictions and layers of memory, thus complicating
the imposition of false closure and its accompanying narrative pleasures. And possibly
Young’s notion of “received history,” one that “interweaves both events of the Holocaust
and the ways they are passed down to us” can be extended to archives, even if that means
reading against the grain of their respective institutional preferences.
25

My dissertation is thus indebted to Young’s work, particularly his rigorous
scholarship on the formation of Holocaust memorials and his emphasis on “reinscribing
these [Holocaust] memorials with the memory of their own origins.”
26
I am attempting to
conduct the same kind of reinscription in the case of video archives. That effort includes

24
Ibid., 257.

25
James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art
and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 15.

26
James Young, “America’s Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity,” in The
Americanization of the Holocaust, 69.

 
15

considering, as Young has done, how the Holocaust has been institutionalized in the
United States, a location removed from what he refers to as the “topography of terror.”
27

Young suggests that an “experiential mode” of exhibition has become common at sites
such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in an effort
to bridge the spatial and temporal chasm. But, as he realizes, there are limitations to that
strategy: “Imagining oneself as a past victim may not be the same as imagining oneself,
or another person, as a potential victim, the kind of leap necessary to prevent other
‘holocausts.’”
28
He thus expresses the concern that through various modes of Holocaust
representation, the events themselves have assumed a universal, paradigmatic status,
serving as the standard by which we measure the destruction of all other communities.
29

To what extent, Young asks, do memorials conduct the work of memory for the public,
rather than creating spaces that compel it to more actively take part in the process?
30

Young has influenced my work by its call for close consideration of the narrative
and formal elements of memorial sites and video testimony projects. He reminds us that
interview questions serve narrative functions and that the placement of the camera
constitutes a representational intervention and a form of authorship, even as institutions

27
Ibid., 71.

28
Ibid., 77.

29
Ibid., 82.

30
James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 5.

 
16

attempt to maintain what Paolo Valesio refers to as the “rhetoric of anti-rhetoric.”
31

While Young has touched on the various framing devices relevant to testimony, this
dissertation attempts to develop that line of inquiry in a more systematic, extensive, and
comparative manner, drawing attention not only to the frame of the camera that functions
during the stage of testimonial production, but also to the myriad protocols that shape the
pre-interview, interview, and post-interview process.
In addition to drawing attention to the “poetics of a witness’s testimony,” Young
makes the case that this interest does not ignore the historical record.
32
For example, he
compares archival testimonies to Yizkor Bikker, memorial books of lost Jewish
communities that serve as “symbolic tombstones” for those who were taken during the
Holocaust, thus preserving some personal textures of memory in narrative form.
33
Like
those memorial books, audiovisual testimonies must be analyzed carefully, not only in
terms of their narrative and expressive elements, but also for their evidentiary traces. In
the case of video testimonies, archives often attempt to mitigate what they perceive as the
tensions that mark the intersection between historical investigation and the performative
and poetic aspects of testimony. Young emphasizes that those aspects of testimony can
never truly be disentangled—that the form and content of witnessing are all part of the

31
James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences
of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 9.

32
Ibid., 3.

33
Young, The Texture of Memory, 7.

 
17

“activity of telling history, of organizing it, of being affected by both events and their
pathos.”
34

The Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, in his work Collected Memories:
Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, has engaged many of these very questions as
he explores the utility of oral histories for his research. He examines the postwar uses of
Holocaust testimony from a range of sources, including the juridical context of the
Eichmann trial, Jan Gross’ scholarly research in Neighbors, as well as Browning’s own
scholarship on the Starachowice labor camp. Browning incisively critiques the manner in
which historians of the Shoah have traditionally been averse to integrating postwar
testimony into their work, preferring instead to deal with documents contemporaneous to
the events. He acknowledges some of the limitations to using testimonies as historical
evidence, but nonetheless presents a powerful argument that they can be used in a
rigorous and responsible fashion. As Browning argues, the lack of archival evidence for
many aspects of Holocaust history means that postwar testimonies are a vital resource for
carefully reconstructing the past.
In order to be used effectively, however, testimonies cannot be interpreted as
homogenous expressions of collective experience, but must instead be seen as more
fragmented collections of frequently conflicting personal accounts. It is in that regard
that Collected Memories has informed this dissertation, in particular its examination of
the ways in which personal accounts often complicate institutional attempts to unify
Holocaust memory. As Browning’s work suggests, the relegation of testimonies to their

34
Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 165.

 
18

collective (as opposed to collected) status, is not only ethically problematic, but also
ahistorical.
35
To be sure, Browning argues, testimonies need to be vetted and
crosschecked with the same kind of care used for more conventional sources.
Nonetheless, he contends that testimonies can be revealing even when they are not
completely accurate in terms of historical content; they can still shed light on the ways in
which witnesses perceive themselves and frame their stories.
I would also argue that testimonies should be examined in terms of their media
specificity. That is to say, it is necessary to look at testimonies not as raw sources but as
texts shaped by the encounter between witnesses and the interviewers working on behalf
of an archive. Issues ranging from the depth and nature of interview questions, the
framing and position of the camera, the personal encounter between interviewer and
interviewee, the history and culture of the institution, all impact the manner in which
testimony is delivered at the moment of production and in turn is transmitted to future
generations. Furthermore, some moments in testimony cannot be reduced to historical
content but are also a function of how witnesses express themselves through tone of
voice, physical gestures, and frequent silences. The meanings generated from those
expressions can only emerge through careful listening and viewing by the audience, and
hence an examination of testimonies is inexorably linked to a consideration of the debates
and choices that shape how testimony is delivered and filtered.
Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman remind us that, on an interpersonal level, the act
of testimony is never just a matter of reporting facts; it also involves telling one’s story in

35
Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar
Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 39.
 
19

the presence of others and thus sharing the burden of witnessing between the interviewee
and the interviewer. Interviewers are “party to the creation of knowledge” and insert
their voices as questions, points of clarification, and at times emotional support.
36
Dori
Laub stresses the importance that interviewers be active listeners who fulfill an ethical
responsibility by bearing witness to the act of witnessing. He argues that interviewers
have a particular obligation to attend to silences that emerge in testimony, at times
allowing them to be maintained, while at other moments interjecting and provoking
further comment. For her part, Felman argues that testimony, in its capacity as a
“discursive practice” and a “performative speech act,” evades linear narrative and
historical frameworks and attempts to impose closure.
37
Felman focuses on listening for
those moments that generate more surprising, spontaneous forms of knowledge generated
through dialogue. She suggests that while interviewers serve vital roles as “witnesses of
witnesses,” putting themselves in a position to interpret and guide testimony, they are not
to assume authority over the testimony.
Lawrence Langer’s foundational work on the subject of Holocaust testimony has
been particularly instructive for this examination of the interrelationship between
interviewer and interviewee. He eloquently describes the painstaking processes and labor
of traumatic testimony, arguing that it is not only a matter of retrieving the past but also
of recording the ways one retrieves that past. In my investigation of the three case

36
Dori Laub, M.D., “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman and
Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57.

37
Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, 5.
 
20

studies in my dissertation, it is apparent that how memorial sites and archives structure
the encounter between witnesses and interviewers, and subsequently between recorded
testimonies and audiences, carries profound analytical, emotional, and ethical
implications. That is to say, the three institutions give varying degrees of agency to
witnesses during the process of collecting their testimony, and each approach changes
how the subject delivers his or her account.
Langer calls attention to the dynamic that is fostered between interviewer and
interviewee, taking note of such elements as tone, silences, and gestures. He also
examines the nature of interview questions and the tension that emerges when the
archive’s agenda does not work in conjunction with what a witness is saying before the
camera. One of the most important contributions in his book Holocaust Testimonies: The
Ruins of Memory is Langer’s discussion of the typology of the various kinds of memory
that manifest themselves during an interview. Invoking Charlotte Delbo’s
conceptualization of the categories of Holocaust memory, Langer differentiates common
memory from deep memory, showing how a witness can move from the chronologically
grounded and more removed nature of the former, only to find him or herself thrown out
of sequence by the destabilizing and often anti-redemptive grip of the latter.
38
In my own
research I have often observed how certain archives and interviewers are invested in
developing more easily accessible, often chronologically charted testimonies (that is,
common memory), only to meet resistance from subjects who are thrown back into the
past, unable to move forward with a particular account.

38
Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991), 5-6.
 
21

For Langer, as in the conceptualization by Felman and Laub, testimony is
necessarily fragmented and defies attempts at rendering it redemptive or progressive. He
argues that witnesses who give testimonies are engaging the past not as past, but rather as
part of the present. The emergence of deep memory complicates any efforts on the part
of the interviewer, and by extension an archive, to compartmentalize recollections and
fully integrate individual memory into an institutional framework. There are, he argues,
inevitably ruptures between preferences for chronological stories of hope and what he
refers to as “frozen moments of anguish.”
39
Langer sees a “bifocal vision” being
expressed in Holocaust testimony, one in which the shadow of the past looms large over
the present and future, thus complicating a more unified, resolved conception of
survival.
40

Langer thus draws our attention to the contested, anti-redemptive aspects of
testimony. However, while Langer, like Felman and Laub, focuses much of his attention
on the one-to-one encounter between interviewer and interviewee, he is less engaged with
examining the institutional and cultural contexts in which testimony is created. Oren
Stier, in his work Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust, has
pointed out how Langer has not fully addressed the media specificity of audiovisual
testimonies.
41
Stier insightfully emphasizes that those sources are mediated at various

39
Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies, 172.

40
Ibid.

41
Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust,
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 70.

 
22

levels including the individual choices of interviewees and the various technological
approaches employed—constituting a process that he refers to as “framing memory.”
42

However, in Stier’s critique of Langer and in his own exploration of the framing contexts
of testimony, he investigates only a handful of interviews and only briefly addresses the
institutional cultures and methodologies that affect their production and reception. He
touches upon some of the distinctions that he sees between the Fortunoff Archive and
Shoah Foundation, for instance, particularly pertaining to their visions for making their
respective holdings accessible. However, he examines few if any of the recordings from
the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and does not systematically address the
internal institutional debates and protocols that were instrumental in framing how
testimonies were collected at both institutions.
My work attempts to engage that issue by discussing how institutional
infrastructures and protocols, including those that are not always apparent on screen (e.g.,
pre-interview questioning, internal ratings of testimonies, and staff debates about the
usability of testimony) play a crucial role in shaping the production and reception of
testimony and the channeling of Langer’s various typologies of memory. In doing so, it
attempts to address Saul Friedländer’s explorations of Langer’s conception of deep and
common memory, particularly Friedländer’s concern that the traces of deep memory will
fade from the scene after survivors pass away, leaving in its place a more redemptive,
restorative common memory. My dissertation examines the prospects for preserving the
recorded traces of survivor’s stories and then transmitting them “beyond individual

42
Ibid., 69.
 
23

recall,” to use Friedländer’s words, perhaps by maintaining deep memory through the
embodied representational strategies of archives in lieu of their living carriers.
43
As he
also suggests, one approach to tending to deep memory may involve balancing the
emotional excesses of traumatic memory with the drive to construct narrative structures
that contain or shield against those very emotions. Friedländer urges historians to
practice a self-aware method of commentary in which the “voice of the commentator” is
clearly heard and which integrates the “mythic memory” of victims into historical
representation without compromising “rational historiography.”
44
My research thus
grapples with the question of whether the “voice of the commentator” and the balance
between emotional rupture and narrative containment can be located across the landscape
of my archive case studies.
In order to begin grappling with these issues, we must, as the film and media
scholar Janet Walker argues in Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust,
closely engage with the rhetorical and performed aspects of Holocaust testimony, and in
doing so move away from a traditionally “binaristic explanation” of traumatic memory—
one that asserts that either trauma occurred and its subsequent recollections are true, or it
did not occur and the recollections are false.
45
Walker argues that we can maintain an
investment in historical truth without jettisoning matters of subjectivity or imposing false

43
Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Memory, and Transference,” in Holocaust Remembrance:
The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1994), 254.

44
Ibid., 261.

45
Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley:
 
24

notions of closure on events and their aftermath. The challenge of writing traumatic
histories, she suggests, is to integrate the mythic memory of victims with rational
historiography.
46
She stresses that Laub’s and Felman’s work in Testimony does not
fixate on the fallibility of witness memory, but rather explores how that “fallible memory
may speak to historical truth.”
47
Walker reminds us that some elements of testimony
cannot be reduced to empirical facts and that accounts can still speak to a witness’
historical experiences even when he or she does not demonstrate complete fidelity to the
historical record. With that in mind, she argues for adopting a position that extends
beyond the limiting binary of “literalist” versus “social constructivist” approaches.
48

Such a position would develop strategies to “triangulate” traumatic memory—to examine
testimonies, for instance, alongside other sources such as historical commentary and
original documents.
49
Walker further suggests that in creating new audiovisual
historiographies, it can be productive to adopt more self-reflexive representational
strategies in order to “call attention to the friability of the scaffolding for audiovisual
historiography.”
50

 
University of California Press, 2005), xviii.

46
Ibid.

47
Ibid., 5.

48
Ibid., 11.

49
Ibid., 22.

50
Ibid., 19.

 
25

Walker concludes Trauma Cinema by making a compelling case that, as survivors
of traumas such as the Holocaust continue to pass away, leaving future generations to
carry their memory, we must anticipate the diminishing personal linkages of memory and
attend to its imaginative forms.
51
Yet even in the presence of those still-living survivors,
Walker reminds us that historical understanding is never guaranteed—the “referent is not
self-evident.”
52
Both the living memory of Holocaust survivors and the site-specific
authenticity associated with the original topography of terror are always mediated.
Walker acknowledges that the reluctance to acknowledge that mediation encourages a
tendency to place far too great a burden on the corporeal and topographical remnants of
the Holocaust. With that in mind, she poses the critical question: What will happen to
engagement with Holocaust memory after living survivors have passed on and physical
sites have deteriorated?
53
I intend to address that question through an examination of
how three separate archives engage the interplay between imaginative and veridical
strains of testimony.
In her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance
in the Age of Mass Culture, media scholar Alison Landsberg contends that the
transference of memory from the authentic, living body of the Holocaust survivor to
subjects who have no direct link to that historical past—this includes museum patrons,
film spectators, new media users, and students—can be both ethically sound and

51
Ibid., 173.

52
Ibid., 174.

53
Ibid., 175.

 
26

politically constructive.
54
Landsberg acknowledges that living survivors occupy a unique
position in Holocaust remembrance and that their eventual absence will alter the
resonance of their recorded testimonies. At the same time, she emphasizes that mass
cultural sites such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will make available
venues where prosthetic memory is generated in those who did not live through the
original historical event.
55

Landsberg’s emphasis on developing these kinds of transferential commemorative
sites in spaces of mass culture marks a shift away from a narrow and particularistic form
of identity politics towards a more inclusive model that allows for diverse communities
and subjects to be brought together at archives, museums, and classrooms through the
shared encounter with memories that originate from outside their own personal and
historical experiences. The affective and experiential aspects are vital to this exchange,
for as Landsberg argues, cognitive understanding of the events is insufficient and must be
coupled with bodily and visceral familiarity in order for it to be tied to political action.
By generating physically charged, immersive forms of understanding through mass
technologies of memory, she argues that this kind of access “allows for a version of

54
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 23-24.

55
Ibid.

 
27

experience that relies less on categories like the real, the authentic, or sympathy than on
categories like knowledge, responsibility, and empathy.”
56

Crucial to Landsberg’s conception of the transmission of Holocaust memory,
then, is the notion that survivors, while providing the necessary first-hand accounts of the
events, are part of a broader representational chain of Holocaust remembrance. While
she makes the argument that survivors’ live and recorded stories serve as a form of
referential anchorage, she argues that priority should be given to the ways in which those
traces of voice and body are ultimately transferred via technologies of memories,
including museum installations, films and other visual representations. In other words,
Landsberg’s conception of prosthetic memory is not so much focused on the actual
physical bodies of the survivors as on the authenticity and authority that they bestow
upon memorial spaces, artifacts, and archives.
I would argue, however, that Landsberg emphasizes the rhetorical constructions
of memory at the expense of more fully considering the evidentiary and historical uses of
testimony, particularly in light of ongoing Holocaust denial. Her emphasis on
transmitting personal stories of trauma as shared collective and individual experiences—
as a visceral foundation for understanding the events in question—is constructive in
terms of envisioning new boundaries of political solidarity. Nonetheless, it obscures the
fundamental ethical connection that should be forged between those who give and receive
testimony. In other words, we must always remember that testimony originates in a
primary interpersonal encounter and not only as a media by-product. While social

56
Ibid., 130.
 
28

responsibility should ultimately be directed beyond the one-on-one encounter between
interviewer and interviewee that is at the foundation of the testimonial exchange, that
dynamic still provides an ethical template for developing and extending our encounters
with the suffering of others. Just as some of the archives I examine (the Holocaust
Museum, as an example) focus on documenting events from the past, they also carry a
mandate to alert our attention to the events of the present. If we are to consider how
Holocaust testimony projects might be activated as models for recording and calling
attention to other acts of genocide, then it is crucial to assess the specific, institutionally
grounded dynamics of bearing witness.
In their essay “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies in Light of the
Wilkomirski Debate,” Andrew Gross and Michael Hoffman argue against
overemphasizing the affective and visceral features of remembrance at the expense of
careful historical examination.
57
With that in mind, they draw distinctions between
testimonial authority and historical authenticity. While the authority of affect that
Landsberg explores may generate interpersonal and experiential identification, Gross and
Hoffman argue that it does not necessarily cultivate political and historical analysis, and
may in fact indulge a narcissistic, sensuous absorption on the part of the viewer or reader.
Furthermore, while the Shoah Foundation and other Holocaust memory sites in the U.S.
may make distant historical events accessible through viscerally charged media
encounters, they ultimately accommodate a particular national memorial culture that is

57
Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity:
Holocaust Studies in Light of the Wilkomirski Debate,” Biography 27, no. 1 (Winter
2004): 33.
 
29

far removed from the origins of the destruction. Although Gross and Hoffman
acknowledge that the national relocation of historical memory is necessary to secure
attention to both historical and contemporary suffering, they are concerned that analytic
specificity may be compromised in the process. Thus they reiterate the need to examine
the dialectical relationship between testimony and history as opposed to giving outright
primacy to testimony’s rhetorical constructions. Rather than abstracting trauma from
individual bodies and rendering them as more totalizing narratives, Gross and Hoffman
advocate for a close and direct examination of how individual testimonial accounts match
up against the historical record, and potentially challenge, reinforce, and elaborate upon
each other.
Marianne Hirsch has done substantial work in addressing the ways in which the
Holocaust is becoming “multiply mediated.”
58
She has examined the ethical and
empathetic dimensions of confronting and teaching the Holocaust in the “face of
extremity,” positioning future generations as inheritors of Holocaust memory without
cultivating more appropriative, surrogate forms of witnessing.
59
Hirsch proposes the
term “postmemory” to describe the movement away from living memory that resides
with witnesses, creating a landscape wherein the inheritors of survivor testimony are
“fully cognizant of the mediated and media-driven source of representation that shapes

58
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, “Introduction,” in Teaching the Representation
of the Holocaust, eds. Hirsch and Kacandes (New York: MLA, 2005), 2.

59
Ibid., 7.

 
30

both knowledge and meaning of the Holocaust.”
60
She contends that the proliferation of
photographic images documenting the Holocaust does not desensitize or shield us from
the horrors of the events, but rather produces the effects of trauma initially experienced
by those who lived through it. She describes this process as “retrospective witnessing by
adoption,” or “adopting the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories of
others—as experiences one might oneself have had.”
61
Rather than suggesting that these
proliferating forms of media witnessing are appropriative and thus contrary to
maintaining a sense of alterity, Hirsch argues: “On the contrary, compulsive and
traumatic repetition connects the second generation to the first, producing rather than
screening the effect of trauma that was lived so much more directly as compulsive
repetition by survivors and contemporary witnesses.”
62

Michael Renov acknowledges the constructive possibilities of Hirsch’s notion of
postmemory, but points out that since her conceptualization of the term refers mainly to
still photographic images depicting the Holocaust, it is necessary to examine the
mediated aspects of audiovisual testimony, including the different forms of reflection and
contemplation distinct to that medium. Renov, in his essay “The Work of Memory in the
Age of Digital Reproduction,” thus directs his attention to close readings of video
testimony, with careful analysis of the traces of “embodied memory,” that is, the

60
Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of
Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 218.

61
Ibid., 221.

62
Ibid., 218.

 
31

individual textures of testimonial subjects that can often work against the more
universalizing and instrumentalizing dimensions of an interview protocol.
63
His analysis
of the Shoah Foundation’s collection suggests that individual testimonial archives do not
necessarily approach testimonial production and the prospects of testimonial reception
with the same degree of investment—a point I will explore further in my comparative
analysis of the three archives. Yet while acknowledging that each of the three sites in
question adopts a different set of expectations concerning how the testimonies will be
developed, conducted, and accessed, Renov’s work reminds us that in the course of
conducting institutional, cultural, and formal analysis, one must never lose sight of the
textures of individual expression in testimony. While each archive that I examine to
some degree fosters a rhetoric of authenticity and sobriety, the performances of
individual testimonies in their collections confirm Renov’s analysis of how documentary
subjects can represent a form of embodied history that cannot be relegated to institutional
and depersonalized discourses of knowledge and power.
64
There are, in other words,
poetic expressions of testimony that evade positivistic categorization and segmentation.
In the fall of 2002 Yale University hosted the conference, “The Contribution of
Oral Testimony to Holocaust and Genocide Studies” to mark the Fortunoff Archive’s
twentieth anniversary at the school. The conference brought together prominent scholars
from a wide range of disciplines to discuss not only the Fortunoff project, but also the

63
Renov, “The Work of Memory in the Age of Digital Reproduction.”

64
Michael Renov, “Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction,” in Theorizing
Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 6.

 
32

prospects for Holocaust testimonial archives more generally. Several of the participants
in that conference subsequently contributed essays on the subject to a volume entitled
“The Humanities of Testimony,” published in a special issue of Poetics Today in 2006.
In her contribution, which focuses primarily on the Fortunoff Archive, Aleida
Assmann argues that the genre of video testimony represents a constructive integration of
history and memory: “It renders accounts of the ways in which the historical event of the
Holocaust has deformed and shattered the patterns of an individual life.”
65
However,
because Assmann provides no extensive analysis of particular Fortunoff testimonies, her
claim that testimony “unsettles” the storytelling process and narrative coherence, and
ultimately “shatter[s] the biographical frame” of witnesses seems limited.
66
If we look
not only to individual performances of testimony, but also to the methods and practices
that help shape them, we can detect some semblance of structure and coherence in the
framework of testimonies. They are never perfectly enacted, but are rather contingent
upon the specific dialogue fostered among interviewees, interviewers, and the institutions
they represent. In other words, testimony is marked by both shattering and unifying
impulses, each represented by the tendencies and preferences of the respective
testimonial parties. In video testimonies there can be moments of cogent analysis rather
than bursts of raw emotion. Assmann, like Langer, contends that video testimony blocks
attempts at framing traumatic memory in a redemptive way. While that is often the case,

65
Aleida Assmann, “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony,” Poetics Today
27, no, 2 (Summer 2006): 264.

66
Ibid.

 
33

there are moments when testimonies, depending on the particular personal and
institutional voices that frame them, do in fact suggest some form of closure, if not
redemption.
Although Assmann draws our attention to the dialogical and mediated aspects of
video testimonies—that is, they depend on moral and technical support and the guidance
of an interlocutor—she focuses on how they are “mediated and refracted through a
specific personality,” rather than on the influence of institutional and formal practices.
67

Her essay concludes with the argument that video testimonies “transform the ephemeral
constellation of an individual voice and an individual face into storable information and
to ensure its communicative potential for further use in an indefinite future.”
68
She
emphasizes the potential of video testimony, but seems to suggest that it is somehow pure
rather than circumscribed by its particular archival contexts. As she argues:
An archive is not a museum; it is not designed for public access and popular
presentations. It differs from what is publicly exposed in the same ways that great
museum shows differ from the array of objects in the stuffed storerooms in the
subterranean tracts of museums. There is, of course, some order and arrangement
in the digital archive, too, but it is one that ensures only the retrieval of
information, not an intellectually or emotionally effective display. The archive, in
other words, is not a form of presentation but of preservation; it collects and
stores information, it does not arrange, exhibit, process, or interpret it.
69

As I argue in my dissertation, however, the boundaries between the archive and its
exhibition contexts are much more permeable and subject to intersecting considerations

67
Ibid., 267.

68
Ibid., 270.

69
Ibid., 270-271.
 
34

of narrative structure. The methods for selecting interviewees, conducting training
sessions, and producing interviews are not developed at a remove from considerations of
transmission and access. I will show that the “order and arrangement in the digital
archive” not only provide access to information; they also calibrate the intellectual and
emotional representation of testimony. In other words, the archives that I examine are
always engaged on some level with entangled considerations of preservation and
transmission. No archive is ever “pure potential”; all are subject to institutionally and
culturally embedded conditions that precede the moment when testimonies are activated.
Allen Feldman describes witnesses who give testimony across different reception
contexts as “embodied survivor[s]” who are subjected to particular “protocols of
authentication within various regimes of truth.”
70
I do not use these terms to suggest that
witnesses are stripped of agency, but rather to argue that their individual expressions of
memory are given not only as part of an interpersonal dialogue, but also in dialogue with
the kinds of institutional spaces afforded to them.
As Patricia Yaeager contends in her essay, “Testimony without Intimacy,”
published in the special Fortunoff conference issue of Poetics Today, those spaces can be
characterized not only by intimacy and thus by close emotional proximity, but also by
distance and even contestation. To use Yaeger’s terms, they may display moments that
“refute our compassion and constitute zones of experience that may be sympathy-

70
Allen Feldman, “Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma Aesthetic,”
Biography 27, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 164.

 
35

secluded, empathy-unfriendly: that jar the act of compassion.”
71
Again citing Yaeger—
and as my analysis of particular testimonies will show—these are moments in some
interviews “when something uncontrolled and uncontrollable about the speaking body
disrupts careful listening by creating an abrupt change in scale: a moment when body
and speech seem to move in opposite direction.”
72
These points, she observes, often arise
when the “listener” wants to listen and open her- or himself to the pain of the other, but is
inhibited from doing so by a performed act of estrangement. Yaeger argues that this
estrangement can be ethically charged by forcing us to consider new frames of reference
and to recognize our inability to fully comprehend traumatic memory.
73

The main body of this dissertation will draw attention to both the formations and
ruptures of intimacy throughout the process of collecting Holocaust testimony. Crucial to
my analysis is the notion, as expressed by Yaeger, that video testimony can never be
reduced to a typed transcript. It is an audiovisual form of historiography that renders
history legible in embodied forms—using gestures, voices, faces, and other elements that
work not only in concert but also in conflict with one another, revealing a more
complicated picture of a witness’ experiences and how he or she grapples with its
aftermath. Testimony, as Henry Greenspan reminds us, is always an act of labor on some

71
Patricia Yaeager, “Testimony without Intimacy,”Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer
2006): 402.

72
Ibid.

73
Ibid., 410.

 
36

level, and the meanings generated from that labor are part of a process that is not easily
extracted from the whole.
74

Tony Kushner’s essay, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of
Representation,” found in Poetics Today, also reminds us that archival infrastructures
have the potential to instrumentalize individual subjects as exemplars in a larger narrative
and historical framework, rather than to preserve their individual complexity. Kushner
contends that testimony must be “taken seriously on it own terms,” not viewed as a
traditional historical record.
75
More specifically, he advocates that archives should look
at testimony as though it presents a life story that encompasses and documents events
from before and after the war, as well as wartime experiences. While the three archives
that I examine focus primarily on the Holocaust era, each of them explores events from
before and after the Holocaust, in some cases, with profoundly constructive effects.
Kushner, like Yaeger and Assmann, may be too skeptical about popular representation of
Holocaust memory, for example, arguing that the testimonies in Spielberg’s Shoah
Foundation and the exhibition of personal narratives at the Holocaust Museum impose a
false sense of “narrative cohesion.”
76
Kushner wants to explore ways to preserve the
“disjunction and confusion” of Holocaust testimony, while still making it available to a

74
Greenspan, “Imagining Survivors,” 62.

75
Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation,”
Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 289.

76
Ibid., 288.

 
37

public audience.
77
His formula for developing new ways to conduct testimony includes
recording fewer survivors and interviewing them in a more self-reflexive mode that
preserves the contradictions and gaps in the work of testimony.
78

While I agree with Kushner on the need to be watchful against the imposition of
narrative closure, as well as to keep our ears and eyes trained on the contradictions and
gaps he describes, I would argue that we can locate those elements in the same sites of
public and popular memory that he critiques. Far from discounting new approaches to
testimony along the lines Kushner describes, I think they represent rich possibilities. We
cannot ignore the vast wealth of audiovisual testimonies already housed in archives, some
of which have adopted strategies that Kushner and other scholars have criticized as being
problematic. This dissertation will demonstrate that it is possible to engage the
testimonial holdings of both more popular and rarefied archives in ways that call
attention to their ruptures, including those not intended by the respective sites.
Research Methodology
This dissertation is based on research that used a wide array of sources including
internal institutional files, interviews with archive and museum staff and faculty,
combined with analysis of archived video testimonies and their editing for use in
documentary films, interactive programming, museum exhibitions, educational settings,
and other exhibition formats. I was able to receive funding that enabled me to conduct

77
Ibid., 291.

78
Ibid., 291-292.

 
38

extensive on-site archival research at each of the three case studies featured in the
dissertation.
In the case of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale
University’s Sterling Memorial Library, I was fortunate to spend several months selecting
and examining my sampling of testimonies. The archive staff not only made the
testimonies available to me, but I was also the beneficiary of their time and interest, in
particular agreeing to extensive interviews and providing me with access to the internal
archive files that document many aspects of the pre-interview and interview process.
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I was able to pursue similar
lines of research as a Charles H. Revson Fellow for Archival Research at the museum’s
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The collection of internal institutional files at
the museum have been extensively catalogued and indexed, and I was afforded the
opportunity to access those files, as well as the collection of audiovisual testimonies, on
an extended basis. In addition, museum staff and faculty who have direct responsibility
for issues related to collecting and disseminating audiovisual testimony granted me
multiple interviews.
Finally, in the case of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, my access to both its
digitized collections of testimonies and its internal institutional files was aided by the
foundation’s integration into the University of Southern California College of Letters,
Arts, and Sciences in 2006. As was the case with the Fortunoff Archive and Holocaust
Museum, I was given a wide range of access to staff and faculty, as well as provided an
opportunity to access its internal institutional files before they were fully catalogued and
 
39

indexed. I was also fortunate to work as a teaching assistant for Professor Michael
Renov, who was a participating faculty member in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
grant: “Pedagogical and Scholarly Implications of the Shoah Foundation Archive in
Research Universities.” In that capacity, I engaged with the ethical and epistemological
implications of incorporating Holocaust testimony into course curricula and was present
at selected meetings of Shoah Foundation staff and faculty in which discussions took
place on the uses of its Visual History Archive.
Therefore, this dissertation is grounded in research into institutional histories as
well as in textual analysis of the testimonies chosen for my sampling. Rather than to
examine the institutional origins, cultures, and practices of each case study as though they
were determinative of how meaning in those testimonies is framed, I also look at how
internal debates and preferences concerning interview methodology work in dialogue,
and often in conflict, with the testimonies they collect. While on one hand I position each
archive as a party to testimonial authorship that impacts how witnesses deliver their
testimony, I am also interested in uncovering the slippages between preferred testimonial
frameworks and actual testimonial practice. Audiovisual testimonies are not simply
embodied in terms of capturing the corporeal presence of witnesses; they also personify a
larger dialogue between that corporeal presence and the institutional and cultural
structures that help construct the testimonial encounter.
That being said, selecting testimonies to analyze for this dissertation was a
daunting experience. I was overwhelmed not only by the sheer number of testimonies
compiled by the three archives, which together exceed sixty-thousand interviews, but also
 
40

by the prospect of engaging in the very process of selection, segmentation, and
instrumentalization that I critique throughout this work. Any sample of testimonies
excludes most of the individual witnesses recorded by these three archives. However,
one of the primary values of the three sites’ immense combined holdings is that they
contain a vast mosaic of singular gestures and expressions. And in the same way that the
Fortunoff Archive, Holocaust Museum, and Shoah Foundation had to devise their own
protocols for collecting and transmitting testimonies, I too had to create a methodology
for analyzing their combined collections.
With that in mind, I developed three separate yet often intersecting categories of
witnesses—a designation I will interchange with the terms “survivor,” “subject,” and
“interviewee,” which is possible since each of the individuals whose testimonies I
examine falls under the category of Jewish survivorship. While the Holocaust was
experienced in different ways by individuals who embodied a diverse range of religious,
ethnic, racial, sexual, political, and other categories, most of the witnesses who are
prominently featured by the three archives in question are Jewish survivors. Although I
recognize that the term “interviewee” may be considered limiting in certain respects,
particularly by eliding the collaborative aspects of testimony, it is nonetheless descriptive
of how these archives position witnesses. I will, however, show how their individual
expressions of memory are more active and empowered than the term might suggest.
79
I
place my sample of survivors in the following three categories: “overlapping” witnesses

79
For further discussion of the limits of these terms, see Henry Greenspan and Sidney
Bolkosky, “When is an Interview and Interview? Notes from Listening to Holocaust
Survivors,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 432.
 
41

who gave testimony at each of the three archives (the largest sample); witnesses whose
testimonies frequently “circulate” within and beyond the archives for exhibition or
pedagogical purposes; and witnesses who are “exemplary” in terms of projecting or
embodying the particular sets of preferences of their respective archive or memorial sites.
These classifications are not rigid in that some witnesses fall under more than one
category. For example, certain exemplary subjects are more likely to have their
testimonies placed into circulation or may be more inclined to give testimonies on several
occasions and at more than one archive. Nevertheless, these three categories allow me to
better isolate how each institution attempts to project its preferences on the process of
testimony, for example, defining what it understands to illustrate Holocaust memory, as
well as its methods for conducting audiovisual history.
My first and by far the most difficult category to locate and research comprises
overlapping witnesses: those subjects who gave testimony at each of the three sites.
Cross-referencing lists of interviewees in each of the three archives, I was able to
generate a sample of at least fourteen subjects who belonged in this category. These
interviews do not fully represent the multi-vocal quality of testimonial archives. Because
only a relative handful of witnesses recorded interviews with the three archives, they are
necessarily exceptional cases. Nonetheless, I hope this unique sample will illuminate the
particular qualities of testimonial construction by isolating across each of the three sites
how witnesses are positioned, and in turn position themselves, respectively, in the context
of different institutional practices.
 

 
42

Testimonies that circulate within and beyond the institutional confines of archives
and museums, including in the form of documentary films, museum exhibitions, and
pedagogical programming, can be said to be exemplary in that they represent or embody
an archive’s idealized, selective vision of its approach to testimony. However, not every
exemplary testimony is put into circulation, so my second category of testimonies draws
only from interviews that were edited for wider distribution within new formats. The
category of exemplary witnesses, by contrast, includes only interviews or live
appearances in their complete form. The exemplary witnesses are designated as such
through internal assessment and ratings protocols, while the circulating witnesses are
subject to further processes that determine which subjects to highlight, and in turn, which
segments of their stories to feature in the new format.
I was able to determine my third group of exemplary witnesses according to a
number of considerations. Each of the three archives developed its own institutional
methodology—some more formal and standardized than others—for rating or otherwise
assessing the testimonies in its collection. Explored in greater detail in my dissertation,
these institutional criteria ranged from dramatic effectiveness, narrative coherence, or
psychological complexity, to a witness’ ability to balance the emotive or cognitive
demands of testimony or their inclination to glean lessons from their experience. In other
instances, archives identified exemplary subjects not only by the quality of their
videotaped testimony, but also by how well they delivered their accounts in person to live
audiences, a particular concern in the case of the USHMM. In some instances I also call
attention to interviews that an archive designated as non-representative of its holdings.
 
43

For each archive and for each of my three samples of testimonies, I have further
categorized the testimonies according to five central areas of concern. My intent in doing
so is to pinpoint some of the processes fundamental to testimonial production. The first
of these categories is the “Labor of Testimony”: those moments in interviews that
capture the witness’ physical gestures, vocal expressions, reenactments, and general
performance of memory, both in dialogue with the interviewer and framed through the
modes of production. It also includes moments when witnesses struggle with translating
deeply interior reflections into terms that might be legible through linguistic, physical,
and other forms of expression. As I will argue, this process represents a form of
testimonial reenactment in which the aural, physical, and visual performances of
memory, which are themselves products of (interior) mediation in their own right,
encounter the archive’s external mediating demands.
My second area of inquiry focuses on the “Interplay of Common and Deep
Memory,” the two types of memory introduced by Charlotte Delbo and elaborated upon
in the work of Lawrence Langer, Saul Friedländer, and others. Under this rubric I intend
to parse out those moments in which the demands of the interviewer, and by proxy, the
archive, shape how witnesses negotiate the terrain of their memory, presenting both
coherent narrative sequences that are in turn uprooted by the return of trauma and an
immersion in the past of that experience. As will be evident in the testimonies to be
analyzed, interviews often reflect an archive’s effort to enact the more unified and
narratively coherent experiences of common memory at the expense of exploring the
shards of deep memory. Other testimonies reveal an attempt to extract that deep memory
 
44

without first attending to the narrative devices that would allow it to emerge. In other
words, deep memory and common memory are entangled—and exist in dialogue—with
one another, and thus they require careful attention by those bearing witness. It is often
when interviewers attempt to sequester common memory from deep memory that the
frictions between institutional itineraries and individual memory come to light.
“Off-Camera Dimensions of Testimony” are those exchanges that seem to reside
near the periphery of video interviews, often in moments between tape changes, or after
the official testimony concludes and the discussion is mistakenly thought to be occurring
off-camera, or when the camera is turned off. These moments often appear to be absent
or otherwise isolated at the margins of typed transcripts. In examining these suppressed
and often rupturing moments in testimony—which underscore precisely what the archive
attempts to leave out—we can gain a stronger sense of the archive’s investments in
mediating memory. For example, it is often in those margins of testimony that witnesses
assert testimonial agency and at times even confront the interviewer on issues of how
their testimony is authored.
The fourth category encompasses the “Collective and Absent Voices of Testimony”
that is, the ways in which interviewers and witnesses attempt to assert their respective
conceptions of individual and collective memory, official history and personal
experience, and the obligation to give voice to absent victims. This includes moments
when witnesses imbue testimonies with a sense of immediacy and moral urgency in
anticipation of an impending moment when their living presence will no longer be able to
inform and authenticate what has been recorded on tape.
 
45

The fifth and final category, while containing elements of the first four, reflects on
the interview methodologies and epistemological preferences that guide the creation of
testimony. This category includes: methods interviewers use to engage witnesses on
how they became aware of the events they describe on tape; the kinds of narrative
frameworks the archive uses to break down testimonies, often into coherent, sequential
units; and the degree to which subjects are given agency in delivering their stories. These
concerns inevitably inform aspects of the ethical relationship between interviewer and
interviewee which is engendered during testimony.
In each of the chapters to follow, I investigate how protocols for the pre-
interview, interview, and post-interview methodologies shape the ethical encounter
between interviewer and interviewee. I also consider the extent to which testimonies are
driven by the agency of witnesses or the itineraries of a given archive. These factors in
turn inform the framing and excerpting of testimonies for use as sources in academic
research, documentary and fiction films, classroom instruction, interactive media, and
museum programming. This dissertation focuses exclusively on archives housed within
the United States, as one of my primary interests is exploring the use of audiovisual
testimonies of witnesses in ways that attempt to Americanize the Holocaust.
Consequently, the witnesses whose testimonies I examine deliver their accounts in
English, rather than in their native tongues, and include primarily those who resettled in
North America after the war. I recognize that the national context in which these
testimonies were produced imposes limitations on the scope of my conclusions.
Nonetheless, because many of the recordings I analyze circulate beyond North America
 
46

and speak to issues in testimony that transcend national borders, I believe that broader
implications can be gleaned from this study. Finally, I chose the three archives featured
in this dissertation not because they are the only institutions of their kind that have value,
but rather because each site represents distinct, yet also intersecting approaches to, and
cultures of, testimony; they range from what were originally more grassroots efforts to
those that were conceived as centralized projects with national and global ambitions.
Dissertation Outline
Chapter One is a case study of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale University, which has deep roots in the survivor community and is
justifiably invested in fulfilling its obligations to preserve the sanctity of its memories. It
currently holds more than 4,300 video testimonies and continues to conduct recordings
with witnesses across the globe. The archive is understandably very protective of its
holdings, as demonstrated by withholding the last names of witnesses in its catalogue and
by providing complete access to its testimonies to exclusively on-site use. The Fortunoff
Archive has ensured the standardization of its cataloguing and Orbis, the Yale University
library catalog, is available outside of the university community, allowing users to locate
interviews from remote locations. However, access to the complete collections is only
available in-person at the Department of Manuscripts and Archives at Yale’s Sterling
Library. This restriction is makes sense to the extent that only the most dedicated and
rigorous students, educators, and scholars will travel to Yale in order to access the
collections. However, if its testimonies are to have a broader pedagogical and research
circulation, it will be difficult to maintain this geographic limitation. The Fortunoff
 
47

Archive also places far less emphasis on educational outreach and promotion than the
other institutions, though it has consulted on other testimonial projects dealing with
genocide and has produced some documentaries and educational programming that
integrate the archive’s holdings.
Using testimonies, internal documents, and my interviews with staff, my research
examines how the Fortunoff Archive both acknowledges and effaces the practices and
preferences that guide how it collects and distributes interviews. The archive’s approach
to issues of media specificity reflects its efforts to expand the availability of testimonies
while working within an archival model that privileges on-site library visitation rather
than remote and more interactive access. The archive distinguishes itself from other sites
of Holocaust testimony by its open engagement with the self-reflexive aspects of the
interview process. For example, in recording sessions, the archive privileges the agency
of witnesses over that of interviewers in guiding the narrative. It openly acknowledges
that testimony is an act of mutual labor between those who give and receive memory, and
that the content and form of that exchange is necessarily intertwined.
However, when circulating segments of testimony beyond its walls (in edited
films and educational materials), the archive often withholds traces of its institutional
intervention and focuses almost exclusively on the expressions of witnesses. In the
process of transmitting testimonies to a wider audience, the archive sets out to stabilize
their interpretative possibilities by positioning them as raw resources absent any
institutional mediation. This reflects its ethical and proprietary preferences, which not
only privilege witnesses as the primary authors of their testimony but also aim to prevent
 
48

the misappropriation of material. However, by regulating the dissemination of its
holdings, whether by editing out the presence of interviewers or by resisting efforts to
make its collections available online, the archive not only limits its wider access but also
prioritizes a mode of reception that obscures the shared labor and media specificity of
video testimony. My work in this chapter aims to restore the traces of that labor.
My second case study, examined in both Chapter Two and Chapter Three,
explores the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. While it
possesses neither the oldest nor the largest collection of testimonies among the three sites,
it is the most centralized and institutionally expansive, bearing the imprimatur of the
United States federal government. In addition, its capacity not only as an archive, but
also as a memorial site, exhibition space, and educational center, positions it as an
illuminating case for examining testimony across phases of collection and transmission.
Rather than presenting a comprehensive history of the development of the Holocaust
Museum, Chapters Two and Three provide a focused examination of how testimonial
authority and authenticity are channeled by and through that institution.
80

80
Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust
Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) is a definitive, comprehensive
history of the USHMM; it served as an invaluable reference in helping me to navigate the
museum’s vast institutional archives during my 2006-2007 term as a Charles H. Revson
Fellow in Archival Research at the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. It
was during that fellowship that I compiled the research for this essay. While Linenthal’s
work in Preserving Memory provides a wide-ranging chronicle of the museum’s
development, issues related to collecting testimony are of secondary concern, and it
contains little in the way of analysis of individual interviews or in-depth discussion of
interview protocols, preferences, and methodologies.

 
49

The mandate for the museum was officially authorized through a unanimous Act
of Congress in 1980, giving it the stated mission to serve as an interventionist, “living
memorial museum” to the Holocaust that could attend not only to that past genocide but
also to the emergence of contemporary atrocities.
81
At the core of the museum’s charter
is a tripartite purpose to commemorate, document, and activate the memory of the
Holocaust in the face of current events, with its federal authorization solidifying its
political and symbolic currency in pursuit of that aim. On one hand, its location on the
National Mall adjacent to the museums of the Smithsonian Institution and in close
proximity to the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument, place it squarely in the
heart of an official American commemorative landscape.
82
Yet at the same time,
museum planners had to explore ways of importing the historical, evidentiary authority
from the European topography of events. A central strategy for accomplishing that aim
was a push to collect audiovisual Holocaust testimonies that would provide embodied
resonance to the museum’s exhibitions and programming. Originally intended to house
the central national archive of Holocaust testimonies, the museum’s oral history
department has to date collected more than nine thousand interviews, mostly in English,

81
Public Law 96-388, Enacted by the 96
th
United States Congress, 7 October 1980, cited
in “Responding to the Future: Work Plan 2000,” 3 May 2000. US Holocaust Memorial
Museum [hereafter USHMM]; Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the
Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 22;
Committee: Conscience.

82
For a more detailed examination of how the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is
integrated into the landscape of American commemorative culture, see Linenthal,
Preserving Memory.

 
50

in both audio and video formats.
83
However, one of the museum’s central priorities, and
in turn a driving impetus for creating a department of oral history, was a mandate from
the main planners that the “soul” of the USHMM would be its Permanent Exhibition and
that all other activities, including the collection of testimony, would be secondary to the
development of that core space.
84
While survivors’ embodied authority is primary to the
museum’s mission as a living memorial, Chapters Two and Three will explore how the
institution has carefully and precisely managed the ways in which living and dead bodies
are presented both within and outside its walls.
My third and final case study, featured in Chapter Four, is the USC Shoah
Foundation. It should be noted that the Shoah Foundation is still in a period of transition,
having become a part of the University of Southern California just over four years ago,
after operating independently since its establishment in 1994. Having completed both its
campaign to interview survivors and other witnesses and its goal to digitize its holdings
of over 52,000 testimonies, the Shoah Foundation is shifting its attention to making its
archives accessible to students, researchers, and the general public. This transition from
testimony production to dissemination requires not only a major redirection of its
energies and staff to new tasks; it also involves the foundation’s integration into the

83
Oral History Interview Guidelines; USHMM, Written by Oral History Staff,
(Washington, DC: Revised 2007), ii.

84
Press Release, Undated (prior to opening), “The Assault (1933-39), The Holocaust
(1939-45), and Bearing Witness (1945-Present): The Permanent Exhibition of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” pp. 1-2). USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition;
CA 1990-1994; Box 13; Oral History.

 
51

academic environment of USC, including its library collections. In particular, the Shoah
Foundation must now confront the challenges of activating its testimonies beyond the
archive, making them useful across a diverse range of venues.
The structure and interface of the Shoah Foundation’s collection of digitized,
online testimonies, which is made available through its Visual History Archive (or VHA)
on an Internet2 network, presents a number of limitations and possibilities. My particular
concern is the media specificity of testimonies, the ways in which the methods and
cultures of collecting and transmitting interviews impact how we access traumatic
memory for research and pedagogy. How does the scope of the viewing window and its
proximity to other bits of information affect how users approach testimony? More
specifically, will it potentially encourage the process of searching, rather than the careful
viewing and listening that is often not only an analytical but also an ethical demand of
working with testimony? Does the segmentation and instrumentalization of witness
interviews potentially position them as sources of historical illustration rather than as
complex and textured sources in their own right? I will address these and similar
questions not only in Chapter Four, but throughout the dissertation.

 
52

Chapter 1
The “Frame Conditions” of Testimony in the Fortunoff Archive
Introduction
Lawrence Langer, who is himself actively involved in conducting interviews for
the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, has engaged
the crucial ethical and pedagogical questions of documenting traumatic memory.
Langer’s scholarship stresses that while the Nazis left behind numerous archives
documenting the bureaucratic processes of genocide, we have few traces of the personal
experiences of their victims.
85
While affirming that statistics and other forms of
empirical evidence are crucial dimensions to historical inquiry, he argues that a different
register of knowledge can be acquired from witnessing survivors grappling with their
attempts to convey their experiences. Langer argues that historians have largely resisted
the use of Holocaust testimony in their scholarship, in part because the passage of time
and the aging of survivors raise issues of the reliability of their accounts. He contends
that, on the contrary, the traumatic memories of survivors is often deeply embedded, and
may even intensify with time as witnesses acquire insights about past events.
86

Langer’s perspective has been echoed by Geoffrey Hartman, co-founder and
project director of the Fortunoff Archive, who has written extensively on the deep
emotional impact of recording and accessing Holocaust video testimonies. Both scholars

85
Lawrence Langer, Forward to Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, eds. Joshua M.
Greene and Shiva Kumar (New York: Touchstone, 2000), xi.

86
Ibid., xviii.

 
53

have written eloquently about the complexities of these sources, underscoring the ethical
dimensions of the dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. While they both
explore in depth the manner in which those two parties shape the construction of
testimony—to use Hartman’s terms, the ways in which testimonies are “mediated by
frame conditions,”
87
such as the time and place of the interview and the language in
which it is delivered—neither Hartman nor Langer sufficiently addresses the institutional
aspects of that mediation. It is not my intention in this chapter to portray their positions
as direct reflections of the institutional culture and ethos of the Fortunoff Archive.
However, both Langer and Hartman have played formative roles in its development, and
the archive’s interview philosophies and methodologies have in part institutionalized
their perspectives.
My chief concern is to look beyond the tripartite interviewer-interviewee-
audience dynamic that is at the core of much of the scholarship on Holocaust testimony,
and towards a mode of testimonial analysis that engages with the presence of an
institutional interlocutor.
88
Hartman has contended that the Fortunoff Archive serves as a

87
Geoffrey Hartman, “The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction,” Poetics Today
27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 250.

88
A wealth of scholarship deals directly with issues of archived Holocaust testimony. A
few noteworthy examples include Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins
of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Henry Greenspan, On Listening
to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998);
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Geoffrey Hartman, The
Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
1996). These are formative works on the subject, but they nonetheless focus primarily on
the testimonial exchange between interviewer and interviewee, and rarely explore the
manner in which testimonies are framed by institutional, cultural, and formal practices.
 
54

“provisional community bound by memory and the recognition of trauma”—one that
nurtures a responsibility for witnesses by giving priority to their faces and voices.
89
The
notion of the Fortunoff Archive as an “affective community” was a central focus at “The
Contribution of Oral Testimony to Holocaust and Genocide Studies” conference, held in
2002 to mark the archive’s twentieth anniversary at Yale. Conference organizers and
participants acknowledged that Holocaust testimony was on the cusp of a paradigmatic
transition in which the living authority of survivors would be transferred to the archives
documenting their memory.
In their published report on the event, Jared Stark and Michael Rothberg note
participants’ eagerness to move away from looking at testimony as direct, unmediated
practice, recognizing that: “these projects insist that Holocaust history cannot be pursued
without a simultaneous inquiry into the conditions of memory and representations within
which this history is produced and received.”
90
Nonetheless, their report focuses largely
on the tripartite relationship among subject, interviewer, and audience—in particular, the
notion that testimonies are products of the context in which they are created and
produced, but only in terms of the moments captured on camera. They cite the work of
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer and their engagement with Roland Barthes’ notion of
the punctum as the “point of memory” that evades full capture or containment by an
archive: “The sharpness of a point pierces or punctures: like Barthes’ punctum, points of

89
Hartman, quoted in Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark, “After the Witness: A Report
from the Twentieth Anniversary Conference of the Fortunoff Video Archive for
Holocaust Testimonies at Yale,” History and Memory 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 94-95.

90
Ibid., 93.
 
55

memory puncture through layers of oblivion, interpolating those who seek to
remember.”
91
In other words, Rothberg and Stark examine testimony for its ability to
reveal the frictions and fragments that emerge during the mutual process of giving and
receiving witness. Within this understanding, they stress that testimony presumes and
requires a future viewer in order to constitute a “living archive.”
92
Yet I argue that what
that future user of testimony will inherit is not only the mutual labor between interviewer
and interviewee—that is to say, the acts of testimonial production as captured on camera
alone—but also those exchanges that take place prior and subsequent to the creation of
the recorded trace. To again invoke Hartman’s terms, my aim is to broaden our
consideration of the multiple frame conditions that shape testimony.
The Grassroots Origins of the Fortunoff Archive
In the case of the Fortunoff Archive, those structuring elements are deeply
intertwined with its institutional history. In a recent essay, the project’s head archivist
Joanne Wiener Rudof chronicles the archive’s emergence in the mid- to late-1970s.
93

Rudof recalls that at that time a campaign within the New Haven Jewish community to
create a monument to the Holocaust ultimately led to efforts to record the testimonies of
Holocaust witnesses living in the area.
94
There is a parallel here of sorts to the

91
Ibid., 93.

92
Ibid., 94-95.

93
Joanne Weiner Rudof, “A New Haven Community Project: From Local to Global,”
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Article, October 2007,
www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/about/Local_to_global.pdf (accessed 4 May 2009).

94
Ibid., 1-2.
 
56

development of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which I will
discuss in more detail in a subsequent chapter. But for now, I want to emphasize that the
Fortunoff Archive and the Holocaust Museum were both forged in the late 1970s, a
pivotal moment in Holocaust commemoration, as I have already discussed in the
introduction to the dissertation. Furthermore, as was the case with the Holocaust
Museum, the initial campaign to create a monument to the Holocaust in New Haven
became linked to efforts at recording survivor testimony, with the realization that
firsthand witnesses would soon be passing from the scene.
Yet despite these similarities in their origins, the two archives histories have
diverged in critical ways. The Fortunoff Archive owed its creation to more grassroots
efforts, as against the Holocaust Museum’s federally mandated status. As Rudof
describes in her essay, in February 1979 representatives of the New Haven Jewish
Federation and WNH-TV met to discuss the making of a documentary about the creation
of the local memorial, which in turn led television producer and personality Laurel Vlock
to get in touch with New Haven psychiatrist and child survivor Dori Laub. That meeting
led to an interview with Laub later that year, and from there four more survivors were
recorded.
95
In 1981 the original tapes of what had become the Holocaust Survivors Film
Project were deposited at Yale University, and in 1982 the Video Archive was officially
established as part of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of Yale’s Sterling Memorial

95
Ibid., 2.

 
57

Library.
96
The Video Archive later produced an eighteen-minute-long program to be
presented at the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington, D.C.
in 1983.
97
The aim of the video was to encourage other survivors to come forward and
record their stories on videotape. While the planners of the Holocaust Museum played a
crucial role at that gathering, that museum had yet to develop an oral history department.
Thus the Fortunoff Archive became the first American institution to dedicate itself to the
collection of Holocaust video testimony. The subsequent campaign to reach out to
survivors beyond New Haven and record their testimony on a national scale also grew out
of a grassroots effort to organize a survivor community eager to solidify its legacy.
Financial support from the Charles H. Revson Foundation for the purpose of
increasing the number of interviews for the Video Archive made possible a series of six-
week training sessions for potential interviewers in 1984. That same year, Joanne Rudof
came to the archive, initially as its manager and later as its head archivist.
98
In 1987,
through a major endowment of Alan A. Fortunoff, the Video Archive was renamed the
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. In the course of its institutional
history, the literary scholar Lawrence Langer became involved in the archive, both as an
interviewer and as a scholar conducting research on his seminal work, Holocaust
Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. The archive considers this study—based on

96
Ibid., 4.

97
Ibid., 5.

98
Ibid., 7.

 
58

Langer’s eight years at the Video Archive—a foundational piece of scholarship on the
subject, representing the archive’s core concerns.
99
At various points in its institutional
history the Fortunoff Archive has entered into collaborative agreements with the
Holocaust Museum on collecting video history. Further, Steven Spielberg’s Shoah
Foundation consulted with the archive as it finalized plans for developing its own
repository of Holocaust testimony.
100
I mention these latter points to emphasize that the
three case studies for this dissertation did not develop at a complete remove from one
another; rather their creators were often in conversation and even collaborated at various
junctures.
The Fortunoff Archive, which pioneered Holocaust video testimony, currently has
a collection of over forty-three hundred interviews, constituting over ten thousand hours
of footage in twenty languages, accessible through thirty-seven affiliates across the
world.
101
Its subjects include not only Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but also Roma
and Sinti, homosexuals, political prisoners, bystanders, members of the Hitler youth, and
other categories of experience. Since the first Fortunoff testimonies date from 1979,
compared to the Holocaust Museum’s in 1989, and the Shoah Foundation’s in 1994, its
interviewees were considerably younger and closer to the events remembered. Thus it
was able to interview survivors whose Holocaust experiences occurred later in their lives

99
Ibid., 9.

100
Ibid., 11.

101
Joanne Rudof, “Research Use of Holocaust Testimonies,” Poetics Today 27, no.2
(Summer 2006): 453.
 
59

before they passed away. In this respect, the other two archives encompass a smaller
demography of witnesses.
Personal Textures of Memory: The Epistemology of Fortunoff Archive Testimony
From its inception, the Fortunoff Archive emphasized the human dimensions of
suffering at the heart of the Holocaust, rather than the broader historical picture.
Speaking for the testimony project, Geoffrey Hartman explained:
It is our wish to document the tragedy and to show it in its full human
detail. But we do not try to make historians of the survivors. We listen to
them, try to free their memories, and see each person as more than a
victim: as someone who faces those traumas again, an eyewitness who
testifies in public.”
102

While Hartman values the historical insights that can be gleaned from testimony, he
contends that scholars too often neglect the emotional and personal textures of memory.
Testimony, he argues, can supplement historians’ work, in particular by reaching out to
what he characterizes as the “audiovisually oriented” younger generations. In his view,
the archive aims to give willing witnesses the opportunity to record their testimony,
rather than designating an “elite” cadre of interviewees.
103
The agency of those
witnesses, not the agenda of the institution or the interviewer, is critical: “They (the
interviewer) should never take the initiative away from the person interviewed.”
104

102
Geoffrey Hartman, “About the Yale Archive,” in Witness: Voices from the Holocaust,
eds. Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 252-253.

103
Ibid., 253.

104
Ibid.
 
60

The Fortunoff Archive’s openness to all witnesses does not, however, imply a
mission to reach the broadest possible audience for its holdings. As I will explore in
more depth later in this chapter, the archive does not currently plan to make complete
interviews available beyond Yale’s Sterling Library, and it has been careful to regulate
the broader circulation of its testimonies. It has been actively involved with developing
educational programming for such initiatives as Facing History and Ourselves, and it co-
produced the PBS documentary Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, which featured
excerpts from the archive’s survivor testimonies. But throughout its history, the archive
has resisted use of its materials in commercial or otherwise more “mainstream” venues.
This view emerges in Hartman’s afterword to the book published to accompany the
documentary video version of Witness: Voices from the Holocaust: “It is essential that
these moving, personal narratives be properly and effectively utilized by public
television, museum exhibits, and school programs.”
105
Conspicuously absent from
Hartman’s afterword are commercial film and television uses, an increasingly rich area
for exploring Holocaust pedagogy.
My conversations with Joanne Rudof have been revealing in terms of the
archive’s concern with protecting testimonies from the representations of popular culture.
As an example, she noted that the release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993)
has had the effect of shaping and often distorting testimonies related to the subject of

105
Ibid., 254.

 
61

Oskar Schindler that the archive recorded after the film’s release.
106
Similarly, in their
summary report on the “The Contribution of Oral Testimony to Holocaust and Genocide
Studies” conference, Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark discuss how the Fortunoff
Archive privileges the agency of witnesses, unlike other projects that distort or idealize
Holocaust experiences. They note that it was not coincidental that the Fortunoff Archive
was started in 1979, in part as a reaction against the representations of the Holocaust in
the popular 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust.
107
In contrast to what many viewed as this
series’ commercialization and homogenization of the events, the Fortunoff Archive
aimed to restore sanctity and rigor to Holocaust memory. The conference report also
contrasted the Fortunoff Archive to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, pointing out
the latter’s use of a more interrogatory and less open interview strategy, as well as its
imposition of a cathartic narrative trajectory.
108

Sidney Bolkosky, the head of the Fortunoff Archive’s affiliate program at the
University of Michigan in Dearborn, echoes these concerns, contending that the Shoah
Foundation and other testimonial archives often adopt an overly interventionist approach
to engaging with witnesses, or in other cases edit interviews to omit familiar, canned
stories. Both approaches, he suggests, leave out the “shared sense of collaborative labor”

106
Joanne Rudof, Archivist, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,
interview by author, 30 March 2006, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University.

107
Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark, “After the Witness: A Report from the Twentieth
Anniversary Conference of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at
Yale, History and Memory 15, no.1 (Spring 2003): 86.

108
Ibid., 89.

 
62

that marks testimony.
109
Bolkosky also expresses concern regarding what he sees as the
densely standardized format used by the Shoah Foundation, in particular its long pre-
interview questionnaire, its reliance on a list of interview questions, and its
encouragement of witnesses to end their recordings with redemptive messages, followed
by on-camera scenes with family members. Bolkosky points out that Lawrence Langer
has challenged those types of affirmative narratives by developing a “typology of
anguished unheroic memory.”
110
Walter Reich echoes this critique in his contribution to
the conference, which points out the commercialization or “Schindlerization of Holocaust
Memory.”
111

These lines of argument are limited in that they do not adequately address specific
examples of testimony from the Shoah Foundation or other institutions outside of the
Fortunoff Archive or its affiliates; thus they fail to account for the variations found
among interviews from other sites. The conference summary reveals the Fortunoff
Archive’s views of its own institutional status in relationship to other archives of
testimony, presenting itself as a more rigorous and less mainstream project. This view is
evident from an essay by Geoffrey Hartman, published in 2006 in the journal Poetics
Today as part of a collection of essays related to the 2002 Yale conference. Hartman
stresses that the poetics of testimony are as crucial as the narrative structure or the

109
Ibid., 88.

110
Ibid., 89-91.

111
Ibid.

 
63

historical content, reinforcing the notion that testimony is equally performative and
informative.
112
Like Lawrence Langer, Hartman highlights the importance of testimony
as a better way to recover the victim’s story than by focusing on official documents
generated by the perpetrators. While he emphasizes that testimonies, like any other
source, should be cross-checked for empirical data, their value is in underscoring the
process of retrieving and grappling with the after-effects of events. Unlike the Holocaust
miniseries, video recordings of survivor testimonies are able to attest to the singularity
rather than the homogeneity of Holocaust experience, with an “appeal to a human
commonality that does not imply uniformity.”
113
Hartman points out that the Fortunoff
Archive deliberately grants agency and primacy to the interviewee rather than to the
agenda of the archive or its interviewers. In his description, testimony should be an
“open-ended interview,” intended to elicit the free flow of memory, thus allowing
witnesses to attempt to express experiences that ultimately defy narrative coherence or
redemptive catharsis.
114
This requires that interviewers, as well as those viewing
testimonies, must be “trained to hear” those moments that emerge during the interview
that cannot be easily culled for historical information.
115
Hartman also stresses the
delicate balance between positioning audiences as vicarious victims subjected to

112
Geoffrey Hartman, “The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction,” Poetics Today
27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 254.

113
Ibid.

114
Ibid., 254-255.

115
Ibid., 255.

 
64

secondary Holocaust traumas and creating opportunities for them to closely examine how
witnesses retrieve and work through their memories. Thus audiences can potentially
forge a sense of social responsibility from the recognition of others’ personal suffering,
making the testimony archive a “living monument of retrieved voices.”
116

Lawrence Langer has had an enormous influence on the Fortunoff Archive, both
as a scholar of Holocaust testimony and as a long-time interviewer for the archive. His
1991 work, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, which I discuss in the
introduction, drew from his research at Yale, and the archive soon adopted it as a
standard for developing its methodology, and incorporated it into training sessions for
volunteer interviewers.
117
Langer’s approach to testimony was reflected in many of the
interviews I analyzed for this dissertation. At its core, Langer’s work emphasizes the anti-
redemptive experiences and “choiceless choices” of those who survived the Holocaust,
rather than pushing witnesses toward redemptive or cathartic accounts of their
experiences.
118
He underscores how testimony can begin to reveal what life was like for
witnesses under circumstances that systematically undermined moral and ethical values.

116
Ibid., 257.

117
Letter from Geoffrey Hartman to volunteer interviewers for the Fortunoff Archive; 15
January 1993; Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies [hereafter FVA]
Internal Papers. This and other FVA archival materials were generously provided to me
by Joanne Weiner Rudof, Archivist, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,
Yale University.

118
Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991): 26.

 
65

Langer argues that, rather than imposing our own redemptive narrative
frameworks on testimonies, we must allow witnesses to express the non-redemptive
aspects of their experiences. While it is impossible for anyone other than a witness to
understand what he or she went through, the interviewer and the audience are nonetheless
obliged to try to understand, even while knowing the impossibility of their attempt. In
this sense, Langer advocates a mode of conducting and receiving testimony that is
engaged without being appropriative, deeply invested but recognizes the experiential rift
that separates the witness from those who receive their testimony. By way of Charlotte
Delbo, Langer distinguishes intellectual or “common memory” from the “memory of the
senses,” otherwise referred to as “deep memory.”
119
While survivors express common
memory in a chronological and coherent structure—recalling in the present moment how
events unfolded in the compartmentalized past—deep memory takes witnesses back to
the events, reintroducing them to the range of senses experienced at that time and
complicating any efforts to keep that past at bay or somehow in sequence. Throughout
testimonies, these two strains of memory often intersect with one another, so that
witnesses find themselves immersed in the past, indeed at a moment that they had
initially narrated from a point of distance and separation. It is equally common for
accounts to assume narrative coherence and chronology after an emotionally wrenching
return to the past sparks a vivid recollection of a particular name, date, or other narrative
detail. Langer underscores the evasiveness of deep memory, marked as it is by trauma

119
Lawrence Langer, “Hearing the Holocaust,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006):
305.

 
66

and extremity, making witnesses less forthcoming in laying bare such experiences. And
in many cases, Langer reminds us, interviewers reliant on a standardized interview
narrative and protocol are inclined to keep testimonies ordered along the lines of common
memory, desensitized to the more nuanced layers and turns of deep memory.
This conceptualization of the layers of memory is a central element of Langer’s
scholarship on testimony, and it clearly informs his approach to conducting and
evaluating the Fortunoff Archive interviews that I examined for my sampling. In
addition to analyzing testimonies conducted by Langer, I accessed his written analysis of
Fortunoff Archive interviews, a project undertaken in his capacity as an outside
consultant working for the Holocaust Museum as it attempted to refine its own oral
history practices. Langer’s evaluations of these testimonies reveal the motivating
inclinations and epistemology of the Fortunoff Archive.
In written correspondence in 1991 between Langer and Michael Berenbaum, then
Project Director for the Holocaust Museum, Langer discusses the interviews from the
Yale archive that he saw as the “most dramatic and eloquent,” and thus potentially
valuable to the Holocaust Museum as it cultivated its own oral history program.
120
One
such testimony was that of Irene W., recorded by the Holocaust Survivors Film Project
(the predecessor of the Fortunoff Archive) in 1982. Langer places particular importance

120
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research
Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box
20; Lawrence Langer. Emphasis in original.

 
67

on the witness’ transition between chronological or common memory and less structured
deep memory, thus underscoring what he describes as the “fluid structure of these
narratives.”
121
For example, in the midst of Irene’s description of hiding her jewelry
before being deported, her story jumps ahead to the time immediately after the war, when
she returns to her house to reclaim those precious items. What happened to Irene, Langer
asks, between her deportation and her return home? There is a substantial gap between
those two events, and the listener is left wondering if and how she will return to that
middle portion of her story. The presence of such lacunae, Langer argues, is a recurring
aspect of Holocaust testimony and should not be sutured to provide a sense of continuity
and closure.
122
Langer notes the tendency in interviews conducted outside the Fortunoff
Archive to rush subjects through their stories or to ask for narrative progression, rather
than allowing witnesses to follow the associative paths of their memories. He argues for
a responsibility to tend to the individual textures of memory and to allow subjects to
return to their respective traumas on their own terms. And that means accepting
testimony in terms of how it is performed, regardless of traditional notions of historical
veracity.
Langer also makes a case for the necessity of reading the subtext of tropes that
recur throughout a testimony related to such experiences as inmates’ arrival at
Auschwitz, particularly survivors’ memories of asking Kapos about the fate of their loved
ones. Survivors giving testimony often recall that the Kapos responded to the inquiry by

121
Ibid.

122
Ibid.
 
68

pointing to the smoke billowing from the camp chimneys, proclaiming: “There’s your
parents.”
123
Langer notes in his critique: “This story has been repeated so many times
that one wonders if it’s become part of survivor folklore or mythology, or in fact
happened exactly that way. On the other hand, the Kapos may have developed this
gesture among themselves, and repeated it almost mechanically.”
124
While Langer
cautions Berenbaum that survivors’ memories are often informed by family, friends, and
the prevalence of particular tropes from collective memory, he nonetheless makes a
strong case for conducting a close and deep reading of testimonies in order to grasp how
survivors understand and frame their own stories. The documented events are only one
aspect of the process and are necessarily refracted through the psychological and
narrative complexity of their telling.
Langer notes that both interviewers and viewers must position themselves to
receive a very personal history without the pretense of complete comprehension. His
comments on the testimony of Leo G., recorded at Yale in 1980, are incisive:
He distinguishes between the impossibility of communicating what he’s
talking about to ‘us,’ and the intuitive shared intimacy with actual survivors,
who know what he’s talking about without asking. The importance of these
testimonies is that if we watch enough of them, we become part of his
intuitively understanding audience, not perhaps in the same way as authentic
former victims, but close enough to move into the subtext of his and their
narratives.
125

123
Ibid.

124
Ibid.

125
Ibid.
 
69

There is a critical ethical underpinning to this claim, suggesting that through close
engagement with and careful listening to Holocaust testimonies, we can responsibly forge
a personal and socially charged connection with witnesses without effacing the alterity of
their experiences.
Invoking the testimony of Dori K., recorded by the Holocaust Survivors Film
Project in 1979, Langer again reflects on the nature of the interviewer-interviewee
dynamic. At one point, Dori attempts to come to terms with the fate of her father after he
was taken away, never to be seen again. Langer describes the moment: “She now can
imagine his real fate, and sobbing she repeats ‘They put him on a train.’ She doesn’t have
to say the rest, we and she can imagine it, and this truth, instead of liberating her, merely
imprisons her in a vision of his fate that overwhelms her.”
126
In this instance, the absence
of a detailed account of what happened to her father compels not only the witness but
also the audience to speculate on the precise fate of her father. Thus, Langer concludes:
“Holocaust truth thus makes one vulnerable as well as knowledgeable.”
127
In Langer’s
assessment, the value of this particular testimony lies not in any semblance of a complete
or redemptive account, but in the endless and fractured struggle to reconstruct an event
without having experienced it. It also underscores how a survivor’s proximity to a
trauma—the extreme experiences of deportation or the concentration camps, for
instance—do not determine the level of anguish that he or she experiences.

126
Ibid.

127
Ibid. Emphasis in original.

 
70

Media Specificity and the Emotional and Analytical Demands of Testimony
A central paradox of the Fortunoff Archive relates to its negotiation of the
analytical and emotional demands of Holocaust video testimony. In an essay chronicling
the development of the archive, head archivist Joanne Rudof underscores the emotional
impact that its holdings have had on witnesses, interviewers, and audiences, while at the
same time emphasizing the scholarly purpose of an archive that Yale’s University Library
considers “one of its premier collections, . . . based not on any emotional factors but on
the archive’s obvious value as demonstrated by its many visitors and the papers, books,
journal articles, music compositions, and other works resulting from viewing the
testimonies. As the generation of survivors passes, I hope that it is with some sense that
their memories will be safeguarded and live after them.”
128
Thus the value of the archive,
like the library that houses it, is essentially measured by the rigorous scholarship it
generates.
In my conversations with Rudof, she emphasized the need to balance historical
inquiry with the obligation to tend to the personal aspects of testimony. She paid less
attention to filling in the historical gaps in testimony than to allowing witnesses to
experience agency in telling their histories. An interviewer must have a foundation of
historical knowledge, but not to the extent of closing her- or himself off from the more
spontaneous and unanticipated paths of testimony. Rudof, like Langer, finds the labor
and process of testimony to be just as crucial as the content that is produced. However,

128
Rudof, “A New Haven Community Project,” 18.
 
71

Langer, Rudof, Hartman, and other scholars who have served as advocates for the
Fortunoff Archive have focused too exclusively on the labor of testimony as it is
practiced between interviewer and interviewee, often with limited consideration of the
potential effects on future generations of users, and even less examination of the
institutional and formal mediations that shape the process. I have conducted my research
and analysis for this chapter with these considerations in mind.
My review of internal documents of the Fortunoff Archive, including training
materials used for volunteer interviews, indicates a clear focus by the project on
grappling with the analytical and emotional demands of testimony, while at the same time
considering the media specificity of the video interview process. My analysis also
reveals a tension between the institutional acknowledgment of testimonial mediation and
emotional investment on one hand, and an emphasis on objective and sober recording
practices on the other.
A training document entitled “Toward an Understanding of Media-Based
Testimony” clearly attempts to engage with the media specificities of the video testimony
format, albeit on a very rudimentary level.
129
And while this memorandum’s
observations demonstrate a limited perspective on the ontological and evidentiary aspects
of the camera as recording device, they reveal the archive’s epistemological preferences
and formal strategies. The document strikes a delicate balance between cultivating media

129
“Toward an Understanding of Media-Based Testimony,” Undated Training
Documents; FVA Internal Papers.

 
72

literacy by drawing attention to the spectrum of choices presented by the interview
production, while at the same time maintaining the possibility of extracting raw
encounters with traumatic memory. At the outset, the document describes the film or
video camera’s function, as a “passive recording device,” able to document an empirical
record of an event: “The purest form of this is exhibited in instrumentation or data
recording of an event such as a scientific experiment.”
130
Nonetheless, viewers accept
certain modifications of this process, such as changes in color, tonal scale, sound
modifications, and the conversion of three-dimensional space into two-dimensional
space. Such alterations are unconsciously accepted unless “the viewer’s sensory
apparatus alerts him/her to a distortion of input . . . At that point, the viewer rejects the
sensory data which are presented as representation of a ‘real’ event.”
131
In that sense, the
memo attempts to reinforce a notion that only the most non-interventionist approach to
the recording process can capture the core reality and truths of the testimonies.
Furthermore, it argues that the perceptions of the real in film and video testimony are
easily disturbed and that: “The variability may be plotted against emotional involvement
with the content.”
132
In other words, the more emotionally invested a viewer becomes in
a testimony, the more willing she or he is to accept or overlook the “departure from

130
Ibid.

131
Ibid.

132
Ibid.

 
73

‘realistic’ sense data.”
133
There are a series of problematic assumptions to be parsed from
this document, not the least of which are its contentions that the level of cognitive
engagement with a film or video object dictates proximity to the real, and that more
emotionally or viscerally charged representations create an analytically distancing effect
for the viewer. This seems consistent with Rudof’s discussion of testimony and her
emphasis that while emotions are a necessary dimension of the interview process, they
must be grounded in sober, restrained, and more objective approaches to interviewing. I
would emphasize, however, that the affective and analytical streams of testimony are
intertwined, and that the emotional connection forged between interviewer and
interviewee creates a constructive form of intimacy—a strain of pathos that allows some
degree of proximity to the suffering being shared while at the same time closing down
possibilities for appropriating trauma. The archive’s training memorandum also
describes the conditions under which testimony is produced, including consideration of
how the foreign space of the studio, the camera’s presence, and the disembodied voices
of those working on set, all potentially contribute to a witness’ unease. It thus argues that
the archive should provide as much comfort to the witness as possible in order to bridge
the potential “psychic distance” between interviewee and interviewer and between
interviewee and the “camera as viewer.”
134

133
Ibid.

134
Ibid.

 
74

In turning to the visual framing of the interview, the memorandum reiterates a
preference for a non-interventionist and more objective approach to camera use. Yet its
perspectives are quite limited, since it suggests that the camera’s ability to express a point
of view is limited to “the single technique of zooming in and out.”
135
In this regard, the
memo contends that the zoom, which it refers to as the “mobile documentary style of
camera,” is frequently overused at the expense of the “purity and objectivity of the
recording.”
136
Therefore, it advocates a mode of representation that captures a sense of
continuous time and space by eliminating editing and camera alternation. This
“unvarnished minimalist” approach to production indicates the “veracity” and “integrity”
of a testimony.”
137
Such a perspective assumes that raw footage can somehow be culled
from an interview. In so doing, the Fortunoff Archive memo neglects to address how
such elements as the use of the camera zoom, the framing of the witness, and the
blocking of interviewer and interviewee, among others, are crucial to shaping the
interpretative possibilities of testimony. My particular concerns are issues of framing and
the manner in which camera coverage of a witness’ physical form can reveal or conceal
how they perform the gestures of memory. While the memo acknowledges that use of
the zoom can be distracting, notably by signaling a rupture in its preferred mode of
realism, it says nothing about how the framing of the face and body convey knowledge.

135
Ibid.

136
Ibid.

137
Ibid.

 
75

Although focusing tightly on a witness’ face can often seem abrupt, it can also permit a
measure of intimacy, depending on the context of the interview. Furthermore, while a
medium shot might compromise facial detail, it can provide a wider spectrum of gestures,
giving the viewer a sense of the discomfort or intensity experienced by the subject. Yet
the memo is chiefly concerned with achieving a neutral representation, rather than
accepting that the process is necessarily mediated, with varying implications in terms of
what is left in and out of the frame. This also applies to its preference for the lack of
editing and an emphasis on the testimonial long-take.
Although the Fortunoff Archive’s training and interview protocols were not
formalized until 1984, there are nonetheless some fundamental consistencies among the
interviews recorded at Yale and its affiliate projects since the project’s inception. While
there are exceptions to the descriptions of testimony to follow, the majority of video
interviews are shot with a single camera positioned in the zero-degree style, with the
camera placed in front, though slightly to the left or right, of the subject, with the
interviewer sitting just off to the side of the lens. There are occasionally moments when
the camera zooms in for a tight close-up of the face of the witness in an attempt to
capture a particular facial expression or to provide dramatic punctuation to a specific
moment, in so doing accentuating the intervention of the recording process. Yet for the
most part, the camera frames the witness in medium close-up, exposing him or her from
the chest to the head in an attempt to foster a more neutral, objective, and static
composition. While early archive testimonies, as well as those from the initial affiliate
programs, would often position interviewees against more prominent backdrops including
 
76

brick walls, bookshelves, or other items indicating an institutional setting, most
testimonies are conducted against a black backdrop with a standard three point lighting
scheme, and recorded onto videocassette. As Joanne Rudof has indicated in interviews,
these approaches were intended to emphasize the primacy of the witness and to privilege
her or his voice, conveying a sense of a direct and more austere encounter by minimizing
the distractions caused by elaborate settings or camera angles.
The training memorandum on “Media-Based Testimony” concludes by stressing
three key elements in testimonial production: the individuals present in the studio
(interviewer, interviewee, cameraman, etc); the viewer of the testimony; and the video
process. Nor was the media process “simply a distortionless carrier of the information
from the first group to the second.”
138
So while the memo recognizes the various levels
of construction in the testimony process, it does not indicate a developed understanding
of how that construction works, or of what would constitute distortion or unvarnished
claims to the “real.” It correctly argues that the details of the interview process and the
expectations of participants frame the interpretative possibilities of testimony, yet it still
holds out the notion that some form of unvarnished testimonial truth is attainable and
ultimately fails to take institutional cultures into consideration as factors in mediation.
Fortunoff Archive Interview Methodology
I would next like to turn to the Fortunoff Archive’s fundamental principles and
practices guiding the collection of testimony. In keeping with Geoffrey Hartman’s

138
Ibid.
 
77

description of the Fortunoff Archive as an affective community for survivors and
witnesses of the Holocaust, the archive invites all survivors and witnesses of the
Holocaust to give their testimony. At the same time, it does not actively promote the
project with the same level of publicity associated with my other two case studies, relying
instead on word of mouth and its reputation to draw interest. The archive currently has
three full-time staff in addition to a stable of volunteer interviewers who conduct
testimonies, primarily on site at Yale or through affiliate projects at other locations,
including but not limited to the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, the Ukraine,
Canada, and Poland. The agreements between Yale and these affiliated projects stipulate
that although the Fortunoff Archive conducts training and integrates the affiliate tapes
into its collections, the participating members assume financial responsibility for their
interviews. The archive did not develop a formal pilot system for affiliate members until
the late 1980s and into the early ‘90s, when it began to require them to submit fifteen
tapes to Yale for analysis, in order to ensure they met the archive’s methodological and
technical requirements.
139
Trainers from the Fortunoff Archive would then observe and
supervise a small number of these affiliate interviews. It is important to note that the
Archive lacked a formal training policy until 1984, when Joanne Rudof joined the staff.
The earlier testimonies recorded both at Yale and by affiliates are consequently less
standardized than those after 1984. The affiliate programs within the United States were

139
Rudof, interviews by author, 15 December 2006 and 10 July 2007.

 
78

eventually severed, in large part due to funding shortages and the emergence of the Shoah
Foundation as a major force in conducting large-scale video testimonies.
140

The Fortunoff Archive assigns two interviewers to each testimony, first training
them to be both historically informed and yet open to the circuitous, less anticipated paths
of memory. As Dori Laub, one of the co-founders of and interviewers for the Fortunoff
Archive has written: “The listener must be quite well informed if he is to be able to
hear—to be able to pick up the cues…Yet knowledge should not hinder or obstruct the
listening with foregone conclusions and preconceived dismissals should not be an
obstacle or a foreclosure to new, diverging, unexpected information.”
141
To advance that
principle, interviewers conduct barebones pre-interviews with witnesses three to five
days prior to the taping, taking notes on the major historical and biographical information
that will be relevant to researching and conducting the testimony.
142
This approach is
intended to prevent witnesses from having to repeat on tape aspects of their story that
they have already given in the pre-interview process, thus encouraging a fresher, more
spontaneous expression of memory. One of the archive’s fundamental rules mandates
that interviewers neither bring their research with them to the interview nor take notes in
the course of the taping. This is intended to forge a stronger interpersonal and empathetic
bond between the parties and to ensure that interviewers listen more carefully to
witnesses, rather than looking ahead to questions or giving the appearance of making

140
Rudof, interview by author, 10 July 2007.

141
Rothberg and Stark, “After the Witness,” 87-88.

142
Rudof, interview by author, 30 March 2006.
 
79

judgment on portions of testimony. Rudof has described this process as following the
model of a teacher-student relationship, whereby interviewers create conditions for
learning from witnesses, being careful not to interrupt them by practicing “active
listening” to the various paths of memory.
143
These instructions attempt to prevent
interviewers from imposing their own prior agendas on the interview process, thus giving
witnesses primary agency and authorship over the testimony, and creating what Dori
Laub has described as an “open, or nondirective, interview that encourages a testimonial
alliance between interviewer and survivor.”
144
This philosophy underscores that the
foundation of the Fortunoff Archive’s testimonial approach is a combination of emotive
and intellectual engagement—an arrangement that asks interviewers to be both
historically informed and emotionally available.
When training interviewers, Rudof stresses the importance of determining the
right moments to speak or to keep quiet and allow long silences to emerge, as well as of
seeing what paths a witness might pursue rather than pushing forward an archival agenda.
The hope, in Rudof’s words, is that by “letting them [the witnesses] just be,” they will
recover memories that are buried beneath the surface.
145
To facilitate those kinds of
silences and avoid imposing limits on the interviewee, the Fortunoff Archive does not
have tape quotas for its interviews, allowing them to continue as long as necessary.

143
Ibid.

144
Hartman, “About the Yale Archive,” 253.

145
Rudof, interview by author, 30 March 2006.

 
80

To this end, the review of existing testimonies is an important part of the
Fortunoff Archive’s interview training, with emphasis on the limitations, strengths, and
potential “entry points” for interviewers, as well as on instances of both “inappropriate”
and “successful intervention.”
146
In training sessions for affiliate projects, Joanne Rudof
and the Fortunoff Archive interviewer Dana Kline have emphasized examining the
“dynamics of an interview” in all facets, ranging from administrative matters like release
forms to strategies for listening silently as witnesses tell their stories.
147
Rather than
compartmentalizing the administrative and interview processes, Rudof and Kline treated
each aspect as a crucial element of the testimony, helping to create a comfortable space
where witnesses are able to tell their stories. With that in mind, they encouraged
interviewers to explain the process to the witnesses, ensuring that they were briefed
before and after each interview rather than being lost in the process. They also suggested
that interviewers reflect on their own past recordings, in terms of ways to both improve
their approach and relate their experiences to academic discourses on the subject of
Holocaust testimony, notably Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies, which, as noted earlier,
became part of the training curriculum in 1993. In addition to reading the book,
volunteer interviewers were encouraged to relate it to their own experiences.
148
The

146
Handwritten and Undated Notes on Fortunoff Video Archive Testimonies; FVA
Internal Papers.

147
Outline for interviewer training held in New York City, 5 February 1990; FVA
Internal Papers.

148
Letter from Geoffrey Hartman to volunteer interviewers for the Fortunoff Archive; 15
January 1993; FVA Internal Papers.

 
81

training placed a particular emphasis on maintaining a “heightened” awareness of
when and how volunteers were to use their own voice.
149
While the training protocols
allowed gentle interjections to avoid too many tangents and to clarify names, dates, and
places, it insisted upon avoiding repetitions by interviewers. Further, interviewers were
to withhold statements that might draw conclusions for, or cast judgment on the witness.
Expressions of excessive pathos were also discouraged for interviewers during the
testimony. While interviewers were encouraged to engage the witnesses on a personal
level, any such relationship should not be explicitly communicated or made visible on the
videotape.
150

An internal document assessing the interview techniques for the testimony of Fred
O., recorded at Yale in 1987, forcefully articulates these principles. For example, one of
his interviewers is criticized for having asked, “Why didn’t you and your family leave?”
on the grounds that such a question expresses a judgment of the witness’s actions and
projects an external agenda onto the testimony.
151
The same interviewer had also pressed
Fred about why it had taken him so long to record his story. The witness responds that it
had been too painful and emotionally draining; he had lived his life trying to move
forward rather than dwelling on the past. The interviewer persisted in pursuing her own
agenda and asked Fred about the transition to life under Nazi occupation: “When did you

149
Notes for first session of “refresher course” (for training interviewers); undated; FVA
Internal Papers.

150
Ibid.

151
Handwritten and Undated Notes on FVA Testimonies; FVA Internal Papers.
 
82

first realize that there was a dramatic change?” Fred responds: “I wouldn’t use dramatic
change…the changes didn’t come in a dramatic way…the changes came
insidiously…degree after degree.”
152
While the interviewer expected there to be a
dramatic framework for Fred’s experience, his account contradicted that notion, and the
notes on this testimony critique the interviewer for failing to listen, understand, or be
sensitive to the witness’ initiative. The evaluator makes a similar assessment regarding
the conclusion of the testimony, where the interviewer imposes a more redemptive vision
of the Holocaust in an attempt to disavow what the critique regards as the “legitimate
cynicism” of the witness. As Fred O. concludes his testimony, he remarks:
I have emotionally exhausted my emotional strength for the day…But so
what? I am cynical about it. It’s told, it’s written…It’s video taped.
People can see my beautiful face on the tape. But so what? So someone
will write a thesis someday? Comparing this Holocaust to the Armenian
holocaust or to the Cambodian holocaust?
153

At this point the interviewer interjects: “No, not if there is a breath left in any of us, like
Eli Wiesel who gets so angered…” Fred O. interrupts her, “Are we on tape now?” The
interviewer responds by trying to end the testimony, stating, “I think we better cut…,”
but not before Fred remarks on camera: “Because you mention Eli Wiesel and I don’t
want to go public on what I feel…”
154
Then the screen cuts to black.

152
Ibid.; Fred O. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-943). Fortunoff Video Archive for
Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

153
Ibid.

154
Ibid.
 
83

This exchange, peripheral to the testimony itself, is exposed, though ultimately
truncated once the interviewer takes the conversation down a path that is politically more
delicate and less redemptive than she preferred to have recorded on tape. It is a
profoundly revealing moment in which the proclivities of the interviewer and the voice of
the interviewee come into tension, ultimately bringing the testimony to a halt. The
interviewer’s approach to the testimony with Fred O. clearly contradicts the prescribed
methodology of the Fortunoff Archive. Critical notations cover the written analysis of
this testimony, suggesting the various points at which the interviewer should have
withheld vocal responses and personal agendas and avoided attempts to cast the
testimony in a cathartic light. The few positive notes commend the witness for his sober
description of hunger—“excellent description, clinical, not emotional”—suggesting that
the Fortunoff Archive looks for testimony that, while informed by emotional experience,
are nonetheless effective at making a story understandable in more cognitive terms.
155

The archive’s training materials carefully consider and circumscribe those
moments when interviewers are expected either to withhold or contribute their voices to
the interviews. They caution interviewers to avoid twelve categories of questions. In
general, these categories cover inquiries that are driven by assumptions, prior agendas,
embedded answers, or statements of judgment.
156
The category of “inappropriate
questions” include those that are deliberately intended to be emotionally charged, such as

155
Handwritten and Undated Notes on FVA Testimonies; FVA Internal Papers.

156
List of sample questions, specifically those that interviewers should look to avoid;
FVA Internal Papers.
 
84

“How did you feel?” or “What was the worst thing that ever happened to you?” Such
questions are to be avoided because they project and exploit the affective dimensions of
testimony, rather than allowing the witness to initiate the emotional contours of testimony
on her or his own terms.
157
Interviewers should also consider the number of questions
presented, and are cautioned about posing “small questions” which can often lead to
small answers.
158
While the Fortunoff Archive remained concerned with reconstructing
the details of the historical record, it meant to facilitate the flow of memory so as to grant
agency to witnesses.
While the Fortunoff Archive encouraged interviewers to address historically
inaccurate information or myths, it worked to create a space where survivors and other
witnesses could engage and deconstruct rather than dismiss those myths. To take one
example, in regard to the often-repeated fiction concerning the processing of Jewish
victims into soap, interviewers are instructed to ask witnesses questions such as, “Did
you know that then?” or “How do you know that?” in order to differentiate between
firsthand and secondhand witnessing or individual and popular memory.
159
Though
interviewers are not to baldly contradict the witness, they are to avoid bestowing on him
or her too much historical authority. In one notation on the testimony of Peter C.,
recorded at Yale in 1987, the interviewer is encouraged to refine her approach in a line of

157
Ibid.

158
Rudof , interview by author, 22 August 2006.

159
Rudof, interview by author, 30 March 2006.

 
85

questioning about the formation of Jewish ghettos.
160
As the witness starts to drift from a
discussion of his own primary memory of events into a more sweeping, secondary
description, a note suggests that the interviewer might ask, “What did you see?” or
“What did it mean to you?” thus trying to maintain firmer boundaries between experience
and memory.
These recommendations represent an approach to testimony that is less
encyclopedic and more self-reflective about the workings of memory and the interview
process. It is a method that seeks to acquire details through the agency of witnesses,
rather than through the agenda and itinerary of the archive and individual interviewer.
Unlike other archives that often provide exhaustive (and exhausting) lists of questions for
interviewers to bring into the session, the Fortunoff Archive prohibits such lists from the
studio during an interview. This protocol encourages interviewers to more closely follow
the associative paths of witnesses. It is a system that, while often limited in certain
respects, nonetheless attempts to make witnesses the agents of their own stories, rather
than exemplars or informants of a pre-designated history.
Overlapping Testimony
For my first sampling of testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive I utilize the
methodology, as described in the introduction of the dissertation, for compiling a list of
witnesses who delivered testimony across each of the three archives under examination,
and in turn for subdividing those interviews into five different categories of analysis: The
“Labor of Testimony;” the “Interplay of Common and Deep Memory;” the “Off-Camera

160
Handwritten and Undated Notes on FVA Testimonies; FVA Internal Papers.
 
86

Dimensions of Testimony;” the “Collective and Absent Voices of Testimony;” and
“Interview Methodology and Epistemology.”
The Labor of Testimony
In viewing and listening to the testimony of Frima L. (born 1936), whose second of
three testimonies across the three case studies was conducted by the Fortunoff affiliate in
New York City (A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, Museum of Jewish Heritage) on
March 13, 1994, one gets the sense of how the performance of traumatic memory can
persist when witnesses are given the agency to navigate their stories. Like her testimony
four years earlier at the Holocaust Museum, Frima sits against a black backdrop in front
of the camera, with the interviewers positioned just alongside the lens. The camera is
fixed in medium close up, capturing Frima from the waist up. At the age of fifty-eight,
Frima is four years older than she was in her first interview, but she is still very vibrant,
an image accentuated by her glimmering red lipstick and brightly colored blouse. She
displays a keen camera presence. Frima’s memory of her experiences during the war are
as vivid as in her prior testimony, even though she was less than five years old when Nazi
troops entered her hometown in the Ukraine. In her words: “Every time I talk I can see
exactly what happened.”
161
She recalls in great detail how she was stricken with fever
around that time, using her hands to demonstrate the various techniques that were used to
nurse her back to health. At moments in the interview, as in her discussion of wearing a
cross in order to pass as a gentile, Frima uses the same wording and emphasis as she did
in the USHMM recording: “I wanted to live,” she explains to her mother in defense of

161
Frima L. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2926). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
87

wearing the crucifix.
162
She also repeats much of the detail and emotions in the course of
describing the loss of her beloved cat, who had followed her during the time she spent
wandering the streets in hiding, until one day it was killed by German soldiers. She was
compelled to shield her tears that day for fear of revealing that the cat belonged to her.
As with her earlier testimony, this memory is accompanied by her tears.
Although Frima’s memories remain vivid, the Fortunoff interview lacks the
historical exposition and causality that marked her first testimony at the Holocaust
Museum. It remains unclear how Frima was able to sustain herself for so long as a child
roaming the streets. She provides little in the way of nuts-and-bolts facts, and much of
the testimony has assumed a fantastic quality. This does not mean that the testimony
lacks credibility; rather Frima is using a form of testimonial repetition in an effort to
acquire mastery over the most grueling aspects of her experience. While short on
historical detail and the trappings of common memory, her testimony is rich with the
textures of deep memories that continue to be visible in her mind’s eye. This is evident
in her recollection of finally being rounded up by the Nazis in 1941. She is stripped and
all of her jewelry is taken away. When her mother is subjected to the same treatment, but
does not act fast enough in taking off a pair of gold earrings, a guard hits her over the ear,
causing hearing loss. In the course of delivering this account, Frima holds on to one of
the gold earrings she wears, underscoring the visceral impact of the story as well as
reenacting a segment of her mother’s experience. She is far less refined and more

162
Ibid.
 
88

anguished in this portion of her interview, at one point bending her head down out of
frame to pick up a tissue and wipe away the tears that have accumulated.
Throughout the course of her testimony for the Fortunoff Archive, Frima serves
as a compelling storyteller, qualities she used to survive the war. While there is a
fundamental difference between those two modes of storytelling—the earlier one
involved deceit as a necessary means of avoiding certain death, the later as an attempt at
reconstructing the past—both speak to Frima’s ability to captivate those who hear her
story and underscore the extent to which she seems to thrive in forming her identity as a
performer of narratives. Just as her storytelling was vital to convincing the Nazis of her
gentile credentials, thus allowing her to survive the Holocaust, so too her ability to
perform testimony enables her to garner some level of comfort if not mastery in recalling
her traumatic past. At one point toward the conclusion of the interview, Frima holds up a
photograph of herself as a young girl. Rather than placing it on a cropped mount, as was
the practice of the Holocaust Museum and the Shoah Foundation, the interviewers allow
the witness to hold the visual document on her lap as she concludes her story. We see
Frima look at her image with pride, holding it lovingly between her fingers as she
describes how she was able to survive by nourishing herself with milk: “So here, this is
how I looked,” she remarks.
163
This moment, facilitated by the integration of this
photograph, rather than its segregation from the testimonial talking head, embodies the
convergence between Frima past and present. There is a merger between Frima, the child

163
Ibid.
 
89

roaming the streets, surviving through her resourcefulness as a storyteller and performer,
and the eloquence and charisma of her identity as a survivor who endures through a
different, more authentic, yet by no means less vital form of performance. What is
striking about this interview are the relatively few questions, with Frima advancing most
of the testimony and the interviewers remaining largely silent partners.
The same pattern characterizes the interview of Lily M. (born 1924), also
conducted by the Fortunoff Archive’s affiliate program in New York. This second of
Lily’s three testimonies was recorded on November 13, 1990 (She gave her third
testimony later that year at the Holocaust Museum.) Lily, a Jewish woman born in Vilno
in 1924, is composed in a medium close-up against a light blue backdrop, sitting in front
of the fixed camera, with the two interviewers placed just adjacent to the lens. The two
interviewers introduce themselves, but they are never seen on screen. Lily strikes a
strong appearance, accentuated by strong brown eyebrows and bright gold earrings. As
in Frima’s testimony, few questions are posed, and Lily needs little prompting to tell her
story.
As Lily begins to recount her experiences before the outbreak of war, she remarks
that she needs to “continue with my memories,” appearing here to be guided less by a
strict narrative than by a recurring flash of sounds, images and smells.
164
Unlike Frima,
she seems to have far less mastery of her experience and often stumbles as she tries to
navigate these difficult memories. This is particularly evident in her description of being
placed with her family in the Vilno ghetto. With squinting eyes, pursed lips, and hands

164
Lily M. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1711). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
90

held near her face, she struggles for words: “You know…um…um…when you take
away from a person their pride, and their human, it is just one more step of an animal and
this was done to us…”
165
The dehumanizing aspects of her experience are at the
foreground, and are given visceral immediacy by the emotional nature of her description.
At one moment, she describes the small attic hiding space that her father built for the
family. She tells of hearing and seeing Jews being taken away for deportation, and as she
describes the scene she holds her hand to her ear and enacts the gesture of looking
through a carved-out peephole in the boards of the hideout. She recalls with great
intensity and emphasis hearing a fiddle as forced musical accompaniment to the
deportations: “It is something that will stay always with me.”
166
When one of the
interviewers interjects, perhaps intending to question or verify the legitimacy of that
recollection by asking her to identify the music being played, Lily does not remember.
But she does sharply recall the feeling that she experienced in that moment: “They took
the dignity from the Jewish people.”
167
Here, then, it is less the accuracy of the historical
details—precisely what, if any, music was played during that particular deportation—and
more a matter of how this memory is integrated into the emotional contours of her story.
Take, for instance, Lily’s recollection of being discovered and deported from
Vilno. She remembers her aunt, whom she regards as a “second mother,” singing a song.
As in the interview at the Holocaust Museum, she asks the interviewers if she may sing

165
Ibid.

166
Ibid.

167
Ibid.

 
91

and translate the piece. The interviewer agrees, and Lily proceeds to sing in a beautiful
voice: “Vilno, Vilno. This is a beautiful city—I will always remember the narrow
streets, the cobblestones, the hills and the valleys of my town.”
168
In one of the most
animated moments in her testimony, the performance of the song functions as a memorial
to both a lost loved one and of a beloved city. It paints a picture of a place, but one that
ultimately remains confined within the subjective vision and hearing of the witness.
Lily’s memories cannot be confined to the typed page of a transcript or finding
aid, but rather they are embedded in her multi-sensory memory. Thus she recollects the
selection process before Jews are placed on the trains to the camps: “And if there is the
smell of death, a smell of misery, a smell of blackness, there was something in the air, the
sound, I mean, the sound of destruction, you could feel it, the air was so thick with the
sound of destruction—you could cut it with a knife.”
169
In the course of giving this
account, Lily periodically sniffs the air and insistently holds out her hands. Her intense
reenactment of this scene has the effect of foregrounding the entangled sounds, smells,
and textures of the events. Lily does not so much convey a narrative account as she re-
experiences the events in their multisensory texture. This is echoed in her recollection of
death marches in freezing conditions that cause her fellow woman inmates to collapse in
the snow: “As I am talking to you, I see it before you.”
170
As she utters these words, she
holds her hands out in front of her so as to frame this picture.

168
Ibid.

169
Ibid.

170
Ibid.
 
92

Unlike the exchange in her testimony at the Holocaust Museum, which placed
greater emphasis on mining the witness’ experiences, in the Fortunoff testimony—in part
as a reflection of the agency given to witnesses—Lily shifts in and out of performing her
memories on behalf of herself and others. Yet, although Lily recounts some memories
with almost the same detail in all three of her testimonies, she is allowed to express
herself in a more associative, less confined manner.
This is also the case with the testimony of Leo B. (born 1921), recorded at the
Fortunoff affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland (Baltimore Jewish Council) on February 5,
1989, in what was his first of three interviews across the three archives. He appears on
screen, framed in a medium close up with a warmly lit office with bright orange
wallpaper as background. As is the usual practice, he sits in front of the camera with the
interviewers just off to the side of the lens. Like Frima, Leo is an impressive figure. He
is dressed in a sharply tailored gray suit and has a head of bright white hair. Leo is
composed and elegant in speech and manner, and he appears to be generally at ease in
front of the camera. Yet as the interview progresses, the few questions that are posed
seem to allow Leo the space to dig deeper into his memories. This is particularly evident
as he recalls his courageous escape from a boxcar destined for Auschwitz. Using a
rancid, urine-drenched rag from the overflowing communal waste-bucket, Leo is able to
free himself from the train by loosening the metal bars on the window of the car. At this
moment one can detect a physical shift in Leo: his eyes widen and he clutches his hands
as if grabbing the bars of the window. After a prolonged pause, he stares straight ahead

 
93

at the camera, remarking: “If there is such a thing as a memory, that stench is still there.
It’s powerful.”
171
As he says this, he holds his nose and his speech begins to stammer.
He is clearly immersed in, but also repulsed by the lingering scent of this memory. Like
the testimony of Lily M., Leo’s memory is largely embedded in its olfactory dimensions.
His recollections, as hard as he might try to express them on camera, are ultimately
confined to his interior experience.
One of the more striking aspects of this particular iteration of Leo’s escape
narrative is his introduction of certain terms that he will repeat in his later interviews. In
his testimony to the Holocaust Museum almost a half-year later, he will remark, “The
stench is still up here, and it’s powerful,” while repeating the gesture of holding his nose
as he recalls the smell of that urine-soaked rag.
172
In that testimony, Leo also comments
that “I have repeated that (the story of his escape) so often, and I don’t want to over-
dramatize.”
173
I mention this to argue that Leo is conscious of the performative,
repetitious aspects of the process of giving testimony. After all, he is an exceptional
witness in terms of having given testimony at three different archives. This is not,
however, to suggest that his testimony is somehow less genuine. The repetitions, in
addition to providing the witness an opportunity to engage the narrative that has helped

171
Leo B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1217). FVA, Yale University Library.

172
Testimony of Leo B. 28 September 1989 and 31 July 1989 (each session catalogued as
part of the same interview). Videotape 50.030*0038, Collections Department, USHMM,
Washington, DC.

173
Ibid.

 
94

him to grapple with the lingering trauma, also work in conjunction with moments that
show the breaks in the prepared or otherwise more familiar aspects of testimonies.
Leo’s testimony for the Fortunoff Archive contains more than a handful of
junctures that punctuate the convergence of newly generated and previously established
knowledge. In his interview at the Holocaust Museum, the interviewer returns to a set of
questions asking Leo what he did to escape from the boxcar. This approach is consistent
with the museum’s designation of Leo’s escape as the “key segment” of his experience—
or those moments (which I will discuss at length in Chapters Two and Three) that the
Holocaust Museum assessed as being valuable for potential exhibition.
174
Yet Leo resists
casting himself as a hero in this testimony, and the museum’s emphasis on what Leo did,
rather than on what he experienced or felt, only serves to inhibit his deeper penetration
into what he himself has characterized as an often-told tale. While the exceptional nature
of his escape narrative is dramatically compelling and no doubt central to his experience
of the Holocaust, its value cannot be extracted out of the larger context and spectrum of
his testimonial performance.
Testimony by the witness can often conflict with the preferences of the archive
and interviewer, as in the case of Thomas B. (born 1927), recorded at the Fortunoff
Archive affiliate project in Los Angeles (UCLA Holocaust Documentation Archives) on
January 19, 1983. In the first of his three interviews, Thomas, a Jew born in Poland, is
framed on screen in a medium close-up against a grey backdrop, seated directly in front

174
Summaries of Completed USHMM Oral Histories (undated). USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-
1997; 1988-011; Box 26; Oral History.
 
95

of the camera, with the interviewers just off to the side of the lens. He speaks with a
strong accent in a very halting manner. His eyes are partially concealed by tinted glasses,
though we can see him peering up periodically as if to visualize the memories unfolding
before him. At various moments during the interview, Thomas is brusque and even
confrontational with his interviewer. When asked, “When did your family then get
taken?” Thomas replies forcefully, “Not what I want to say…”
175
He has his own agenda
for the interview and is rather insistent in focusing on his escape from the ghetto. When
discussion shifts to a description of the selection process in the ghetto, Thomas’ speech
slows down considerably as he ponders the memory of his mother’s parting words to
him. The interviewer interjects, asking, “Do you want to say what?” to which Thomas
firmly replies “No” and continues with his own trajectory of the story.
176

Since this testimony was recorded at a Fortunoff affiliate project, the budget for
the taping was locally funded, and there was no protocol for unlimited tapes for the
interview, as was the case for those at the main project at Yale. Moreover, since
Thomas’ testimony was recorded in 1983, before the institution of more standardized
training practices, the interviewer asked far more leading questions than the Yale archive
would have preferred. In this case, Thomas is noticeably conscious of the UCLA
affiliate’s two-hour time limit, and of the interviewer’s motivation in having him focus on
his exceptional experience as an escapee from Sobibor. His pace quickens and his breath

175
Thomas B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-400). FVA, Yale University Library.

176
Ibid.

 
96

deepens as he describes having survived the selections, “So, okay, I was working in
Sobibor for six months. Now because of time, I will skip everything.”
177
The
interviewer interjects, looking for more emotional detail without realizing that it must be
grounded in the agency of the survivor: “But you knew that first day you had lost your
entire family?”
178
Within the context of the rushed, truncated interview format, this is an
intensely intimate question that has yet to be earned by the interviewer, and Thomas
largely evades any elaboration. The interviewer continues to press: “So, that was a
shock?” To which Thomas responds:
No. That was no shock. It was simple. The moment you take me out of life, it’s
like you threw on a switch. What happened before never happened.
179

The interviewer presumes to understand what Thomas experienced, only to be
contradicted. Thomas then explains that in the years since he was liberated until the
moment of giving testimony, he had never described losing his parents—“Until I was
liberated I didn’t go back to this episode at all.”
180
For Thomas B., what he endured after
the escape, not before, was the greatest challenge. Just as the Baltimore affiliate deemed
Leo’s experience of escaping the deportation train to be the central component of his
testimony, in this case the UCLA affiliate focused on Thomas’ experience as a rare
surviving escapee from Sobibor. But whereas Leo is given the space to tell his story on

177
Ibid.

178
Ibid.

179
Ibid.

180
Ibid.
 
97

his own terms, Thomas must contend with the interviewer’s agenda, which allows him no
room for performing a process that he has never undertaken. This interview experience
seems to have carried over to subsequent testimonies for the other two archives, in which
Thomas, seemingly dissatisfied with his first interview, urgently attempts to tell his story
in ways that capture the human details that are most important to him. The subsequent
iterations of his story thus serve as attempted correctives to what was cut short due in part
to the two-hour limit to testimony.
I also want to raise the question of how we engage with witnesses who possess
different levels of comfort or mastery with their experiences. Take the case of Fela W.
(born 1926), a Polish Jewish survivor who recorded her testimony at the Fortunoff
Archive affiliate program in Milwaukee in December of 1992 (Generation After of
Milwaukee). This was the first of her three testimonies. She is framed in a medium
close-up against a wooden backdrop, placed in front of a fixed camera, with her
interviewers sitting to the side of the lens. She wears a bright red jacket and black blouse
and speaks in an understated fashion. Fela is at once motivated to tell her story, but
reluctant to add flourishes to the narrative. At one point she speaks of remembering a
song that was sung by workers, including one of her brothers, who were skilled enough
that—rather than being immediately killed—they were sent to what she calls “vacation
spots” to do hard labor. Her brother eventually died, but Fela still remembers the
song.
181
When asked to sing it, she declines, but does recite the lyrics in great detail,

181
Fela W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3029). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
98

exhibiting a very strong memory. She has a matter-of-fact demeanor, yet her recitation of
the lyrics provides a glimpse into the still present despair over the loss of her brother.
Towards the conclusion of her testimony, Fela comments that she did not speak
openly about her experiences until 1985, when she remembered hearing about a
controversy over whether Dr. Mengele was still alive. Although Fela went through the
selections at Birkenau, she is uncertain whether she ever encountered the infamous
figure. Yet when a journalist from her local newspaper in Sheboygan, Wisconsin,
learned of Fela’s experience and asked for her comments, she went on to speak at schools
and other public venues, even though she had no direct knowledge of Mengele.
182
Her
authority as a survivor, not the specificity of her experience, was paramount. This
authority was reinforced when a schoolteacher asked Fela to speak to her class about her
experiences of being liberated from Bergen-Belsen. The teacher, who had been assigning
The Diary of Anne Frank, thought that Fela’s experience in that camp would provide
insights regarding what it may have been like for the diarist who died there. When
commenting on her liberation in the interview with the Fortunoff Archive, Fela remarks:
“I always cry when I talk about that.”
183

Yet in Fela’s Fortunoff Archive testimony, there are no tears and no crying. I
mention this because it suggests the extent to which Fela has internalized what is
expected of her as a witness and has adopted the rhetoric of affect that draws from her
experiences. Interviewers often ask her to reflect on experiences that are not her own, or

182
Ibid.

183
Ibid.
 
99

of which she had no direct knowledge—serving, in effect, as a proxy witness. When
asked to sing the song that marks a vivid memory of her brother, however, she recites the
lyrics without the tune, thus expressing her memory on her own terms. Furthermore,
while she grows accustomed to crying during the multiple times she gives testimony, in
this interview she speaks of those tears without shedding them, thus working against
expectations of how she should perform. This is to say that it is precisely in those
moments when Fela’s testimony seems flat or otherwise lacking in dramatic flare, that the
labor and tensions of how she practices memory become most evident.
The form witnesses assume in delivering their testimony is integral not only to the
process of testimonial production—the recorded interaction between interviewer and
interviewee—but also to the evaluation and dissemination of testimonies. As previously
mentioned, the Fortunoff Archive uses both formal and informal practices to hold up
certain witnesses as exemplary or representative of its preferred ethos and epistemology.
While not as formalized as the internal ratings and evaluations used by the Holocaust
Museum or Shoah Foundation, the archive’s practices raise questions regarding how one
encounters less exemplary witnesses.
It is thus worth considering the testimonies of less dramatic witnesses across the
three archives. Fela W., discussed above, is one such example. Another is Rochelle S., a
Polish Jew born in 1922, whose first of three testimonies was recorded by the Fortunoff
affiliate in Auburn, Maine (Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine), on August 2,
1988. From the beginning of the interview, Rochelle—with her pale skin and white
blouse—quite literally fades into the white backdrop. Framed in a medium close-up, she
 
100

looks just off to her left to where the interviewers are sitting, not toward the camera.
184

For the Fortunoff affiliate Rochelle matter-of-factly relates her story, just as she will in
her Holocaust Museum and Shoah Foundation testimony. She uses the same tone to list
the mundane, quotidian details of her life as she uses to recall more dramatic occurrences.
But it is precisely the lack of variation in her delivery that compels us to consider how the
everyday aspects of her life were fluidly intertwined with and ultimately
indistinguishable from what might be considered the more dramatic elements. It is
difficult to break down her story according to highlighted transitions and dramatic
flourishes, because it is flattened out by her understated delivery. Only by closely
listening to and viewing her testimony do we detect how her often-monotonous
expression of memory appears to mirror the dehumanizing monotony of her degraded life
during the war.
The testimony of Fred B. (born 1925) also conveys a sense of blankness that can
at first be difficult to penetrate, yet is critical to the meaning it conveys. He recorded his
Fortunoff testimony—the second of his three—at the New York City affiliate (A Living
Memorial to the Holocaust, Museum of Jewish Heritage) on April 28, 1985. Like
Rochelle, Fred—who wears a white shirt against a white backdrop—often gets lost in the
frame. Similar to the archive’s other testimonies, he is shot in a medium close-up, but he
faces the interviewers directly as they sit adjacent to the lens. Like Rochelle, he speaks in
a monotone voice, but he is even less audible because he stares down towards his lap.
The interviewers ask few questions as he lists various occurrences during the war. The

184
Rochelle S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1473). FVA, Yale University Library.
 
101

roar of subway trains in the distance periodically punctuates the silences, serving to
underscore the rather slapdash nature of this particular affiliate project, which—in
addition to instituting a two-hour taping limit—at one time conducted up to thirty people
in three days in order to accommodate logistical and budgetary concerns.
185
The result is
the impression that the camera is kept running in anticipation of capturing something
revealing. Although the static camera and restrained interview approach underscore the
witness’s tortured, contemplative nature, it does little to probe deeper or to initiate a
dialogue on certain subjects.
Fred’s testimony only picks up a bit when he arrives at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He
recalls how he survived the selections by managing to stay in the infirmary. But “the end
is very close,” he observes, in fear that his time in the infirmary will certainly lead to his
execution.
186
A German doctor enters the infirmary to conduct selections, and Fred is
surprised when he is led back to the work camp. One of the interviewers interjects,
suggesting that it might be a good time to take a break. With a half-hour left in the
allotted time, the screen cuts to black and the interview ends. It is a rupturing moment,
considering not only the stage in the testimony, but also the implied promise that it will
resume. It is almost as if the interviewers do not know what to do with Fred’s more
subdued performance. Rather than to represent a constructive albeit restrained dialogue
along the lines suggested by the Fortunoff Archive methodology, Fred’s aborted
testimony represents the limitations of an affiliate program that does not always act in

185
Rudof, interview by author, 10 July 2007.

186
Fred B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2047). FVA, Yale University Library.
 
102

accord with the standards and practices of the archive at Yale. In its efforts to record as
many testimonies as possible in a short period of time, and in instituting a two-hour limit
for interviews, the affiliate program here illustrates the need for active dialogue with the
subject and for framing the interviewee’s encounter with memory. An archival
institution has an obligation to make its voice heard in more ways than placing a camera
before a witness and hoping that her or his memory will unfold on screen.
The Interplay of Common and Deep Memory
The tensions that often emerge between witnesses and their interlocutors often
occur around issues of common and deep memory, as witnesses alternately are able to
convey the sequence of events in the past and then are overwhelmed by the way that past
continues to hover over their present lives, with the result of undermining efforts at
narrative closure. Take, for instance, the previously cited example of Rochelle S. As I
remarked in my earlier analysis, Rochelle’s testimony represented an often-monotonous
performance of memory that is difficult to penetrate but reveals the enduring effects of
the tragedy. There is, however, a moment when Rochelle is much more insistent and
animated, in responding to a request for the specific dates of her time in a concentration
camp: “What year is this? How long were you in the first concentration camp?”
187

Rochelle replies that her experience did not lend itself to that kind of knowledge:
It’s hard to remember, our minds didn’t work so good at the time. We didn’t
know what the time was then, time didn’t mean too much to us. We lived like
animals. We never knew what time of the day it was…we only guessed
what’s what.
188

187
Rochelle S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1473). FVA, Yale University Library.

188
Ibid.
 
103

While Rochelle cannot assign dates or times to her experiences, the memory of
dehumanization is indelibly marked in her mind. She is evidently immersed in the scenes
of the past but is unable to order those experiences along traditional historical lines. This
encounter represents a moment in which even the most seemingly objective approach to
interviewing a survivor on issues of common memory can come into fundamental
conflict with the manner in which witnesses process their experiences.
I also want to return to the testimony of Leo B. In that interview, the archive’s
emphasis on granting more agency to Leo for his account of his dramatic escape creates
moments when careful listening can detect slippages between common and deep
memory. As he recalls his and his companions’ decision to plan their escape from the
train, he comments:
And the memories are here. And they will live forever. And we decided
if we don’t do something about it now, who knows, and that decision was
the decision of my life. The watershed.
189

Leo fluidly transitions from his reflection on the nature of his contemporary memory
process to a recollection of a monumental decision he made in the past. But one could
also interpret Leo’s comments as a description not only of his escape plans during the
war, but of his decision to give his testimony in the present, which in turn constitutes a
form of survival. He is transmitting not only the content of his experiences—those
moments that represent the “key segments” or historical highlights of his time during the

 

189
Leo B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1217). FVA, Yale University Library.
 
104

Holocaust—but also the form of his expression, the exhausting labor of testimony.
Towards the conclusion of his interview, he remarks with evident physical and emotional
exhaustion: “We’re making a small effort, really, but this effort comes from experience,
not from hearsay, not from ‘I have read this here or there,’ but it is vividly in our hearts
and minds and it is emotionally straining and very exhausting.”
190

Examination of the overlapping testimonies in the three archival case studies in my
dissertation reveals a clear persistence of this interpenetration of past and present lives.
The testimony of Max "Amichai" H., a Dutch Jew born in 1933, is yet another example.
The Fortunoff affiliate in Baltimore recorded the first of his three testimonies across the
three archives on March 12, 1989. Amichai sits in a plush chair adjacent to a plant,
directly facing the camera in a medium close-up, with the interviewer sitting alongside
the lens. He speaks with a dignified continental accent. Having survived the war as a
young child, Amichai is considerably younger than the majority of witnesses analyzed
from my overlapping sample. Much of his testimony recalls his experiences of surviving
the war while hiding with his family in a chicken coop in the Dutch countryside.
Amichai is careful and deliberate, to the point of carefully distinguishing between his
more reliable memories and those events he has reconstructed through second-hand
knowledge. When, towards the end of the interview, he is asked, “Why do you think it
was important for you to tell your story today?” Amichai becomes more animated in his
gestures and slips into a reflection on the nature of his dual identity:

190
Ibid.

 
105

For a long time, I had a hard time integrating my two lives…I dealt with these
obviously terrible memories by walling them off, by saying that was then, this is
now…I realize that I can’t wall it off, that [his past] is as much a part of my life as
what I have here which on the surface looks like any other city dweller.
191

Throughout this passage, he places his two hands apart and then together, to illustrate the
merger of those two selves. Amichai proceeds to thank the interviewer for giving him the
opportunity to initiate the process of addressing the interwoven nature of his past and
present experiences. It is only through the dialogue generated alongside the interviewer
that the demarcation between common and deep memory is proven to be illusory.
The breakdown in the compartmentalization of memory is also evident when
interviewers ask witnesses to tell their stories in accordance with a particular sequential
framework. In the earlier discussed testimony of Lily M., the witness remarks that the
most traumatic aspect of her wartime years occurred fairly early with the loss of her
mother: “This is the first tragedy, I couldn’t find peace for a long, long time.”
192
Lily
talks with evident affection and pride about her mother’s kindness and generosity, and
her memory quickly drifts forward to the experience of coming across a friend of her
mother’s in a camp. The fellow inmate speaks kindly of her mother, and Lily seems to
savor the recollection before quickly realizing that she has jumped ahead in the sequence
of events and must get back on track to events proceeding this encounter. Her memory of
her mother and her continued sense of both loss and pride are overwhelming and clearly

191
Max H. and Johanna J. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1329). FVA, Yale University
Library.

192
Lily M. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1711). VFA, Yale University Library.
 
106

provide a structure for her story. The interviewer, however, sees this recollection as a
digression that must be corrected in order to keep the story coherent and on track.
The Off-Camera Dimensions of Testimony
Although the Fortunoff Archive lacks transcripts of testimonies, such as the
Holocaust Museum (though not the Shoah Foundation) provides, its finding aids contain
brief segment summaries of the progression of testimony, each marked with
corresponding time-codes. In addition, the Orbis cataloging system includes citations for
major place names, historical figures, and a range of historical experiences. Yet like
both the Holocaust Museum and Shoah Foundation, the elements of testimonies that are
included in catalogues and indexes (and in some cases transcripts and finding aids) are
only those that are recorded as part of the official recorded interview session. That is to
say, anything that occurs before the camera is officially rolling or between breaks never
makes its way into the infrastructure of the archive’s database and rarely, if ever, into the
distributed byproducts of the interviews themselves. As I have argued, those exchanges
that occur seemingly at the periphery and margins of testimony, often as the camera
appears to have stopped rolling, are often quite informative, if not central to the process
of interpreting meaning from these holdings, particularly in terms of uncovering the
dialogue and labor that takes place between the interviewee and interviewer.
Again, the testimony of Fela W. provides an illustration. One of the most revealing
moments comes in the intermission between the first and second videotape. As the first
tape winds down, one of the interviewers can be heard saying, “This is the end of tape

 
107

one.”
193
The finding aids do not describe what follows, when we see Fela, clearly trying
to regain her composure, take a sip of water, wipe her mouth, gather her thoughts and
remark to the interviewer, “How many hours do you usually tape a person?” The
interviewer responds, “We don’t go any longer than two hours,” to which Fela inquires,
“How long have I been now?”
194
In this exchange we learn of the internal framing
conditions of the interview: the fact that the testimony, in accord with the practices and
budget of the Milwaukee affiliate, is limited to two hours and further that the witness is
made aware of this constraint, to which she must accommodate her remaining testimony.
As the tape continues to roll, unbeknownst to one of the interviewers, she asks Fela, “Do
you find, since you’ve spoken a lot at schools and things, do you find that you think of
new things or do you usually remember it the same?” To which Fela responds, “The
major things I remember, but every time…”
195
At this point, the screen cuts to black
before her full comments are completed. Either the tape has run out or the interviewer
realizes it has been rolling and chooses to cut before anything more is recorded. When
the second tape rolls, the interviewer asks “Are we on? This is tape two of Mrs. Fela
W…do you want to continue please?” There is no mention of the off-camera
exchange.
196
Fela picks up her description of how bombs were dropped on the work site
near her camp, as if there had been no break in the narrative.

193
Fela W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3029). FVA, Yale University Library.

194
Ibid.

195
Ibid.

196
Ibid.
 
108

This exchange is interesting in several respects. First, the interviewer withheld her
question about the impact of repetition on testimony until after she thought the cameras
had stopped rolling. Perhaps she thought that such a question somehow threatened the
impression of rawness and spontaneity by drawing attention to the fact that although
Fela’s first archived testimony, the recording is by no means the first time she has told
her story to an audience. It underscores the Fortunoff Archive’s emphasis on initiating
testimony on terms that can grant agency to the witness in ways that allow their stories to
convey directness and immediacy. However, Fela’s truncated admission of variability in
at least the less “major” elements of her story seems to mark a breach in the interview,
when the performed, mediated, and framed dimensions of the process are laid bare at the
periphery, while the interview moves forward without comment on the meta-narrative of
how Fela delivers her testimony. Thus regardless of the Fortunoff Archive’s efforts to
initiate a dialogue with witnesses, it imposes limits on what constitutes that exchange if it
potentially ruptures the continuity of a particular testimony. This is not to argue that the
Fortunoff Archive fails to create spaces for a meta-reflection on testimonial labor.
However, they are primarily limited to the before-mentioned project to conduct limited
re-interviews of a small sampling of subjects. There is no space for that kind of
discussion within the body of a standard interview.
“Off-camera” moments also reveal witnesses’ search for affirmation as to their
delivery of testimony. Liane R.L., for example, is heard between the first and second
tapes saying, “Is this going the way you want to go?” to which the interviewer responds,

 
109

“Yes.”
197
We then see Liane get up from her chair and leave the frame to get a tissue and
compose herself for the next segment of the interview. Thomas B., clearly exhausted
from his interview, gets up from his seat during a tape change to stretch and ask for a
glass of water. Then there is the case of Ben M. The main Fortunoff Archive recorded
the first of his three testimonies across my case studies on February 18, 1983. Because of
Ben’s prominence in the survivor community—as is discussed below—he is interviewed
in his office. As the phone rings during the course of his interview, he stops and answers
it. Returning to the interview, he looks directly at the interviewer and seeks assurance
that the testimony is going well. She responds, “You’re brilliant Ben, brilliant.”
198

In certain circumstances, the work of testimony shown in these impromptu, off-the-
record moments can highlight the shift in tone between pre-interview and interview
interactions. The interview with Leo B., for instance, begins on an unexpected note. We
see and hear the elegantly dressed witness talking with the interviewer and camera
operator before the interview begins. In a tone more befitting a borsht-belt comic, Leo
tells the following joke:
You know what a woman said to her husband over a cup of coffee in the
morning? She asked him, ‘Darling…Now that I’m gray, do you still love
me?’ He said, ‘I loved you through five different colors, why not gray?’
199

You can hear the people in the studio chuckling, but then rather effortlessly, Leo

197
Liane R. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1213). FVA, Yale University Library.

198
Benjamin M. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-194). FVA, Yale University Library.

199
Leo B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1217). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
110

composes himself and without any audible prompting from anyone, dives right into the
beginning of his testimony, “My name is Leo B., I was born in Vienna, Austria…”
200

I bring up this moment not to suggest that Leo’s testimony is somehow too scripted
or polished. On the contrary, it shows the witness as a consummate performer—someone
who is comfortable in front of the camera and is so intimately familiar with his memory
that he can fluidly modulate between these various modes of address in front of the
camera. In addition, his joke, with the resultant chuckling, highlights the fact that there is
always an audience in the studio, one that in partnership with the witness, anticipates the
various turns in the story.
These exchanges reveal the preferred vision of a seamless testimony that leaves the
grittier work of memory at the margins. But they also underscore a common underlying
dynamic to testimony—the notion that witnesses, in enacting their memory before the
camera, are engaging with an embedded set of practices and expectations that encourage
them to ask interviewers: “Is this going the way you want to go?” Despite the Fortunoff
Archive’s emphasis on privileging the voice of witnesses, the process of delivering
testimony necessarily involves integrating the individual voice into a conversation with
the interviewer’s expectations and with the presence of the camera and the potential
audience that it represents. It is also an endeavor that extends beyond the recording to the
pre-interview program, the psychological preparation by the witness and the interviewer,
the breaks between tape changes, and the post-interview debriefings. Each component is
part of the larger constellation of testimonial production, not just the means of producing

200
Ibid.
 
111

a discrete recorded unit of testimony. It is an ongoing process and labor rather than a
pure distillation of a testimonial essence. And it is in these off-camera moments when a
glimpse into that nature of testimony can be made visible.
Towards the end of her testimony, the interviewer asks Rochelle S., “So you have
hope for the future?” Rochelle replies, “Yes, I have hope.”
201
The camera cuts to black
and the interview is officially concluded, but the audio recording is still running. We can
hear the interviewer talking about how she felt that it was an appropriate time to end the
interview: “I could have asked more questions, but it was the perfect place to stop.”
202

Rochelle’s last audible words are: “You can ask me again in private.”
203
Thus, while the
testimony breaks down at the various levels of recording—first the visual then the audio
components—the testimony continues, moving from the public record of the archive to
the seemingly private moments of the off-tape exchanges, and on to the ongoing
discussions and reflections that will take place after the interview ends. This makes it
imperative to examine testimony across this broader spectrum of activity rather than
looking only at those aspects that are captured within the official frame of the camera.
The Collective and Absent Voices of Testimony
Often in testimonies, ruptures between common memory and deep memory, as well
as between the agenda of the interviewer and that of the interviewee, manifest themselves
at the interchange between collective/individual and present/absent testimony. The

201
Rochelle S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1473). FVA, Yale University Library.

202
Ibid.

203
Ibid.

 
112

video-testimony collections of the Holocaust Museum and the Fortunoff Archive both
place an emphasis on having witnesses deliver their accounts in terms that relate to their
individual histories as opposed to serving as informants of larger historical developments
or collective experiences. Yet this is an impossible challenge for certain subjects whose
individual fates were intertwined with those of others, and their role as testifiers is often
as much about speaking for those who are now absent as it is a matter of portraying their
own individual survival. Holocaust testimony is necessarily a collective act in that it
involves documenting the traces of lost traditions, communities, and individuals.
Revisiting the testimony of Lily M., I am reminded of the moment in her interview
when she recalls how a friend named Tosha at the Dunawerke labor camp had written a
song that embodied for Lily one of the few traces of humanity able to persist during the
war. Lily asks for permission to sing the song, and she does so with clear warmth and
fondness but also with a sense of urgency in terms of entering this ephemeral fragment
into the record. She remarks that Tosha did not survive the war but that by singing her
song, “I want to just pay homage to her.”
204
Here, Lily not only pays respects to her
departed friend, but also gives presence to a now absent voice and reenacts the humanity
that Tosha was able to create in the camp. In so doing, Lily also testifies to the fact that
in the face of grave dehumanization, some semblance of humanity persisted then and
continues to persist after the events. At this point in the testimony, Lily is clearly lost in
the memory of her friend and the feelings that it invokes. The interviewer attempts to

204
Lily M. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1711). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
113

move the testimony back on its sequential track, “So you were still in Dunawerke?”
205

Lily seems slightly thrown off by the question and responds, “Um…when I start to talk
about Tosha, I lose myself…”
206
There is a sense here that she is startled out of her
intimate, deep memory of a close companion in order to trace the narrative development
of her own experiences. Towards the conclusion of her interview, Lily will further
underscore her sense of obligation to speak for others, even at the expense of the value
she places on keeping to herself:
Six million people cannot talk. I have to talk for them. I am a very private
person. It is very hard for me…just the idea that I have to spill my guts
before strangers, I can’t do it…but I have to do it…
207

The labor of testimony appears to be neither comforting nor cathartic in this interview,
but rather seems to function as a way of fulfilling an obligation to others and not only to
one’s individual experience.
At other moments the presence of the dead penetrates the otherwise rote or overly
polished aspects of testimony. The interview with the prominent Jewish survivor Ben M.
serves as an interesting example in that respect. Ben was a prominent figure in the
formation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a co-founder of the
National Registry of Holocaust Survivors. His testimony is notable for the fact that on
account of his preeminent status as a leader in the survivor community the first of his
three archived testimonies was recorded by Laurel Vlock, one of the founders of the

205
Ibid.

206
Ibid.

207
Ibid.
 
114

Fortunoff Archive, in what appears to be his office, as opposed to the customary studio or
archive office space. Ben’s testimony is also exceptional in the sense that he carries a
certain amount of institutional and communal authority as a figure at the forefront of
survivor advocacy. Much of his brief, less than one-hour-long testimony is dedicated to
promoting his various efforts on behalf of survivors. Indeed, at times his manner seems
to presume a monolithic survivor voice and set of interests.
At one point, Ben drifts into a mode of address seemingly more fractured and
deeply embedded in his psyche. He recalls how, while living in the Warsaw Ghetto, he
arranged to have false identification cards issued for Jews, including himself. “Here
comes my personal story,” he remarks, as he proceeds to comment on how a twist of fate
placed his name on a “dead list.”
208
He then secures a false ID, with the intention of
leaving his family in the ghetto in order to seek out options for himself and for his loved
ones. In the end, his brother volunteers to take his place and leaves with the ID, only to
be killed not long thereafter. It is one of the few times in his testimony when Ben seems
to lose himself in his recollections, overwhelmed by the emotional nature of this story
and the fact that his fate was swapped with that of his brother:
So officially my name, in the records of the Germans, I am on the death list. And
I have to live for the rest of my life with that thought, that in that moment, my
brother came and exchanged me for him. That instead of me being sent away, he
went. Actually, I am living all my life with the thought that I am living his life. I
know that I didn’t do anything to be—to have a guilty feeling. But similar cases
like this you will encounter with other people.”
209

208
Benjamin M. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-194). FVA, Yale University Library.

209
Ibid.
 
115

Here, Ben speaks of his own experience, while also trying to make a larger comment
about other survivors, in an apparent attempt to come to terms with his lingering sense of
guilt. The power of this passage only truly emerges when Ben breaks away from what at
times appears to be a somewhat rote interview. It helps to shed light on Ben’s dedication
to organizing commemorations of those who died in the Holocaust—and in turn his
tendency to generalize about the experiences of other survivors—when we see how
deeply it is embedded in his very personal sense of living on behalf of someone else.
In other instances, as in the testimony of Thomas B., the act of giving testimony is
inextricably linked to reenacting the gestures and behavior of others who were not so
fortunate. Following his harrowing escape from Sobibor, he hides in a barn in the Polish
countryside. At one point, a group of bandits discovers him, shoots him, and leaves him
for dead. He only manages to survive by faking his death. Thomas reenacts this whole
performance on tape: he mimics the sound of a gun firing “bang”; dramatically slumps
his head forward, eyes closed; and sighs, as on that fateful night. He explains: “I had
seen people dying in Sobibor…I know. Usually when they die, they make last, ughh…I
made the same way.”
210
To convey this experience through video testimony, he is
compelled to replicate the same set of actions, thereby embodying a trace of those who
are now absent.
Interview Methodology and Epistemology
The possibility of generating and interpreting testimonial meaning often depends on
small yet ultimately pivotal decisions concerning the framing of the camera and an

210
Thomas B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-400). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
116

archive’s approach to documenting the personal possessions of witnesses. Take for
instance, the previously discussed testimony of Max “Amichai” H. His later testimony at
the Holocaust Museum in 1990 concluded with a photo- and artifact-sharing session with
objects that included a photograph of the family that sheltered him and a hat made by the
Scottish soldiers who liberated him. Presented on a stand and cropped against a black
backdrop, they were not integrated into the main interview. Some of these objects were
later donated to the museum as “object survivors”—accessories to his testimony—and
there is a sense that their introduction into the tape serves a more curatorial than
testimonial function.
211
We never see Amichai handling the artifacts, and his off-screen
discussion of them is largely limited to brief accounts of their provenance. In contrast,
his testimony for the Fortunoff Archive includes moments when Amichai incorporates
certain artifacts directly into the main body of his testimony. In one notable instance, as
he recalls how he was saved by a Dutch family that sheltered him and his family in the
countryside, he pulls out a children’s book that he read to the young children of that
family. From a very young age he had a fondness for reading to children. And as he
holds up this precious “object survivor,” we get a fuller sense of the affection and
humanity that characterized the dynamic between Amichai and those who helped him
survive. The Fortunoff Archive was fairly consistent in allowing witnesses to bring
documents and photographs into the body of the interview, rather than strictly relegating

211
Letter from Anita Kassof to Max “Amichai” H. 29 November 1989. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu
“Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 144; Smith, Martin.
 
117

them to the concluding moments, thus making it possible for more impromptu and
organic moments to emerge.
Another example of the incorporation of artifacts into testimony is found in the
interview with Gerda H. (born 1922), recorded at the Maine affiliate of the Fortunoff
Archive (Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine) on July 9, 1987. In this first of her
three recorded testimonies, Gerda, a German Jewish survivor, is framed for most of the
interview in a medium close up in front of an orange curtain backdrop. She faces the
interviewers, who sit just alongside the camera lens. She is dignified, eloquent, and soft-
spoken. The testimony begins with an establishing shot of her sitting near a table on
which are strewn documents, letters, photographs, and other artifacts. As the interview
progresses, the camera frame will include those objects relevant to particular moments in
her life. For example, as she talks of being forced to wear the identifying yellow Jewish
Star, she holds up the badge and dangles it in front of her chest to illustrate where it was
worn. As the camera zooms in to capture the image, we can hear Gerda remaking, “So
we were marked.”
212
Capturing this detail within the main body of the interview, rather
than limiting it to the concluding segment, lends a heightened sense of spontaneity that is
missing when objects are compartmentalized in keeping with their curatorial value.
Yet there remain limits to what the camera can capture on screen. In all three
archives under examination, the medium shot is the standard perspective for recording
witnesses. While in certain circumstances, particularly at the Fortunoff Archive, the
camera will sometimes move in for extreme close-ups to provide emphasis and detail, for

212
Gerda H. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1029). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
118

the most part the camera remains static, capturing subjects from their waists up. This
approach has significant limitations, especially in providing a narrower range of the
physical expressions that are central to how witnesses work through and express the
details of their memories. It can often obscure the revelation of crucial corporeal
markers, such as the tattoos that were forcibly inscribed on the arms of certain
concentration camp inmates.
The testimony of Erwin B. provides such an example. Erwin, a Polish Jew born in
1926, gave the first of his third archived testimonies to the Fortunoff Archive affiliate in
New York (A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, Museum of Jewish Heritage) on January
18, 1994. He is shot in a medium close-up against a black backdrop, seated in front of
the camera with the interviewer just to the side of the lens. At one moment in his
testimony, he discusses his arrival and processing at the Stutthof labor camp, where his
left arm was tattooed. At this point, he pushes up his left sleeve to show the tattoo, as the
interviewer encourages him, “Yes, let’s see that.”
213
But due to the narrow range of
coverage by the medium close-up, we cannot see his tattoo on the screen. We only catch
a quick glimpse of it during the main part of the interview when he briefly lifts his left
hand to brush his nose. It is a highly noticeable elision and one that finally captures the
attention of the cameraman. After the interview has apparently concluded, the
cameraman can be heard from behind the camera asking Erwin if he can hold out his left
arm so that they can get a full visual record of his tattoo. At this point, Erwin holds out
his left arm, the camera zooms in, and the number “79631” fills the screen. Erwin

213
Erwin B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2875). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
119

describes how he and his brother Itzik arranged to be tattooed one after the other in order
to have sequential numbers. It is an important detail that shows the interlinked fates of
Erwin and his brother—one that the perspective of the camera can capture. The tattoo’s
missing image during the interview forces Erwin to recall its details yet again—and in a
way that positions his tattooed arm as an artifact to be preserved, rather than as an
integrated element of his testimony.
It is important to stress that the Fortunoff Archive is not a venue for therapy. Head
archivist Joanne Rudof rejects such a characterization, as is largely reflected in the
testimonies that I have examined.
214
It has nonetheless attempted to create a testimonial
environment where witnesses, in concert with their interlocutors, can engage the
psychological complexities of their experiences. That is to say, the archive aims to
facilitate an affectively charged, psychologically engaged, yet not necessarily therapeutic
encounter.
The result is often an interview approach that, while motivated to gather the “what”
and “where” of testimony, nonetheless focuses attention on the “how” aspects of
experience. This sometimes manifests itself in ways similar to the “silent” approach
often practiced in the first phase of oral history collection at the Holocaust Museum. In
Fela W.’s testimony, discussed earlier in this chapter, there are very few questions in the
interview’s first ten minutes, other than requests for brief biographical information and a
question asking her to paint a picture of her life and town as it existed before the war.
Fela requires no prodding after that point and proceeds to recount her memories of her

214
Rudof, interview by author, 30 March 2006.

 
120

hometown. She reflects: “I—there are so many things a person can go back and
remember but sometime you need more time to dwell on things, and so what I am telling
you know, it is what I remember up till now. Naturally, when Germany invaded Poland,
all of this has changed…”
215
Here, Fela acknowledges that her memory is imperfect and
limited by the framework of the testimony. As her narrative proceeds, the interviewers
ask questions such as, “What did you think was going on? What did you feel about what
was going on?”
216
Being allowed to rely less on maintaining an illusory notion of precise
historical knowledge, the witness is able to recall her more experientially charged
memories. At one point, it is evident that the interviewers are emotionally captivated by
her testimony, as—contrary to the standards suggested by training guidelines for
affiliates—the audio on the videotape captures their sighs of amazement, sympathy, and
wonder at Fela’s ability to survive.
Fela’s testimony is also revealing in terms of the Fortunoff Archive’s handling of
inaccurate historical information and the invocation of recurring experiential tropes. In
discussing her arrival in Birkenau, Fela recalls the infamous gate inscribed with “Arbeit
Macht Frei” (“Work Will Set You Free”), although that gate was the entrance to
Auschwitz, not the Birkenau camp. Soon after, she reports being told by the Kapos—
regarding the smoke and ashes coming from the chimneys: “See that smoke up there,
that’s where you’ll end up tomorrow.”
217
The interviewer does not ask Fela to clarify her

215
Fela W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3029). FVA, Yale University Library.

216
Ibid.

217
Ibid.
 
121

encounter with the gate, instead allowing her to proceed rather than potentially
undermining the flow of her memory or exerting control over the testimony. Similarly,
rather than to question the trope of the billowing smoke, it is more constructive to keep it
intact as a lens through which to examine how survivors then framed (and continue to do
so now) their understanding of the industry of death through which they were processed.
Because the interviewer allows Fela to recall these memories without asking for
clarification, the Fortunoff dialogue is not nearly as incisive as Fela’s interview with the
Holocaust Museum, conducted during the second period of its oral history department.
That testimony contains far more probing by the interviewer into issues of gender
relationships and sexuality in the camps, whereas this interviewer largely defers to her
and is reluctant to press for deeper analysis.
Accessing and Transmitting the Testimonies of the Fortunoff Archive
At the same time that the Fortunoff Archive has been envisioned as a non-
traditional audiovisual source, it is catalogued and made accessible in ways that are more
commonly associated with library materials. Its holdings are searchable through Yale’s
Orbis catalog employing the MARC standardized format; as such, it is searchable for
geographic place names like “Warsaw” or experience categories such as “Forced Labor.”
Joanne Rudof has stressed the importance of cataloging testimonies in accordance with
standardized library practices to ensure that they can be cross-referenced with other
sources, “conforming to established archival practices and employing authoritative and
standard vocabulary.”
218
In taking this approach, Rudof emphasizes that the Fortunoff

218
Rudof, “Research Use of Holocaust Testimonies,” 458.
 
122

Archive is inter-operable, thus allowing users to search between different bibliographic
sources and more easily include testimonies in their research agenda. While the archive
is protective of its subjects—to ensure privacy, it identifies witnesses only by first names
and last initials—it has nonetheless made the holdings searchable (but not usable) across
multiple databases. To further that aim, each of the interview findings on the catalog
contains brief content descriptions with linkable search terms.
Orbis is an open catalog available beyond the Yale community, allowing users to
identify the archive’s interviews from remote locations. However, the collections are
only available in person at Sterling Library, and there are currently no plans to make the
collections more widely available, including through Internet2 (as in the case of the
Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive) or other remote venues. All requests for
access to testimonies are handled directly through Rudof and her staff, with requested
tapes (usually no more than three or four at a time) left at the desk of the reading room
within the library’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives. This space has three
dedicated video viewing stations for Fortunoff Archive testimonies. Consistent with its
rigorous rules regarding decorum and protocol, the reading room creates a suitably
distraction-free environment for accessing this very delicate material, making possible
focused engagement. Rather than being accessed through a digital archive, viewing
copies of interviews are on VHS tape, accompanied by finding aids for each testimony
that list brief summaries of the contents corresponding to a time-code that is visible on
the screen for each testimony. While this falls short of providing a transcript (as often
available at the Holocaust Museum), it is a reliable research tool for navigating
 
123

interviews. The archive plans to eventually digitize the finding aids, making them
available within the library to researchers and staff who want to refine their search
beyond the Orbis terms. This search tool would be accessible through direct consultation
with the archive staff, not online. As with the withholding of witnesses’ last names, this
represents another effort to protect the identities of witnesses and the proprietary
standards of the archive.
The library protocol speaks to one of the strengths and limitations of the Fortunoff
Archive. On one hand, it is highly protective of its holdings, for example, withholding
the last names of witnesses and by limiting access to the library’s confines. This is an
understandable position, given concerns of the archive and certain witnesses regarding
the intensely private and intimate nature of these resources. The archive has deep roots in
the survivor community, and it is justifiably invested in fulfilling its obligations to
preserving the sanctity of its memories. At the same time, the resistance to making its
testimonies available through remote venues makes access much more challenging. This
can be useful insofar as it limits access to the most dedicated users, who are thus willing
to travel to New Haven. This restriction is, however, a barrier to broader pedagogical and
research circulation for these resources.
Those Who Were There
While not nearly as extensive in its outreach as the Shoah Foundation or the
Holocaust Museum, the Fortunoff Archive has—as noted earlier—made some attempts to
raise awareness of its work, for example, disseminating samples of its interviews for
educational and public programming. Its first major attempt at raising awareness came in
 
124

1983 with the production of a promotional video entitled Those Who Were There, which
was screened that year to the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, an
event bringing over 20,000 survivors and their families to Washington, D.C. Produced
four years after the archive began recording interviews in 1979, the video was released at
a time when the survivor community was becoming more fully mobilized, including the
campaign to construct the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the formation of
the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and growing efforts to establish
oral history archives of the Holocaust. The video functioned both as a call to give
testimony, particularly in light of the aging of survivors, and as a primer for witnesses
who were apprehensive about telling their stories in front of the camera.
Those Who Were There features interviews with survivors who were initially
reluctant to give testimony but realized that their stories would be lost if their accounts
were not documented. The video includes interviews with both witnesses and scholars
such as Erich Goldhagen, who appear on screen to lend historical credibility to the
archive, as well as to stress the importance of oral histories by the victims to counter
sources left behind by the perpetrators.
Those Who Were There also encourages survivors to come forward and lend their
voices through the technology of video. It discusses in detail the conducting of
interviews, with footage of the studio, control room, and other aspects of the testimony
process. The video portrays the Fortunoff Archive as an affective community for
survivors, one that creates a space and fosters a dynamic that grants them agency in
giving their histories. Interviewer Dori Laub appears in the tape to testify to this
 
125

interaction: “A listener to a survivor needs to be a full participant in every aspect of the
shared experience. There is no place for fleeing from it. The survivor is contacted ahead
of time, the project is explained, and from that period onwards there is a companion with
them on the way to this opening of the painful secret of his life.”
219
Rather than
characterizing survivors as historical informants, Laub emphasizes the mutual process
and responsibility that mark a testimony. Acknowledging the immense psychic toll that
can accompany the process, he assures potential witnesses of the archive’s commitment
to making survivors the primary authors of their testimony; there are no tape limits on
testimonies and the technological interaction will be as non-threatening and comfortable
as possible.
Elie Wiesel—then the Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council—is also a key figure in the video. His contributions on camera serve a vital
function, given his identity as an iconic survivor and the political and moral authority
bestowed upon him by the federal government through his involvement in the Holocaust
Museum. His address to the video’s audience is framed as a mandate for their
participation in giving testimony:
And to you, to you who are there. I know how difficult it is to speak. You have
children, you have friends and you don’t want to open wounds—why should you?
But you must. When you choose not to speak, your story will not be told, not
even in silence. You are more than a witness, you are a hundred witnesses. You
belong to a very special minority. A minority that will very soon be gone. And
with you or with me, that part of the story will be gone too. You must share. You
must.
220

219
Those Who Were There, VHS. Promotional video shown to American Gathering of
Holocaust Survivors in 1983.

220
Ibid.
 
126

Wiesel describes the act of giving testimony as psychologically traumatic, yet morally
necessary. He also underscores the stakes of the endeavor, citing the impending absence
of survivors and the fading of their living memory. Consistent with the ethos of the
Fortunoff Archive, there is nonetheless an expressed acknowledgment of the
impossibility of fully conveying the extreme nature of the events experienced by
survivors. Later in the video, when Wiesel speaks to the potential audience for the
archive’s testimonies, he admits that they will never know what it was like to experience
the Holocaust; they will, however, “come close to the gates” of that history by carefully
listening and attending to survivors.
221
Therefore, while Wiesel presents the possibility
of generating an ethical bond between audiences and recorded witnesses, he
acknowledges that the divide between those two parties is ultimately unbridgeable.
Witness: Voices from the Holocaust
After the release of Those Who Were There, the Fortunoff Archive continued to
expand as one of the preeminent sites of Holocaust testimony in the United States. In
1999, the archive co-produced another video drawing from its collections at that time.
Whereas the video Those Who Were There was a promotional and explanatory work to
raise awareness of the need for collecting testimony, the archive’s continued growth
created an incentive for making those holdings accessible beyond Yale’s Sterling
Memorial Library. To that end, the archive co-produced Witness: Voices from the
Holocaust, a documentary video directed and produced by the independent filmmakers
Joshua Greene and Shiva Kumar. Completed in 1999, it aired on PBS in 2000 on

221
Ibid.
 
127

Holocaust Remembrance Day. My main focus on this work pertains to the Fortunoff
Archive’s attempts to make its archival holdings more accessible, while in the process
negotiating the struggle to maintain its particular institutional standards and principles.
The opening titles for Witness are surprisingly sentimental for a project of the
Fortunoff Archive. It features a mosaic of stock Holocaust images—flames, barbwire
fences, faces of anonymous victims—with a caption stating that the interview footage for
the video comes from the Fortunoff Archive, particularly its earlier testimonies, and was
not generated specifically for the video. Directors Greene and Kumar had earlier worked
with the archive on thirty-minute programs for cable television, and it was from that
experience that they developed the idea of highlighting the archive’s work in a fuller
ninety-minute format. To make the project, they screened more than six hundred hours of
“raw, relentless testimony” spanning one hundred interviews, from which they excerpted
over twenty.
222
The documentary has no external narrator and features no experts or any
other figures who did not give testimony to the archive. The filmmakers emphasize not
only the rawness of the edited footage, but also the visceral and labored nature of the
endeavor of testimony. The editor’s introduction to the book adaptation of the
documentary describes the process of reviewing and selecting testimony as “exhausting,”
but the editors kept going because of the fragments of insight they uncovered in searching
through the myriad testimonies.
223

222
Joshua M. Greene, “Editor’s Introduction” to Witness: Voices from the Holocaust,
eds., Greene and Shiva Kumar (New York: Touchstone, 2000), xxiii.

223
Ibid.
 
128

I would argue, however, that Greene and Kumar tend to understate the extent to
which their source material and the video represent the multivocal dimensions of
archived testimony. They characterize Witness as a “multivoice narrative” in which the
complexity and contradictions of experiences can be viewed across the witnesses featured
in the documentary. Yet they do not engage with the multiple voices that exist within
individual testimonies, since they mostly edit out the participation of interviewers and
focus, with only a few exceptions, on the words of witnesses. This appears to be an
extension of one of the driving principles of the Fortunoff Archive—its emphasis on
allowing witnesses to author their own testimony. And while the archive acknowledges,
through both its training methodology and supported scholarship, the critical role of
interviewers in facilitating the testimony, there remains an underlying notion that the
archive can uncover a purer, unadulterated form of memory.
Greene and Kumar assert that they attempted to use testimony for their
documentary “without romanticizing, without fanfare, in a manner that reflects
meticulous research and inquiry, and with profound respect for the words of the
witnesses.”
224
Elaborating on that aim, they note that they strive “not to comment on the
testimonies but to carefully sequence them into a narrative that roughly traces life, before,
during, and after the Nazi era—to edit without editorializing.”
225
This perspective fails to
adequately acknowledge how the acts of excerpting and editing interviews constitute
forms of commentary and editorializing. Although Greene and Kumar describe witnesses

224
Ibid., xxviii.

225
Ibid., xxiv.
 
129

as “experts” in their own stories, they do not discuss how those subjects express their
memories in dialogue with an institution and individual interviewers. With that in mind,
I want to focus on the specific framing devices of the documentary Witness: Voices from
the Holocaust.
By virtue of its three-part structure, Witness attempts to excerpt testimony in a
more accessible, sequential format. This may be difficult to avoid in light of the sheer
magnitude of testimonies housed within the Fortunoff Archive, but it nonetheless belies
the filmmakers’ claim that the process of editing can exist without editorializing. While
on one hand, the archive’s guiding ethos and interview methodology often creates
circumstances that allow the associative, often non-sequential paths of memory to be
pursued, the process of making testimony legible as a documentary or as pedagogical
programming can nonetheless complicate efforts at preserving that nature. Constructing
the work requires not only excerpting portions of testimony that advance the narrative
trajectory of events from before, during, and after the war. It also involves choosing
which witnesses best represent certain thematic and chronological divisions.
While this is an unavoidable aspect of extracting testimonies from such a large
archive, the decision to structure the video along sequential lines complicates the
Fortunoff Archive’s investment in conveying the openness and lack of closure in its
testimonies. By adopting a sequential rather than more mosaic framework, the
documentary imbues the footage with a coherent trajectory. The video is broken down
into chronologically advancing categories that include such topics as Hitler’s rise to
power in Germany, the process of ghettoization, and the events of liberation. Since the
 
130

interview footage used for the video derives not only from testimonies recorded at Yale,
but also from the various Fortunoff affiliate projects, it varies in settings and production
quality. That is particularly the case since the affiliate footage was largely recorded in
the period before the training and interview process was more widely instituted, with a
resulting lack of standardization. This is helpful in that it produces a more diverse
aesthetic spectrum of clips, rather than the repetition of medium shots of witnesses
framed against a black backdrop (an approach that eventually becomes the Fortunoff
Archive standard). However, it further underscores the way that demands for a certain
production value circumscribes the multivocal nature of the documentary. It is also
important to point out that in highlighting testimonies from an earlier period of the
Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates, the filmmakers primarily feature witnesses who are
closer to the events of the Holocaust and thus less likely to have previously given
testimony to other archives. While that might create less rehearsed forms of memory, it
can also have the effect of excluding many older witnesses.
While the documentary’s interview segments are initially captioned with first
name and last initial, as well as the place and date of birth (e.g., “Helen K., Born Warsaw,
Poland, 1924), the date and location of the interview is not included. Excluding that
information reinforces the notion that the account of a witness, and not his or her
dialogue with an interviewer, is the primary source of testimonial meaning. This is
further reinforced through the video’s incorporation of documents, photographs, and
other artifacts including stock moving images. Witnesses are often shown on screen
holding photographs of their loved ones or pictures of themselves before or after the
 
131

onset of war, but their voices are also superimposed over archival images that—while
they may reference events being discussed at that point of the interview—do not always
directly index the personal experiences of the witness. For example, in segments of the
testimony of Robert S., a now contrite former member of the Hitler Youth, he recalls
being seduced by the allure of Nazi torchlight parades in his German hometown. As he
describes the scene, his testimony can be heard over stock footage of Nazi torchlight
parades with no mention or captioning of the context or origin of that footage. Similarly,
as the Jewish survivor Joseph W. remarks on the emerging threat of the Nazis—“the
clouds were getting dark”—his testimony is intercut with archival images of Nazi
propaganda and of anti-Semitic warnings being placed on the windows of Jewish
storefronts.
226

This use of stock footage in the video is sometimes interwoven with material
specific to the witness. Thus at one point, during an excerpt from the testimony of Jewish
survivor Joseph K., the witness discusses the Nazi practice of taking hostages and how
his father was placed on a list of Jews who were to be executed should any harm come to
German soldiers. At this point, original footage shows such a declaration being posted,
with captioning that locates the name of Joseph K.’s father on the document.
227
In this
case, there is a fusing of collective and personal memory, joining images of personal
artifacts and depictions with more generic visual material serving as illustration and filler.
These moments complicate the attempts of the documentary and the archive to allow the

226
Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, VHS. Directed by Joshua M. Greene and Shiva
Kumar, 2000.

227
Ibid.
 
132

testimonies to stand on their own terms rather than rendering them as more general
exemplars of Holocaust experience.
Equally important, the recurring use of generic footage serves to undermine the
rigorous epistemology of the Fortunoff Archive that privileges firsthand accounts of what
was seen and heard, as against more sweeping historical generalizations or unverified
secondhand speculations. At one point during an interview with John S., a Catholic
Czech priest, the witness recalls having seen the deportation of a group of Jews, though
he ultimately remained a bystander, too afraid to intervene on the victims’ behalf. It is an
incredibly powerful moment in which John S. reflects on his failure to take action and his
inability to ever forgive himself. But rather than allowing that testimony to stand on its
own, it is intercut with footage of Jews being loaded onto a train for deportation.
However the footage appears to be the same material that I have seen used by the
museum of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in an exhibit on the deportation process
at the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands. While the footage in question does
represent an invaluable trace of the deportation process and serves as material testimony
to the Nazis’ genocidal machinery, its value can only be fully expressed when grounded
in its historical context, not employed as an exemplary image of deportation. That
problem is underscored by the testimony of John S., who is horrified by the events he
witnessed but fearful of the consequences of intervening. To suggest a correlation
between what he witnessed that day and what is presented on screen is to universalize his
encounter rather than let his account stand on its own. The same critique applies to an
interview segment with Joseph K., which features found film footage depicting Nazi
 
133

shooting of victims in ditches during the witness’ discussion of reprisal actions.
228

Although the material is forceful and presents rare moving image footage of such
Holocaust atrocities, its provenance is never provided, relegating it to an expressive
rather than evidentiary function.
In his introduction to the book adaptation of Witness, Greene notes that the
documentary is compelling despite its heavy dependence on witnesses sitting in one place
in front of the camera, thus violating what he paraphrases as the primary lesson from the
directors’ film school training: “Talking heads won’t hold viewers’ attention.”
229
He
reiterates this point, noting that since the Fortunoff Archive was founded in the late
1970s, Holocaust documentaries increasingly tended to focus on witnesses rather than on
using footage of camps or other elements of the Nazi genocidal infrastructure.
230

However, I would argue that the filmmakers’ use of stock moving and still imagery not
only takes their illustrative value for granted, but also serves to prop up the testimony
footage by interweaving it with recycled visual tropes, rather than allowing the “talking
heads” to stand on their own terms or to be placed in constructive conversation with the
found footage.
In one of the video’s more compelling, emotionally wrenching testimonies,
Abraham P., a Romanian Jewish survivor, describes his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau
and the process of selection that continues to haunt him at the time of his interview. He

228
Ibid

229
Greene, “Editor’s Introduction,” Witness, xxiii.

230
Ibid., xxiii.

 
134

recalls with great anguish having encouraged his youngest brother to join his parents in
the selection line, unaware that they would be chosen for execution: “I can’t get it out of
my head. I hurts me, it bothers me, I don’t know what to do.”
231
The interview segment
immediately cuts to a montage of various iconic moving images of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
including the infamous gate to Auschwitz and the barbwire fence surrounding that
camp—punctuated by a pensive piano score that intensifies the pathos of this already
intensely emotional moment. One of the strengths of the work is that it places excerpts of
testimony in conversation with one another, often providing contesting perspectives on a
particular historical event. The editing serves to animate the testimonies beyond the
archive, underscoring the many textures of human experiences of the Shoah. Yet, just as
it is essential to contextualize Abraham P.’s background and experience, it is equally
crucial to rigorously use found footage that can generate new knowledge, rather than to
recycle routine visual tropes. While it is inevitable, and ultimately productive in a work
such as this to pair testimony footage with archived images, there is a potential that these
images will be appropriated as exemplars of a general sentiment or moment rather than as
sources to be examined in their own specific context.
The interview segments with Abraham P. also underscore one of the larger issues
relating to the documentary Witness, namely the absence—with one or two exceptions—
of the interviewer’s voice. Abraham’s initial interview took place in 1984 at the
Fortunoff affiliate project at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, with Sidney
Bolkosky, the project’s founder as interviewer. Bolkovsky asks him a series of

231
Witness, VHS.
 
135

penetrating questions: “What are your dreams like?”; “Are you regularly affected by
your experiences during the war?”
232
These questions spark the witness’ reflections on
how the past continues to haunt his present life, including his ongoing confrontation with
the memory of his younger brother during the selection. By omitting such interactions,
the documentary emphasizes the voice of the witness in isolation, at the expense of
showing it in dialogue with the interviewer. Withholding that voice has the potential
effect of obscuring the viewer’s position as a vicarious interviewer charged with
receiving and attending to the traumatic memories of the subject. While the talking heads
of survivors, liberators, and bystanders predominate in Witness, the presence of
interviewers and the operative influence of the Fortunoff Archive methodology are
largely placed at the periphery.
Exemplary Witnesses
As I have suggested, perhaps one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the
Fortunoff Archive in terms of constructing its archived testimony rather than its
circulated byproducts such as Witness, has been its investment in openly, even self-
reflexively, examining its testimony methodology. This was particularly the case in the
late 1980s, when because it appeared that the archive was running out of funding, its
planners decided to look back on the work that they had conducted. Some of the chief
interviewers for the archive, including Dana Kline, Lawrence Langer, Dori Laub,
Geoffrey Hartman, and Joanne Rudof, each submitted five names of witnesses who they
thought should be re-interviewed in the hopes of addressing particular elements of the

232
Abraham P. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-738). FVA, Yale University Library.
 
136

testimonial encounter.
233
Langer was a strong advocate for these re-interviews. In a
letter to Michael Berenbaum at the Holocaust Museum he explained the great value of
revisiting certain witnesses when there is a sense that some order of experience is yet to
be penetrated by the survivor.
234
Langer ended up playing an active role in the re-
interviews, both as a member in each of the new interview teams and as a participant in
developing new sets of questions and lines of investigation. In contrast to the first
interviews, the second round would be more structured, less open-ended.
235
Rather than
to focus on reconstructing the personal history of the subject, interviewers were to
directly raise larger questions of language, the work of memory, and the challenges of
cognition; in addition, they were to ask witnesses to reflect back on the experience of
giving their earlier testimonies.
Joanne Rudof has expressed doubts about the effectiveness of some of the re-
interviews, but she concedes that they shed light on how the passage of time affects the
telling of the same story and allows issues of memory and language to be pushed to the
foreground.
236
Having analyzed a sampling of these repeat testimonies, I agree with
Rudof that they reveal much about how the passage of time affects a witness’ recollection
of events. More than informing an individual’s story-telling, however, they reveal the

233
Rudof, interview by author, 20 July 2006

234
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research
Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box
20; Lawrence Langer.

235
Rudof, interview by author, 20 July 2006.

236
Ibid.
 
137

Fortunoff Archive’s changing preferences and approaches. By virtue of having been
reexamined by the archive’s core interviewers, the testimonies in question are positioned
as being exemplary in terms of a preferred testimonial method or idealized testimonial
subject. I will elaborate on this point by focusing on one such repeated witness, Eva B.,
who delivered testimony the Fortunoff Archive on three different occasions.
Eva B., a Czech Jewish survivor born in 1924, was interviewed by the main
Fortunoff Archive at Yale (as opposed to at an affiliate project) in 1979, 1983, and a third
time as part of the re-interview project in 1988. Her first testimony—like others
conducted before the mid-1980s—is notable for its more impromptu, unformed quality,
reflecting the fact that it was one of the earliest interviews conducted at Yale, before the
archive established a firm institutional identity or methodology. Unlike testimonies
conducted after the mid-1980s, this and other early interviews have an unfinished quality.
There is no mention of either the interviewer or of the location, though the citation and
finding aids identify archive co-founders Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock as the interviewers.
Eva is not asked to provide fundamental biographical information such as name or date of
birth. Rather than being framed against a black backdrop, she sits in an orange reclining
lounge chair placed in front of a bookshelf, in what appears to be an office.
237
In contrast
to later, standardized interviews, Eva tilts to her right, facing the off-screen interviewers,
rather than looking towards the camera with the interviews placed just adjacent to the
lens, thus resulting in a less direct mode of address. She is initially framed in a medium

237
Eva B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1). FVA, Yale University Library.
 
138

close up but with a static lens, though the camera eventually racks back and forth into
tight close ups of Eva’s face, punctuating particular moments in her story, including her
description of the rising threat of Nazism. This latter technique seems to reflect Laurel
Vlock’s interest in having the camera intensify the dramatic effect of a particular
testimony. Perhaps as a reflection of Vlock’s background as a television producer, her
method appears to be marked by an investment in capturing an emotional reaction from
witnesses through a series of often prying questions. Dori Laub, as consistent with his
more psychoanalytically informed approach, allows more room for silences and moments
of reflection to make their way into Eva’s testimony. In contrast, Vlock adopts a much
more aggressive tack, often asking questions one after another: “Were people in contact
with the outside world?”; “Do you remember the old city (of Prague)?”; “Was there much
discrimination before the war?” In pursuing these questions, Vlock is asking Eva to
compile a detailed chronicle of her experiences, pinning down the facts of what
happened, but in the process framing Eva’s testimony in Vlock’s terms, rather than
allowing Eva’s memories to emerge through more indirect, carefully placed inquiries.
Whereas Laub poses questions such as “What stayed with you (after the war)?” thus
asking her for perspectives on the workings of memory and the legacy of the Holocaust—
“how” questions, if you will—Vlock shows more of an interest in reconstructing the past,
capturing the “what” dimensions of her experience, including detailed questions about
life in Teresienstadt.
Despite Vlock’s attempts to determine the path of this first testimony, some
moments emerge with a rawness that is in part attributable to the novelty of Eva’s
 
139

experience telling her story in front of the camera. She comments that it was not until the
five years leading up to this first recording in 1979 that she was able to more openly
discuss her experiences with her children. Before that, her children hardly even knew
that she had been in a camp. And Eva herself had to integrate what had occurred: “It
was a dream. It was unreal.”
238
She later remarks in the testimony: “I just pushed it
away, I couldn’t think about it, I couldn’t cope with it. I was so busy adjusting,
repressing, living.”
239
Eva’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust seems to
mirror the before-mentioned discourse of survivors beginning to more openly confront
the Holocaust in the United States, mobilizing the memory of the Shoah through such
endeavors as the formation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, resistance
to the neo-Nazi march on Skokie, Illinois, and critical responses to popular
representations of the events in the television miniseries Holocaust.
In spite of the litany of questions posed to her, Eva—often in tension with
Vlock—finds spaces for immersing herself in the past, rather than strictly chronicling
events from a more distant present. When asked early in the interview to provide a sense
of her family life before the war, Eva assumes a sullen mien and mournfully reflects on
the loss of her high school sweetheart: “A very talented individual…he never came
back.”
240
The moment falls outside of the topic and sequence of the question—the realm

238
Ibid. Note that while the HVT number for the 1979 and 1983 testimonies are the same,
this footnote refers to the testimony from 1979.

239
Ibid.

240
Ibid.

 
140

of common memory—and down the more unanticipated path of deep memory. Eva
seems to personify Lawrence Langer’s description of the anti-redemptive nature of
Holocaust memory. Even in describing her liberation from Mauthausen, she speaks not
of freedom but of irredeemable horror. She recalls seeing the emaciated bodies of fellow
inmates: “You see these pile[s] of corpses, these pictures of corpses, that everyone I
think has seen by now and I think the much more horrible thing is to see these corpses
walk…walking into this typhoid ridden place was liberation for me.”
241
As the testimony
heads towards a conclusion, Vlock departs from her list of questions and openly
expresses her sympathies for Eva: “I just want to hold you and tell you I want to be your
family. I don’t want you to feel alone. That’s just how I feel.”
242
At that moment, the
camera suddenly zooms back and the camera goes to black. The audio remains on, and
we hear Eva remark: “Thank you, I appreciate it…I think I’m through. I don’t think any
more details would be interesting.”
243
While Vlock attempts to comfort Eva by openly
expressing, and potentially imposing her concern and desire to care for her, the intensity
of the witness’s despair seems to evade that kind of nurturing. Eva is still grappling with
many of the details of experiences she has never before recorded on camera.
The subsequent interview at Yale, conducted with Eva four years later in 1983,
reveals not only the witness’ firmer grasp of her story, but also how the Fortunoff
Archive had begun to move towards a more formalized process of conducting

241
Ibid.

242
Ibid.

243
Ibid.
 
141

testimonies. This time, when we encounter Eva, she no longer sits in an office space, but
rather against a more neutral black backdrop, sitting in a chair and more directly facing
the camera, with the unidentified interviewer just off the side of the lens. Though only
four years have passed since the last interview, Eva appears to have aged considerably,
with her hair now completely gray. She is, however, much more assertive in initiating
her account. Rather than having to face a litany of questions concerning her life before
the war, Eva raises those issues on her own, with self-confidence and clarity that perhaps
reflects her opportunity to confront memories that had been largely unaddressed until the
prior interview. To some extent it appears that Eva has internalized or at least anticipated
that the interviewer would inquire about the historical dimensions of her story. In
contrast to her earlier interview, Eva keeps her story moving forward with a competence
that appears to be firmly grounded in her familiarity with a common memory of the
events. Having delivered her testimony before, she now has developed some mastery of
her story and of the generic conventions and performance modes of testimony.
Nonetheless, Eva’s competency and historical grounding are undermined by
moments where she loses her footing, including one point when her memory departs from
the chronology and drifts forward to the experience of losing her beloved high school
sweetheart. It is a moment that speaks to both the repetitious yet also spontaneous and
authentic nature of Eva’s testimony. While she repeats many of the same details from her
prior interview, the breakdown in her recollection is evidence of the persistence of trauma
and the impossibility of rendering her memory in strict compliance with an institutionally
or individually disciplined format. At one point in this second testimony, Eva openly
 
142

addresses the difficult and incomplete nature of giving testimony. Her son would urge
her to tell him the whole story, but he would run away in discomfort before she could
finish. As a result, she felt compelled to put her thoughts down on paper and at one point
even attempted to record her recollections on audiotape—but the project was left
incomplete. It was not until her first taping at the Fortunoff Archive that she realized just
how alive her experiences were, and she began to feel obligated to tell her story, all the
while acknowledging that these experiences would continue to cast a shadow over her.
In her second interview, Eva frames testimony as a confessional—an obligation to
herself and to her family to confront her past. Rather than achieving closure, the more
she tells her story the more she realizes the fragmented, singular nature of her experience.
It is a “worm’s eye” view of the Holocaust, she remarks, but “as a worm’s eye view, [it]
has its own value.”
244
The interviewer, rather than focusing on the singular nature of
Eva’s story, presses her to extrapolate some universal lessons from her experience,
asking: “Do you have any thoughts on those who listen. Learning lessons…
teaching?”
245
Eva is mostly resistant to the idea as the interviewer continues to press her
for thoughts on the pedagogical utility of her experience. At one point, Eva responds: “I
have no desire to tell anybody who doesn’t want to know. I’m not sure that any lessons
can be learned.”
246

244
Ibid., 1983.

245
Ibid.

246
Ibid.

 
143

Just as the testimony appears to come to a close, with the screen cutting to black,
Eva reappears on tape and begins to sing a song that she learned while in Auschwitz,
passed down from one inmate to another as a means of boosting morale. As she
eloquently performs this song, she looks directly into the camera, with the lens zooming
in for a close up to further punctuate the moment. Eva translates the song: “Be of good
mood and strength, keep your belief alive.”
247
It was, as Eva recalls, one of the few
things that lifted her spirit in the camp: “It would give you a cohesion. A sense of
belonging.”
248
It is one of the most penetrating moments in this testimony, in part
because it emerges in a seemingly peripheral moment after the testimony appears to cut
to permanent black, only to resume with the performance of the song. But it is also
compelling in regard to its function as a trace of the voices that sang this song, yet
ultimately did not survive the Shoah. Eva serves as a surrogate of sorts, reenacting a
song transmitted between and across the inmates of Auschwitz. This moment in her
singular testimony gives voice to a larger collective experience. Though Eva cannot
attribute the song to any writer, the interviewer presses her for its provenance. Eva can
only reply: “It wasn’t told. I was just taught it by people who were earlier than I.”
249
In
reciting the song on camera, she too has transmitted the story to future generations, and in
that sense takes responsibility for a survival that is larger than her own. Eva actively
resists, however, assigning a redemptive meaning to her survival. When hearing the

247
Ibid.

248
Ibid.

249
Ibid.

 
144

song, the interviewer asks Eva if she ever has had an inclination to see any of her fellow
survivors from Auschwitz. Eva unequivocally rejects the idea: “No, listen. Auschwitz
was so horrendous that the faces kind of merge, they were shadows.”
250
The interviewer
continues to inquire about Eva’s possible desire to communicate with other survivors, but
she seems less invested than the interviewer in constructing an affective community of
remaining survivors.
The interviewer indicates that she has one final question for Eva: “People have
said that they think it is impossible to cry about things that happened forty years ago,
people who were lost forty years ago, one doesn’t cry about losing a parent or a child
when that much time has elapsed and yet almost uniformly people’s eyes get filled when
they talk about the concentration camp experience. Why?”
251
With this line of inquiry,
the interviewer places Eva in the position of having to generalize about the mindset of
other survivors. She briefly indulges the questioner: “Because the way they lost people
was so traumatic. But of course I didn’t lose anybody that close.”
252
Then her thoughts
travel yet again to her high school love, someone, she remarks that she would have
married had they have both survived the war. Eva attempts to downplay her own turmoil
during the Shoah, suggesting that because she survived, her proximity to real loss is not
so profound. This is the moment of recollection, similar to her performance of the song,

250
Ibid.

251
Ibid.

252
Ibid.

 
145

when Eva seems to be immersed in her memory, seemingly off the track of the testimony.
Her voice grows increasingly hushed as she looks towards her lap and squints her eyes:
He was a pianist and an artist and an engineer…he was a lovely person. It
hurt. His death hurt me more than my family, although I was very
young…He was part of my life for many years.”
253

At this point the interviewer interjects, “You married a Czech man? You needed
that?”
254
But Eva is still pondering her utterance, and she signals an interest in concluding
the testimony: “I didn’t think we would talk that much more.” At this point the
testimony abruptly comes to an end, as the camera cuts without any formal conclusion.
255

Whereas the first two interviews with Eva B. had been directed towards
reconstructing a narrative of her experiences during the Shoah, the third and final
testimony, recorded in 1988 as part of the re-interviewing program, is almost completely
dedicated to the meta-discursive elements of the process. As for the previous testimony,
Eva sits against a black backdrop, centered in the frame, with the two interviewers seated
to the left of the camera. Unlike the other two testimonies, the interviewers here (Dori
Laub and Lawrence Langer) introduce themselves at the beginning of the tape before
deferring to Eva to begin talking. The witness, now almost ten years older than she was
in her first interview, has visibly aged and yet looks stronger and more upright, and she
speaks with an even greater sense of purpose and confidence than in her previous session.
She reveals, rather tentatively, that she is now working as a psychotherapist. And while

253
Ibid.

254
Ibid.

255
Ibid.
 
146

she does not elaborate upon that fact, it is a revealing admission, in that it suggests a
continued, dedicated, and formalized engagement with trauma and memory, which seems
to inform her demeanor and performance throughout the interview.
By virtue of the motivations for the re-interviewing project and the fact that Eva is
now delivering her testimony for a third time, there is a self-reflexive dimension to the
process. Eva remarks that in her first testimony in 1979 she “treated it in a clinical way,
conveying the facts but none of the emotions.”
256
She reflects how in the first interview
she played down her own emotional struggles, noting that since her father died before the
war and her mother survived with her, she somehow did not suffer as much as others,
leading her to feel guilty. But she realizes now that “it [the Holocaust] has very much
affected my relationship with people. I really keep my distance.” Her remarks are
followed by a very long silence until Langer assures her that her accounts will have
educational value and that it will be useful for future audiences to hear her thoughts on
the process. As against Langer’s more aggressively interactive approach, Dori Laub
conveys a gentler disposition, attempting to take her back to particular memories about
her hometown of Prague. Laub asks: “There is a memory of Prague that is life. How do
you remember it, not the facts?”
257
He is interested not in uncovering a place that has yet
to be described, but rather in finding an entry-point into how she remembers: “How do
you remember? Not what but how?”
258
When Eva drifts into discussions of particular

256
Eva B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1101). FVA, Yale University Library.

257
Ibid.

258
Ibid.
 
147

details of her life before the war, rather than on reflections on the process of memory,
Dori Laub keeps her on track: “We’re going to try to keep you away from facts.”
259

At more than a few moments throughout the recording, the particular agenda of
this re-interview—the focus on “emotions” rather than “facts”—has the effect of framing
Eva’s memory in very precise, deliberate ways. She feels taken aback by her feelings of
guilt over the fact that her mother survived on account of not wearing glasses, while the
bespectacled mother of a close friend was selected for extermination. As she attempts to
come to terms with that ever so small yet critical twist of fate, Laub interjects, asking her
to describe what is going on inside her head: “When you mention these incidents, are
there pictures, like the glasses the woman wore? Are the memories images of
moments?”
260
And while Eva describes certain events in terms of their visual resonance,
they seem to correspond with a particular narrative account that initiates the process of
taking her back to that moment in time. Similarly to her two prior interviews, she recalls
again her high school sweetheart in a manner so intense that it underscores the
persistence of her feelings of love and loss:
I have memories of the things we did together. Playing tennis with him. I
remember he came, we had a sandwich together, I remember where we
were sitting.
261

On one hand, the built-in self-reflexive approach to this interview draws out
perspectives that never arose in the prior interviews by shedding light on both the form

259
Ibid.

260
Ibid.

261
Ibid.
 
148

and content of Eva’s memories. At the same time, it constitutes a representational
framework that ultimately looks past the more subtle and unanticipated moments in
testimony. Rather than fostering moments where the witness and the prospective
audience can look for meanings in the silences of testimony and in tensions generated
between interviewer and interviewee, the very subtext of witness narratives that Langer
eloquently describes is made explicit without sparking closer analysis.
In one particular exchange in the testimony, Eva reflects on the guilt she feels for
having survived while others perished during the Shoah. Langer, who in his scholarship
on testimony eloquently writes of the “choiceless choice” facing the victims, projects his
concern with that subject onto Eva by asking: “How did the absence of choice affect
your thinking about it?”
262
While Eva seems to affirm Langer’s assessment here, it is less
the result of her own initiation than of the interviewer’s prodding. There is a sense that
both Dori Laub and Lawrence Langer are turning to the re-interview process as a way of
re-exploring certain preferred lines of inquiry, often at the expense of the archive’s
declared aim of granting agency to witnesses. In one exchange, Dori Laub asks Eva
about why she viewed her first testimony as primarily factual rather than emotional:
Dori Laub: Do you really think it was factual only?

Eva B.: That’s what I thought at the time. Am I deceiving myself,
you think?
263

On one hand Laub and Langer attempt to give Eva an opportunity to reflect on the
first interview and the evolution of her perspective on the act of giving testimony. Yet

262
Ibid.

263
Ibid.
 
149

Laub’s attempt to move Eva towards the emotional core of her story is to some extent at
odds with the mechanisms she has adopted for confronting her past. As the testimony
comes to a conclusion she remarks with dry profundity: “There were a few traumas in
my life. So I’m more comfortable with facts than with emotions.”
264
At this point
Lawrence Langer concludes the testimony: “Well, thank you for the facts and for the
emotions.”
265
The camera holds still on Eva looking away from the camera, as she is
clearly exhausted and emotionally depleted. The screen then cuts to black.

Langer and
Laub have attempted to penetrate the emotional core of Eva’s testimony by capturing
both its raw and constructed quality. This is one of the limitations of this re-interview
approach, as it presumes that unvarnished testimony can somehow emerge, rather than
necessarily being framed by the interpersonal and institutional dialogue. Nonetheless,
this closing moment ultimately sheds light on how the emotional and analytic aspects of
Eva’s testimony are entangled rather than discrete, displaying how Eva can negotiate the
affective burden of her memory through the mastery of facts.
As I have suggested earlier, the Fortunoff Archive’s repeat testimonies represent
examples of what I call that institution’s exemplary witnesses. While a central argument
of my dissertation is that the multi-vocal and often contested nature of Holocaust memory
complicates institutional efforts to frame the interview process or make it a closed,
unified field of knowledge, it is important to examine how archives project their
preferences onto the interview process in order to understand how that dynamic operates.

264
Ibid.

265
Ibid.
 
150

In addition to Eva B. and other witnesses who reappeared to give their testimony on
camera, another survivor, Rabbi Baruch G, exemplifies the ethos of the Fortunoff
Archive. Baruch appears as an exemplary figure in internal discussions within both the
Fortunoff Archive and the Holocaust Museum, and later in this chapter I will discuss his
place in another grouping of witnesses for the Fortunoff Archive who were included in
the book adaptation of the video Witness: Voices from the Holocaust. His was the first
interview that Rudof suggested to me during my initial encounter with the Fortunoff
Archive, requesting to see an illustrative sampling of its work. Furthermore, the archive
features a portion of his testimony in a section of its website that features excerpts of
witness testimony that are intended to provide insight into the general nature of the
archive’s testimonial project.
266
While the rabbi’s interview does not represent the
production standards eventually adopted by the archive, it does illuminate the dynamic
between interviewer and interviewee.
The testimony of Rabbi Baruch G. (born 1923) was recorded at Yale on
September 6, 1984. The interviewer, identified on the finding aids as Dana Kline, is not
introduced at the beginning of the tape. Baruch sits on a brown couch in front of a beige
curtain, directly facing Kline, who sits just off the right of the camera. Her first question
reveals the archive’s agenda: “Why don’t we begin by thinking about the past almost as
if you are looking at an album with pictures in it from your family, from your early

266
FVA, Excerpts; Rabbi Baruch G., http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/ excerpts/
index.html (accessed 8 April 2009).

 
151

years—and can you tell me your name and where you were born?”
267
This question
privileges the visual component of memory and glosses over some crucial biographical
information—we never learn his birth date, for instance. However, it rather quickly
provokes Baruch to ponder his deeply embedded sense memory of the Holocaust. By
turning the pages of this internalized picture album, Baruch associatively calls up his
younger sister, a figure who will often return throughout the testimony. He tenses up at
the thought of her, putting his hands to his pursed lips and with a sullen, unsteady
delivery comments:
I missed my sister for a long time. For some reason I felt—I thought that
for some reason she had survived and for many, many years I dreamt that
some day I would hear that she was still alive…so when you talk about my
brother and sister, this comes to mind always.
268

Thus the interviewer has Baruch frame his memory of his family in a way that enables
him to arrive at a moment of intimate memory, rather than relegating his biography to a
litany of census-like questions. She allows him to experience a more intimate
recollection of memory, one that cannot be viewed from a distance but rather is
experienced as the interpenetration of past and present.
Another such moment emerges when Kline asks Baruch about his family: “You
said you were from a religious family. I bet you can describe a Seder.”
269
Baruch
proceeds to lovingly recall the details of the Passover feasts from his youth, remembering
how his father sat at the head of the table like a king. His fond memories of those prewar

267
Rabbi Baruch G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-295). FVA,Yale University Library.

268
Ibid.

269
Ibid.
 
152

experiences, rather than following along the sequential trajectory of common memory,
then quickly jump ahead to his more anguished moments from many years after the war.
In fondly recalling the plenitude of past Seders, he cannot help but ponder the glaring
absence of his family. He recalls with great anguish that, at his son’s Bar Mitzvah, no
one from his side of the aisle was present to celebrate the joyous event as they would
have been in those years before the Shoah. It is at those moments of expected joy and
celebration that Baruch’s sense of loneliness is most pronounced, in fact in many ways is
more intense than during the war. At this juncture, Baruch reveals that in some instances,
the events during the Shoah present fewer difficulties than do the challenges of grappling
with its after-effects. Perhaps most telling, these revelations surface in the first fifteen
minutes of an almost two-hour-long testimony.
While Dana Kline gives Baruch the space to follow the unanticipated paths of
memory, she carefully brings him back on track with comments like: “Let’s leave 1948
for a minute and go back to 1933, 34, Hitler comes to power in Germany, and does this
have any impact on your life?”
270
When Baruch responds by commenting that he did not
think it would be that bad, that God would eventually intervene, Kline asks for
clarification: “Do you remember thinking that now or thinking that then?”
271
So while
the interview foregrounds the interpenetration of past and present, Kline also attempts to
parse out the various levels of knowledge, including considerations of retrospective
insight. Ultimately, however, she enables Baruch to inhabit the painful moments and to

270
Ibid.

271
Ibid.
 
153

create a space where his performance of testimony can serve to reenact and re-embody
the presence and gestures of those whom he lost.
It is not only the memory of Baruch’s sister, but also that of his father that
continues to resonate with him, and in his recollections of this figure one senses Baruch’s
role as a surrogate witness. He remembers how his father was assigned to a forced labor
camp and was never the same man after his return. He never told Baruch what had
happened to him during his absence, but the impact was evident on his body—the shaven
beard of a pious Orthodox Jew and the meek disposition of a once strong and charismatic
man. As Baruch speaks of the physical denigration of his father, his own body begins to
wilt, his lips quiver, and his voice begins to tremble. A period of silence is followed by
tears.
As Baruch proceeds to tell of his arrival at Auschwitz, Kline asks him: “What did
the name (Auschwitz) mean to you?”
272
Here too Baruch uses bodily expression to
invoke his own and others’ experiences. In an unexpected moment, Baruch responds to
the question by pulling back the left sleeve of his dress shirt to reveal a large tattooed
“76300.” He deciphers the number as designating both his individual identity in the
camp and the series of inmates taken from his hometown. In that sense, revealing the
tattoo chronicles not only his dehumanization but also the larger suffering of fellow Jews
from his community. Baruch explicitly comments on how his testimony functions as
both a form of individual preservation and collective commemoration. One of his main
motivations for coming forward is his recognition that he is the last surviving member of

272
Ibid.

 
154

his family. Without his testimony: “There will be no one to tell of the existence of the
Goldstein family in the city of Mlawa. It sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
273
Baruch is torn
between the obligation to remember and the pain of revisiting the past. He recognizes
that time is running out for survivors and that he has no right to “bury” his story; still, he
is plagued by questions of his own survival and his reasons for giving witness:
I sometime feel guilt. Why have I survived? Have I fulfilled a basic
obligation that one should carry with him to tell the world about it?
274

Baruch had struggled to tell his story soon after the war but, like many witnesses,
he found it difficult to be heard. He also reveals that after the war, he became terribly
afraid of doing harm to others, of making anyone displeased with him. He thinks that he
should have seen a psychiatrist, and that perhaps now he is making up for that by telling
his story on camera. At the same time, he seems to recognize that the process of
testimony, while constructive, is not completely cathartic, noting: “But I can tell you that
I wasn’t well mentally. By not well, I don’t mean that I was crazy…but my inside was
definitely, is still definitely scarred.”
275
Baruch briefly slips into relegating his suffering
to the past tense, but quickly reaffirms that his pain remains palpable in the present.
Baruch’s testimony also illuminates both the imbrications of past and present
trauma and the mediated, contested, and cross-generational dynamic of transmitting
Holocaust memory. He appears to be someone who has struggled regarding the

273
Ibid.

274
Ibid.

275
Ibid.

 
155

revelation of his story. He remarks that his son was upset with him for not having opened
up earlier about his experiences, causing a rift between the two: “He (his son) has gone
to therapy and I have not. He urges me to go.”
276
Baruch is reluctant, but eventually
reconsiders his position after viewing a documentary film dealing with the generational
inheritances of the Holocaust. In particular, he recalls a scene in the film about a female
survivor who is afraid to love her daughter because the loss of her family during the war
makes her resistant to getting too attached. Baruch considers whether this might apply to
him—that he buried himself in his work in order to avoid becoming too attached to his
son for fear of losing him:
Is it fear to come close to him? Or is it wanting to become normal so much
so that I immerse myself in my work…or what? But I suppose these are
the scars I mentioned before and that are with us and I suppose will be
buried with them.
277

Thus his encounter with a mediated representation of another survivor’s experience
triggers Baruch’s resolve to record his own testimony and grapple with the strained
relationship with his son. Baruch may have not talked about his experiences openly with
his child, but the after-effects were transmitted to the next generation. In his comments,
Baruch echoes a not uncommon tendency to pluralize his experience, commenting on the
scars that will be buried with us, suggesting the collective legacy of the survivor
community.

276
Ibid.

277
Ibid.

 
156

In keeping with its “exemplary” status, Baruch’s interview resurfaces in 1990 in
the Fortunoff Archive’s training documents as a model case study for volunteer
interviewers for affiliate projects, including those in New York and Houston.
278
And—as
mentioned before—on my first visit to the archive in 2006, Joanne Rudof presented me
with the tape of Baruch G. as a gateway interview to introduce me to the work conducted
at Yale. Even more revealing, perhaps, are Lawrence Langer’s comments in 1991, as a
consultant to the Holocaust Museum’s oral history department, regarding what he
considers the Fortunoff Archive’s most compelling and instructive testimonies.
279
His
memorandum to the museum’s project director Michael Berenbaum discusses Baruch G’s
enduring pain, referring back to his descriptions of Passover and other family events:
He describes it as "life around you seems to be normal, but you are abnormal," and
he speaks at length about the difficulty he had adjusting after he was "liberated."
The overwhelming loss casts a permanent shadow over his present joys, not
undermining them, but causing them to exist within the framework of irretrievable
loss. This passage begins about 11 minutes into the tape, and is a locus classicus on
the subject.
280

As consistent with Langer’s discussions of the anti-redemptive, non-cathartic, and
temporally interwoven dimensions of testimony, he characterizes Baruch’s perspectives
as the classic embodiment of those points. He also emphasizes Baruch’s experience of

278
Outline for interviewer training held in New York City, 5 February 1990; FVA
Internal Papers.

279
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research
Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box
20; Lawrence Langer.

280
Ibid.

 
157

what he calls “humiliated imagination,” as he continues to be racked with guilt and a
sense of unworthiness, and by an irreconcilable tension between a traumatic past and a
“normal present.”
281

The anti-redemptive aspects of Baruch G’s interview were further underscored by
the Fortunoff Archive’s collaboration with Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar in
adapting the video, Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, as a book with the same title in
2000. The book includes excerpted transcripts of testimony for all of the witnesses
included in the video, along with additional testimonies from selected survivors,
including Baruch. The volume is edited along the same thematic structure as the video,
covering subsets of experiences before, during, and after the war. In the forward
Lawrence Langer stresses that survivors avoid speaking in terms that can be rendered as
redemptive lessons. The book’s final segment, “It Started with Dreams: Aftermath,”
incorporates the conclusion of Baruch’s interview, including the following remarks:
Do we have the right to bury this [story] with us? We have no right to
do it. It’s got to be told. It’s got to be—it’s got to be recorded. For one
reason and one reason only: not so much to know what happened, but
rather what assurance do we have that it’s not happening again?
Actually, it is happening in one way or another…And this must not be
permitted to go on if we—if we are humans. And I hope we are human.
282

Although the ambivalence of Baruch’s testimony is difficult to deny, the above passage is
introduced as the closing encapsulation of his experience, suggesting an even starker

281
Ibid.

282
Greene and Kumar, eds., Witness, 249-250.

 
158

representation of his interview. While the following segment of Baruch’s original
testimony for the Fortunoff Archive (not included in the book or in the video) is by no
means fully redeeming, it nonetheless conveys the sense that the witness has held out
some prospect for hope:
Dana Kline: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Baruch G.: One thing that I’ll be thinking a lot is the work you’re doing
so quietly…It is good to point out that there is still
humanity. And while my experience has been so much the
brutality of the human condition, human beings, I’ve learned also
goodness...if we keep increasing in number the people who do
care, the world will be a better place.
283

While Baruch acknowledges that he continues to endure much suffering, he reaches out
to the future both on behalf of others and his own psyche. The act of giving testimony,
while it will never recover those lost to him in the Holocaust, is seen as a way of
reconstructing his relationship with his son and making him a better grandfather.
Conclusion: Expanding an Understanding of “Frame Conditions”
My examinations of the Fortunoff Archive and the other two case studies in this
dissertation underscore the multi-vocal aspects of testimony—the impossibility of
rendering these collections as monolithic, despite efforts to project certain frameworks
and standards onto the interview process. The recognition of that multi-vocality is one of
the strongest underpinnings of the Fortunoff Archive, with its deep investment in
granting agency to witnesses to tell their singular stories rather than strictly adhering to a
predetermined interview agenda. As Geoffrey Hartman has written, the archive considers

283
Rabbi Baruch G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-295). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
159

each of the witnesses it records to be an agent rather than a patient or legal witness of his
or her testimony; by examining the individual details across their interviews, both the
uniqueness and commonalities of those testimonies surface without constituting a
“prematurely unified voice.”
284
However, the emphasis on facilitating testimonial
authorship carries with it a set of operative, framing preferences.
For example, the refusal to impose redemptive closure on testimonies can miss
those moments when a witness actually expresses some semblance of redemptive
catharsis. In his forward to the book adaptation of Witness: Voices from the Holocaust,
Lawrence Langer reiterates one of his recurring arguments about Holocaust testimony:
witnesses do not present themselves as heroes or martyrs—“labels” they firmly reject”—
but rather they adopt the role as “chroniclers of a melancholy and dreadful tale.”
285

Langer wants to counter the romanticizing of Holocaust testimony and the tendency to
equate survival with victory over oppression—“an act of will worthy of celebration.”
286

Joshua Greene echoes those sentiments in his introduction to the book, contending that in
screening the testimonies included in the video or book versions of Witness, not one of
the subjects “ever celebrated the act of survival.”
287

I would argue, however, that this firm, continued insistence on the anti-redemptive
strains of survivor testimony can limit our basis for understanding how archived memory

284
Robert Kraft, “Archival Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Oral
Testimony,” Poetics Today 27, No. 2 (Summer 2006): 312-313.

285
Langer, “Foreward” to Witness, xii.

286
Ibid., xv.

287
Greene, “Editor’s Introduction” to Witness, xxv.
 
160

works. Based on the interviews sampled for my dissertation, it is clear that certain
witnesses do express a sense of at least partial redemption through the delivery of
testimony. I previously cited the example of Baruch G., the “exemplary” witness, in
particular portions of his testimony not included in the book that do speak to his belief in
the constructive social potential of acts of remembrance. I mention this example to
underscore the ambivalences of memory and the tensions that emerge between witnesses
and the institutions that record and disseminate their stories. While Langer takes an
ethically charged position to safeguard testimonies from shallow romanticizing and
kitsch, his (and the archive’s) preference for stressing anti-redemptive modes of
testimony constitute their own framing paradigms. Even an interview agenda that intends
to foster agency by witnesses is an agenda nonetheless and should be analyzed as to how
it shapes the generation and transmission of Holocaust memory.
Rather than to characterize testimonies as anti-romantic or –redemptive, I would
argue for viewing and listening to testimonies in ways that emphasize the interplay
between often competing impulses of memory. To return to the case of Baruch G., I
would neither discount Langer’s description of its tragic, dehumanizing aspects, nor
would I ignore the traces of moral redemption in the conclusion of his testimony, which
are elicited when the interviewer asks: “Is there anything else you would like to add?”
288

In other words, the conflicted nature of his survival comes to light when the voice of the
interviewer and the archive comes in dialogue with the witness. Such dialogue is
precisely what is absent from both the documentary video and book versions of Witness.

288
Rabbi Baruch G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-295). FVA, Yale University Library.

 
161

This absence speaks to a larger issue related to how Langer and other advocates of
the Fortunoff Archive discuss the process of mediating testimony. In his previously
mentioned 1991 letter to Michael Berenbaum, Langer elaborates on some of the
distinctions between literary and oral forms of testimony. In his written analysis of the
Fortunoff testimony of Barbara T., recorded on November 8, 1986, he points out how at
one point in the interview, the witness, an author, cites her autobiographical historical
novel to recall certain experiences.
289
Langer is skeptical about the blending of video
testimony with novelistic genres, arguing that people do not talk in the same manner in
which they write—that the latter form is less spontaneous and more stylized than the oral
expression. While Langer’s scholarship has been groundbreaking in its attention to the
complexity of Holocaust testimony, he seems resistant to drawing attention to how the
mediation of interviews in conversation with archival practices complicates the
categorizing of interviews as spontaneous or unstylized. In his memo to Berenbaum, he
posits the “artlessness” of immediate recall—an ability on the part of witnesses to capture
a pure, raw expression of oral memory absent the “enhancement of narrative style and
tone and form” associated with written forms.
290

This chapter and the dissertation as a whole argues that audiovisual testimony is
never free of those stylized elements and is always generated in concert, and at times in

289
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research
Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box
20; Lawrence Langer.

290
Ibid.

 
162

conflict with institutional histories and practices. To some extent, the Fortunoff Archive,
as well as scholars working for or in dialogue with the institution, acknowledge the need
to look beyond the impact of testimony on the witness and towards issues related to the
prospects of its future use. As I mentioned earlier, in the fall of 2002, Yale hosted the
conference “The Contribution of Oral Testimony to Holocaust and Genocide Studies,”
dedicated to examining these very questions. In remarks on the conference published in a
Spring 2003 edition of the journal History and Memory, Jared Stark and Michael
Rothberg wrote of the event as a turning point in addressing how and why testimonial
resources will be utilized now that survivors and other witnesses are increasingly passing
from the scene.
291
According to Stark and Rothberg, “formerly dominant discussions of
the practical and ethical dimensions of recording testimonies” must give way to
“questions concerning the future of the archive.”
292
I would suggest, however, that rather
than to separate those two lines of inquiry concerning testimonial production and
transmission, it is imperative to examine the ways in which they are intertwined. That is
to say, the practical and ethical aspects of recording testimony profoundly impact the
prospects of how future generations will use the testimonies. Rothberg and Stark
acknowledge that Holocaust memory can be instrumentalized and politicized—that the
uses of memory are linked to the “politics of memory—that is, with the interests,

291
Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark, “After the Witness: A Report from the Twentieth
Anniversary Conference of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at
Yale,” History and Memory 15, no.1 (Spring 2003): 86.

292
Ibid.

 
163

institutions, and conceptual frameworks that mediated what we know of the past.”
293

Nonetheless, their account of this groundbreaking conference offers little actual
discussion of the institutional frameworks that affect the construction of testimony at the
Fortunoff Archive. It is with that in mind that this chapter has explored the “frame
conditions” of the Fortunoff Archive’s institutional cultures and methodologies, with the
aim of calling attention to how they work in conversation with the personal textures of
accounts, and in so doing, represent a necessary area of analysis if we are to more fully
interpret audiovisual Holocaust testimony.

293
Ibid., 91.
 
164

Chapter 2
The Institutional Origins of Testimony in the Holocaust Museum
Introduction
Each of the chapters in my dissertation addresses how the respective institutional
histories and practices of archives play crucial roles in shaping the production and
reception of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies. These next two chapters focus on the
case of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM, Holocaust Museum,
or museum) and its connection to much larger constellations of Holocaust testimonial
practice within the United States, given its “official,” federally mandated status. While
the Holocaust Museum possesses neither the oldest nor the largest collection of
testimonies among the three sites featured in this dissertation, it is the most centralized
and institutionally complex among them, bearing the imprimatur of the United States
federal government and thus the hierarchical structure associated with it. The museum’s
collection currently holds over 9,000 testimonies, recorded mainly in English, in both
audio and video formats, more than 2,000 of which the USHMM oral history department
conducted on its own (as opposed to the others acquired from outside projects).
Witnesses include but are not limited to Jewish survivors, non-Jewish bystanders, Roma
and Sinti, homosexuals, political prisoners, liberators, and rescuers.
294
The museum’s
capacity not only as an archive, but also as a memorial site, exhibition space, and
educational center, makes it an illuminating case for comparing how testimony is

294
Oral History Interview Guidelines, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Written by Oral History Staff, Revised 2007, pp. ii-iii.

 
165

collected and transmitted. What follows is not a comprehensive history of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but rather a focused examination of how that
institution channels testimonial authority and authenticity.
295

Chapters One and Four examine how the video holdings of the Fortunoff Archive
and the Shoah Foundation, respectively, circulate within and beyond their archives
through the production of various pedagogical media, including documentaries and
online platforms. These next two chapters extend that discussion to the more spatial and
overtly political transmissions of Holocaust testimony. The following research draws
from the vast institutional archives of the Holocaust Museum and its documents
pertaining to the development of the museum itself, as well as from the collection of
testimony; analysis of a sampling of oral history video testimonies from the museum; and
interviews with museum staff and faculty who are directly or indirectly involved with the

295
Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust
Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) provides the definitive, truly
comprehensive history of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served as
an invaluable reference in helping me to navigate the vast institutional archives of the
museum during my 2006–2007 term as a Charles H. Revson Fellow in Archival Research
at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM. It was under the generous
auspices of that fellowship that I compiled the research for these next two chapters.
While Linenthal’s work in Preserving Memory provides a wide-ranging chronicle of the
development of the Holocaust Museum, issues related to collecting testimony are of
secondary concern, and there is little analysis of individual interviews or an in-depth
discussion of interview protocols, preferences, and methodologies. Therefore, certain
sections of this and the next chapter are based on my examination of many of the same
USHMM records of debates and archival collections that Linenthal takes up in his book,
and they are cited accordingly. However, in this chapter, I mobilize my own extensive
investigation of those and many other of the museum’s archival sources and discourses to
interweave the relationship between the institution’s history, conceptualization, and
development and the emergence of its oral history project over the years.

 
166

collection and dissemination of audiovisual testimonies (which the institution categorizes
under the rubric “oral history”).
Authenticity, Authority, and the Mandate of the Holocaust Museum
November 1, 1978, marked a pivotal moment in the history of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum. On that date, President Jimmy Carter established the
Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (otherwise referred to as the Commission or
the PCOH), and charged its thirty-four members to submit a report on establishing a
national memorial to the Holocaust, in addition to mandating Days of Holocaust
Remembrance on April 28 and 29 of each year.
296
The eminent writer and Holocaust
survivor Elie Wiesel was made chairman of the PCOH; other members consisted of
survivors, lay and religious leaders of all major religions, historians and other scholars,
five members of Congress and five senators. Of particular importance, as of January 15,
1979, the PCOH created a number of subcommittees that forged the institutional
perspectives that would mold the museum’s collection and transmission of oral history.
Particularly crucial subcommittees were: Museum and Monument; Secondary Education
and Curricula; Human Rights; Funding; and Fact Finding and Travel Mission.
297

The commission report established two guiding principles for the Holocaust
Museum: an emphasis on the uniqueness of the Holocaust; and the moral obligations of

296
Report to the President, President’s Commission on the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel,
Chairman, 27 September 1979, USHMM, http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/
faq/languages/en/06/01/commission/#principles (accessed 6 April 2009).

297
Ibid.

 
167

American remembrance.
298
Specifically, the report framed the Holocaust as a product,
rather than an aberration of modernity, citing such developments as the expansion of
modern bureaucratic systems, industrial management, and technological advancement. In
commemorating the Holocaust, the museum would offer a lesson on their catastrophic
potential. The commission designated the new museum a “Living Memorial” and
charged it with the task of making Holocaust memory a morally pedagogical and socially
interventionist force in American culture, based on the commission’s claim that:
“remembering can instill caution, fortify restraint, and protect against future evil or
indifference.”
299
In the words of the museum’s interview guidelines, its “primary mission
is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy, to preserve
the memory of those who suffered, and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon moral and
spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as by their own
responsibilities as citizens of democracy.”
300

The museum’s official character—its location near the National Mall in
Washington, DC, and its designation in 1980 as a federally mandated and partially
federally-funded institution—is basic to its mission.
301
The authorizing legislation that

298
Ibid.

299
Ibid.

300
Oral History Interview Guidelines, USHMM. Written by Oral History Staff, Revised
2007, p. i.

301
Public Law 96-388. Enacted by the 96
th
U.S. Congress, 7 October 1980. Cited in
“Responding to the Future: Work Plan 2000.” 3 May 2000. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike”
Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 22; Committee: Conscience.
 
168

created the Holocaust Museum itself and charged it with organizing the national Days of
Remembrance each April also created the United States Holocaust Memorial Council
(USHMC or Memorial Council), assigned to carry out the PCOH report in conjunction
with the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies.
302
This included the
requirement that the Memorial Council receive federal approval for the museum’s design
and location. Rather than being a burden, these federal mandates ultimately proved to be
a source of political and moral authority and capital. With the appropriation of land on
federal property next to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and just off the National
Mall, the Council could proclaim: “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is
rising in the heart of Washington adjacent to the National Mall, within sight of the
Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial.”
303

For Michael Berenbaum, the museum’s first Project Director and a major figure
throughout its development, the task at hand entailed Americanizing the Holocaust,
enabling the museum to bridge this country’s historical and spatial distance from the
events by importing them into the memorial topography of the United States. In
Berenbaum’s words, the challenge was both spatial and temporal: “to move them (the
visitors) back fifty years in time, transport them a continent away… [I]n 90 to 120
minutes, we must discharge them into the streets of Washington with a changed

302
Ibid.

303
Michael Berenbaum, “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” undated,
p. 1. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History.

 
169

understanding of human potential and commitment.”
304
Similarly, the Museum
Development Committee urged that the museum “explain the events of the Holocaust in
an intellectual/emotive/symbolic language that Americans can understand.”
305
The
notion of the USHMM as an “American Museum” was central to its architecture,
exhibitions, and pedagogy. For example, storytelling would appeal to American modes
of cognitive interpretation and emotional engagement, thus reaching the widest possible
audience, most of whom would have little or no direct personal ties to the Holocaust or
its victims. In this sense, the USHMM, by virtue of the event it commemorated and its
location, was conceived as an experiential site that aims to bridge a historical and cultural
divide. It thus embodies Alison Landsberg’s idea of “prosthetic memory.”
306

For Michael Berenbaum, the challenge of the museum was both emotional and
intellectual: it had to both rigorously chronicle the history and “transmit a sense of the
horror and outrage in a moving experience that from beginning to end addresses and
touches the visitor.”
307
In that sense, while the USHMM was chartered as an American

304
Ibid.

305
Memo from Arthur Rosenblatt to members of the Museum Development and Content
Committee, 14 September 1987. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute,
Directors Office; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports, 1986-1996;
1997-016.1; Box 1; Content Committee Records. Content Committee—October 21
1987.

306
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004),
23-24.

307
Remarks of Dr. Michael Berenbaum to Joint Meeting of the Museum Development
Committee and Content Committee, 20 January 2008. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports, 1986-
 
170

museum that would make the Holocaust understandable to a domestic audience,
Berenbaum stressed that it must stand apart from other official memorial sites on the Mall
and its vicinity. In particular, as against the contemporary view of the Smithsonian
Institution and its museums as presenting a redemptive view of humanity, the USHMM
would represent the “dark side of human nature.”
308
Certainly the Holocaust Museum
presents the genocidal potential of civilization; nevertheless it serves as a monument to
American ideals by commemorating the horrific consequences of a non-democratic
society.
Early on, the Presidential Council on the Holocaust recognized the need to export
the experiential and topographical resonances of the events to the specific national
context of the museum. Thus in 1979 it organized an official trip for its members and
other museum backers and dignitaries to Poland, to visit historical sites including the
remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
309
Visiting these sites of
destruction presented an opportunity to stand in proximity to physical evidence of the
crimes and to appreciate the material traces and moral resonance of the events. It also
allowed those involved in the museum’s creation to forge a figurative and material link
 
1996; 1997-016.1; Content Committee Records; Box 1; Content Committee—January 20
1988.

308
Commentary and Response to Committee Reactions to Joint Meeting of the Museum
Development Committee and Content Committee, 20 January 2008; undated. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda
and Reports, 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Content Committee Records; Box 1; Content
Committee—January 20 1988.

309
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 32.

 
171

between the landscape of destruction in Europe and the newly acquired territory of
remembrance in Washington DC. As Commission Chair Elie Wiesel remarked, visiting
the places of destruction enabled the visitors to partially “touch” and “feel” the events,
enabling them to potentially “recapture the unknown before it could be known.”
310
These
trips to Europe continued, under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council (or USHMC—the overseeing body of the Holocaust Museum) during the period
before the museum’s groundbreaking in 1990, some of which aimed to secure artifacts
and institutional partnerships with museums and camps, including those at Majdanek and
Auschwitz. In the case of Majdanek, the USHMC worked out an arrangement whereby it
would provide video equipment to the camp for recording oral histories, in exchange for
which the museum would receive loans of shoes and other artifacts.
311

In this process of mutual authentication and authorization, the Holocaust Museum
traded its federal, institutional legitimacy to Poland along with its technological
infrastructure, in return for physical, evidentiary anchorage. This convergence of
resources was on full display at the official groundbreaking for the Holocaust Museum on
October 2, 1990, when ashes from Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Dachau, and other
sites of destruction were blended with the earth below the structure’s foundation. More
than representing a commingling of sacred soil, the groundbreaking marked the
transference of living memory, as Holocaust survivors placed their spades of ceremonial
earth on the area holding the ashes.

310
Ibid.

311
Ibid., 152-154.
 
172

Two interrelated trends in American Holocaust commemoration largely motivated
the museum’s creation: recognition of the advancing age and diminishing cohort of
Holocaust survivors and the intensified effort to document the voices of those witnesses.
The voices and presence of survivors were also to be mobilized on behalf of the
Holocaust’s Americanization. In other words, just as the survivors relied on the
museum’s institutional authority and legitimacy to give expression to their experiences,
so too the museum required their stories as a means of transmitting its moral and civic
pedagogy in person-to-person terms.
The fading of the survivor community and the emergence of the Holocaust
Museum were thus intertwined, as museum planners aggressively linked the institutional
authority of the USHMM with the living authority of survivors. Central to that aim was
the forging of an alliance between the Holocaust Museum and the National Registry of
Holocaust Survivors (or Registry). The Registry was founded by Ben and Vladka Meed,
two survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance and prominent members in the North
American Holocaust survivor community, in order to collect the names and other
information of Jewish survivors living in the U.S. and Canada.
312
For the Meeds, the
work of the Registry and the USHMM converged in constructing an affective community
of survivors—a network of support and documentation that connected survivors with

312
“About the National Registry,” Introduction by Benjamin Meed, 1983 (undated).
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—
Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 4; American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

 
173

each other and with the second and third generations. Unlike the Holocaust memorial
registry at Yad Vashem, the National Registry lists survivors. Although not a central
concern of my dissertation, the Registry’s history reflects the link between the imperative
to preserve records of survivors and the creation of the Holocaust Museum. At a
ceremony marking the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1981 in
Jerusalem, survivors read a collective statement vowing “never to let their sacred
memory be erased.” Members of the Second Generation then responded in turn: “We
accept the obligation of this legacy…We dedicate this pledge to you our parents who
suffered and survived.”
313
In this particular ritual of memory younger generations
inherited the responsibility to commemorate the Shoah, even as survivors fulfilled their
obligation to remember the lives of those who perished. In this regard, the survivors
functioned as surrogate witnesses, able to recall the experiences from a position
ultimately exterior to the final teleology of genocide—annihilation. Through this
prosthetic transmission—a ritual of call and response—the National Registry came into
being and converged with the interests of the Holocaust Museum.
Early promotional materials for the USHMM employ a recurring emphasis on
creating a centralized, definitive authority for Holocaust commemoration and
documentation—in keeping with its location on a prime piece of real estate in the
symbolic and political heart of the nation’s capital. A press release before its opening

313
“The World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors,” Prepared by Abraham Bayer,
Director of NCCRAC International Commission, August 1981, p. 11. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu
“Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 4; American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors.

 
174

stressed the museum’s singularity and impact as the “only National Memorial of the
American people to the victims of the Holocaust,” with an “educational program that will
teach an estimated half million youngsters a year about the Holocaust.”
314
The release
continues:
In recent years, Americans have seen a significant growth in local
and regional Holocaust memorials, museums, and study centers in
response to the needs and questions of a new generation about the
Holocaust. Each of these local institutions performs a valuable
function in its area. The United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, however, is unique in its status, its sponsorship and its
location.”
315

The USHMM was “more than a Museum,” to use the terms of its fundraising campaign,
because it afforded a convergence of archival, educational, and memorial functions in an
official, centralized location—a “site for state visits by American Presidents and visiting
foreign dignitaries, a solemn, sacred site, to commune with memory.”
316
In this sense,
the space was to be firmly embedded in both mainstream and elite circles, serving tourists
as they made their way through the popular attractions on the National Mall, while also
serving as a required destination for prominent diplomats and other public figures.

314
“A Unique Institution: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” undated
press release issued prior to the opening of the Holocaust Museum. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

315
Ibid.

316
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” by Michael Berenbaum, undated,
pg. 2. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History.

 
175

The museum’s hybrid status as both public and private institution is reflected in
its funding, which derives from a combination of private and federal government sources.
Its public/private identity also affects the ways in which it enshrines memory, particularly
in terms of survivor testimony. As an American museum built on public land and
chartered by a unanimous Act of Congress, the USHMM was mandated to serve the
domestic constituency that made possible its authorization and to integrate itself into the
iconographic landscape of the National Mall. At the same time, James Freed, the
architect who designed the Museum, strove to immerse visitors in foreign historical
events. As Edward Linenthal comments:
Ironically, then, though the location of the museum in the monumental
core was deemed crucial for those who believed that Holocaust memory
should be an integral part of the nation’s memory, Freed’s building has at
its object the removal of visitors from Washington, so that they may be
receptive to the story told in the Permanent Exhibition.
317

The same paradox characterized the development of the museum’s content and its
storytelling approach, which required planners to try to balance the uniqueness of the
Jewish experience with the need to open up memory to those outside the Jewish
community. Although the museum’s mandate emphasized the particularity of the
Holocaust and not the teaching of universal lessons, debates continued regarding which
victims should be at the center and periphery of the museum’s historiography. Again, to
quote Linenthal: “The representation of various groups of Holocaust victims in the
exhibition satisfied the pluralistic imperative of a national museum to the Holocaust in
the nation’s capital, and serves as a way to portray Jewish uniqueness through

317
Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 89.
 
176

comparison with various others.”
318
The museum’s promotional materials promised to
tell the “Full Story of the Nazi Terror,” including, for example, homosexuals and the
disabled, but as a “non-sectarian American institution,” it would also reach out to other
historical or contemporary atrocities and genocides, thus positioning it as what Linenthal
calls a “site of conscience,” an interventionist memorial where commemorative, archival,
and educational spaces would converge to document the past, but with an eye toward
present and future generations.
319

Experiential and Narrative Pedagogy
The USHMM was established as a “story-telling museum”—a site where the
history of the Holocaust would be animated by the careful placement of personal
artifacts, historical documents, and firsthand witnessing.
320
Through their witnessing,
survivors have assumed the roles of living artifacts at the forefront of imbuing Holocaust
commemoration with a viscerally and ethically charged resonance. The museum’s
emergence in the context of the declining number of survivors was evident in Ben
Meed’s appeal requesting North American Holocaust survivors to submit their
biographical information and personal artifacts to the museum. Meed saw these survivor
accounts and artifacts from the Shoah as necessary for the institution’s legitimacy and
authenticity: “The Museum needs our participation to insure that the Permanent

318
Ibid., 228.

319
“A Unique Institution” press release; and Linenthal, Preserving Memory, xxiii.

320
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, xii.
 
177

Exhibition…tells our story accurately, authentically powerfully.”
321
The proprietary
aspects of Holocaust memory are further illustrated in Meed’s successful efforts to merge
the Registry with the USHMM. This merger constituted a centralization of Holocaust
memory—joining what was mandated as the definitive national memorial with the most
extensive registry of survivor names, numbering over 70,000 in 1990.
322
Not simply a
merger of administrative and networking resources, it meant a convergence of affective
and preservation discourses, stressing the importance of nurturing survivor outreach and
documenting as many stories as possible before witnesses passed from the scene.
The joint efforts of the USHMM and the Registry thus marked an intersection
between institutional and more vernacular strains of Holocaust memory. Just as the
community of survivors represented by the National Registry required the museum’s
political and institutional currency, the USHMM in turn relied on the support and
participation of survivors and their embodied, ethically charged presence. In 1989, the
National Leadership Board of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
issued a resolution declaring: “Without our testimony no one would have known of the
magnitude of the uprising in Warsaw, the revolt in Treblinka, the escape from

321
“An Appeal for Information about Materials for the National Holocaust Memorial
Museum,” undated (circa 1988). USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute,
Directors Office; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports, 1986-1996;
1997-016.1; Box 2; Content Committee—28 September 1988. Emphasis in original.

322
A Mass Fundraising Letter from Benjamin Meed to Unspecified Recipients on behalf
of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, November 1990. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael
Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box 1; American Gathering—Federation of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors.
 
178

Sobibor….”
323
In this sense, the American Gathering and later the Registry reflected an
unease that traditional history alone would be insufficient to foster a postmemory legacy.
In the language of the American Gathering’s resolution: “We have all seen the skeletal
remains of once vital people, but we must give flesh to the bones and see the people as
they once lived.”
324
By collecting and centralizing survivor memory in the U.S., the
USHMM in conjunction with the Registry aimed to renew and preserve three different
bodies of memory: the body of recorded testimonial work representing the individual
and collective experience of survivors; the bodies of absent victims who were relegated
to the iconic piles of corpses in visual traces of the Holocaust; and the body of the
USHMM, a memorial structure with a structural foundation containing the ashes of
Holocaust victims and an institutional life made possible through the advocacy of
survivors and other witnesses.
Elie Wiesel, as the first chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council, wanted to incorporate survivors into the museum in ways that preserved the
sanctity and incomprehensibility of their memories, while at the same time allowing their
use in moral pedagogy. As Wiesel stated in guidelines to the USHMM’s Content
Committee in 1985:
At times one must attempt to do the impossible. Perhaps this is such a
time. Fully aware that there exists a human suffering that cannot be
communicated, we must try to transmit it. We realize that due to its

323
“Resolution by the National Leadership Board Meeting, American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors,” 20 February 1989. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-
011; Box 1; American Gathering—Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

324
Ibid.
 
179

magnitude and character the subject lies outside time and space, yet we are
called upon to use temporal and concrete means of communication to
share our knowledge of it. The Holocaust defies language and art and yet
we must do both to tell the tale.
325

On one hand, Wiesel wished to enshrine the mystery of the Holocaust and stress the
impossibility of penetrating the interior of its experience. At the same time, he asserted
that the voices of survivors must be heard, that they must be registered in the public
consciousness as witnesses of a uniquely Jewish event with universal humanitarian
implications. Yet this brought the dilemma of potential commercialization of the
Holocaust. Wiesel had himself been a strong critic of the 1978 NBC television
miniseries Holocaust, accusing its producers of trivializing the events with melodramatic
storylines and crass consumer exploitation.
326

Thus Wiesel pressed the Content Committee to envision a museum that would
inspire among visitors a sense of transcendence and solitude, allowing them to look
inward by compelling them to identify with the suffering of the victims. He hoped that
confrontation with the “people, objects, words, images that have survived the dead”
would perhaps “bring back an echo, at least an echo, of the screams, of the shouts, of the
silences, the faces.”
327
But Wiesel thought that these people, objects, words, and images

325
Chairman’s Guidelines for the Content Committee, Assisted by historian Eli
Pfefferkorn, 12 August 1985, p. 1. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of the
Chairperson—Elie Wiesel, 1978-1986; 1997-013; Box 22, Museum Content Committee
I.

326
Wiesel, Elie. "Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction." The New York
Times, 16 April 1978.

327
Chairman’s Guidelines for the Content Committee, 12 August 1985.

 
180

could speak for themselves, without extensive historical contextualization or
commentary. To preserve the sanctity of the museum, Wiesel envisioned that survivors
would circulate through the exhibition as docents, guides and storytellers, anchoring the
photographs and documents on display to the authority and authenticity of their
experience, and asserting: “Look, that is the place; I was there, and if you look closely,
that is me.”
328
For Wiesel, survivors were the crucial connection between the European
Holocaust and the landscape of American Remembrance: “So that the educational
process links the survivor to the story and the story to the visitor. No one can move
people better than survivors, and therefore we must organize them and that will be the
educational arm of the Museum, providing the explanation, the background, and the
emotion.”
329

Central to this vision of the survivors’ role is Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic
memory, whereby visceral, experientially charged mediations transmit the memories of a
historical past to those who have no direct linkage to the events.
330
Because Wiesel
thought the stories of the Holocaust were to be told with austerity and restraint, he
preferred that larger artifacts, including crematoria ovens, gas chamber doors, and
railcars, not be included within the exhibition space. Better to tell the story of the
Holocaust with a “whisper” and to keep its visual representation to the smallest possible

328
Ibid.

329
Ibid.

330
Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 112.
 
181

scale.
331
Ultimately, and despite his formative role in the USHMM, Wiesel’s preference
for limiting the visual representation of events proved difficult to accommodate.
In the end, the members of the Content Committee—not the USHMC chairman
—were primarily responsible for vetting the details of the Museum’s exhibition spaces,
which included their obligation to the museum’s pedagogical and socially transformative
mandates. The USHMM was not only to be a place of quiet contemplation, but also a
site for a more interactive and dynamic transformation of the consciousness of its visitors.
For the committee, this entailed a more integrated approach to exhibition space, one that
allowed sacred, educational, and often politically charged activities to co-exist under one
roof.
The museum’s Hall of Remembrance would serve as a space where visitors could
reflect on the history they had encountered in the Permanent Exhibition (or PE), as well
as a venue for hosting state visits and addressing contemporary political events, such as
the recent Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, Iran, which I will discuss in more
detail later. The plans for the Hall of Learning, later renamed the Wexler Learning
Center, foresaw an interactive environment for studying the Holocaust that allowed
visitors to use new media to negotiate choices and responses faced by people during and
after the historical events. The planners’ embrace of innovative and interactive
technology did not lead them to reject such artifacts as a Polish railcar and a bin of shoes
taken from concentration camp inmates as historically suspect commercial attractions.
To the contrary, in the consensus opinion of the Content Committee:

331
Chairman’s Guidelines for the Content Committee, 12 August 1985.

 
182

The visitor can be set in a Jewish Ghetto, a transfer station,
a train car, a work camp, a concentration camp…. Then, having
set a context of experience, the visitor can decompress into a
conventional museum which adds the historical context…EPCOT
and Disney World are full of technological wonders. Our challenge
is to apply such wonders to the rigors and dignity of our subject, the
Holocaust.
332

Thus the planners who guided development of the museum’s content confronted the
challenge of both popularizing and dignifying the study and commemoration of the
Holocaust—of attending to both the visceral and cognitive strains of memory. While the
Content Committee struggled to devise ways of making Holocaust history lived, felt, and
embodied by those with no direct link to the events, they recognized the limits of
recreating trauma. While interactive and immersive displays would generate a sense of
authentic historical experience, the authority of historical scholarship was not to be
compromised in the process.
Nevertheless, the terms of historical rigor and representational excess were often
highly contested. Certain members of the Museum Concept Planning Committee had
advocated for constructing spaces that recreated the streets of ghettos, including
technology that imitated appropriate smells. As Yale Roe described such an exhibit: “I
think one of the things we’re all agreed on is that this should be experiential…So at the
end, you don’t have to explain anything. He [the visitor] already knows it in his gut.”
333

332
“Summary of Content Considerations,” Prepared by Micah H. Naftalin, 29 July 1985,
p.14. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of the Chairperson—Elie Wiesel, 1978-
1986; 1997-013; Box 22, Museum Content Committee I.

333
Typed Transcript from Museum Concept Planning Committee, 6 November 1985, pp.
105-106. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of the Chairperson—Elie Wiesel,
1978-1986; 1997-013; Box 21; Museum Concept Planning Committee Minutes 11/6/85.
 
183

In the end, this approach lost out amid concerns of a museum as a “chamber of
horrors,” recreating the traumas of the Holocaust for unsuspecting patrons. Committee
member Eli Pfefferkorn summarized the debate in stark terms: “It’s a controversy
between…those who advocate the visceral experience and an intellectual
[experience].”
334
The question remained how to achieve a balance between these
intellectual and emotive strains of Holocaust representation. Another fundamental
tension arose regarding the museum’s attempts to transport the American museumgoer
into the midst of a foreign, historical event. Eli Pfefferkorn, a historical consultant to the
Content Committee, referred to this as the “Double Vision” of the Holocaust.
335
There
was a recurring concern that the farther the museum ventured into the experiential realms
of remembrance, the more it would diverge from the historical specificity of the events.
The “Soul” and “Emotional Architecture” of the Holocaust Museum
The Museum Concept Planning Committee determined that the Permanent
Exhibition would be the vehicle for addressing these dilemmas about remembrance
versus history and immersion versus cognition. As the core segment of the museum, this
exhibition would direct the visitors’ experiential engagement with the events while also
anchoring the encounter with a clear historical storyline.
336
Through the careful design
and placement of artifacts and documents in this exhibition, planners could calibrate the
interplay between immersion and cognitive distance, institutional storytelling preferences

334
Ibid., p. 173.

335
Ibid., p. 28.

336
Ibid., p. 84.
 
184

and visitor agency. The final design favored a more “fixed route” over an optional
course, so that the architectural design and narrative flow predetermined the flow of
movement through the exhibition.
337
Furthermore, none of the exhibition’s panels or
installations were to be altered or rotated, thus positioning it as a fixed space for
presenting a definitive historical account. Any variation in displays within the USHMM
was to be limited to temporary exhibits, housed in spaces outside the Permanent
Exhibition. Underlying this decision was the recognition among planners that many, if
not most, visitors would have had little exposure to the events of the Holocaust and
would be unlikely to return to the museum a second time. It was thus necessary to ensure
their exposure to what the institution considered to be the core narrative elements of
Holocaust history.
Nonetheless, the PE was intended to interpret rather than to present historical
facts. Its films, photographs, music, and other artifacts were positioned less as artifacts
with their own origins and particularities, than as narrative markers or illustrations for
telling a larger story within a three-act structure documenting events from before, during,
and after the war. While embracing visual historiography, the exhibition ultimately
aimed to advance a predetermined institutional narrative, rather than compelling visitors
to examine the multiple histories and meanings that could be drawn from the artifacts on
display. In the words of Museum Concept Planning Committee Chairman Stuart Silver:
“What we have said is that, it seems to us that to tell—to create the effect, to create the
understanding in the visitor is almost basically a visceral thing. And we’re going to

337
Ibid., p. 109.

 
185

select material to achieve the presentation of certain stories to create this effect.”
338
In
this sense, the objects, documents, and testimonies were not in the Permanent Exhibition
because of their singular historical value, but rather because of the visceral understanding
they generated and the effects signified by their curatorial placement. While many of the
artifacts within the exhibition were indeed authentic, it was more important that they
conveyed authenticity and in turn advanced a particular museum narrative.
In conjunction with the Content Committee, the Museum Design Team set out to
create what it referred to as the exhibition’s “emotional architecture”— spaces where
emotional catharsis would stem from an encounter with documents, images, and artifacts
converging with the historical chronology.
339
In the process, it was necessary to develop
an accession policy that would serve the museum’s historical and pedagogical aims. For
this task, the museum solicited the consultation of the esteemed Holocaust scholar Sybil
Milton, who in 1985 issued draft recommendations for accession and collection practices,
laying out standards for the satisfactory authentication and documentation of artifacts.
While most of her recommendations are tangential to this dissertation, it is worth
noting Milton’s skepticism toward collecting not only oral history, but also human
remains, including bones, hair, and ashes, insisting that it would be difficult if not
impossible to authenticate their provenance:

338
Ibid., p. 144.

339
Typed Transcript from Museum Design Committee, 13 November 1985, p. 86.
USHMM Institutional; Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—
Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 107; Museum Design
Committee Meetings, 12/13/85.

 
186

They will not be considered as valid items of an
American archival depository, since these items can never
be satisfactorily authenticated and documented. Although
their shock value is appropriated in the original localities of
persecution (e.g. Auschwitz-Birkenau or Majdanek), it is possible
that authentication is subsidiary to moral re-education at these
facilities where mass murder occurred. Since the United States
was not the place where the original events occurred, it would be
unseemly to use museum and archival facilities for such vicarious
titillation. Moreover, such artifacts are dubious from the standpoint of
taste and problematical for their impact on the average museum
visitor.
340

Milton’s argument is limiting in certain respects: first, the process of enshrining human
remains, even at the original sites of destruction, itself represents a vicarious form of
witnessing; and second, privileging the sites of destruction as the only legitimate contexts
for displaying these remains has the effect of rarifying the events and confining access to
those who have the means to visit the grounds. It appears that underlying Milton’s
aversion to the collection of these objects is a resistance to the popularization of
Holocaust memory, both abroad and in the United States.
Milton’s recommendations concerning the use of human remains intersected with
her skepticism towards oral history. For Milton, both the traces of human life and the
collection of oral histories should be governed by the more rigorous accession practices
associated with more traditional sources such as documents, works of art, and physical
remnants of the camps. She found oral history troubling from a collections standpoint in
that it constitutes subjective interpretation. But as with the collection of human traces,

340
“Draft Recommendations for Archival Accessions and Collection Development,”
Prepared by Sybil Milton, March 1985, page 16. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition;
CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History. Emphasis in original.
 
187

Milton’s skepticism toward oral history was not only a matter of empirical objectivity, it
also broached the ethics of emotional appropriation:
[T]he usual American oral history program about
the Holocaust has been unfocussed, eliciting vague,
repetitive, emotional, and occasionally erroneous
testimony…the existing mishmash is ahistorical,
trivializes the events, and exploits the individual
survivor, who must recall emotionally charged events
at a distance of forty years. Few recent programs have
durable validity for scholarship, although they may
yield impressive classroom results in public school settings.
341

Thus Milton distinguished between the scholarly and pedagogical value of testimony:
emotive responses might be suitable for public educational settings, but scholarly inquiry
required analytical distance and sobriety. Similar to Dominick LaCapra, who has argued
that Claude Lanzmann re-traumatized his testimonial subjects in Shoah (1985) in an
effort to transfer their suffering to viewers, Milton claimed that the “usual” oral history
projects had exploited survivors for their own pedagogic aims.
342
But LaCapra and
Milton have neglected to look more closely at the actual framing devices and strategies
that shape their respective objects of inquiry. I will elaborate on these issues later in this
chapter and throughout the dissertation, but want now to stress the fact that many of the

341
“Draft Recommendations for Archival Accessions and Collection Development,”
Prepared by Sybil Milton, March 1985, p. 17. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records
of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA
1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

342
See Dominick LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Why,” Critical
Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997) and the critical response to that essay by Ora Gelley, “A
Response to Dominick LaCapra’s ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah,’ Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring
1998)
 
188

museum planners saw an entrenched binary between cognitive and scholarly approaches
to representation on one hand, and more visceral, popular strains on the other.
This perspective extended not only to the use of audiovisual testimony, but also to
moving images more generally. While Wiesel had stressed the importance of visitors
meeting Holocaust survivors in person, Stuart Sliver, chairman of the Museum Concept
Planning Committee in 1985, foresaw the growing visual literacy of a “media-oriented
generation” that would eventually have no direct contact with those who had lived
through the history.
343
At the same time, the museum’s Design Team determined that
while media representation of the Holocaust was a necessary aspect of its mission, there
had to be careful consideration of the kinds of images displayed. For team member Eli
Pffeferkorn, this necessarily entailed an artistic rendering of the events: “What mediates
between the horror and the viewer is the artistic shaping of the horror.”
344
There was a
consensus among team members that many child visitors would see visual images,
particularly on television and in film, as more “real” than flesh and blood subjects. With
that in mind, the planners were careful not to inundate visitors with a barrage of graphic
representations. The Design Team’s conclusions were expressed by Brewster
Chamberlain, who explained the importance of “imaginative suggestion rather than
blatant offering,” with “artistic consciousness mediating the horror without making it
inauthentic.”
345

343
Typed Transcript from Museum Design Committee, 13 November 1985, p. 26.

344
Ibid., p. 28.

345
Ibid. p. 30.
 
189

Returning to the notion of “emotional architecture,” while planners had initially sought to
sequester the cognitive and emotive dimensions of the Holocaust by cordoning them off
into independent spaces, they increasingly recognized the need to intermingle those
strains—or at least to embed the affective modes of representation with “hard
information.”
346
With that in mind, an approach to the Permanent Exhibition that
carefully placed objects that could provide both visceral punch and an evidentiary
valence countered Sybil Milton’s critique of the use of oral history and human remains.
As early as 1982, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, working in
association with the National Institute for Mental Health, convened a conference of
historians, museum designers, and behavioral and social scientists to explore the
psychological and visceral effects of the Holocaust Museum on future visitors. A
summary of the findings presented at the conference—“Remembering and Memorializing
the Holocaust: Psychological and Educational Dimensions”—was submitted to the
Council’s Content Committee, which was charged with integrating the report into their
development plans. The opinions expressed in the report emphasized not only the
content of the history being presented but also the effects of representing the horrors of
the Holocaust. It is notable that the USHMM planners viewed the museum as an
affectively charged venue not only for survivors but also for those who bear witness to
their stories. With that in mind, the planners set out to regulate the flow of trauma within
the space of the museum in order to construct a pedagogical and narrative framework that
 

346
Ibid., p. 69.

 
190

could channel the emotive and psychological valences of Holocaust memory. While it
called for moderation in presenting unrelenting horror, under the rubric “Learning and
Behavior Issues,” the report also asserted that:
The Museum will fail if it communicates only facts. It needs to transform the
visitors’ self-awareness, that is, to bring about the realization that everyday
ordinary human beings can become both victims and victimizers. Ideally, the
visitor should leave the museum emotionally touched and transformed.
347

In that sense, the Content Committee, through the recommendations of this report, was
charged with the task not only of circulating historical knowledge about the Holocaust,
but also ensuring that visitors become “empathetically involved.”
348

The report acknowledged the particular learning experience offered by a museum,
namely it is “experienced while standing rather than sitting and by walking through
sensory stimuli rather than by more or less passively attending to material being passed
before one.”
349
A museum such as the USHMM “with a mandate to transform and affect
the moral consciousness of its patrons,” was able to promote interactive learning and
“knowing through personal experience.”
350
However the report warned against granting
interactive displays too much agency or placing too much emphasis on dramatic,
interpersonally charged encounters at the expense of historical grounding. The Content

347
“Remembering and Memorializing the Holocaust: Psychological and Educational
Dimensions,” October 1983, p.10. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Director’s Office;
Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014;
Box 138; Remembering and Memorializing the Holocaust: Psychological.

348
Ibid., p. 11.

349
Ibid., p. 12.

350
Ibid.
 
191

Committee thus had to achieve equilibrium between the vestiges of a more “traditional
museum” and more innovative, interactive techniques. This would ideally allow for both
clearly defined moral and historical pedagogy, yet encourage personal identification with
the subjects of history.
In terms of the displays, the report found original and replicated artifacts to be
necessary authenticating markers for the Permanent Exhibition. For example, shoes
belonging to concentration camp inmates would provide “perceptual advantage” by
lending both evidentiary weight and personal texture to the exhibition’s historical
storyline.
351
But the report urged planners to show restraint in the display of such objects
in order to avoid triggering voyeuristic fascination on the part of visitors.
With the recommendations in hand, USHMC Chairman Wiesel convened a
meeting of the Museum, Process, Education, and Archives committees in June 1983. The
agenda was to develop programmatic requirements to achieve the commemorative,
educational, and preservation mandates of the Holocaust Museum, which would be
presented for his approval to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior by the middle of 1985.
352

The committee’s work was summarized in a report called “To Bear Witness, to
Remember, and to Learn: A Confidential Report on Museum Planning,” referred to
internally as the “Red Book.” With its three-pronged emphasis on remembrance,

351
Ibid., p. 15.

352
“To Bear Witness, To Remember, and to Learn,” by Anna Cohn and David Altshuler, 28
February 1984. USHMM; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu
“Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 23; Concept Outline – Weinberg (2
Folders) [The ‘Red Book’ – a report titled “To Bear Witness, To Remember, and to Learn,”
by Anna Cohn and David Altshuler, February 28, 1984].
 
192

teaching, and documentation, the Red Book dealt with every aspect of planning for the
USHMM, from its exterior and interior design to thematic structure and definitions of
authenticity for exhibitions and education programming.
The Red Book addressed the previously discussed issue of how to integrate the
building’s exterior design into the National Mall, as well as interior space. In regard to
the latter, it urged planners to imbue every aspect of the Museum with a sense of
witnessing the events of the Holocaust, in order to “evoke in visitors empathy and
reverence for the nearly six million of others who suffered and perished, and to provoke
in people of all ages and backgrounds questions that engender yet more questions,” thus
making clear the multi-vocal dimensions of the Shoah. At the same time, planners should
ensure that the “obligation to remember [is] . . . fulfilled with absolute authenticity and
expressiveness. Visitors must experience a sense of immediacy in direct relationship to
the persons, artifacts, and documents that bear witness to the Holocaust.”
353

Within this schema, the report saw survivor stories as having a fundamental mediating
presence between the often competing impulses to make the Holocaust either distant and
scholarly or a subject for popularization. Stories would foster interactive education but
also contribute to a mood of solemn contemplation. As initially envisioned in the early
1980s, the visitor’s first experience in the Permanent Exhibition space would be an
encounter with audiovisual testimonies of witnesses and survivors, each narrating a brief
but personally compelling account of experiences related to the themes and artifacts of

353
Ibid., pp. 12-14.

 
193

the exhibition.
354
The plan to embed the exhibition journey in testimonial encounters had
been reversed by the museum’s opening in 1993, by which time the use of testimony had
been relocated to the final segment of the Permanent Exhibition.
One reason the USHMM moved away from relying on testimony as the primary
source of authentication was the anticipated passing of survivors and the resulting
postmemory landscape. Instead, the foundation for the journey into the museum became
an encounter with official documents, artifacts, and academically vetted historical
accounts. In other words, the official history as it exists “on the record” is now the
source for authenticating and authorizing the integration of corporeal referents, including
witness testimonies. While these sources work in concert with one another—the
testimonies do, after all, lend a unique moral and evidentiary voice to the exhibition—the
presence of human witnesses is ultimately subordinate to the museum’s “official,”
overarching story. The core challenges continue to be reaching an audience with little or
no direct experience with or knowledge of the events—that is, bestowing new and
unfamiliar ideas with a sense of “authenticity, immediacy, and sensitivity.”
355
If
survivors were to serve as exemplars of those three concerns, their stories would have to
first be grounded in an established historical record.
The Holocaust Museum as Storytelling Site
Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg, former director of the Museum of the Diaspora in
Israel and later USHMM’s first director, was hired as a consultant in 1985, when the

354
Ibid., p. 13.

355
Ibid., p. 14.

 
194

museum was still soliciting plans for exhibition development. Weinberg’s ideas continue
to shape the contours of the museum. For example, he thought it essential not to
emphasize cognitive engagement with the Holocaust at the expense of underscoring its
emotional dimensions, although he also supported the framing of the affective encounter
in a chronological, three-act sequence of events before, during, and after the Shoah. This
format enabled visitors to be immersed in their own visceral, individual experience while
still being guided by a historical narrative trajectory. For Weinberg, the planning process
presented the challenge of balancing the institution’s monumental and informational
imperatives. As he articulated in a proposed outline for the museum in May 1985: “The
more monumental its exhibits, the less information the Museum can present.”
356

Weinberg envisioned in his early proposal that film would be instrumental to
balancing the museum’s various demands, and he passionately proposed that the museum
produce “The Holocaust Film,” which would tell the story “not through a sequence of
static exhibits, but rather through the medium of a film of the highest artistic quality.”
357

At one point, he even suggested that Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) should
constitute the entirety of the Museum’s exhibit, running on various screens throughout
the Permanent Exhibition—though that idea was ultimately abandoned. For Weinberg,

356
“Proposed Concept Outline for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,”
Washington, D.C., May 1985. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Director’s Office;
Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014;
Box 23; Concept Outline – Weinberg (2 Folders) [The ‘Red Book’ – a report titled “To
Bear Witness, To Remember, and to Learn,” by Anna Cohn and David Altshuler, February
28, 1984].

357
Ibid.

 
195

the “poetic quality” of film could capture the complexity and multiplicity of voices and
perspectives, while at the same time the universal language of cinema would serve as an
“audience attraction.”
358
Weinberg did not, however, advocate for a mode of cinematic
expression akin to the features at mainstream movie theaters. Rejecting any notion of
creating a “regular film,” he pressed for a work steeped in “hard documentation,” though
with a “poetic narrative and human warmth.”
359
The director of such a film would have
to adapt the work to the specific spatial, temporal, and institutional dimensions of the
Holocaust Museum, while preserving the “artistic level of the film, the poetic quality of
its narration, and the continuity and wholeness of the cinematographic experience to
which the visitor is exposed.”
360
Although this film concept was never adopted, its
underlying principles remained intact. And the three-act structure persisted as a guiding
structure in shaping the Permanent Exhibition’s historical narrative, which takes viewers
through a chronological series of events, each act punctuated by moving and still images,
human voices, and personal artifacts intended to imbue the story with the poetic, human
traces for which Weinberg advocated.
While Weinberg’s recommendations for personal, emotionally charged traces in
the exhibition found general acceptance, this was not the case with the objects to be
displayed. As museum planners developed conceptual models, they drafted a series of
guidelines on the use of print and visual materials in an effort to ensure the objects’

358
Ibid.

359
Ibid.

360
Ibid.

 
196

authenticity, while also adapting them to the exhibition’s storytelling needs. In other
words, the objects should be sufficiently “evocative” or “expressive” to bestow universal
meanings beyond their historical particularities.
361

As Edward Linenthal has documented, Elie Wiesel had resisted any attempt to
make the Holocaust accessible in visual terms, proclaiming: “I believe that we are
dealing here with something so sensitive, something…so sober, so austere as an ancient
prayer. Now how do you translate ancient prayers into something visual? I think
everything must be pure.”
362
Although Wiesel’s extreme position did not prevail, and the
museum adopted a visual historiography for the exhibition, planners remained concerned
that the world of cinema would penetrate the museum’s sacred space. This issue flared
up in 1988, when the Content Committee was considering applications for the position of
Director of the Permanent Exhibition, and its members expressed concern that the leading
candidate, Martin Smith, would rely too heavily on his background as a documentary
film director and producer in Great Britain. Although then Project Director Michael
Berenbaum regarded Smith as an accomplished storyteller, he was concerned that the
filmmaker’s experience consisted largely in weaving a two-dimensional narrative and
presenting it to a seated rather than a kinetic audience. In light of these concerns, the
committee designated Martin Smith as Executive Producer of the design process, but also

361
Memorandum from Eli Pfefferkorn, Director of Research Development, to USHMC
Members, Regarding Print and Visual Materials for Exhibit Model, 3 December 1986.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—
Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 120; Pfefferkorn, Eli.

362
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 116.

 
197

brought on Ralph Appelbaum as Exhibition Designer, taking advantage of his museum
experience, which involved juxtaposing three-dimensional fixed objects with “stable
images and a moving audience.”
363
With this marriage of documentary film practice and
traditional museum curating, the Content Committee was “assured that Mr. Smith will
not be making a movie but rather will be leading a design team that will shape a Museum
and that will tell the story outlined in the approved narrative storyline.”
364

This decision to split responsibilities between Smith and Appelbaum reflected an
institutional anxiety with the prospect of converting the Holocaust Museum into a “movie
house” that would privilege technological distraction and redemptive narrative closure.
As Raul Hilberg, the renowned Holocaust scholar and member of the Content Committee
warned, the museum must be on guard against “transforming the Holocaust life
experience into a technological experience.”
365
He also questioned Berenbaum’s belief
that the technological imperatives of exhibition design could be offset by the sensitive
integration of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Hilberg contended that because survivors
do not always recall things that have been historically confirmed, he would not want to
integrate information, whether as testimony or interactive computer terminals, which had

363
Minutes of the Meeting of the Museum Content Committee, 28 September 1988, p. 2.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee
Memoranda and Reports Dates: 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 2; Content Committee—
September 28 1988.

364
Ibid.

365
Ibid., p. 5.

 
198

not been completely authenticated.
366
Hilberg’s critique of recorded survivor testimony
merged with his skepticism towards computer technology, arguing that such less
“official” and more interactive sources were less rigorous than the more “traditional”
sources of recovered documents and physical artifacts. For Hilberg, mediation of the
events of the Holocaust through recorded testimony and interactive display would make it
possible to redeem a sense of triumph and resolution from the “abyss” of the
Holocaust.
367

Ultimately, however, the mystery of the abyss had to be converted into tangible
moral pedagogy. Members of the Content Committee, including Holocaust survivor Sam
Bloch, advocated a role for survivor testimonies as an intermediating presence between
the impenetrability and accessibility of the Shoah. In response to Hilberg’s objections to
oral history, Bloch and others contended that the historians on the committee had a
responsibility to consult with survivors as they progressed with the development of
content for the Permanent Exhibition.
368
For Bloch and the other survivors on the

366
Ibid.

367
“A Working Response to the Question of Explicit Imagery Including ‘The
Pornography of Murder,’ Nudity and Violence in a Museum,” Prepared by Michael
Berenbaum, Alice Greenwald, and Shomer Zwelling on behalf of the Content Team, 26
February 1988. USHMM ; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael
Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports Dates: 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 1;
Miscellaneous.

368
Minutes of the Meeting of the Museum Content Committee, 29 February 1988.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee
Memoranda and Reports Dates: 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 1; Content Committee—
February 29 1988.

 
199

committee, the survivor’s voice should provide not only moral authority but also an
experiential foundation for the museum.
Both USHMC Chairman Miles Lerman and the museum’s architect James Freed
had pressed for the role of survivors. Lerman suggested that survivors be rotated
throughout the exhibition as docents to tell their stories; he also pressed for their recorded
testimonies to be given priority in the exhibition space. Freed recommended that
survivor testimony be the meeting point for “one-on-one encounters” between visitors
and the witnesses of history.
369
These debates about historical authority and authenticity
continued throughout the development process, revealing deeply embedded tensions
between the role of the survivor community and the responsibility of professional
scholars in securing a postmemory legacy.
The details of this debate directly affected the contours of the USHMM’s
educational mission. As against Hilberg’s rigorous and sober approach to research and
education, Berenbaum and most of the other planners realized that this museum’s
mandate went beyond the traditional curatorial mission of presenting historical
information; rather its mission extended to the task of moving the “hearts and minds” of
its audiences in morally grounded terms.
370
The Holocaust Museum’s brand of pedagogy
aimed to activate both the cognitive and visceral registers of experience in its visitors,

369
Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the Museum Content and Development Committees,
20 January 1988. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael
Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports Dates: 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 1;
Content Committee—January 20 1988 (joint with Develop.).

370
Minutes of the Meeting of the Museum Content Committee, 15 November 1988.

 
200

lending an affective and analytical charge through the “direct effect of its imagery.”
371

Content Committee Chairman Ben Meed stressed that the museum must be a site not only
of information, but of urgent moral understanding: “There must be a clear
message/lesson that comes from the Museum. It must be clear that the Museum is
dedicated to helping the visitors understand that they and their choices are critical to
preventing another Holocaust.”
372
To instill these lessons, the museum had to transcend
traditional conceptions of disseminating historical knowledge: it must not be a “textbook
on the walls,” but rather “it must use authentic, accurate history to create a compelling
narrative, a visual epic of the Holocaust.”
373
Yet this epic would be registered in personal
terms by creating a storyline that used film and artifacts to speak “authentically and
directly to the visitors.”
374
Martin Smith’s task was less to show history than to create an
environment that would evoke the feelings of historical events.
Thus the working objectives of those charged with collecting material for the
Permanent Exhibition differed from those at traditional, research-oriented scholarly
archives. The USHMM was to be first and foremost a storytelling site, and as such,

371
Ibid.

372
Minutes of the Meeting of the Museum Content Committee, 21 October 1987.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee
Memoranda and Reports Dates: 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 1; Content Committee—
October 21 1987.

373
Ibid.

374
Exhibition Story Outline, Presented to Museum Content Committee 11 May 1988,
p. 1. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s
Committee Memoranda and Reports Dates: 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 1; Content
Committee—Miscellaneous.
 
201

design and narrative considerations rather than traditional curatorial standards were to
determine the collection practices. It would not be the most extensive display of
historical materials dating back to the period of the Holocaust, but rather a dramatically
compelling presentation of individual and epic events, framed through a carefully
selected set of themes and narrative paths.
Shaike Weinberg—hired as chief consultant in 1988, and then as the first museum
director after 1989—further intensified this emphasis on the museum as a storytelling
site. As I discussed earlier, Weinberg’s work as a consultant in 1985 had provoked initial
internal resistance to his preference for cinematic media, in particular that he might turn
the Holocaust Museum into a site of attractions, rather than a space for serious, solemn
contemplation. While he was respected for his work designing the Museum of the
Diaspora in Israel, that institution was known for its interactive storytelling, as against
traditional collection and display practices. Within the Content Committee, charged with
selecting a chief consultant, member Fred Diament expressed apprehension:
The Museum of the Diaspora is wonderful, but it is
different from the museum we are building. If Shaike
Weinberg is the chief consultant, I am concerned about
the soul and authenticity of the Museum. This Museum
cannot be sanitized or cosmeticized. This museum cannot
be reduced to the least common denominator. It is our
function to insist on historical truth. This principle can
never be compromised.
375

375
Minutes of the Content Committee, 28 June 1988. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports Dates:
1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Box 1; Content Committee—June 28 1988.

 
202

In Diement’s view, making the story of the Holocaust accessible to the widest audience
possible inevitably brought the prospect of diluting its historical authenticity. With
Weinberg’s earlier proposal still fresh in their minds, the committee feared that he would
privilege film as the primary display medium for the Permanent Exhibition at the expense
of compromising its solemnity.
Weinberg met with the Content Committee and assured its members that as chief
consultant he would not attempt to push through his earlier recommendations. At the
same time, he emphasized the importance of adopting innovative storytelling approaches
through the use of audiovisual technology, while maintaining historical standards. For
example, while he recognized the importance of collecting authentic historical materials
such as currency from the Warsaw Ghetto or posters announcing race laws, he
recommended that curators enlarge photographs of those artifacts, so that they would
provide dramatic accent to the storyline. He also underscored the importance of using
video testimonies of survivors and witnesses and contemporary film footage as “strong
storytelling instruments.”
376
And while the Museum tried to secure original materials
from foreign institutions, Weinberg emphasized that in the absence of authentic articles, a
feeling of authenticity could be achieved with castings of original objects or through the
use of artifacts—such as the proposed Polish boxcar—“of the kind” used for

376
Ibid.

 
203

deportations.
377
The boxcar became a particular bone of contention. When it arrived
from Poland in 1989, Content Committee member and survivor Sam Bloch expressed his
concern that the boxcar looked too “fresh” after having been painted by Polish
authorities. As a result, it was restored to its “authentic” condition, in order to more
closely correspond with the iconography of the Holocaust.
378

Rather than stressing the provenance of the boxcar and other holdings, objects on
display were meant to advance the experiential and narrative aims of the institution. To
quote Michael Berenbaum: “…artifacts, architecture, and design are subservient to the
tale that is to be told. They are the midwife of the story.”
379
That is to say, collected
artifacts were valued for their rhetorical flexibility—conveying symbolic and thematic
meaning while at the same time providing material traces of traumatic history.
Earlier visits to Poland by the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust in the
late 1970s—discussed above—and tours of Europe by the Content Committee in 1989
reflected this approach. The requested items from abroad—all of which are inventoried
in the museum’s internal files—are highly personal in nature. For example, a letter of

377
An explanation that the exhibited boxcar is “of the kind” used for deportations is on its
accompanying didactic panel in the Permanent Exhibition, USHMM, Washington, DC.

378
Memorandum from Cindy Miller to Ralph Appelbaum, Martin Smith, Shaike
Weinberg, and Michael Berenbaum on 27 April 1989. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-
011; Box 29; Railroad Car.

379
Remarks of Dr. Michael Berenbaum to Joint Meeting of the Museum Development
Committee and Content Committee, 20 January 2008. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee Memoranda and Reports, 1986-
1996; 1997-016.1; Content Committee Records; Box 1; Content Committee—January 20
1988.

 
204

agreement between the USHMM and the State Museum at Majdanek in Poland refers to
the acquisition of 2,000 shoes of former inmates; 50 inmate uniforms; 100 hand mirrors;
100 brushes; 4 prostheses; and batches of human hair.
380
This small segment of the
personal artifacts collected by the museum speaks to the drive to fill the Permanent
Exhibition with effects tied directly to victims of the Holocaust, which the museum then
interweaves with more iconographic objects such as castings of a gas chamber door and
the entry gate at Auschwitz.
The effort to define and preserve the embodying functions of personal artifacts
was particularly evident in approaches to handling the ultimately 4,000 inmate shoes on
loan from Majdanek. A report by USHMM conservator Katherine Singley observed that:
More than any other article of clothing, a shoe
makes a personal statement for its owner. Generally,
there is only one wearer. This collection would reflect
the socioeconomic diversity among the Jewish population
of Poland, and the personal tastes, values, and even
personalities of individuals within the group. Information
on individual heights, weights, and physical problems
possibly could be extrapolated from the collection using
forensic techniques.
381

Thus the shoes embody their absent wearers, such that curators could extrapolate their
gender, class, and physical attributes. A condition of the loan was that the USHMM not

380
Agreement between the State Museum at Majdanek in Poland and the USHMM, 7
March 1989. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the
Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1998-011;Box 28; Poland—Agreements and
Collections Assessment.

381
Interoffice Memo from Susan Morgenstern to Shaike Weinberg, Martin Goldman,
Martin Smith Re: Attached Conservator’s Report on Shoes, 2 February 1990. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael
Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1998-011; Box 32; Shoes.
 
205

reshape them into their form at the time of their initial confiscation during the war.
Rather, the museum was to clean and stabilize the shoes against further deterioration,
maintaining their faded appearance at the time of donation.
The museum’s preference for authenticity meant that it would neither return these
objects to their original, “ideal” form or allow them to decay. In other words, it would
attempt to maintain its holdings in a state of suspended animation. Unlike the shoes’ in
situ presentation at Majdanek, where they were housed within originally placed barracks,
in the USHMM the shoes would be subjected to more rigorous preservation in order to
maintain their living essence in a space far removed from the site of destruction. Indeed,
the greater the distance between the shoes or other artifacts and the original site of
annihilation, the more intensely the Holocaust Museum labored to preserve their
condition and frame their historical value. In an internal memorandum, Martin Smith
offered his suggestions for displaying the shoes: “My instinctive attitude is pile ‘em
high, do it cheap. Majdanek has done so and the impact of the message behind the shoes
is very strong.”
382
If the USHMM was unable to benefit from Majdanek’s immediacy to
the Holocaust, then it would attempt to replicate its scale and authenticity of presentation.
The collection of shoes and other personal effects, including glasses, prayer
shawls, and brushes, would provide a material foundation as the museum anticipated both
the opening of its doors and the deterioration and diminution of the survivor community
on which the living memory of the Holocaust depended. Awareness grew among

382
Interoffice Memo from Martin Smith to Susan Morgenstern, Regarding “The Shoes”,
13 February 1990. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of
the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1998-011;Box 32; Shoes.

 
206

museum planners that they must launch an urgent effort to secure not only their
testimonies, but also objects that could be linked to their living experiences. The
collection of testimony and artifacts proceeded hand-in-hand. Thus the museum
distributed donation forms to survivors during the pre-interview process. In one such
case, Max “Amichai H.,” one of the survivors in my sample of testimonies, agreed to
donate his childhood drawings and other effects to the museum, which in turn designated
them as “object survivors.”
383
The USHMM had the advantages of institutional resources
and political leverage that enabled it to secure artifacts and testimonies that could bridge
that spatial, temporal, and experiential divide between it and the Holocaust. Its planners
endeavored not only to create the largest clearinghouse of Holocaust-related testimonies
and artifacts in the world, but also to serve as the primary center for authenticating and
legitimating other works, including films, which commemorated the Holocaust.
Regulating the Boundaries of Holocaust Representation
Steven Spielberg’s critically acclaimed film Schindler’s List was released in the
winter of 1993, not long after the Holocaust Museum opened in April of that same year.
Prior to the film’s general release, on November 30, the USHMM hosted an event at
which Oskar Schindler was posthumously awarded a U.S. Medal of Remembrance. The
audience included Steven Spielberg, the central cast of the film, and recently appointed
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, thus bringing together both the official and

383
“Proposed Gift List from Museum at Auschwitz to USHMM,” undated. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu
“Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 56; Donations: Objects.

 
207

popular cultures of Holocaust representation.
384
Spielberg’s film had not only been
embraced by film critics, but had been lauded by Holocaust survivors and educators who
were eager to use the work as a gateway text for teaching the lessons of the Holocaust.
While the work of a definitively populist auteur, the film was praised for its sensitive and
historically grounded treatment of the subject and for its ability to penetrate the conscious
of the mainstream public. Spielberg could profit from the institutional and historical
legitimacy of the USHMM, and the museum could in turn capitalize on the popular
appeal of the filmmaker and the cultural phenomenon of Schindler’s List.
The museum’s internal discussions of the film are thus illuminating, in particular
the efforts of staff and administrators to vet Spielberg’s project in an effort to ensure its
commitment to historical fidelity and thus grant it institutional recognition. In the
process, tensions arose between the museum’s institutional culture and Spielberg’s
commemoration of the Holocaust. In November 1993, the USHMM offered an advance
screening for staff, who submitted their responses in internal memos. The staff’s overall
reception to the work was enthusiastic. They accepted it as essentially accurate, though
only insofar as it reflected a movement away from mass culture and towards established
history. One staff historian, Severin Hochberg, praised Spielberg’s commitment to
history but suggested that expositional captioning would give the narrative a more
authoritative voice, placing events in their appropriate context and chronology. He
concluded: “Spielberg, up to now a successful director of entertainment and fantasy, now

384
“Visit Regarding Schindler Ceremony,” 30 November 1993. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent
Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 16. Schindler’s List.
 
208

takes his place among the best directors of serious film in our time in my judgment.”
385

In this sense, it was Spielberg’s progression away from popular moviemaking toward
“serious film” that won him support from museum staff—less an acceptance of his work
on its own artistic terms than a guarded embrace of Spielberg’s turn towards the “real.”
The museum’s senior staff was more critical. For example, Raye Farr, then
director of the Permanent Exhibition and later head of the Steven Spielberg Film and
Video Archive at the USHMM, reported that her “primary concerns” were the film’s
“playing loose with historical facts and fundamental processes of Holocaust events, in
order to achieve powerful drama.”
386
Museum Director Shaike Weinberg summarized
staff reactions in a letter to Marvin Levy, the head of Universal Studios. He began
diplomatically with praise for the film as a powerful work that remained sensitive to both
historical issues and the subject’s emotional intensity. His concerns revolved primarily
around representational accuracy, for example, the film’s misleading sequencing of
events related to deportations: contrary to the film’s representation of events, deportees
surrendered their personal belongings after, not before arrival at the camps, a strategy
crucial to maintaining the deception of resettlement in the East. Had deportees followed
the film’s scenario, they would have been aware of the fate that would befall them. The
most frequent criticism concerned the scene in which a group of Jewish women were
forced into what they thought were gas chambers, only to be relieved when water—not

385
Ibid.

386
Ibid.

 
209

gas pellets—was released from the showerheads. Weinberg pointed out that upon arrival
most prisoners did not know of the gas chambers, so expected a shower.
Weinberg expressed particular regret about the shower scene because of its
potential to fuel the cause of Holocaust revisionism—a threat that Raye Farr raised in
explaining the smaller “margin for error” in representing the events of the Holocaust. In
light of this concern, Weinberg urged Levy to have the shower scene removed before the
film’s release: “We hope you will not mar the accomplishment through inattention to the
real, and not always present, world in which the history of the Holocaust is debated.”
387

As director of the foremost institutional authority on the Holocaust in the United States,
Weinberg tried in vain to enforce the standards of accuracy of his staff historians on a
Hollywood project that adhered to different standards. The museum’s expectations
perhaps demonstrated a degree of naiveté in regard to the narrative devices of cinema and
the industry culture of the Hollywood system.
Weinberg’s concept of the USHMM reflected this delicate balance between
integrating popular forms of display and representation with an attention to historical
authenticity. In 1991, two years before the museum’s opening, Weinberg circulated a
manifesto entitled “The USHMM: A Conceptual Museum.” It emphasized that although
the museum would possess one of the largest collections of Holocaust-related objects in
the world, the Permanent Exhibition’s chief purpose was not to showcase this collection,
but rather to serve a pedagogic narrative.
388
As I indicated earlier, Weinberg’s multi-

387
Ibid.

388
Memorandum to Museum Staff Re: Attached Article, 13 July 1991, p. 1. USHMM;
 
210

faceted approach to visual historiography integrated historical information into a
carefully constructed storyline told through a careful placement of artifacts, photographs,
and audiovisual displays.
In Weinberg’s view, that approach distinguished the USHMM from what he
referred to as “classical history museums.”
389
Whereas the Holocaust Museum
concentrated on fostering interactive communication with visitors, other museums were,
in Weinberg’s opinion, dogmatically committed to collection and preservation without
any attention to telling the story underlying their holdings. It was in this sense that the
USHMM was a “conceptual museum,” driven more by historiography than curatorial
demands.
390
Indeed, Weinberg went so far as to suggest that the Holocaust Museum did
not necessarily need a curator, at least not in the traditional sense. He recognized the
necessity for personnel to care for the museum’s holdings, but this purpose was
secondary to the role of exhibition designers charged with making the story of the
Holocaust accessible in audiovisual terms. For Weinberg, this, above all, distinguished
the USHMM from its counterpart institutions on the National Mall. He developed this
idea in a memorandum to museum staff:
The classical history museum does not affect its visitors emotionally. In this
sense, it is a ‘cold museum.’ It conveys impressions and a measure of
information, but it does not raise the blood pressure of its visitors; neither

 
Institutional Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu
“Shaike” Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 23; Concept Outline.

389
Ibid.

390
Ibid.

 
211

does it intend to do so. The USHMM, on the other hand, definitely intends to
make not only an intellectual, but also an emotional, impact on
the visitor. It will be a ‘hot museum,’ emotionally loaded, upsetting, disturbing,
perhaps driving up the blood pressure—not just another site of some cultural
Sunday afternoon family entertainment.
391

So while the Holocaust Museum was to be unlike any other museum—certainly not an
ordinary form of “family entertainment”—it would distinguish itself by integrating more
interactive and visceral modes of display. At once unique and yet universally accessible,
it would rely less exclusively on intellectual forms of expression than on allowing visitors
to register knowledge at the level of bodily experience.
Although that approach had a populist dimension, it was wedded to a storyline
deeply embedded in the unique moral lessons of the Holocaust. Despite his claims of
uniqueness for the USHMM, Weinberg noted that Chicago’s Field Museum had explored
such an approach in its exhibit on ancient Egypt, which critics had seen as iconoclastic in
its use of replicas and non-authentic objects to evoke rather than document history.
Although more orthodox curators had been critical, the public had embraced the Egyptian
exhibit, affirming Weinberg’s belief that the USHMM’s accessibility to the public was
more critical than its adherence to standard museum practices.
392
As I suggested earlier,
this view was in line with the federal mandate for civic pedagogy to raise genocide
awareness. As Edward Linenthal pointed out—using Weinberg’s terms—the museum

391
Ibid.

392
Ibid.

 
212

was designed to “inflict” and “transform” by eliciting a powerful emotional response in
the visitor, to be followed by empathy and social consciousness.
393
Nonetheless, the
process of achieving the vision of a “conceptual museum was highly contested,
particularly pertaining to the representation of bodily suffering and the instruments of
genocide. Although museum planners came to agree that visitors were to be inflicted and
transformed by the story of the Holocaust, it was not clear how to forge that kind of
experiential historiography—particularly in regard to the redemptive and anti-redemptive
dimensions of Holocaust representation. Lawrence Langer’s remarks, as noted by
Linenthal, are especially relevant on the dangers of romanticizing the Holocaust:
When we write of martyrs instead of victims; focus on resistance instead
of mass murder; celebrate the human spirit and bypass the human body;
invoke the dignity of the self and ignore its humiliation—we are initiating
the evolution of preferred buffers of insulation against the terrors of the
Holocaust, without bringing us any closer to its complex and elusive
truths.
394

These concerns should be kept in mind while examining decisions made in shaping not
only the narrative flow of the Permanent Exhibition, but also its display of the human
body in both its living and mediated testimony forms. As I have argued, those strategies
aimed to regulate the cognitive and visceral demands of Holocaust memory, ensuring that
depictions of extremity and the creation of surrogate suffering would not overwhelm
moral pedagogy or the ethical obligations to respect victims and survivors.
The Content Committee raised some of these issues by commissioning an internal
report, “A Working Response to the Question of Explicit Imagery Including ‘The

393
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 112.

394
Ibid., 101.
 
213

Pornography of Murder,’ Nudity and Violence,” prepared by Michael Berenbaum, Alice
Greenwald, and Shomer Zwelling. The report stressed that the debate did not concern if
“difficult material” would be presented, but rather how it was to be handled. The
museum had to use documentary images of brutality, emaciation, and systematic
dehumanization; however it must make a determined effort to avoid exploitation so as not
to further humiliate victims and their families, or to engender in visitors a sense of
historical voyeurism. Although the report argued that the museum must include even the
most graphic representations, it must mitigate any sensationalist appeal by careful
historical citation and contextualization about the lives being presented.
The report did not dismiss outright the idea of shocking museum visitors. To the
contrary, it recognized that the extreme nature and viscerally charged quality of certain
images could serve an invaluable interpretative and ethical dimension: “In being
horrified at the sheer enormity of the murder, one cannot lose sight of the fact that each of
the corpses in a pile was a single, complex, multifaceted human being…. The horror must
shock, but it should not obscure the real message of the exhibition, which is to explore,
deplore, and ultimately counter through learning the all-too-human motivations which
can result in such horrifying eventualities.”
395
Berenbaum countered concerns that “over-
exposure to horror” might result in the “numbing of one’s intellect,” with his belief that
the museum’s multi-discursive presentation of events, which would mobilize testimonies,
memorabilia, photos, and documents in service of a larger narrative, would decrease the
impact of any particular artifact. In that manner, moral pedagogy and the fostering of

395
“A Working Response to the Question of Explicit Imagery.” (See n. 367. above.)

 
214

interpersonal identification between visitors and historical subjects would counter the
exploitative potential of images of death and destruction.
In order to achieve that goal, the report laid out four guiding principles to inform
the development of visual content in the Permanent Exhibition. First, the pairing of
graphic images and more “benign” content would prevent the museum from being a
“Musée des Horreurs,” while also conveying a sense of the personal violations
perpetrated against victims.
396
Second, images needed both context and interpretation in
order to ensure that they served the museum’s pedagogical and transformative
intentions.
397
Visceral engagement and shock was constructive only when it was
consistent with the museum’s commemorative and educational aims, in particular if
emotive responses to a display remained within the prescribed storyline. The report
strongly encouraged the inclusion of images made by the victims, not just those by the
perpetrators, in order to achieve a more diverse range of perceptions and experiences.
Third, the report recommended that the size, dimension, and quantity of documentary
images should be appropriate to the aims of the particular display.
398
To achieve
authenticity, images should be presented in their original format, not enlarged. An
exception might be made if the aim was to underscore certain events or compel visitors to
reflect on their own voyeuristic tendencies: “The narrative and contextual placement will

396
Ibid.

397
Ibid.

398
Ibid.

 
215

dictate the appropriate scale.”
399
Finally, the report placed heavy emphasis on the
development of tools and strategies to help visitors engage with graphic and disturbing
visuals. The authors believed that patrons had to be sensitized and prepared for the
overwhelming nature of the representations and primed to initiate a “respectful
encounter” with the exhibition, rather than morbid curiosity. The report concludes: “The
telling of truth requires the use of authentic materials. The effective use of materials
requires restraint, care, sensitivity and planning.”
400

An underlying tension remained in the particular notion of authenticity reflected
in the USHMM’s effort to deal with troubling imagery. Authentic objects would
establish the veracity and historical credibility of the museum and its storyline, yet that
authenticity had to be carefully calibrated to maintain a delicate balance between the
Permanent Exhibition’s emotive and cognitive aspects of representation and, first and
foremost, to support its narrative framework. The exhibition storyline was not yet fully
developed in 1988, when the report on imagery was drafted, and the content planners
realized they first needed “a fully-articulated exhibition program . . . which will provide
the structure and sequence for the exhibition narrative.”
401
Nonetheless, planners and
curators proceeded to collect images and other material artifacts in line with the
developing storyline. That process included a search through the National Archives to

399
Ibid.

400
Ibid.

401
Ibid.

 
216

review concentration camp liberation footage that would serve in both the opening and
closing portions of the exhibition.
The National Archives’ documentary images starkly presented the challenges of
identifying a powerful representation. What constitutes a “shocking” or “powerful”
image, and how are those categories distinguished from one another? Which images are
clichés and which are penetrating? What representations should visitors encounter when
they enter the exhibition? In designing the initial segment of the Permanent Exhibition,
planners ultimately decided to include an opening image of American liberators
encountering the charred remains of concentration camp inmates. In this way, they
deliberately created a space where visitors could identify with the liberators discovering
the reality of the Holocaust, rather than positioning them as voyeurs to the suffering of
the victims. It is also important to note that the planners, in reviewing documentary
footage, particularly that of human corpses and liberated, emaciated inmates,
demonstrated sensitivity to the clinical presentation of the human body and recognized
the need to restore some sense of dignity, physical embodiment, and soul to the victims
recorded in the images.
An Embodied and Embodying Museum
The USHMM’s mandate as a “Living Memorial” implied a charge to reconstruct
some semblance of what was lost in the Holocaust. It would serve both as a space for
regenerating the lives of those who perished and those who survived the Holocaust, and
as a surrogate living body in its own right—an organic commemorative structure that
would speak to the memory of the Shoah in the absence of those who were—or would no
 
217

longer be—present to attest to their experiences. Weinberg’s vision for the museum
reflected these sentiments, as conveyed in press releases distributed both to the outside
world and internally, in an effort to define the guiding terms and concepts of the
exhibition space. Thus a statement prior to the museum’s opening stresses the Permanent
Exhibition’s central importance to the museum’s role as a space of living memory:
The soul of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will be its
permanent exhibition … Through oral recollections, written narratives,
authentic objects and still and moving images, the story of the Holocaust
will unfold for the visitor over three floors of evocative and unique
exhibitions. Serving as guides will be the people who lived the story—
victims, bystanders, public officials, liberators, rescuers, and perhaps even
perpetrators—creating an intimate dialogue between the visitor and the
dramatic historical events of the Holocaust through personal narrative and
memorabilia. Thus, walking through large exhibition spaces and intimate
towers, the visitor will encounter the people of the Holocaust story in the
fullness of their lives and confront the shattering of society, understand the
vulnerability of countless victims and discover the resilience of the human
spirit even in the most extreme and inhumane circumstances.
402

This statement clearly describes how the museum aims to mobilize emotive and cognitive
forms of address. In an effort to calibrate those two impulses, the planners salvaged and
reconstructed the living traces, voices, and bodies of history, thereby generating a sense
of lived intimacy and restoring victims to the “fullness of their lives.” However, a
process of careful segmentation and instrumentalization determined the placement of
specific bodies. As Raye Farr, the former director of the Permanent Exhibition

402
Press Release, Undated (prior to opening), “The Assault (1933-39), The Holocaust
(1939-45), and Bearing Witness (1945-Present): The Permanent Exhibition of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum”, pp. 1-2). USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition;
CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.
 
218

explained, the space, except for a dedicated Anne Frank section, was designed to evoke a
sense of “individuality,” rather than an encounter with specific “individual persons.”
403
As Linenthal has argued, the presence of survivors in the USHMM, whether
through testimonies or in-person accounts, reflected an increasing fascination with and
sacralization of survivors, witnesses, and victims of the Holocaust.
404
He suggests that
the museum, while striving to personalize those subjects, particularly survivors, tended to
homogenize their experiences by assigning them a universal moral currency and
bestowing their stories with a redemptive value. Although I agree with Linenthal that the
museum attempted to instrumentalize survivor experiences by mining them for their
precious knowledge and moral authority, I would argue that it was far from a pristine
process. While the museum strived to deploy documents, material objects, and
testimonies in service of its institutional preferences, the collection, display, and
interpretation of those holdings revealed the specificity of individual trauma.
The deliberations of the Content Committee regarding the collection of original
artifacts—specifically the boxcar and a casting of the crematorium model on display in
the Auschwitz Museum—illustrate this conflict. Earlier, I discussed objections to the
railcar on grounds of historical authenticity. Those passionately raised by Content
Committee member and Holocaust survivor Hadassah Rosensaft invoked her own
experiences of deportation and the loss of a young son during the Holocaust. Thus
Rosensaft urged her fellow members to “draw a line” that excluded objects that could

403
Raye Farr, Director, Film and Video, Collections Division, USHMM. interview by
author, 20 November 2006, Washington, DC, USHMM.

404
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, xiv-xv.
 
219

cause emotional distress to survivors and visitors.
405
She invoked the moral authority not
only of her own experience but collectively as a representative of Holocaust survivors
more generally: “I often hear the words that our Museum in Washington is not being
built for the survivors; I agree, but it is being built because of the Holocaust and because
of the survivors; It will tell our story, my story.”
406
She asserted a personal and
communal imperative to monitor the museum’s representations in order to ensure that the
Holocaust would be endowed with a respectful and sacred quality befitting the once and
still living traces of that experience. Her concern was not whether the railcar in question
had been authenticated as having transported Jews, rather:
I looked carefully at the showing of artifacts that we consider to expose,
and I saw myself. Well, it is me (saying me, I mean all the
survivors…who was brought…in the cattle car). It is me that was
standing at the selection…before entering the camp. It was me,
whose entire family including my first son—age six—was consumed by
the flames…It was me whose head was shaved.”
407

Rosensaft shifts between singular and collective expressions of authority, speaking for
the larger experiences of the Holocaust and its survivors while also drawing from her
own firsthand encounters. For Rosensaft, the material objects of destruction are not so
much artifacts of a contained past as they are emotionally charged embodiments of a
suffering that will never be fully alleviated.

405
Letter from Hadassah Rosensaft to Michael Berenbaum on 16 April 1988. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael
Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box 16; Hair.

406
Ibid. My emphasis added.

407
Ibid. Emphasis in original.
 
220

While the display of the boxcar or the model of the crematorium might foster
experiential engagement in museum visitors, Rosensaft’s comments remind us of the
ethical and emotional challenges of reconstructing the Holocaust. Though the Holocaust
Museum was designed to generate what Alison Landsberg terms “prosthetic memory,”
whereby the memory of the Holocaust is transferred to those with no firsthand experience
in those events, the notion of what constitutes prosthetic or “experiential” learning are
variable and highly charged.
408
Rosensaft’s opposition was not to the idea of displaying
the railcar or the crematorium model in theory, rather to showing those objects away
from their original sites. In other words, the prosthetic transmission of the trauma is what
makes it more problematic than its in situ display. In Rosensaft’s assessment, the farther
those objects are removed from the original landscape to be reconstructed on foreign soil,
the greater the risk of appropriating and exploiting the memory of the Shoah:
I know how important it is to expose the artifacts, but we must draw a line.
Tools of torture, tools used by the Germans to kill…must remain in the
places of the crime. We should never sanctify the Museum or enshrine
their tools of torture!”
409

Ultimately, Rosensaft and her allies lost the debate, and the railcar and crematorium
model gained places in the Permanent Exhibition. However they were displayed in such
a way as to mitigate the traumatic impact. For example, an alternate route was
constructed for the boxcar installation, allowing visitors who so chose to move through
the space with less discomfort and emotional duress.

408
See my discussion of Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory in the Introduction.

409
Letter from Hadassah Rosensaft to Michael Berenbaum, 16 April 1988.
 
221

The potential acquisition and display of corporeal remains—notably a large bin of
hair shorn from inmates in Auschwitz-Birkenau—also incited heated debates within the
Content Committee.
410
Here again, Hadassah Rosensaft played an active role in arguing
that such a display would constitute a violation of the sanctity of human remains and an
affront to good taste. It would be sufficient, she argued, to display explanatory panels on
the subject; anything more would further dehumanize the victims.
411
Even more
outspoken was fellow committee member and survivor Helen Fagin. Having lost family
members in the Shoah and having herself been subjected to the shaving process at
Auschwitz, Fagin was specifically concerned that her own hair or that of her loved ones
might be included in the pile on display.
412
In her opinion, the hair should remain in
Auschwitz.
Berenbaum tried to assure Fagin and Rosensaft that Jewish practice does not
accord a sacred status to hair as bodily remains. Although sensitive to their view that the
hair display might turn the museum into a “chamber of horrors,” he nonetheless argued
that, carefully regulated, a display that provoked “fear and trembling” could be

410
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 210-216, extensively chronicles the debate concerning
the display of hair. This book is where I first learned of this controversy—and was
directed toward USHMM institutional documenting the debate.

411
Minutes of the Meeting of the Museum Committee on Collections and Acquisitions,
12 April 1989. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the
Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 2;
Collections/Acquisitions Committee.

412
Minutes of the Meeting of the Museum Content Committee, 13 February 1990,
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Michael Berenbaum’s Committee
Memoranda and Reports, 1986-1996; 1997-016.1; Content Committee Records; Box 2;
Content Committee—February 13 1990.

 
222

productive and would not violate ethical obligations to victims.
413
Berenbaum did,
however, consult a psychiatrist on the potential emotional impact of such a display, with
the result that a second bypass route was proposed for the hair. For Berenbaum, the
exhibit’s purpose was not just to provoke a visceral response, but rather to cultivate a
deeper understanding of the ultimate by-product of the Nazi dehumanization of Jews.
414

In this sense, he framed the collected hair as both of and outside the human body. It
could convey corporeal authority and authenticity and index actual bodily suffering,
without clearly referencing an individual body or compromising religious rituals.
As the debate on hair as artifact headed towards a conclusion, committee member
Mark Talisman urged sensitivity to the objections of those who opposed the display, but
argued that a visual encounter with the actual hair would be a better teaching tool,
especially for children, than oral or textual description. Raul Hilberg echoed those
sentiments, arguing that the hair presented an opportunity to embody the “ultimate
rationality amidst a process no one can understand.”
415
Hilberg noted that whereas early
in the development process planners worried about an “empty Museum,” devoid of
sufficient material evidence, they now found themselves with an abundant collection and
a “full Museum.”
416
He considered it an obligation to show whatever materials they
could acquire in order to bolster the museum’s evidentiary anchorage and historical

413
Ibid.

414
Ibid.

415
Ibid.

416
Ibid.
 
223

credibility. Berenbaum and other advocates for the hair display underscored both the
interpretative and visceral benefits. Ultimately, the planners looked beyond the issue of
isolating emotive from cognitive modes of address and tried to achieve an integrated
display concept that could accommodate both streams of representation.
The internal debates within the Content Committee reveal anxiety concerning the
pending disappearance of living survivors and the consequent projection of historical
authority onto institutions rather than individual witnesses. These issues raised questions
of commemorative ownership: For whom was the museum being constructed: survivors,
or future generations? While survivors could provide an invaluable source of living
memory for commemoration and education, Berenbaum foresaw the need to develop an
infrastructure for transferring that memory beyond the physical presence of survivors.
With that in mind, the collection of shoes, hair, personal effects, and other material
artifacts could give a sense of fullness to the museum, providing some measure of
compensation for the impending absence of survivors.
At the time that these decisions were made, the individual and collective voices of
survivors were still very much alive. As a result their opposition to the display of hair
had to be accommodated. Planners also had to navigate potential religious or legal
objections to the display, while also trying not to compromise the museum’s fundraising
mission or muddy its larger commemorative and pedagogical mission. In the end,
although the boxcar and crematorium models were incorporated into the Permanent
Exhibition, the hair was acquired, but put in cold storage at the museum’s warehouse in
Maryland. In its stead is a large photomural that depicts the display of hair.
 
224

The divisions over the collection of hair speak to larger issues related to the
museum’s dual mandate as museum and memorial space. Its charter as the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum designated it as both a sacred commemorative site for
enshrining the memory of the victims and as a popular exhibition space for transmitting
the moral lessons of the Holocaust. These entangled mandates often complicated the
museum’s ethical and pedagogical aims: how to preserve the sense of mystery and
trauma of the Holocaust while also making it accessible to a wide audience; which forms
of expression will convey both the universal and more particular aspects of that historical
suffering; in what ways can stories and material artifacts preserve the sanctity of the
Holocaust without positioning them as historical curiosities? In the debate over the hair
display, opponents, largely members of the survivor community, persuaded museum
authorities to preserve the sanctity of the events. However, despite the hair’s exile to the
Maryland warehouse, planners continued to pursue a display strategy that could capture a
sense of living memory. The collection of audiovisual testimony represented a central
means to achieve this goal.
The Initial Stages of the Museum’s Department of Oral History
As USHMM planners began discussions of an oral history department, they were
aware of the growth of efforts to record survivor testimony since the late 1970s,
particularly the Fortunoff Video Archive. They also knew that the diminishing ranks of
the survivor community made that cause all the more crucial. Framing the collection of
testimony as a public duty to scholars and educators, museum planners sought to expand
on the activities of other archival institutions and capitalize on its federally mandated
 
225

status by positioning itself as the definitive, central repository of Holocaust
testimonies.
417
They also recognized the value of recorded interviews to a museum still
in need of content.
The project’s launch was deemed urgent on two counts: “Because of the schedule
for opening the Museum and the aging of survivors, it is imperative that the interviewing
process begin as soon as possible.”
418
For names of potential interviewees it would first
count on the immense database of the previously discussed National Registry of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors. Registry founder and United States Holocaust Memorial Council
member Ben Meed was encouraging: “The survivors are dying at a rapid pace and we
must assume that within the next 5-10 years, the majority of them will be gone or
incapable of giving testimony.”
419
He acknowledged that many of the Registry’s
survivors had already given testimony elsewhere, but was adamant that the USHMM
record as many witnesses as possible: “It is true that there are bound to be repetitions,
but in each personal testimony, there may be something which may shed a different light
and contribute to better comprehension.”
420

417
“Oral History Report: An Overview of the Process and Initial Steps,” 20 August
1988. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the
Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box 26; Oral History.

418
Ibid.

419
Notes by Benjamin Meed re: USHMM National Registry, 3 January 1991; p. 3.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—
Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box 33; Survivors Registry.

420
Ibid.

 
226

The previously mentioned American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
was another source of names. In 1991, museum representatives attended the
organization’s meeting in Los Angeles, where they distributed promotional material and
survey cards calling on survivors to record their personal stories for the USHMM and
“become part of our history.”
421
The cards had spaces for biographical and Holocaust-
related experiences. Museum administrators, including Weinberg and Berenbaum, also
realized the necessity of evaluating the testimony holdings of other U.S. institutions in
order to formulate a list of interview priorities, as well as to make agreements regarding
the names of their interviewees. By cultivating relationships with both local and national
survivor and archiving institutions, the museum hoped to locate local survivors and their
interviews and then transfer their testimonies to its centralized site. If the Holocaust
Museum could not be the first archive documenting audiovisual testimonies of the
Holocaust in the U.S.— the Fortunoff Archive already had that distinction—then it would
be the “first national archive of Holocaust video and audio testimony”
422

The fact that the Fortunoff Archive had been acting as the first national repository
of Holocaust testimony for a decade complicated the USHMM’s assertion of priority.

421
Survey distributed to American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Los
Angeles, CA; 19 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr
Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994;
1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

422
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Michael Berenbaum RE: Oral History Project
Plans, 11 November 1988; and USHMM—Oral History Department—Description for
Michael Berenbaum, 9 February 1990. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye
Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994;
1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History. Emphasis added.

 
227

Despite its federal mandate, substantial funding, and a vast educational network, the
museum lacked the archive’s academic credibility and proven track record. Moreover, a
1981 agreement between the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and the video
archive at Yale University—later renamed the Fortunoff Archive —granted official status
to the latter as an official depository for audiovisual materials for the future Holocaust
Museum.
423
In the course of analyzing Yale’s holdings with an eye towards potential
exhibition use, USHMM planners also looked to this archive as a model for conducting
and cataloging Holocaust testimony. The museum would retain some elements of the
Yale approach, particularly an early emphasis on granting agency to the interviewee, but
tensions marked the attempt to blend the two sites’ methodologies and institutional
cultures.
Development of a USHMM oral history department was formalized in 1988 with
the hiring of Dr. Linda Kuzmack as its first director. From an early point, tensions arose
between the fledgling department and the more established Yale project, which had by
then been renamed the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The
frictions grew as planners increasingly sought to consolidate the museum’s position as a
clearinghouse of Holocaust-related holdings in the U.S. Although the Fortunoff Archive
provided assistance in securing audiovisual materials for the museum’s future use, it did
not relinquish its institutional independence or pursuit of its own projects. Concerned

423
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Shaike Weinberg, Michael Berenbaum, Martin
Smith, Martin Goldman Re: Yale’s Proposed Agreement, 6 August 1990. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael
Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1998-011; Box 26; Oral History—Fortunoff Archives—Yale.

 
228

that Yale’s ongoing archival work would compromise the museum’s emerging status, in
April 1990 Kuzmack sent an internal memorandum to Weinberg, arguing that the
USHMM must “combat Yale’s image as the only archive where organizations may
deposit their tapes. Right now, Yale is trading on their image as the only Holocaust
archive.”
424
This concern prompted Kuzmack to begin cultivating relationships with
grassroots testimony projects, including those that had preexisting affiliations with the
Fortunoff Archive, in an attempt either to appropriate their holdings or standardize their
interviewing techniques along the lines of the museum’s guidelines.
This growing competition between the two institutions made maintaining the
depository agreement more difficult. In 1990, they made an effort to extend the
cooperative arrangement so that the museum could use Fortunoff testimonies for
exhibition and public education. The Yale archive agreed to loan the museum 150 video
testimonies on a renewable basis, with the museum bearing all costs, in addition to
publicly acknowledging Yale’s “pioneering role” in the area of video testimony.
425
The
Fortunoff Archive seemed to be motivated in part by a need to benefit from the
museum’s promotional cache, while the museum hoped to benefit from the archive’s
intellectual credibility and resources. More specifically, the museum intended to request
testimonies that would serve its particular criteria for dramatic impact, historical value,

424
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Shaike Weinberg Re: “Creating Oral History
Affiliates,” 13 April 1990. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject
Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1998-011; Box 26; Oral
History—Fortunoff Archives—Yale.

425
Memorandum from Kuzmack to Weinberg, Berenbaum, Smith, Goldman Re: Yale’s
Proposed Agreement, 6 August 1990.
 
229

and range of personal experiences. Rather than a considered strategy for expanding the
museum’s fledgling audiovisual archive, the agreement was designed to fill immediate
exhibition needs, with an eye towards generating clips of testimony footage for the
Permanent Exhibition. Ultimately, however, the agreement fell apart as the Holocaust
Museum severed its ties with the Fortunoff Archive for failing to budge on the issue of
allowing scholars (as opposed to museum staff) to access testimonies without added cost.
The failure of the two institutions to come to a new agreement also revealed a
larger divide between their respective institutional cultures and practices. While the
Fortunoff Archive was intent on setting conditions on access to its holdings and on
keeping its collections largely within its institutional borders, the Holocaust Museum
attempted to use testimonies to extend its mission to the broadest possible audience. A
more detailed description of the museum’s approach to audiovisual testimony will
demonstrate the profound implications of these institutional differences for the aesthetic,
pedagogical, and ethical dimensions of testimony.
“Quiet Empathy” and the Challenges of Collecting and Exhibiting Testimony
The Holocaust Museum’s investment in collecting audiovisual testimony, as I
have pointed out, was grounded in the imperative to both archive and exhibit testimony,
although the latter took precedence as the museum’s opening approached. Thus
Exhibition Director Martin Smith was given supervisory authority on the collection of
audiovisual testimony over oral history director Linda Kuzmack. Smith’s primary focus
was on serving the museum’s interpersonal and narrative interests with an “Exhibition

 
230

Storyline” that included the experiences of survivors and witnesses.
426
Although he
realized the importance of drafting a list of potential interviewees that would fill the
historical and geographical categories needed for the Permanent Exhibition, his
background as a documentary filmmaker informed his view that the testimonies sought
were different from the historical material traditionally pursued by scholars. Thus, Smith
asked Kuzmack to locate testimonies that would cover such “nodule points” of the
exhibition’s storyline as conditions in the ghetto, camp life and liberation. She was also
to secure “the little nuggets that are likely to be our most frequent requirement”—that is
to say, fragments of drama and pathos with which visitors would identify.
427

In March 1989 Weinberg, Berenbaum, Smith, and Kuzmack assembled to
develop a set of priorities guiding the collection of testimony, focusing on three main
areas: the Permanent Exhibition, the archive, and special programs (this latter category
including the Learning Center, temporary exhibitions, and educational programs). For
the moment, they determined to create a database of preexisting interviews, but also to
acquire collections of other holdings in order to pinpoint “dramatic stories” for inclusion
in the Permanent Exhibition.
428
In the end, however, the decisions taken would shape the
museum’s own oral history project, one that specifically accommodated its needs.

426
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, November 1988. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

427
Ibid.

428
Oral History Policy Meeting, 31 March 1989, p.1. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition;
CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.
 
231

Although its affiliation with the Fortunoff Archive would prove unsuccessful, at
this point the Holocaust Museum invoked the “Yale Method” as the paradigm for its pilot
oral history program. It also commissioned Lawrence Langer, a primary interviewer for
the Fortunoff Archive and a preeminent scholar on Holocaust testimony, to examine three
hundred of the Yale tapes for the purpose of identifying potential interviewees and
recommending interview techniques.
Langer’s recommendations translated into Smith’s emphasis on forging personal
connections between interviewers and witnesses, which would in turn allow visitors to
access the more intimate textures of the Holocaust. As with the Fortunoff Archive, fewer
questions would be asked during the testimony. While this accorded witnesses more
agency on how they narrated their stories, this approach suited Smith’s preference for
producing usable footage. Echoing his preference for “quiet empathy,” Smith remarked:
“Interviewers will be neither seen nor heard in edited video.”
429

Smith found the first testimonies recorded by Kuzmack in early 1989 too focused
on the historical rather than the personal nature of experience. His review reiterated the
dominant criteria: the storytelling needs of the Permanent Exhibition; and an investment
in “unique testimony to offer to posterity.”
430
He also made recommendations on the

429
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, 16 October 1989. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

430
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, 24 June 1989. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

 
232

form, composition, and effectiveness of the interviews in an effort to create a standard
methodology for future interviews. Smith’s comments reflected first and foremost his
concern for their use as exhibition material rather than their archival value. In order to
mine recordings for the much-coveted “nuggets,” there had to be certain protocols for the
generation of footage.
431
This requirement appears to have been the underlying reason
for his suggestion that Kuzmack and her staff of volunteers ask fewer questions during
the interview and avoid the use of sympathetic noises or utterances, which muddied the
sound track when they overlapped the voice of a witness. He also wanted interviewers
and camera placed closer to the subject, thus creating a sense of “personal contact,”
despite the approved restraint in broaching questions. Indeed, interviewers’ silence was
preferred to speech: “Quiet empathy yields better results than repeated questioning.”
432

Kuzmack questioned Smith’s insistence that the interview should focus only on
personal experiences and events that a subject witnessed firsthand. Her experience with
interviews had taught her that witnesses would inevitably invoke background that they
had not directly encountered: “You would be surprised how many insist they must put in
the [historical] background or it will have no meaning. They do this no matter what I
say.”
433
Moreover, when she tried to interject a question in order to lead witnesses back

431
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, November 1988.

432
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, 16 October 1989.

433
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Martin Smith, 18 October 1989. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

 
233

to the personal aspects of their stories, they often lost track. Thus Kuzmack urged Smith
to allow witnesses to include historical context in order to better ground their narratives.
Underlying the balance between the personal and the historical currents of
testimony was the larger issue of how to address the entangled nature of deep and
common memory. Smith’s primary concern was mining testimony for the nuggets that
represent the viscerally charged impulse of deep memory—those moments that transcend
chronology and place the witness and by proxy the spectator, back in the emotional
center of the events. Kuzmack and her interviewees, however, often needed
chronological frameworks to ground both their past experiences and contemporary
reflections. In that sense, Smith turned to deep memory as the essence of testimonial
value for the Permanent Exhibition, but failed to appreciate how it emerged in process
and in dialogue with common memory. In the end, Smith’s preferences prevailed over
those of Kuzmack and heavily influenced the shaping of the USHMM oral history policy.
While this dissertation explores the ways in which institutional prescriptions
break down when confronted with the complexities of testimony, I want to first elaborate
on how oral history was envisioned and practiced by the Holocaust Museum. Both in
developing its own program and in attempting to acquire testimonies from and develop
affiliations with other, smaller archives, the USHMM saw the Fortunoff Archive as a
standard in terms of interview methodology, with modifications to accommodate the
museum’s particular exhibition needs. In particular, Smith was critical of the production
value of the Fortunoff recordings: although dense with pathos, they did not meet the

 
234

required “exhibit quality” for the PE.
434
Thus he requested that Kuzmack develop a
model that would train interviewers to conduct the sessions that employed Yale’s
interview methodology, but used a more refined and standardized approach to lighting
and framing witnesses.
The Holocaust Museum also consciously attempted to recreate the affective
community for survivors and witnesses achieved by the Yale project. For a time, the
museum enacted the practice of having a psychologist on hand to attend to witnesses
before or after giving testimony. Like the Fortunoff Archive, it used a limited pre-
interview process in which interviewers engaged witnesses on the broad historical
elements of their experience, assisting their preparation for the interview and making
them more comfortable with the process. In each of the three case studies in my
dissertation, the pre-interview stage, although varied in scope, amounted to a testimonial
rehearsal with implications for how individual witness accounts would be situated. The
museum’s policy, however, was insistent that interviewers not use information gathered
from this pre-interview phase to “control” the testimony. As stated in the initial oral
history guidelines: “Effective interviewing must include a great deal of spontaneity on
the part of both the interviewee and interviewer…the retrieval of ‘unrehearsed’
information best serves the research historian’s needs and works very effectively with

434
Report from Linda Kuzmack to Michael Berenbaum, 14 December 1988. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.
 
235

museum audiences.”
435
So while priming interviewers and interviewees for the testimony
was a crucial element of the process, a more open approach was intended to foster a
dynamic of discovery.
Originally, the length of an interview was to vary according to the witness. By
the time of Kuzmack’s tenure, a rule of thumb—with certain exceptions—had been
instituted: “Generally an interview of less than an hour is superficial, while a session of
more than two hours may become aimless, redundant, and listless.”
436
This rule—which
I will elaborate on later—illustrates a source of friction in the museum’s oral history
collection. Similar to the conflicts over managing the flow of common and deep
memory, planners wanted a process that could rehearse and frame testimony while also
engendering spontaneity. But as I will demonstrate in my analysis of individual
testimonies, a two-hour-long time frame works against an organic flow of memory.
The Holocaust Museum differs from the other two institutions in having a
screening process that determines the selection of interviewees, rather than accepting all
those willing to participate. Using an initial set of phone interviews Kuzmack developed
a set of criteria, which included: the testimony’s importance for the Permanent
Exhibition or historical record; the witness’ ability to present his or her story, e.g., are

435
“Oral History Report: An Overview of the Process and Initial Steps,” 20 September
1988. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History

436
Ibid.

 
236

there lapses in memory or difficulties in articulating the story?; and would the witness’
health and age enable him or her to endure the interview process? This latter criterion
was particularly relevant to the museum’s exhibition-related concerns. Although health
and age might affect witnesses’ capacity to tell their stories, they could also affect
visitors’ ability to relate to them and their accounts.
In this regard, the advancing age of survivors complicated the museum’s mission
of both preserving the legacy of the Holocaust and making that history accessible to a
wide audience. Paradoxically, the planners faced a closing window of opportunity for
documenting the stories of older survivors, yet their exhibition standards sought out only
the most articulate and reliable witnesses. The older the survivor, the more likely he or
she would be to have experienced a wider spectrum of the Holocaust era, particularly
compared to child survivors. Yet Weinberg, Smith, and other planners feared that the
advancing age of witnesses would weaken their grasp on details from the past, thus
diluting their evidentiary value and their potential as personal mediators of the Holocaust.
These concerns emerged during development of the Permanent Exhibition’s
“Voices from Auschwitz” segment, an audio installation of survivor testimonies on the
third floor, adjacent to the display of an original Auschwitz barrack. Linda Kuzmack had
originally urged the designers to use audiovisual accounts from the oral history archive
because visitors would be able to connect better with “living human beings, not with
abstract voices which often produce a feeling of unreality in the hearer.”
437
For

437
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Shaike Weinberg, Michael Berenbaum, Martin
Smith, Re: Videotestimony in the Exhibition, 13 July 1989. USHMM; Institutional
 
237

Kuzmack, then, the more fully embodied audiovisual testimonies produced a more “real”
rather than “theatrical” effect. The resultant interpersonal connection was especially key
to enabling visitors to see survivors’ faces, thereby showing the expressions of human
suffering and fully capturing the immediacy and veracity of their stories.
On this issue, the different approach of the exhibition’s director Martin Smith
prevailed. His vision of the “Voices of Auschwitz” display would draw exclusively from
the audio content of the museum’s audiovisual archives. Reviewing the audiovisual
recordings had reinforced Smith’s belief that the visual markers of survivor aging would
potentially leave visitors “turned off” rather than immersed in the testimonies.
438

Disembodied, oral recordings would allow visitors to imagine survivors on their own
terms, as vital and perhaps young historical agents. In this case, as in others explored in
this chapter, the process of screening survivors’ voices and bodies involved filtering out
elements that complicated the museum’s institutional preferences.
This issue became evident in protocols the museum implemented to evaluate the
integration of preexisting interviews into the other exhibition spaces. As eventually
instituted, Kuzmack, Smith, and other oral history department staff rated testimonies
according to the following grades: “Excellent” interviews are “technically, emotionally,
and historically outstanding;” “Good” ones are “first-rate dramatically, technically, and
historically, but not as stunning as the ‘Excellent’ category”; “Fair” tapes could “be used
to fill in details of life during the Holocaust, but may not provide outstanding drama”;
 
Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-
1997; 1998-011; Box 26; Oral History.

438
Ibid.
 
238

and a “Poor” rating excluded interviews from the Permanent Exhibition.
439
Reviewers
also made comments on what they considered testimonies’ “key segments,” such as:
“Inside a gas chamber when power failed”; “Selection by Mengele”; “Transport to
Auschwitz”; “Buried alive for 16 months in an underground pit”; and “Death march—
eating undigested bits of grain from dried cow manure.”
440
With few exceptions, the
highest ratings went to the most extreme experiences, thus allowing planners to better
pinpoint segments that would provide pathos and dramatic punch to the exhibition
narrative.
The USHMM’s Oral History Interviewee Release forms codified the editorial
control basic to this segmentation of testimony. Specifically, the witness’ signature
granted the USHMM the right to: “Publish, exhibit, display, copyright, transfer, edit the
image, name, voice, or content in whole or in part for any purposes, including
fundraising, education in media both currently in existence or developed in the future.”
441

This language, which is almost identical to releases used by the Fortunoff Archive and
Shoah Foundation, raised concerns about how testimonies might be altered or regulated.

439
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Shaike Weinberg, Michael Berenbaum, Martin
Smith, Ralph Appelbaum, and Cindy Miller, 21 November 1989. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent
Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

440
Summaries of Completed USHMM Oral Histories (undated). USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-
1997; 1988-011; Box 26; Oral History.

441
Oral History Interviewee Release Form. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of
Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-
1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.
 
239

In particular, survivors worried that by signing the release, they might give up
rights to their accounts of their own Holocaust experiences and might therefore be
prevented from passing on interview tapes to their families. In response, Kuzmack
advised Berenbaum that the museum should revise the agreement in consultation with a
group of survivor leaders. The museum’s revised release contained the following
clarification:
Please note that the second provision of the Form only gives the Museum
ownership and copyright of the words and/or photographic images
contained in this one particular interview. In other words, you are not
giving the Museum ownership of this particular recording of your personal
history. Therefore, signing this Form will not in any way limit your
continuing right to tell your personal story in books, articles, or other
interviews in this or other media in the future.
442

The strong involvement of survivors in the Holocaust Museum intensified their
proprietary stake in giving testimony, giving them leverage to strengthen the claims of
individual and familial memory. Museum staff assured prospective interviewees that:
“Each videotape will remain unedited, preserved exactly as told to the interviewer.”
443

Certainly the recorded interviews remained unedited within the archive. They were,
however, edited and reconfigured for installations and educational programs both within
and outside the museum. The evolving language of the agreement speaks to the
question: how can testimony be both sacred and pliable?

442
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Michael Berenbaum, Re: Oral History Project
Plans, 11 November 1988; USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr
Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994;
1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History. Emphasis in original.

443
Letter from Raye Farr to Ari Zev, 21 February 1995. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition;
CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.
 
240

An Interactive Approach to Testimony
Raye Farr replaced Martin Smith as director of the Permanent Exhibition in 1991.
Under her tenure, the PE’s needs continued to drive the collection of oral histories,
although the approaches to that mission radically changed as the museum’s 1993 opening
date neared. For example, the oral history department was tasked with developing a
concluding film segment for the exhibition consisting entirely of its own testimonial
footage. In her new capacity, Farr decided that in order to attain a deeper level of
response by witnesses, interviewers should abandon the earlier “quiet empathy” approach
for a more interactive, question-driven methodology. She hoped that this change would
both fill in needed historical detail and spark an emotional response from witnesses.
444

As discussed earlier, Kuzmack was already a proponent of such an approach. Indeed, she
was aware that Smith’s interview protocols had caused her staff of interviewers to hold
back on following up with witnesses on certain subjects or probing deeper on their
psychological impressions. The resulting digressions and lengthy descriptions made it
difficult to extract the concise, emotion-laded nuggets useful for the exhibition.
Kuzmack expected interviewers to pose questions that would elicit particular
answers regarding personal experiences and impressions, as well as broader cultural and
historical observations. In addition to questions that would clarify facts and chronology
—“what did you do then?” or “what happened when?”—she also pressed for queries

444
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Raye Farr, 2 August 1991. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

 
241

directed at recovering emotions—“what was it like for you when?” or “how did you feel
when?” In this regard, she invoked the Yale method, in particular its use of both “feeling
questions” and “fact questions.”
445
Kuzmack further refined the protocol in terms of how
survivors were to be handled before, during, and after the interview process and
combined it with new sets of prepared questions, which she compiled in “Interviewing
Holocaust Witnesses: Question Guide.”
446
The new guidelines established that before
the interview took place, the oral history department would send the interviewer
historical background and other information as a basis for developing an itinerary of core
questions. Furthermore, practice interviews were conducted by phone one-to-two weeks
before prior to the testimony, enabling interviewer and interviewee to develop a comfort
level with one another and to engage the main elements of the testimony in advance of
the taping.
447

At the testimony itself, the interviewer was encouraged to keep eye contact with
the witness; the camera was placed directly behind the interviewer’s shoulder so that it
would appear that the witness was speaking directly into the camera. The guidelines

445
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Raye Farr Re: Video Interviews, 3 January
1991; p. 2. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the
Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box
13; Oral History.

446
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Raye Farr Re: Question Guide, 14 June 1991.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History.

447
Ibid.

 
242

placed a particular focus on conveying empathy to the witness, thus the interviewer
should nod his or her head or perform other “appropriate body language” such as leaning
forward during certain critical moments, to reinforce a sense of engagement.
448
Through
these guidelines, Kuzmack aimed to achieve “attentive listening,” which would keep the
interviewer engaged but discourage outward signs of empathy. Like Smith’s earlier
guidelines, Kuzmack’s approach was deemed “essential to enabling us (the Department
of Oral History) to edit a tape for public viewing,” since interviewer questions were not
to be included in the content produced from the archive.
449

Although museum interviewers were given the discretion to select certain topics
from a prepared list, a set of required “core questions” addressed the oral history
department’s designated key themes of a survivor’s testimony. These required questions
were broken down into three parts, covering events before, during, and after the war. The
first set posed biographical questions including: “When were you born?”; Where were
you born?”; “Tell us about life with your family”; and “Describe your town before the
war.”
450
These questions would help reconstruct the witness’ family and communal life
before the Holocaust. Similar queries addressed events during the Holocaust, for
example: “Describe a typical day in the ghetto” or “Describe how you were deported to
camps (if that is relevant to the witness’s experience).”
451
Interviewers would also pursue

448
Ibid.

449
Ibid.

450
Ibid.

451
Ibid.
 
243

lines of discussion that could elicit emotive aspects of the Holocaust experience,
including witnesses’ reflections on what kind of legacy they would like to impart.
This attempt by the museum’s oral history department to move from a more
restrained to a more interactive mode of testimonial engagement was circumscribed not
only by the requirement of standardized questions, but also by a two-hour time limit and
a narrative framework divided into the tri-partite sequential division of events, with the
majority of time dedicated to events taking place during the Holocaust era. This schema
made it difficult for survivors to express seemingly digressive yet nonetheless vital paths
of exploration that did not correspond with the itinerary of the oral history department.
While some variations were allowed, the focus on timed segments played an instrumental
role in framing the possibilities of the recorded interview. The frame conditions extended
beyond the vision of the camera and shaped how witnesses were handled before and after
their testimony was recorded. In order to tend to the affective and psychological aspects
of the process, interviewers were given such advice as: “Stay and talk with the
interviewee as long as necessary, so he/she may unwind from the interview. Remember,
the interviewee may literally have relived the horror of the Holocaust, and may need
some time to unwind from the stress.”
452

On one hand, the Department of Oral History recognized that collecting testimony
for the purpose of generating emotionally charged content necessarily involved opening

452
Procedures—United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—Instructions for
Interviewers, 2 March 1992, p. 3. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr
Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994;
1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

 
244

the wounds of traumatic memory. Even while the museum attempted to tap into that well
of pathos, it instituted interview protocols and exhibition guidelines that intended to
regulate the overflow and excesses of testimony. In other words, the Holocaust Museum
oscillated between activating and containing traumatic memory. These institutional
preferences did not determine the meaning generated by testimonies; they did, however,
represent a central source of contention that often emerges in the dialogue between a
witness and the archive.
The Refining of the Holocaust Museum Testimony Methodology
Friction often resulted from the USHMM’s efforts to replicate the testimonies its
planners envisioned as being exemplary of the Fortunoff Archive methodology.
Although the two institutions had failed to reach a new agreement on the sharing of
testimonies, in 1991 the museum, in the hopes of refining its approach to conducting
further testimonies, nonetheless solicited the consultation of Lawrence Langer. He
agreed to survey a collection of the Fortunoff interviews, generating a list of 150 of the
most useful interviews, complete with brief summaries and commentary, highlighting the
“most dramatic and eloquent” testimonies.
453
He also produced a half-hour videotape
comprising selections from those interviews, structured along themes including survival,

453
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research
Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box
20; Lawrence Langer. Emphasis in original.

 
245

liberation, resistance, and rescue, as laid out by Michael Berenbaum.
454
Langer’s
commentary on the interviews reveals the tensions that surfaced when the two archives’
methodological and ethical preferences diverged, underscoring the central role
institutional mandates and cultures play in the formation of archived testimony.
Langer’s report on this project invokes many of the critiques in his previously
mentioned work, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. In that work, Langer
placed a particular emphasis on the recurring manifestation of “humiliated memory”—
those shameful moments that a subject would prefer to forget, and that are incapable of
being redeemed.
455
That line of examination conflicted directly with the museum’s
mandate to Langer and its emphasis on the transformative moral potential of Holocaust
testimonies. In Langer’s view, Holocaust testimony is fundamentally anti-redemptive,
resisting attempts to impose coherent meaning and closure on its events. He thus
considered valuable those moments that reveal the struggles and vicissitudes of memory,
those that speak less to recapturing the past than to documenting the ways in which
witnesses attempt to recapture the past.
These differences were reflected in Langer’s review of the Fortunoff testimony of
Dori K., a Jewish survivor attempting to come to terms with the fate of her father by
replaying in her mind the moment when he was taken away from her. As Langer
commented on this episode:

454
Ibid.

455
See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991), 77; Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive
Testimonies from Lawrence Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991.

 
246

She now can imagine his real fate, and sobbing she repeats, ‘They
put him on a train.’ She doesn’t have to say the rest, we and she
can imagine it, and this truth, instead of liberating her, merely imprisons
her in a vision of his fate that overwhelms her….Holocaust truth thus makes one
vulnerable as well as knowledgeable.
456

In Langer’s view, testimony is not a cathartic act of retrieving memory. Instead, it is an
anguishing moment of temporal and emotional collapse when the present moment of
recollection and the past experiences of pain are interpenetrated. Rather than marking a
compartmentalized and clean extraction of personal or historical knowledge, it makes
vulnerable not only the witness, but also those who bear responsibility for receiving their
story. Langer emphasized that the value of Dori K.’s testimony does not derive from her
proximity to death and destruction during the Holocaust—she was never in a
concentration camp and did not witness the death of her father—but rather from the
anguish with which she responds to questions such as: “What do you think about when
you think of your father’s last moments?”
457
No progressive commemorative narrative
could redeem the pain she experienced through the reenactment of that painful moment
of separation. In Langer’s words: “Its legacy leads not to reconciliation, but the difficult
struggle with memory that we witness here.”
458

In Langer’s interpretation, memory is a labor to be shared by both the witness and
the interviewer. Visual and sense memory allow the witness to be overtaken by a

456
Ibid. (Correspondence). Emphasis in original.

457
Ibid.

458
Ibid.

 
247

traumatic past, to be put in a position to reenact profound moments of psychic fracture.
As I will explore in later sections, this interior labor is screened before the interviewer
and the spectator, as the witness evinces the physical and emotional gestures of
translating interior images, sounds, smells, and textures into words that are translated into
a non-native tongue. When the testimony also requires linguistic translation—converting
memories experienced in Polish, Yiddish, German, or another tongue—an additional
process, labor, and mediation are enacted. There is a dual level of translation in that
sense, whereby witnesses have to rework their memories into verbal expressions and in
turn convert them into a language that is not indigenous to their experiences.
In line with Martin Smith’s conception of oral history, Langer stressed that the
collection of oral history requires not only extracting historical narratives but also
capturing interior personal experience. He pointed out that the process of excavating
deep memory often works in conjunction with a more controlled and linear historical
chronology. In fact, the testimonies he designated as the most dramatically compelling
were usually those that illustrated the fluid interplay between chronological (or common)
memory and associative (or deep memory).
459
In the case of Baruch G., who gave his
testimony to the Fortunoff Archive in 1984, Langer noted that during the first 11 minutes
of the interview, as Baruch discusses his Jewish life and rituals before the war, he
suddenly moves forward to his life after the Holocaust and the loneliness he felt during
holidays and Bar Mitzvahs when he realized that no one from his side of the family

459
Langer uses both sets of terms in his correspondence with Berenbaum.

 
248

remained alive to celebrate those events. In Baruch’s words: “. . . life around you seems
to be normal, but you are abnormal.”
460
That moment illustrated for Langer the hovering
presence of the past over survivors’ lives after the war, and underscored how testimonies
that begin in chronological sequence can suddenly, without warning diverge from that
trajectory. As Langer remarked in the evaluations, survivors: “report a simultaneity but
not a sequence.”
461
He thus advocated for careful listening and viewing of the subject
during taping, not rushing the witness to reach a pre-designated point of interest or to
create a desired effect. This meant granting agency to the witness to face events and their
consequences on his or her own terms.
Langer further advised the museum against adopting a stance of moral judgment
over witnesses given the “choiceless choices” faced by Holocaust survivors.
462
He noted
that interviewers sometimes conclude testimonies by asking witnesses to reflect on the
moral or redemptive lessons of the Holocaust. But in doing so they can uncover a
profound tension between the attempt to impose cathartic closure on the events and the
persistence of trauma that continues to resonate, thus rendering any redemptive resolution
illusory. Even while discouraging such concluding questions, Langer noted that the gaps
between redemption and trauma that ensue from such gambits may be constructive
insofar as they compel the viewer of testimony to process the contradictions, thus
complicating efforts to restore meaning out of meaningless events.

460
Ibid.

461
Ibid. Emphasis in original.

462
Ibid.
 
249

Langer’s report did not prompt the museum to consider the self-consciously
constructed elements of the testimony process, as had motivated the Fortunoff Archive
with its re-interview project. On the contrary, as I have suggested earlier the museum
often attempted to efface the presence of the interviewer as proxy for the institution,
either advocating for silent listening or concealing the interviewer’s identity during the
testimonies and in some transcripts and catalogues. In a number of the testimonies I
analyzed that were conducted during the department’s early years under Linda Kuzmack,
interviewer names were misattributed or missing on databases and transcripts.
Moreover, the museum’s single-shot strategy focused exclusively on witnesses;
interviewers were never in the frame, even at the beginning of testimonies.
The museum’s guidelines were shaped both by curatorial needs and the urgency
of preserving the living memory of survivors before they vanished. As stated in an
internal description of the oral history department from 1990:
The Museum faces a daunting task—to enable visitors to emotionally feel the
terror and reality of the Holocaust, as well as to understand it intellectually….The
Museum’s Oral History Department plays a major role in solving that dilemma.
Every visitor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will ‘meet’ Holocaust
survivors, liberators, and rescuers through video- and audio-taped testimonies ….
Standing ‘face to face’ with Holocaust survivors through the miracle of videotape,
Museum visitors may encounter a woman who walked out of a gas chamber when
the gas failed to release; one of the few survivors of the Treblinka uprising; and a
woman who attached a Nazi guard and was, in turn, shot in the head.
463

463
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” by Michael Berenbaum, undated,
pg. 1. US Holocaust Memorial Museum; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr
Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994;
1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

 
250

The notion of a direct testimonial encounter is thus embedded in the epistemology of the
Museum’s oral history department. Technology—the “miracle of videotape”—is framed
less as an intermediating presence in a larger institutional and interpersonal dialogue than
as a vessel to preserve living memory and transfer it to future generations. The affective
impact of testimony is just as central as its cognitive effects, and it is precisely that
emotional rawness that will be a core asset of the museum’s oral history department. A
museum press release quoted Kuzmack: “No one, after seeing these tapes, can dispute
the uniqueness of the Holocaust with credibility.”
464

This insistence on preserving the unvarnished nature of Holocaust memory helps
explain why the museum keeps the institutional mediations of its testimonies at the
periphery. The question remains, however, whether the museum was really able to hide
its contributions to testimonial authorship. How does the oral history department’s claim
that testimonies are unique, authentic, and direct expressions of individual experience
hold up to an analysis of individual testimonies or the museum’s use of testimonial
footage? How do interview methodologies designed to deemphasize the mediated
aspects of the testimonial encounter affect the resonance of witnesses’ lives throughout
the museum exhibition?
On a fundamental level, the embodied dimensions of testimony depend on how
the camera and microphone record the physical forms, gestures, and voices of witnesses.

464
Press Release, “Videotaped Oral Histories Will Preserve Holocaust Eyewitness
Accounts in United States Holocaust Museum,” by Dana Goldberg, Undated 1989, p. 2.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History.

 
251

This factor in turn has implications for how interviews are later segmented and
repackaged for use outside of their archive. As discussed earlier, Martin Smith’s primary
concern was to secure testimonies for integration into the Permanent Exhibition, in
particular for the film to be shown in the “Testimonial Amphitheater” that was to
conclude the exhibition. The designers had originally anticipated that other repositories,
including the Fortunoff Archive, would provide the footage for this project. While the
film would ultimately be subcontracted out to an independent producer and director,
planners originally conceived it as an in-house project. However, on reviewing available
footage from within the museum’s archive, Smith determined that much of it lacked the
refined and consistent style that was suitable for exhibition use.
465
It was to advance his
search for testimonies with standardized production values and “visually interesting
interviews” that Smith, as described earlier, mandated Kuzmack and her staff to adopt a
uniform approach to lighting and to framing the witnesses.
Smith wanted interviewers to sit directly in front of the subjects, as close to the
camera as possible and out of the frame, so the witness seems to look almost directly into
the camera. The eye-lines of witness, interviewer, and spectator were all to be level. In
Smith’s words, the camera should position the witness so that “we are not looking up to a
giant or down to a child.”
466
Furthermore, all interviews were to be shot against a black

465
Raye Farr Agenda for Oral History Meeting, 31 March 1989. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent
Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

466
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack and Bonnie Durrance Re: Oral
History Interviews, 11 May 1989; USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr
 
252

background with three-point lighting, achieving a “cohesive” and “rigorous” appearance
distinct from other archives. Smith’s most important touch was the exclusive use of
close-up composition to achieve the tightest possible framing, thus emphasizing the face
as the central site for screening the emotional texture of memory.
467
This innovation was
a response to his criticism of Kuzmack’s wide framing of shots as expressed in his
internal memorandum to her: “There was too much shirt/blouse and not enough human
for the impact I would like.”
468
Kuzmack responded that she found such extreme close
ups “too tight and too close to the neck, giving me a bit of a choked feeling.”
469

Smith’s views did not prevail in regard to the framing of interviews—an issue that
reflected the larger question of how to harness the visceral impact of Holocaust testimony
through the representation of the body on screen. His preference for frames that were so
tight that the camera could capture sweat and tears on a witness’ face would have
concealed the wider range of gestured expression. Or consider the tattoos on the left
arms of many survivors who were interned at concentration camps, which are usually
outside the frame of a tight close up. In most cases they are visible to the camera only on
request of an interviewer asking about wartime experiences, or during a concluding
 
Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994;
1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

467
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, 24 July 1989. USHMM;
Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the
Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

468
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, 16 October 1989, p. 2.

469
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Martin Smith, 18 October 1989, p. 1.

 
253

segment of testimony when witnesses are asked to present photographs, documents, and
other artifacts, usually shot on display stands with black backgrounds. In either case, the
camera breaks from its focus on the survivor’s face to move in for a segmenting close up
of the tattoo, which is then—like the artifacts—abstracted from its corporeal context, but
providing authenticating value.
In 1992, after a brief interim period following Kuzmack’s departure from the
museum, Joan Ringelheim became the director of the oral history department. In the
period leading up to the museum’s opening, Ringelheim attempted to restructure the
interview process in order to maintain some semblance of consistency, while also
encouraging more spontaneity and emotional power in USHMM testimonies. She
maintained the screening process for selecting interviewees, but dramatically scaled
down the pre-interview process. As the museum’s primary interviewer, she dropped the
telephone pre-interview and insisted on not speaking to witnesses before the testimony, in
order to develop greater immediacy and a less rehearsed dynamic.
In 1993 Ringelheim also issued new “Oral History Guidelines,” which expanded
the program’s mission and scope to explicitly recognize oral history’s importance in
“add[ing] to our knowledge of all genocides.”
470
These guidelines reflected the
museum’s mandate to expand upon its core dedication to the Holocaust, its victims, and
survivors, by addressing more general issues of tolerance, injustice, and contemporary
atrocities. But perhaps the most important distinction between the museum’s initial

470
Oral History Interview Guidelines, USHMM, Written by Oral History Staff, Revised
2007, pp. ii.

 
254

efforts at oral history under Kuzmack and Ringelheim’s subsequent tenure was the
increased emphasis on attending to the interpersonal, ethical, and visceral dimensions of
the process. In place of the earlier stress on the dramatic highlights of witnesses’ stories,
she brought a new, more self-conscious focus on the challenges of reenacting trauma
through testimony and a recognition that: “To ask survivors of the Holocaust to tell their
stories is to ask them to describe the sights, smells, and sounds of the human destruction
they witnessed…it is one of the most difficult requests that one person can make of
another.”
471
Ringelheim’s guidelines also recognized the implicit ethical contract
between interviewer and interviewee. Rather than focusing exclusively on mining
testimony for its content, she paid increased attention to the process and labor involved in
the exchange. The restructuring of the oral history department would focus on how to
forge rather than to efface a bond between both interviewer and interviewee: “It is within
that bond that questions and answers flow, and that history is revealed.”
472

Despite Ringelheim’s development of guidelines, the museum’s new oral history
protocols eschewed the notion of “one correct interview technique or mode,” so long as
the bond between interviewee and interviewer was upheld.
473
With this in mind, the oral
history department began to focus on creating a stronger ethical bond with witnesses and
cultivating careful listening to draw out more subtle and intricate details of memory.

471
Ibid., p. v.

472
Ibid. p. vi.

473
Ibid.

 
255

Interviewers were taught to guide, not direct testimonies, enabling the witness to drive
the process and allowing for sustained silences, thus revealing the internal dialogue and
labor that is part of the process of recounting trauma.
474
Underlying these lessons was
recognition of the ultimate impenetrability of a witness’ experiences:
As interviewers, we travel with the interviewee. We try to see more
than the mere representation of the interviewee’s experiences. We
attempt to sit within the person’s story as if nothing else exists, and we try
to understand. We try to understand from the inside as if we were there—
much like the musician playing a piece of music. But we are always
outsiders, even while we share an intimacy with the interviewee. It is
important to balance our ability to listen empathetically with our ability to
listen carefully and critically.
475

With these words, the guidelines highlight the tension between the cognitive and
affective demands of giving and receiving testimony.
Despite this emphasis on interpersonal bonds between interviewers and
interviewees (and with the audience), the approaches adopted by the oral history
department often compromised that aim. Unlike the other two archives in my study—the
museum did not accept all who applied to give testimonies. Its criteria depended less on
the historical importance of the interview than on finding witnesses who could relate their
experiences with “clarity of memory.”
476
Yet these criteria confronted the museum with
a paradox: while the aging of witnesses made the need to record their stories more
urgent, the deteriorating condition of many survivors reduced the number who could give

474
Ibid., p. vii.

475
Ibid., pp. viii.

476
Ibid., p. 74.

 
256

reliable and coherent testimonies. Although the frailty of memory and resulting lack of
polish can to an extent bolster the sense of unrehearsed authenticity on the part of a
particular survivor, it complicates the mission of an institution dedicated to upholding the
veracity of Holocaust history. To address this problem, Ringelheim’s guidelines
recommended a series of questions to provide an embedded narrative structure through
which survivors could connect their experiences to an established historical record, while
also allowing room for unique individual expression. In other words, a linear,
chronological framework would compensate for the frailty of individual memory.
In practice, this meant that interviewers were expected to organize their
interviews in three chronological sections: prewar, wartime, and postwar. They would
allow the witness to drive the testimony, but intervene when the witness drifted away
from the chronology. Tangential reflections were permitted, but not to the extent they
undermined the basic structure. Testimonies would begin with a series of establishing or
“first questions” to assist in entering witnesses’ stories into the official record, charting
their essential biographical information so they could be catalogued in the archival
database. These questions ranged from “What was your name at birth?” and “Where
were you born?” to “What are your recollections of your city or town before the war?”
and “What were your family’s political affiliations?” While seemingly rudimentary, the
questions served a number of functions. First, they established the witnesses’ agency,
imprinting their own voices into the record. They also allowed witnesses to attest to
having “been there” and to connect their personal and familial experiences with a larger
social fabric. Of course, a witness’ responses to the initial questions demonstrated his or
 
257

her faculties for performing the labor of testimony. But to balance personal experiences,
some questions connected the witness’ stories with a larger historical narrative, thus
providing authentication through association with paradigmatic or iconographic events of
the Holocaust. For example, questions about Kristallnacht or the Nazi-imposed
requirement that Jews wear a yellow Star of David could be used to locate the witnesses’
stories along the wider historical trajectory. The guidelines recognized that there was no
“typical” Holocaust experience, but nonetheless emphasized that certain events and
categories of experiences had particularly compelling symbolic resonance.
One of the more unique facets of the updated USHMM oral history guidelines—
one that reflected Joan Ringelheim’s academic background in the study of women in the
Holocaust—was the attempt to focus on the role of gender identity and bodily and sexual
experience in witnesses’ Holocaust experiences. Interviewers were encouraged to ask
such questions as: “Were the lives of men and women similar or different?”; “Did you
even notice that you were a man or a woman? In other words, did gender matter to you
and in what ways?” Other questions concerned the female body, especially those related
to sexual violence, menstruation, pregnancy, and abortion.
477
As I will explore later in
greater depth, such inquiries often generated tense exchanges between interviewers and
witnesses. If under Kuzmack, the oral history department had tried to regulate the
overflow of emotions, under Ringelheim the revised practices frequently triggered an
emotional overflow. Examples of such questions included: “Describe any thoughts,
feelings, hopes, fears”; “What did you see, hear, smell?”; “Describe your registration in

477
Ibid., p. 29.

 
258

the camp—Shaving? Showers? Tattoo? Delousing? (Be sure to get the tattoo number or
other identification used in the camp—number and/or letter on uniform, etc.).”
478

Questions also aimed to generate reflections on the continuing impact of
witnesses’ Shoah experiences into the present, including their relationships with family
and friends, as well as their core fears, values, and concerns. Yet it proved difficult to
both keep an interview open-ended “so that the interviewee is actively shaping the course
of the interview rather than responding passively,” and to uphold the institutional
investment in establishing—in chronological order—what witnesses “knew, saw,
thought, dreamed, feared.”
479

Conclusion
The next chapter explores the intersection of oral history development and
production with a larger institutional epistemology that shapes the transmission of
testimonies within, outside, and in some cases, on the walls of the Holocaust Museum.
Specifically, it will examine the museum’s use of the products of testimonial labor across
their archive, exhibition, and pedagogical contexts. It will assess not only how the
museum recorded and excerpted its testimonies, but also their entanglement in a larger
institutional effort to accommodate both the cognitive and visceral demands of Holocaust
representation. Rather than to chronicle the extensive history and design of the USHMM
and its various exhibition and public programs—a subject that, as I earlier noted, has
already been extensively investigated by Edward Linenthal—I want to focus my attention

478
Ibid., p. 30.

479
Ibid., p. 39.

 
259

on the museum’s visual pedagogy and its relationship to the circulation of archived
testimony.
 
260

Chapter 3
The Production and Circulation of Testimony by the Holocaust Museum
Witnessing the Act of Witnessing
This opening section, and the chapter as a whole, will shed light on how the
individual textures of survivor memory are placed into conversation with the institutional
mandates and practices analyzed in the previous chapter. As a research fellow at the
Holocaust Museum, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to see this methodology put
into practice when, on February 20, 2007, I accompanied Joan Ringelheim, then the
director of the museum’s oral history department, on an interview with Sarah Z., a Polish
Jewish survivor. My account of this experience is intended to speak in more intimate
terms to how the labor of testimony at the Holocaust Museum is put into practice outside
of development meetings and internal memoranda and, in turn, to reflect on how
testimony is never simply a matter of what is captured on camera, but also includes
moments that never make it to the screen.
Sarah Z.’s testimony, like most of those conducted under Ringelheim’s
directorship, was not conducted in a professional studio.
480
Rather, it took place in a
quiet residential neighborhood in Virginia, in the home of a cameraman who had shot
many prior interviews with Ringelheim. The comfortable domestic space appeared to put
Sarah at ease with Ringelheim, as well as with the cameraman and sound technician. The

480
The following account and transcriptions of the interview with Sarah Z. stem from my
presence at the home studio in which the recording was conducted—access that was
generously facilitated by the museum’s oral history director Joan Ringelheim. The quotes
derive from my notes during the live interview and not from the taped version.

 
261

living room had been set up as a recording studio, complete with sound padding and a
black backdrop. The basement den housed a monitor for Ringelheim’s assistant,
Elizabeth Hedlund, who took notes that would later be used for cataloguing the
testimony. I set the scene here in order to underscore the extent to which the interview
extended beyond what was captured on camera; it was conducted across a fluid
continuum where the interview flowed into the preparation and downtime that marked the
recording process.
The moments preceding the interview were as revealing as those caught on video.
Over coffee and pastries, Sarah openly spoke about her experiences with Joan, me, and
the crew members, remarking that her memories “stay with you all the time.” Her
recollections of the Holocaust were not compartmentalized, only to be revealed at the
start of the recorded testimony, but were rather more fluid elements of her life. She
appeared to feel welcomed and supported, and that sense of comfort and intimacy seemed
to carry over into the taped portions of the interview I viewed from the monitor. Sarah
began the official testimony by saying: “I’m really happy to be able to tell my
story…You’ve made me feel comfortable…I feel like you’re my family.” She noted that
while this was the first time that she had officially recorded her testimony for an archive,
she had told her story many times before, in fact once had recorded herself telling
portions of her story on videotape: “It [her story] was never filmed [by someone else],
but it’s interesting. I have made many memories myself—self-portraits.” Throughout
the interview, Ringelheim kept the testimony moving forward in sequence, giving Sarah
space to move off track, but then bringing her back to the narrative’s chronology. In
 
262

contrast to the more removed, silent interview method used during Kuzmack’s tenure,
Ringelheim introduced a much more probing and interjectory set of questions. At one
point, she asked Sarah: “You said that your mother had a warm heart. What did you
mean by that?” This prompted Sarah to talk lovingly about her close relationship with
her mother, allowing her to reconstruct traces of her family life that would have gone
unexpressed in the absence of attentive listening. And when Sarah recalled having
overheard her parents discussing their plans to leave Poland during the war, Ringelheim
asked for clarification, knowing that the witness had been a young child at the time and
thus wanting to distinguish between what she remembered directly and what she recalled
second-hand.
Ringelheim’s approach to this testimony reveals her investment both in mining
the emotional texture of the interview and attending to the meta-questions of memory—
the “how” and “why” of Sarah’s memory. At one point, Sarah recalled how during her
family’s departure from their Polish hometown, the non-Jewish community, which she
refers to as “Polaks,” apparently performed the throat-cutting gesture famously
referenced in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s
List (1993). Indeed, Sarah herself reenacted the gesture, passing her finger across her
own throat. Noticeably a bit skeptical, Ringelheim interjected, “Did you see it?” to
which Sarah replied: “Yes…psychologically, I will always remember this because it
happened when I was a child.” In this moment, both Ringelheim’s skepticism and
Sarah’s certainty seem justified. Ringelheim knew all too well how witnesses are capable
of subconsciously incorporating elements of collective memory into their personal
 
263

recollections; however, Sarah’s use of the term “psychologically” seemed to make her
claim appear to be structurally true in terms of how she processed the events. This
recollection, while questionable in terms of its historical veracity, was nonetheless a
powerful expression of the witness’ perceptions of her experiences.
Sarah herself appeared to recognize that those viscerally charged accounts were
equally if not more central to her testimony than the historical details. At one point, she
recalled with intense emotion how a Polish Catholic family gave them shelter for a short
while. With clutched chest and hushed voice, she said: “I feel chills when I tell that
story.” But her story was interrupted by a tape change. During the extended
intermission, Sarah spoke easily with Ringelheim while Hedlund confirmed the spelling
of various names and places. When the second tape started, Sarah effortlessly returned to
the same gesture of clutching her chest and repeated her comment about feeling chills as
she picked up the threads of her story. As recorded, the testimony about the altruistic
Polish family is fairly seamless, with little trace of the off-camera banter. I raise this
point not to suggest that Sarah had over-rehearsed the narrative, but rather to underscore
the fact that once the camera starts rolling, it demands that the witness reenter the
testimonial discourse, resuming her disposition as a more formal witness. Just as I have
argued that the Holocaust Museum calibrates the cognitive and visceral strains of
traumatic memory to transmit a particular message, so too, Holocaust witnesses carefully
regulate the boundaries of their own recollections.
The camera’s presence also revealed how Sarah perceived herself as a performer
of her memories. At one point when the camera is not running, she admits to being a
 
264

vain person who aspires to perform well for the camera. During the breaks, she carefully
examined her appearance, and she was eager to see how she appeared on the playback
monitor. This concern was evident in the fact that she had clearly taken care of herself,
as by the elegant dress she wore, complimented by her refined application of makeup. At
one point in the testimony, she commented, “I love to pose to this day.” Rarely captured
on camera, yet evident in the downtimes of the recording session, were the moments of
trauma and rupture. At one point, as Sarah joined Ringelheim and the crew for a lunch
break, she revealed things that remained absent from the videotaped interview. For
example, she reflected on how her son had wanted to hear her story, but that her
daughter-in-law was resistant to hearing that history. Now, she remarked, the videotape
of her testimony would enable her family to more easily learn about her past.
Perhaps more important, the moments between tape changes uncovered what
appeared to be a fundamental trauma of her life—the loss of one of her sons. It was only
during lunch that she discussed in detail his paralysis and eventual death, and the
unbearable pain of burying your own child. Her fluent on-camera performance of the
relatively insulated experiences of her wartime childhood is coupled with the more
destabilized grief that marked her experiences after the Holocaust. This reinforces the
sense that, contrary to the framework of interview protocols, the Holocaust era is not
always the defining trauma of a witness’ life. In the case of Sarah, I would argue that her
testimony serves less as a means of coming to terms with her life during the Holocaust
than it does with engaging events during its aftermath. Whereas she is carefully
composed and confident on camera when asked to recall events from a distant past, she is
 
265

less firmly grounded when dealing off-camera with the challenges she faces within her
own family. In that sense, her testimony creates a space where she can perform with
competence and comfort, in contrast to the struggles of her everyday life.
Overlapping Testimonies
I now want to shift my attention to my sampling of overlapping testimonies in order
to capture an even more systematic analysis of the interrelationship between the
parameters of the museum’s oral history department and the individual expressions of
memory articulated by witnesses. Thus far, the majority of my analysis concerning the
case study of the Holocaust Museum has teased out the distinct preferences of a federally
mandated institution facing the challenge of Americanizing the Holocaust. I will now
turn my attention to the personal textures of Holocaust experience that often support but
also challenge that very endeavor.
The Labor of Testimony
During my research fellowship at the Holocaust Museum, I would often talk with
colleagues from the field of history about the challenges and possibilities of using video
testimonies as sources for their research. Historians working with the oral history
collections would typically rely exclusively on typed transcripts of interviews rather than
viewing testimonies in their full, videotaped format. I would often point out the levels of
performed memory that are lost in reviewing only the written documentation of an
interview. Much of the historical content of a testimony, I argued, was to be found in the
inseparable interrelationship between the form and content of a testimony and in the
silences and gestures that marked its performance.
 
266

Take the case of Norman S., a Polish Jewish survivor, born in 1920, whose
testimony was recorded on May 15, 1990, in the second of his three different testimonies
for my case studies. Many of the most revealing moments in his testimony never made
their way into the transcript. At one point, for example, Norman recalls his life in the
ghetto and in hiding, as well as the experience of having his father taken away and shot to
death. Norman could hear the shots as he hid in a nearby forest, and his memory of those
shots stall the otherwise clipped pace of his interview to that point. His voice becomes
more hushed as his head drops towards his lap. He slowly gestures outward as he speaks:
Now those shots were the loudest shots I ever heard in my life. They were
something that [was] so loud that till today, I hear them. Till today when I wake
up at night, I could hear those two shots.
481

Soon after making these remarks, Norman fixates on the memory, attempting to
reconstruct the appearance of one of the Gestapo officers who shot his father: “I am
trying to get now his picture.”
482
While the transcript would reveal all the words, they
would fail to capture their rupturing quality. This moment, aside from lending pathos to
his story, marks a break in chronology—an emergence of deep memory marking the
interpenetration of past and present. It also lays bare the multi-sensory dimensions of
Norman’s memory—the interplay between the piercing aural resonance of those shots,
the challenges of conjuring up an image of the perpetrator, and the labor of translating
and gesturing that interior act of reconstruction into a comprehensible, externalized
expression.

481
Testimony of Norman S. 15 May 1990. Videotape 50.030*0199, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

482
Ibid.
 
267

Later in his testimony, Norman will encapsulate the challenges of this process in
recalling the moment he was interned in a labor camp and guards forced him to dig his
own grave, shot him, and left him for dead:
Now what went through my mind? My whole life from the first minute
I remember to the family this and then went through. People ask, “What is
the taste of death?” Does somebody know the taste of death? Nobody
knows the taste, because if somebody is dead he cannot tell you the story
the taste of death. But I know the taste of death.
483

Having been left for dead, he inhabited a liminal state between an executed victim and a
living witness, able to recollect the process leading up to the moment of death, but spared
its ultimate outcome. But soon after recalling this incident, he comments that, “every
time I tell this story, I break down….”
484
Yet his testimony shows no sign of such a
breakdown at this moment. While that kind of rupture is evident in his memory of the
shots, it is absent in his telling of his own (near) execution.
Rather than suggesting that this lack of apparent emotion undermines the
reliability of his story, it affirms that Norman has previously reenacted these memories
several times, to the point where he has seemingly internalized his emotional responses.
This does not mean that his memory exists strictly in the form of common memory. As
his recollection of his father shows, he is capable of being immersed in that past. As the
testimony officially closes while the camera is left running, we see Norman immediately
get up from his seat and exit the frame, clearly exhausted from the four-hour testimony.
It is at that moment, after sitting with the testimony for so long, that the viewer gets a

483
Ibid.

484
Ibid.
 
268

shared sense of the exhaustion and the labor that goes not only into the giving but also
into the receiving of that testimony.
The physical intensity of exchanging testimony is a recurring element in most of
the recordings examined in my sample of overlapping archive interviews. Another
example is the testimony of Erwin B., a Polish Jewish survivor, born in 1926, for whom
the emotional challenges of presenting his story on camera are as crucial as the historical
information he transmits. Erwin recorded his testimony for the Holocaust Museum on
July 6, 1994, in his second testimony of my sampling. Towards the end of his interview,
after almost three hours of conversation, Erwin can barely speak. He wipes his brow,
gathers strength, but continues to choke up as he recalls an image that continues to
burden him: a memory of a screaming woman who is shot in the mouth as her child is
taken from her arms. He remarks: “You know, seeing all these sceneries just come back,
come back to me, haunting me.”
485

Just as Norman is consumed by the sound of the shots and the elusive image of
the soldier who killed his father, Erwin is struck by the multi-sensory nature of this
traumatic memory. We see him moving his eyes from side to side as he appears to
inhabit the images and sounds that mark the traumatic event. As his testimony comes to
a close, he poignantly recalls his experience of liberation by the Allies:
They came and they were there; the Territory was occupied and we
were there. But there was no provision for us, you know, like I

485
Testimony of Erwin B. 6 July 1994. Videotape 50.030*0016, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

 
269

would understand they came in with doctors or Red Cross, you know, medication
or some food, nothing. Pictures.
486

Without having viewed this testimony, his placement of the word “pictures” seems out of
place. But Erwin utters that statement after taking a prolonged pause, appearing to reflect
on what had been screened by his mind’s eye. To further emphasize this point, he places
his hands together to form a rectangular frame and uses one of his fingers to mimic the
movement of snapping a photograph. In an instant, he separates his hands, capturing the
ephemeral nature of the image he has just conjured. It is an intensely powerful moment,
one in which the witness offers us a window into his process of mediating memory, not
only in conversation with the museum and its archive protocols, but through the lens of
his own imagination. It is a moment that reminds us that regardless of our attempts to
formulate more direct, penetrating interactions with survivors and other witnesses, their
stories are necessarily filtered through difficult processes of recollection and reenactment.
Those processes, rather than emerging on the surface of the transcribed page, manifest
themselves in gestural and vocal traces captured, however elusively, within the camera’s
frame.
In the case of witnesses who survived the war as children, how they perform their
memories of events is often more crucial than the sparse details they are able to
reconstruct. Sheer performativity dominates the testimony of Frima L., the Ukrainian
Jewish women, born in 1936, who gave her testimony for the museum on April 30, 1990,
in her first in the three series of interviews. Her youthful appearance is central to her
narration of her harrowing wartime journey. She clearly takes pride in her looks and

486
Ibid.
 
270

dresses for the occasion in a white blouse and pearl earrings that accentuates her bright
red hair and her coy smile. At one point, just before the official portion of the interview
begins, we can hear the interviewer telling her from behind the camera, “You look very
nice,” to which Frima responds with an appreciative “thank you,” as she readies her
appearance before the testimony.
487
There is a sense of her preparation here—the care
with which she has put herself together and her investment in coming across as a
dramatically and aesthetically compelling witness.
Rather than undermining the reliability of her testimony, Frima’s emphasis on
performance compensates for what might potentially appear to be the overly vivid
remembrances of a young girl. She recalls in great detail her experiences at the age of
five-and-a-half years, undergoing deportation and managing to trick a Gestapo officer
into momentarily believing her to be a non-Jew. She recalls watching her mother being
beaten as she was forced to strip away her clothing and hand over her possessions: “It
was a cloudy day, very cloudy, and a very fine drizzle was going down. And all the
women were so embarrassed that they were without anything on top that they covered
their breasts with their hands.”
488

The pain and humiliation of this experience is inescapable, but her precise
description of the scene is remarkably detailed for someone who experienced it at such a
young age. Nonetheless, her telling conveys a powerful resonance of authenticity, which
resides in the intense physical and emotional manner in which she expresses her

487
Testimony of Frima. 30 April 1990. Videotape 50.030*0123, Collections Department,
USHMM, Washington, DC.

488
Ibid.
 
271

memories. She speaks with heavy breaths and sighs, accompanied by pursed lips, a
constantly moving head, and broad gestures in which her arms mimic the motion of the
women covering their breasts. While Frima presents herself as someone who is invested
in how she tells her story, as well as in the precise details of what she remembers, this
moment in the testimony appears both to showcase and yet rupture her performance of
memory. The vividness of her recollection strains its believability, yet the heavy
breathing, the pursed lips, the destabilized head, and the imitative gestures, reveal just
how deeply embedded these memories have become. While the exact details of her story
might perhaps be too refined, her physical presence seems to reveal someone who is
marked by the traumas she witnessed. Rather than serving as a source for historical
information, her testimony provides Frima with a venue and an audience for reenacting
her experiences in ways that indicate a capacity for remembering certain details from her
earliest years.
The testimony of Lily M. on October 16, 1990—the first of three interviews for
my study—further underscores the value of the performative aspects of testimony. Lily,
a Lithuanian Jew, was born in 1924 and thus survived the war as a young adult. She
delivers her testimony with dramatic urgency, as if recognizing that her time before the
camera is limited and there is much that she needs to tell. She also speaks in a collective
voice that represents those who are not present to deliver their own testimony. This voice
comes to the surface on two primary occasions. The first occurs when Lily discusses her
life in the Vilno ghetto alongside other young women consigned to do labor. She speaks
in a hushed, almost sentimental tone, acknowledging that while life in the ghetto was
 
272

incredibly trying, some vestiges of humanity were preserved: “There were theaters, and
people really were trying to survive.”
489
At this juncture, she returns to a very specific
memory of “a poem that was written by one of the girls that used to walk everyday with
me to the Polo barrack, and if you wanted I can read it for you.”
490
She proceeds to bring
out a piece of paper and read the poem in its original Yiddish, stopping to translate it for
the interviewer: “It is enough. It is enough. We have no strength to walk in our shoes on
those hard cobblestones.”
491
Lily has clearly prepared for this moment, having written
out this brief poem in anticipation of delivering the lines on camera. And yet while the
reading was prepared, its utterance triggers something seemingly more spontaneous. As
she reads the lines, her voice rises with excitement as she grows more animated. We
learn of the affection that she had for the friend and how, for her and her other
companions, reading the poem was one of their few sources of comfort during their hard
labor. At one point, a German guard discovers them reciting the lines:
So right away we took this piece of paper and we put it inside you know
(clutching her breast), and we were afraid because they were…they were
just beating us up for no reason. But somehow girls made copies of this
poem and many times we used to walk, you know, to work a bit and we
used to recite it. And so in 1948, when I had a little…I came a little bit to
myself, the first thing what I did I remembered the story…it was like
written down in my heart. I wrote it down and I said, “Let me remember
this.
492

489
Testimony of Lily M. 16 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0150, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

490
Ibid.

491
Ibid.

492
Ibid.
 
273

Lily’s reading of the poem on camera thus serves multiple forms of reenactment
—recapturing not only the poem from its wartime context but also from its salvaged
form, reconstructed three years after the war. She had committed the poem to her heart
and memory, but she chose to write it out to fulfill her obligation to remember and give
voice to the words and experiences of her companions. What had earlier been something
to share only with her friends for fear of being discovered by the Germans, is in Lily’s
testimony brought to light and entered into the testimonial record. In performing the
lines, she not only gives voice to those who are absent, but also sheds light on the process
that brings that voice to the surface. Lily’s recollection is not a matter of preserving a
discrete, perfect unit of memory—not that there is such a thing. Rather, it triggers an act
of remembrance that is at once spontaneous and rehearsed, singular and yet collective. It
is a laborious process that exhausts her physically and emotionally, and in the process
proves to be disorienting. The first interview tape ends as Lily finishes reading the poem,
and we can see her exhaustion as she becomes conscious of the studio around her after
having been consumed by the past: “I jump from place to place” she remarks, and the
camera fades to black.
493

At another point, Lily tells of her deportation from the ghetto to a concentration
camp. She recalls passing through the gates of the ghetto, catching one last glimpse of
her family home and of her childhood innocence. Then suddenly, she hears the voice of
her aunt singing a beautiful lullaby-like song. Lily then proceeds to sing the song in her
own melodious voice, translating the words afterwards:

493
Ibid.

 
274

Dear Vilno. Our town that we are born. Our dreams and our desires all
went…only have and say your names. When they only have your name on
our lips, we have to cry…We are dreaming about you and we are thinking
about you and we cannot forget old times.
494

Just as the recitation of the poem enabled Lily to fulfill her obligation to remember and
give voice to her companions, so her singing of her aunt’s song takes her back to that
moment of leaving the ghetto and in the process restores some semblance of her human
dignity.
The return to deep memory also helps move the narrative of her story forward, as
she makes the transition from the song to her experiences of being herded into a boxcar
and sent to the camp. During this moment in her testimony she uses her arms to convey
the confined space of the boxcar, placing both arms to her sides to convey enclosure.
“We couldn’t even squat,” she remarks as she hunches down in her chair. Upon her
arrival, she recalls a smell: “And I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I smelled
something burning (and at this moment, she rubs her left hand on her nose, closes her
eyes, and sniffs the air). And in my imagination we were—I mean not my imagination—
my mind, I felt that we are taking to the crematoria.”
495
Lily seems to be fully immersed
in the moment, revisiting not only the vision but also the feeling and smell of the events.
There is slippage in her words between what she now imagines and what she thought at
the time, though she is quick to correct her words, apparently in order to avoid
undermining the intensity of her experience. Her memory is embedded in the senses,
conveying how what she “felt” at the time overlapped with what she later in life thought

494
Ibid.

495
Ibid.
 
275

and imagined. The entanglement of her visceral and cognitive response to events is
ultimately enacted before the camera during her archived testimony.
Given the museum’s preference for witnesses whose testimonies would provide
effective nuggets for exhibition purposes, it is useful to look at witnesses who were either
reticent or otherwise less adept at enacting their memories before the camera. Rochelle
S., a Lithuanian Jew born in 1922, gave her second of three interviews to the Holocaust
Museum on June 15, 1990. In the recording, she speaks in a deep, halting, and flat voice,
recounting in an uninflected and matter-of-fact tone both mundane and extreme
experiences, so that the viewer must listen carefully in order to detect small tonal shifts
and dramatic transitions. In describing her arrival at the labor camp Stutthof, she
recounts her memories as if reading off a list of items:
When we came there they took away everything what we had again and
they shaved our heads again. They gave us different numbers, but it was
much worse in this concentration camp. It was much bigger and we
weren’t allowed to go out from the camp. We had to stay in the camp all
the time. We weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom by ourselves. We
had to have permission. If our kapo felt like taking us, it was alright. If
not, it’s too bad. We couldn’t wash ourselves. We couldn’t go to clean
up, to wash our hands or faces. We were filthy there. We were hungry.
We looked skeletons all the time.”
496

Although Rochelle delivers this account in a monotone, the unadorned and spare quality
of her remarks lends a direct and urgent quality to her testimony. That dimension is
underscored by the blankness of her physical expression—the numbed yet piercing eyes
that occasionally stare directly at the interviewer. This lack of expression conveys a

496
Testimony of Rochelle S. 15 June 1990. Videotape 50.030*0216, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

 
276

sense of how accustomed she became to the dehumanization of the camp, as does her
comment: “We lived in fear and every day was about the same thing as the previous
day.”
497
Rochelle’s testimony is relatively short—barely over an hour in length—yet her
performance challenges the viewer to remain engaged since there are few of the cues that
signal the modulation of intensity or the emergence of narrative transitions.
On March 1, 1990, the USHMM interviewed Benjamin M. (previously identified
as Benjamin Meed), born in 1922, a Polish Jewish survivor and the founder of the
National Registry of Holocaust Survivors, as well as the former chairman of the
museum’s Content Committee. This was his second in the series of my sampling. The
rote quality to this interview seems partly attributable to the many occasions on which
Meed had already delivered his story in public settings and archival testimony. It is clear
that he knows his story well, and he speaks with little hesitation and minimal probing
beneath the surface. Whereas most of the museum’s testimonies were recorded by oral
history staff, Michael Berenbaum, then the museum’s project director, conducted this
one, underscoring Ben’s privileged position. Nonetheless, at critical moments the
narrative breaks down, and Ben can be seen grappling with the challenges of memory.
At one point, Berenbaum intervenes in a manner unusual during Linda Kuzmack’s
directorship of the oral history department: “Let’s go back a little bit and touch on a

497
Ibid.

 
277

couple of things. Ben, the one thing you didn’t give us at all is what life was like in the
ghetto when you were in the ghetto way back when.”
498
Ben responds:
It’s impossible to speak about everything and much more difficult is to
describe everything. There are scenes which are in my mind which I am
not able to describe. I am too poor with my language to be able to do it,
but I was trying.”
499

Ben struggles here not only with the act of telling his story but also with the translation of
interior memories into externally describable events. During most of his interview, he
seems to be telling his story in terms that could be charted along a familiar course—
which is why it is less compelling. But something different emerges when the
interviewer’s interjection impels Ben to comment on the fragile and impossible nature of
the task at hand. Berenbaum’s line of questioning, which is geared towards having Ben
recreate a sense of space, compels the witness to instead reflect on the difficult workings
of testimony and the impossibility of making his recollections fully known.
The question remains, however, how the museum’s archive nurtures and receives
that labor. The fact that Ben’s reflections on the struggles of memory emerge only after
he is prodded to describe his life in the ghetto makes this an aberrational moment among
the museum’s earlier recorded testimonies, which were guided by a preference for silent
interviewers. Another testimony from my sample underscores the importance of this
factor. The interview with Liane R.L., an Austrian Jew born in 1934 and recorded on
October 24, 1989, in her second interview for my sample, is notable for the tensions

498
Testimony of Benjamin M. 1 March 1990. Videotape 50.030*0152, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

499
Ibid.
 
278

between the witness’ eager and textured self-reflection and the interviewer’s agenda. The
museum designated Liane’s story as historically valuable on account of her experiences
on board the infamous St. Louis, which attempted to carry European Jews to safety in the
United States. The interview centers primarily on that experience, but Liane, because of
her young age at the time of the events in question, has only a limited memory of life on
the boat. Instead she focuses on the after-effects rather than on historical details of her
wartime experiences. At one point the interviewer asks a question about her mother, who
cared for Liane and her brother on her own after her husband committed suicide as the
Nazis entered Austria:
Interviewer: What is your perception of your mother during that period?

Liane: I think…I think in retrospect—and I wish I had realized
this more when she was still around—my mother must have really,
basically, been an incredibly strong person to have gone through
that. Because when I try to think back on it, I often think I…you
know, I don’t think I could have done the things that she did.

Interviewer: That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking what your memory
of her…

Liane: I…I know what you’re asking, and I…I really had to give a
preamble; because my…my sense of my mother during those years
and…and many years later, is that she somehow never got it all
together except for the practical things.
500

Throughout her account, Liane looks from side to side, shaking her head, and pursing her
lips, struggling to reconstruct a sense of her mother.

500
Testimony of Liane R.L. 24 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0186, Collections
Department, USHMM , Washington, DC.
 
279

For the interviewer, however, this current work is not nearly as important as
details from the past. When the interviewer intervenes in an attempt to cull some
unvarnished perception from her telling, Liane understands her intent but is compelled to
acknowledge that her vision of her mother in the past is inseparable from her reflections
in the present. The testimony is not simply a means to transmit information, but rather a
process of excavation and coming to terms with the impenetrability of the past. Liane
cannot attempt to divulge details without first working through the fragments on her own
terms. Liane’s revealing statement that, “… I feel as though there’s a kind of black box
there that I’m maybe constantly trying to pry open but can’t get it open,” surfaces at a
moment of contention between interviewer and interviewee, as the former presses for a
more compartmentalized account of events than Liane can possibly deliver.
501

The Interplay of Common and Deep Memory
The intertwining of common memory and deep memory during the interview
process explains why many survivors in my sample from the Holocaust Museum find
themselves at a loss when asked to provide information that either advances an
interview’s narrative trajectory or aids in the collection of traditional historical
knowledge. However, the manner in which those two streams of memory are channeled,
and in some cases suppressed, does not depend on the individual agency of the subject
alone—for example, whether polished or halting—but on the dynamic between witness
and interviewer, as well as the archive more generally.

501
Ibid.
 
280

To illustrate this dynamic, I want to return to the testimony of Lily M., the Polish
Jewish woman who so powerfully performed the songs and poems of her wartime
experiences. Toward the conclusion of her testimony, she recounts the horrific details of
a death march:
Many times in the night when I…I get up…I get up…I wake myself up
screaming and I see those young girls, frozen, falling on the snow. This is
something undescribable. The…here on the cheeks, they were red, and
they were just sticks. This is something that whoever wasn’t there cannot
believe it. And when I talk to you I think I’m telling you something that
happened to somebody else because I cannot believe that I went through it
and lived to tell. It was March 11, 1945. We came to a place called
Kruma.
502

Starkly apparent in viewing this segment of her testimony is the lived nature of her
memory—the way the past penetrates her everyday life, surfacing at unanticipated
moments. Lily’s return to the experiences of the march is deeply rooted in her psyche
and impossible to translate into external, knowable information. She herself cannot fully
grasp the images or the fact that she was subjected to such horrors. But it seems clear
that while she cannot fully transmit the details of her memory, she conjures the
experience of attempting to reconstruct the traces. As she describes the march, her eyes
open widely and she places her hands on her face to emphasize the redness of the other
women’s cheeks, trying to capture some element of the experience in her words and
gestures. As she remarks, “ I cannot believe that I lived through it and am alive to tell,”
she leans forward in her chair, clutching her chest, urging both the interviewer and the

502
Testimony of Lily M. (16 October 1990); Videotape 50.030*0150.

 
281

audience to absorb what she is expressing.
503
This provides a moment that is both of and
about the emergence of deep memory. It demonstrates not only how memory returns in
ways that are often resistant to narrative framing, but also how it can place the testimonial
subject in an intermediary position between past and present.
That emergence of deep memory can also spark remembrance of the sequence and
location of experiences, enabling the transmission of common memory. Lily concludes
her remarks on the shooting: “It was March 11, 1945. We came to a place called
Kruma.”
504
The transition between these two modes of delivering her testimony—
between sharing the rupturing burden of her trauma and recollecting the precise date and
location of stops along the death march—is fluid and conveyed without hesitation. The
two impulses of memory in this segment, rather than appearing as discreet, are entangled
as Lily recalls and reenacts her past. However, the museum’s library database catalogues
its testimonies primarily according to historical experiences, rather than considering the
larger context of how that moment is recaptured in the present. The traces of deep
memory are often effaced as priority is given to the more readily indexed aspects of
common memory.
As Lily’s account moves forward to her recollection of liberation, the interviewer
interjects: “We have one minute. Can you tell us just very briefly where you were
taken?”
505
With that, Lily must hurriedly wrap up her story, unable to discuss her

503
Ibid.

504
Ibid.

505
Ibid.
 
282

postwar experiences since a third tape was not issued for her interview. The central
experiences of Lily’s testimony, as far as the interviewer was concerned, had been
recorded, and those events that continued to resonate in the present are largely left
unexplored.
A similar approach is evident in the previously cited example of Liane R.L.,
whose interest to the museum was her passage on board the St. Louis, not the
repercussions of the painful dissolution of her family. For Liane, the remembrances of
her father and his suicide appear to be the endpoint of her testimony, whereas for the
interviewer, they serve more as a point of departure, an incident for launching into the
story of life on board the St. Louis. Early on in the interview, Liane struggles to retrieve
a memory of her father. Her speech slows, her eyes turn from side to side seemingly
trying to capture his image: “And I sort of would like to try and go back and remember
what that relationship might have been like, but I can’t. I can’t bring it back.”
506
The
interviewer here is intent on moving the story forward rather than exploring deep
memory, and interjects before Liane has the chance to complete this particular
recollection:
Alright. You’ve moved to your father. And let’s talk about what
happened, as it were, on either side of Kristallnacht. What happened?
507

As with the testimony of Lilly M., events, rather than how experiences are reconstructed
in fragments, drives the interviewer’s approach to the testimony with Liane. Deep

506
Testimony of Liane R.L. (24 October 1990); Videotape 50.030*0186.

507
Ibid.

 
283

memory, rather than triggering further discussion of the process of remembrance,
becomes a framing device for plotting a historical narrative.
The same tendency is evident in the interview of Max “Amichai” H., the Dutch
Jewish child survivor, born in 1933, who was forced to flee with his family from
Amsterdam shortly into the war. Like Liane, he was a child during most of the war, and
his memories of the events, while vivid in certain respects, are nonetheless inseparable
from their after-effects. At one point in the interview (recorded on February 1, 1990 in
his second interview for my case studies), Amichai recalls the deportations, but finds
himself reflecting on his return to the Netherlands over forty years after the war:
I mean the Jews were deported and gassed, but the rest of the people had a very
hard time as well. And after the war, you know, I…I…went back to the
Netherlands for about a half a year, and one of the interesting, for me, things that I
did was I joined a therapy group because I’m having a hard time living all this
stuff down. And I figured, in Dutch, on the scene that might help me quite a bit.
And there was some people in there my age and when I raised that this was an
issue for me, the subject completely switched from all the troubles they had at
home and the troubles that they had at work, and they were completely there with
me, talking about the experiences in the Netherlands, because no one came off
free from it. But you know the early experiences that I had for example is that the
Nazis, the Germans, hard to distinguish as I say, built a wall down the center of
my school. One side for the Jewish kids, one side for the non-Jewish kids…
508

As in the case of Liane, Amichai is only able to express his remembrances of the
past by interweaving them with commentary on their challenging legacy. The difficulty
of coming to terms with his past is triggered by his return to the physical site of trauma in
Holland and then engaged through his entrance into therapy. The flow of his trauma is

508
Testimony of Max “Amichai” H. 1 February 1990. Videotape 50.030*0094,
Collections Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

 
284

not discrete from his everyday life—as he says, he cannot “live all this stuff down.”
509

His discussion moves fluidly from the deportations, to his return to Amsterdam, and back
again to the Holocaust years with his description of the school wall. However, rather
than engage Amichai on the challenges that continue to vex him, the interviewer presses
backward in time, remarking: “Can you tell me a little bit about the events leading up to
your departure from Amsterdam?”
510

Similarly, some of the most glaring moments in Berenbaum’s interview with Ben
M. occur when he strayed from the historical chronology to reflect upon the lasting
impact of events. Thus, as he recalls the fires during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Ben
mentions hearing the screams of victims bleeding into the sounds of carousel music
playing just outside the walls. Then, more quietly than in his earlier delivery, peering
upwards and carefully composing himself, he says: “But I…those thoughts of the
carousel…probably constantly being with me. I am never free of them.”
511
Ben’s
testimony here seems both overly familiar and yet spontaneous. Again, he comments:
“And people asking me, ‘Why all of sudden quiet down?’ But when I quiet down it’s the
moments when I really go back to the past.”
512
This allusion to the fact that earlier
interviewers had commented on his silence during recordings conveys the sense that Ben

509
Ibid.

510
Ibid.

511
Testimony of Benjamin M. 1 March 1990. Videotape 50.030*0152, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

512
Ibid.

 
285

has so internalized the conventions of his own story that silences and pauses have become
deliberate points of emphasis. Yet during in-between moments, when the camera is left
rolling before a tape can be changed, we see that Ben is exhausted and not wholly
comfortable with what has transpired, in that he has activated a painful return to the past.
Many of the testimonies that I examined show a clear slippage between past and
present, chronological and less linear accounts of events, thus revealing the extent to
which certain survivors have merged their past and present identities. For example,
toward the end of Fela W.’s testimony (a Polish Jew born in 1926 and recorded on
February 9, 1995 in her second interview across the three archives), the interviewer asks:
“How do you think you survived all this?” to which she responds:
Fela: I don’t know. When I talk about it, some people say, “it wasn’t
your time to die.” And when I go and speak in places, they say,
you see, you survived so you will be able to tell us what happened.
So this is their interpretation. You had to be here to tell us what
happened so we know what was going on.

Interviewer: Do you think it required any special inner strength?

Fela: Well, my sister for instance, cannot do that a lot. She does it
where she lives in Milwaukee now, once in a while.

Interviewer: I mean the actual surviving, do you think that took something
special?

Fela: It did. It took determination. It took will power because I know
that a lot of women were in the same situation. They were just as
weak as I. They gave up. When you give up, you die.
513

 

513
Testimony of Fela W. 9 February 1995. Videotape 50.030*0303, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

 
286

In this exchange, Fela mistakes the interviewer’s question about survival for one
concerning the telling of her story to others. And yet the two experiences overlap in the
sense that both tasks took will, courage, and determination. Her comments, however
harsh and perhaps even prideful in their assessment of her fellow survivors, nonetheless
underscore how her participation as a testimonial witness is an extension of her ability to
survive.
The Off-Camera Dimensions of Testimony
Some important moments in testimony occur at the periphery, appearing within
the frame of the recorded interview, but not as part of the official, transcribed testimony,
only marked on those pages as “technical conversation.” These are ephemeral moments
that often abruptly cut to black as the tape runs out or the interviewer realizes that the
camera is still running and shuts it off in an attempt to keep these moments off the record.
I would argue, however, that is in these fleeting, unintended moments that archives,
including that of the Holocaust Museum, often lay bare their epistemological parameters
and reveal the workings and often the ruptures that characterize the exchange of
testimony between witnesses and interviewers—and by extension the archive.
In the testimony of Frima L., for instance, at the start of the second tape we can
hear her deep sighs as she turns directly towards the interviewer and remarks: “I am very
good. I’m not even crying. I didn’t think I’m that strong.”
514
But because the oral
history department prefers “quiet empathy,” the interviewer withholds emotional

514
Testimony of Frima (30 April 1990); Videotape 50.030*0123.

 
287

engagement and remarks: “Okay, we’re rolling.”
515
Such restraint not only makes it
easier to edit and excerpt the tape for future use; it also conceals the process of
performing testimony for fear of undermining its historical credibility. Thus at the close
of Frima’s interview she expresses her thoughts on the ambivalence of having survived:
And then when we finally made it to the United States of America, I still
don’t feel free. I don’t think that a survivor will ever feel free. It’s
something that was done to his life, to his way of feeling, thinking.
Something that nobody can understand, only the survivor himself will
have to sort of adjust himself to the world and do his part as a human
being. Oh gosh.
516

And with that, Frima takes a deep breath and extends her hands outward, moving her
fingers, clearly exhausted from giving her testimony. She plaintively adds: “What else is
there? So much, so much, so much.”
517
But these final remarks remain off the transcript,
separated from the labor she performs during the interview.
In other peripheral exchanges a witness reveals her or his anxiety about the
process as well as the need for affirmation by the interviewer. In Rochelle S.’s testimony
in 1990, she turns to her interviewer at the start of the second tape and comments: “I
don’t know how good it was.”
518
Rather than to provide the wanted confirmation, the
interviewer initiates the prescribed sequence of questions on the past, avoiding any
discussion of present challenges. In other testimonies, such as that by Amichai H., the

515
Ibid.

516
Ibid.

517
Ibid.

518
Testimony of Rochelle S. (15 June 1990); Videotape 50.030*0216.

 
288

interviewer occasionally responds to the witness’ affective pleas, so long as she is
confident that they remain off the record. The first encounter with Amichai on tape
occurs before his official testimony begins. The interviewer is heard off-screen assuring
him: “You sound fine and you look great, Bonnie [her assistant] says.” To which
Amichai responds: “Well, Bonnie is a great morale lifter.”
519
A prolonged and awkward
silence follows. Amichai sits in his chair under the lights, rolling his shoulders, turning
his neck and taking deep breaths, sipping his water and clearing his throat—nervously
anticipating the start of the interview. He addresses the interviewer: “Can we continue
talking or keep quiet now?” And with that, the interviewer responds, “We’re ready.”
520

This exchange underscores the oral history department’s emphasis on capturing
moments that appear within the official, transcribed portions of the interview, rather than
also documenting the processes that make possible their production. It exhibits an
operative preference for conveying the rawness of testimony and effacing the traces of
mediation, which include expressions of emotional support that might potentially
compromise appearances of sober neutrality on the part of the archive.
For many survivors the act of submitting their testimony is a burden openly
shared and acknowledged. An example is Leo B., an Austrian Jew born in 1921, who
recorded for the museum twice in 1989, on July 31 and September 28, in his second
series of interviews across the three case studies. As Leo B.’s testimony comes to a
close, the interviewer strays from the usual practice and can be heard sighing, exhibiting

519
Testimony of Max “Amichai” H. (1 February 1990);Videotape 50.030*0094.

520
Ibid.
 
289

some degree of emotional engagement. Leo picks up on this and remarks: “You are out
of breath and so am I,” thus hinting at the shared burdens involved in generating his
testimony.
521
When Leo then begins to reflect on how he thinks he did, he reveals self-
doubt and insecurity: “Did that go too long with me, maybe I…became too verbose?”
The interviewer responds: “Don’t worry about it, that’s fine. I’m assuming the tape is
off.”
522
But it quickly becomes apparent to her that the tape is in fact still rolling,
recording this unofficial exchange. The cameraman hastily racks his zoom back and the
screen cuts to black before any more conversation is documented.
Although such “unofficial” exchanges remain largely off the record in the older
testimonies I sampled at the Holocaust Museum, it is not surprising that later testimonies
offer more affective dimensions. This in part reflects Joan Ringelheim’s (as opposed to
Linda Kuzmack’s) preferences for a more direct, interpersonal interviewing style and her
investment in having witnesses reflect on the legacy of their experiences. We get a sense
of that emotional investment in the interview with Erwin B. conducted during
Ringelheim’s tenure by another interviewer. At the interview’s conclusion, the following
dialogue takes place:
Interviewer: How are you?

Erwin B.: Okay, what do you think, it’s useful?

521
Testimony of Leo B. 28 September 1989 and 31 July 1989 (each session catalogued as
part of the same interview). Videotape 50.030*0038, Collections Department, USHMM,
Washington, DC.

522
Ibid.
 
290

Interviewer: Absolutely. You gave very valuable information. I know it has to
be very draining. Do you go out and speak at all, have you done
this before?

Erwin B.: No, not really.
523

And with that, the screen fades to black, but not before we glimpse the entangled,
affective bond between the witness and the interviewer.
The Collective and Absent Voices of Testimony
The tensions that often emerge between interviewer and interviewee can also be
examined in terms of the dichotomy between the witness’ individual memory and his or
her obligation to the collective memory of those who can no longer give their testimony.
The protocols of the museum’s oral history department allows witnesses to fulfill this
obligation by presenting testimony as a commemorative, and even restorative,
experience.
In the testimony of Norman S., a moment arises when his interviewer interjects as
the witness begins to discuss the systematic destruction of Jews in Poland:
Interviewer: Excuse me. I’m gonna have to break in if I may. We
need…for this interview, I want to talk about you. So let’s
focus on what happened to you.

Norman: Alright. Well, this I give you just a feeling how the
situation was in this time….”
524

But Norman cannot easily separate what happened to him from his sense of the collective
experience of his community. He lapses into the broader historical voice, recounting that

523
Testimony of Erwin B. 6 July 1994. Videotape 50.030*0016.

524
Testimony of Norman S. 15 May 1990. Videotape 50.030*0199.

 
291

over fifty percent of the transport from his ghetto to the death camp Belzec died on the
train. Again, Kuzmack interjects: “I need you to stick to what you saw.”
525
This
exchange marks a conflicting set of priorities—the museum’s imperative to record
Norman’s experiences as a Jew fighting for the Polish partisans versus his own obligation
to the memory of those who cannot give testimony. Norman responds in a direct,
insistent fashion:
Now I have to speak in the name of all of them because nobody can tell any
stories. They are dead. So my responsibility is to tell their stories. Now I’m
preparing episodes of everybody, the circumstances how he was killed. And I
remember more or less about everyone who was killed, how he was killed and
when and by whom. So I’m preparing stories for each one how each was
killed.
526

Norman is forming his own archive in a sense, documenting the experiences of his
comrades and fulfilling his promise to honor their memory. His notion of survival
depends less on his personal experiences, as preferred by the museum’s testimony
methodology under Kuzmack, than on his sense of obligation, and it is in that respect that
his testimonial voice is at odds with the agenda of the interviewer.
An exploration of the broader historical points of witnesses’ experiences often
serves as an entry point into a more detailed reflection on individual memories. In
Thomas B.’s second of three overlapping interviews (the subject is a Polish Jewish
survivor, born in 1927 and recorded on September 6, 1990), the interviewer’s questions
about his family’s home prompt remembrances of his larger hometown, Izbica, Poland:
“There were about four houses according to the … what I discovered in the town …”

525
Ibid.

526
Ibid.
 
292

But before he can continue, interviewer interrupts: “Tom, what we need to do…excuse
me…we need less of the history. We need your story.”
527
Thomas acknowledges her
comment, but continues with his broader account, either unable or unwilling to separate
his individual story from that of his community: “Okay…It’s a typical Jewish town, a
shtetl hundred percent Jewish. The Christian population lived around the town, on the
foothills.”
528
As Thomas continues to paint a picture of Izbica, including a description of
the Nazi-created Jewish Council, the interviewer—growing ever more impatient—asks:
“What were you and your parents doing?”
529
It is at this moment that Thomas articulates
his own process of visual memory: “I will go in second…first let me go to the picture,
then I’ll go to the particular.”
530

Ben M. is an example of a survivor whose mission to promote remembrance of
the Holocaust in the United States was paramount. Nonetheless, his testimony
acknowledges the challenges of that endeavor. Toward the end of his interview he
observes:
To conclude, if future historians search for the truth, I cannot help it, to tell them,
don’t look only for documentations. We did not have cameras in the
concentration camps. We did not have videotapes in the Warsaw Ghetto and we
could not document it to you. We are trying to describe things that are not
describable….But with our testimony we want to say to the world before we are
departing that it did happen, it was true, we were there, we saw it, and we are

527
Testimony of Thomas B. 6 September 1990. Videotape 50.030*0028. Emphasis in
original.

528
Ibid.

529
Ibid. Emphasis in original.

530
Ibid.

 
293

telling you the story, it is not our story, but only an echo of those who couldn’t
tell that story anymore.
531

Meed’s assertion of the certainty of survivors’ individual and collective experiences also
acknowledges the necessarily fragmented and incomplete nature of giving testimony. It
is an articulation of the survivor’s role as a witness to both personal and communal
experience, an act of giving voice to oneself as well as for others who are absent.
Interview Methodology and Epistemology
As I have already discussed, the ways in which the entanglements of common and
deep memory are engaged or left unaddressed in interviews recorded by the Holocaust
Museum are an extension of particular institutional methodologies and epistemologies
that are brought to bear on the process of collecting video testimony. There is often a
paradoxical emphasis within the museum’s oral history department on interviewers being
as silent as possible, while at the same time moving the testimonies forward, particularly
when witnesses digressed from the designated central aspects of their experiences. The
first twenty-five minutes of Lily M.’s two-hour interview focused primarily on her
remembrances of losing her mother before the war, and how bereft she felt: “I don’t have
nothing…I have nothing to live anymore….”
532
But the museum’s tri-partite framework
for interviews, which allocates over sixty percent of the testimony to the war years,
leaves inadequate time and reel space for experiences such as Lily’s, in particular when
testimonies do not conform to the museum’s emphasis on historical chronology. Lily’s

531
Testimony of Benjamin M. 1 March 1990. Videotape 50.030*0152.

532
Testimony of Lily M. 16 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0150.

 
294

interview also reveals the museum’s epistemological biases, specifically its focus on what
witnesses saw (rather than heard). For example, the interviewer asks about her
experiences in hiding while Jews were being deported to a killing site in Ponary:
Interviewer: When you were in the secret room, you told us about…that
you heard people being taken to Ponary. Can you tell me
what you actually saw?

Lily: Well, I…me and my sister, we were lying on the floor and
there was just a little…a little opening. It was an attic and
between the old wood, there was a very small opening....
You really had to look with one eye because we were very
afraid that we will be noticed. And when I heard this
music, this fiddle playing, I…I got very excited. I didn’t
know what kind…what kind of fiddle playing, so I put
my eye to it and I saw fiddler playing in the front…In the
front of the column and man, women, and children were
taken in columns, taken out through the streets of the
ghetto, going toward the gates. And I with my own eyes
heard…saw the people taken there. The women were
carrying little children and they were playing.
533

As she delivers this account, she squints as though witnessing events through a crack, and
repeatedly places her hands to her right ear, to emphasize what she heard. For Lily, the
aural and visual dimensions of that experience bleed into one another. The music is both
her entry into the process of witnessing and something that still haunts her after the war.
By stressing what Lily “actually saw,” the interviewer misses the experiences revealed
through both audio and visual cues. The interviewer then asks, “What happened to you?”
thus trying to move Lily away from this critical moment of witnessing in order to
emphasize her experience as an agent in her own story.
534
But that moment of witnessing

533
Ibid.

534
Ibid.
 
295

is a deeply embedded, multi-sensory encounter and cannot be separated from what the
museum understands as first-hand experiences.
A similar encounter occurs in Leo B.’s interview. As previously discussed, Leo’s
internment in Drancy ended with his transport in the direction of Auschwitz. When the
interviewer asks him to tell the harrowing story of his escape from the moving train, Leo
repeatedly denies any acts of heroism on his part: “We are not heroes. I don’t even exult
in the word ‘surviving’ because it speaks of something so, so exclusive.”
535
Rather than
engaging Leo on what it means to survive carrying the burden of his memory, the
interviewer keeps pressing him about what he did, trying to elicit details of his
exceptional escape. Leo ultimately gives that account, but he resists the pressure to stick
to the facts in order to continue talking about heroism: “You make a hero of somebody,
but that person knew deep down that here was a lot of fear.”
536

A similar cross-communication occurs toward the end of the interview, during the
segment set aside for artifacts. Leo’s several items include copies of his family’s
deportation documents, which he describes with particular attention to the names of his
mother and sisters, remarking: “These are the three people closest to my heart.”
537
Yet
the interview transcript preserves none of his comments during the artifact-sharing
segment, not even marked as “technical conversation” —the usual practice for moments

535
Testimony of Leo B. 28 September 1989 and 31 July 1989 (each session catalogued as
part of the same interview) Videotape 50.030*0038.

536
Ibid.

537
Ibid.

 
296

designated as falling outside the official boundaries of the testimony. As evident in Leo’s
case, the sharing of personal effects—in particular, photographs—often sparks deeply
intense reflections on loss. Although the museum records such objects on tape—and the
objects themselves are in some cases donated or copied for its collections—they are not
considered part of the interview. By segregating them in a special segment at the end of
the recording, the museum fails to recognize their potential for both animating the
memories of survivors and serving as material surrogates for those who did not survive.
For Liane R.L., her collection of photographs, letters, and documents strengthen
her connection to events she experienced as a young child. As the interviewer instructs
her to hold her passport steady for the camera and consults with the cameraman on
framing it, Liane reflects on its special meaning to her:
Liane: But for me, somehow especially because I didn’t think of
this for such a long time, every once and a while when this
whole episode comes into my mind, I sort of think, you
know, this…this can’t possibly have happened to me. This
is some movie I saw, or some dream. (At this point, the
passport moves somewhat out of frame).

Interviewer: Hold it…that’s it (in regards to moving the passport back
into frame).

Liane: Then I go and fish out the passport, and convince myself
that it really was real.”
538

The interviewer manages to record the passport, thus accomplishing the oral history
department’s mission to capture “object survivors” in order to document the markers of
authenticity, here in the form of a passport with an official seal. Yet the passport’s value

538
Testimony of Liane R.L. 24 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0186.

 
297

does not reside in and of itself, but in dialogue with Liane’s memory, in particular in
helping to convince her that what she experienced was in fact real. In documenting the
passport after the interview, the museum’s oral history department positions it as a
guarantor of authenticity rather than as a vehicle for generating testimonial dialogue.
It must be said that the epistemological preferences of the USHMM’s oral history
department have evolved along with the museum. The procedures instituted by Joan
Ringelheim have substantially modified not only interviewers’ approach to their
witnesses, but the information they pursue. Thus in Fela W.’s interview during the
Ringelheim era, there are far more questions in the first section on events before the
Holocaust era, each of them more probing then those generated under Kuzmack’s
directorship. Thus as Fela recalls being lined up while naked at Auschwitz, the
interviewer asks: “Now, just tell me when you were standing naked in front of all these
Nazis having to parade around, that must have been a very unusual experience. I’m
wondering if it was more difficult for the girls?” Later, the interviewer probes even
further on psychological issues, asking: “What kinds of things did you—do you
remember what you talked about or dream about?”
539

Given the museum’s focus on historical authenticity, it is illuminating to
consider interviews in which witnesses appear to contradict historically established
conclusions. And while the museum’s later interviews are far more probing in their
questions, the interest in pinning down what witnesses saw, as opposed to heard,

539
Testimony of Fela W. 9 February 1995. Videotape 50.030*0303.

 
298

continued. During Erwin B.’s testimony, recorded in 1994, he claims that the Nazis used
the skin of his fellow inmates to make gloves and lampshades. The interviewer
interjects: “How do you know this…or did you know this at the time?”
540
When Erwin
replies that he heard this from fellow inmates, the interviewer again asks: “Did anyone
you know actually see this happening?” Erwin replies: “No, who could see?”
541

Although established historical scholarship disputes the story about gloves and
lampshades, Erwin’s perception has an experiential and structural truth. But it is not easy
to reconcile this kind of truth with an archive’s need for empirical, catalogued terms.
In her second testimony of the sample, Gerda H. (a German Jewish survivor born
in 1922 who recorded testimony at the museum on June 12, 1995) the level of
psychological and familial detail is far more penetrating. For example, the interviewer
probes the witness on both prosaic and more intimate matters: “Can you tell us
something about your family, your sister, your parents?”; “Did your mother work?”;
“Tell me what the relationships were like in the family?”; “Were you closer to one parent
more than another?”
542
This approach largely reflects an interest during this period of the
oral history department in issues of gender and the Holocaust. At various points during
the session, the interviewer asks questions tailored to women’s experiences, for example
in regard to Gerda’s time in Theresienstadt: “When you think back, do you think that
women had different sorts of friendships than men, or there’s not a gender difference

540
Testimony of Erwin B. 6 July 1994. Videotape 50.030*0016.

541
Ibid.

542
Testimony of Gerda H. 12 June 1995 Videotape 50.030*0334.
 
299

here?”
543
Later, the interviewer inquires: “Did you menstruate in the ghetto, or did it
stop?”—asking her to reflect on how events impacted her on a fundamental physical
level.
544
This more penetrating mode of testimonial engagement attempts to dig beneath
the surface of historical facts to uncover how witnesses processed (and continue to
process) what they experienced.
In some instances, this method necessitates going backward rather than forward
with the story, asking witnesses to fill in their recollections of details earlier left
unexplored. At one moment in Gerda’s interview, she is asked to step back from her
telling of the last time she saw her father before his deportation: “Can I go back for a
moment. The day that your father or the few days before when you knew he was going
to leave, did he talk to you in any particular way?”
545
While it does not move the story
forward from a narrative perspective, this question nonetheless calls upon the witness to
reflect on her remembrance of things in ways that she might not have previously
explored.
As the interview comes to a close, the interviewer asks Gerda if she has any other
details she would like to add. To which the witness replies:
I’m exhausted. That’s what I‘d like to say. You were a great interviewer, but you
got all the things out of me that were long buried, and that had to come up again,
and had to be talked about. My life is a patchwork. But the nice thing is that the
good parts are the quilted ones. And the not good parts, they just are there. They

543
Ibid.

544
Ibid.

545
Ibid.
 
300

just are there, but…I still have nightmares, I still have nightmares today, but
during the day I’m a very happy person. Thank you.
546

Here we get a strong sense of a shared burden—the interviewer’s effort to dig beneath the
surface of personal history and Gerda’s exhaustion in undergoing the process of
excavation. While she had previously given her testimony with an affiliate of the
Fortunoff Archive, this time—engaged by an interviewer who asks her to confront the
ambivalences of having survived—she has uncovered new layers of memory.
Calibrating the Visceral and Analytical Dimensions of the Holocaust
There are striking parallels between the configuration of the Holocaust Museum’s
Permanent Exhibition and the frameworks that shape the role of oral history within the
museum. The Permanent Exhibition, like its basic outline for testimonies, is divided into
three sections covering events before, during, and after the war, following in linear order
and with clearly marked transition points. In addition, the exhibition and oral history
departments share a concern with fine-tuning emotional reactions to, and imposing
analytical coherence on Holocaust history and memory. As I have already mentioned,
part of this tension arose from the museum’s mandates to import an event from its
European context and adapt it for an American audience, as well as to preserve a rigorous
attention to historical specificity while also endeavoring to forge universal, interpersonal
lessons from the Holocaust.
However, the USHMM’s Permanent Exhibition uses few if any extensive
captions to accompany still and moving images, including documentary film footage
from the Warsaw Ghetto. This contrasts with the relatively detailed text that explains the

546
Ibid.
 
301

provenance and historical context of written documents. It would seem that the
illustrative and visceral impact of images is of primary interest, not considerations of
their historical provenance. There is an operative assumption that still and moving
images possess an immediately legible moral value and visceral charge that can be
abstracted from the details of their individual histories. Within the established narrative
of the museum’s story-driven exhibition space, images of suffering are not artifacts in
their own right; rather they exemplify a historical narrative.
While the PE confronts visitors with sets of moral choices and their
consequences, it offers few spaces where they are asked to reflect on how meaning is
constructed through the images on display. James Freed, the museum’s principle
architect, stressed that the exhibition’s primary purpose is to make visitors feel part of a
common human experience. Rather than focusing on questions of “how did it happen?”
Freed sought a “visceral story, one that addresses via emotion, not intellect, since many
cannot comprehend such a larger picture.”
547
Storytelling and the immediacy of the
historical experience were to take precedence over the exhibition’s analytical and
informative functions. Thus the museum selected particular moving and still images
because of their ability to convey a sense of lived immediacy, not because of their origins
in a particular time and place.
548

547
Memorandum between Cindy Miller and Ralph Appelbaum, Martin Smith, Shaike
Weinberg, and Michael Berenbaum, 21 February 1989. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-
011; Box 14; Exhibition Floor Plans.

548
Susan Bacrach, Historian, Exhibitions Division, USHMM, interview by author, 8
February 2007, Washington, DC, USHMM.
 
302

During a meeting with Susan Bachrach, the museum’s director of special
exhibitions, I raised the prospect of using testimony, documentary footage, and other
visual sources in a self-reflexive manner, juxtaposing them with more “traditional”
sources in order to draw out how they challenge, interrogate, and reinforce each other.
549

She responded that such a critical engagement with the display of visual materials could
undermine the museum’s mandate to counter Holocaust revisionism, which required
uncontested documentation of a particular historical narrative. Moreover, it would
potentially confuse visitors with a casual or non-existent familiarity with the Holocaust.
The documentary footage installed in the interactive media bays on the Permanent
Exhibition’s fourth floor illustrates such key events as Nazi rallies at Nuremberg and the
1936 Olympic games. However, their presentation with few citations obscures their
provenance and fails to stimulate discussion of how images of the Nazi regime were
constructed both from within and outside its boundaries. Similarly, a monitor in the
third-floor section on life in the ghetto displays Nazi propaganda footage of Jewish life in
the Warsaw Ghetto, amidst a collection of other artifacts, including one of the famous
milk canisters that housed the collections of the secret Ringelbloom archive. Yet no
didactic panel explains the origins of the footage, thus obscuring the Nazis’ framing of
Jewish experience. Without captioning, visitors unversed in the ghetto’s history or the
images might assume the footage was recorded by the Jewish inhabitants.
While the use of these artifacts for illustrative and thematic ends has complicated
how we engage them as authentic sources in their own right, the museum still sees them

549
Ibid.
 
303

as a source of authenticity. As I discussed earlier, the planners of the USHMM did not
want a traditional museum in the sense of putting its collections in the foreground.
Rather, this new museum would strategically display its holdings in the service of an
experientially driven narrative. With that in mind, the exhibition commingled replicated
objects with authentic artifacts, original images and documents with their enlarged,
copied equivalents, each carefully weighed to create a historically authentic, emotionally
charged experience for the visitors.
In the exhibition’s segments on Auschwitz-Birkenau, a cast of the infamous
Auschwitz gate with the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, stands adjacent to original
collections of personal artifacts including scissors, brushes, and prayer shawls, as well as
an original barrack from Birkenau donated by the Polish government. This section also
houses the Polish boxcar, with an explanatory caption that it was “of the kind” used for
deportations to concentration camps. Thus, the real, the replicated, and the potentially
authentic coexist within the exhibition, providing less a chain of historical evidence than
a thematically and morally driven display. Yet even the appearance of authenticity
carried implications for the exhibition’s development. As discussed earlier, the display of
hair shorn from inmates was banned on the grounds that it might potentially have come
from relatives and members of the Content Committee or from museum visitors or their
relatives. While in the case of the ambiguously genuine railcar, the museum constructed
a detour around it. In both these debates, the most vocal opposition came primarily from
Holocaust survivors.

 
304

The Permanent Exhibition’s introductory segment provoked controversy over the
use of images of suffering. The initial plans, as chronicled by Linenthal, used an image
shot in color so that visitors could more easily relate than they would to the sharp
contrasts of black-and-white photography.
550
As Raye Farr argued, color would convey a
“sense of flesh—flesh colored flesh.” Upon further deliberation, however, Farr
determined that “too much flesh” would shock audiences just beginning the exhibition
experience.
551

Anxiety about generating shock in visitors informs the entire Permanent
Exhibition, in particular its use of privacy walls to shield sensitive viewers from the most
gruesome images, such as those dealing with medical experiments at Auschwitz-
Birkenau and emaciated survivors and decomposed corpses in scenes from camp
liberations. While no barriers were placed around still photographs depicting Soviet
prisoners at Mauthausen, they were located further into the display panel out of concern
that the unsettling, viscerally charged images would discourage visitors from continuing
with the historical text in the didactic panels.
A Mosaic of Traces
These debates also informed the development of the exhibition’s “Tower of
Faces,” a central installation that runs from the second floor to the fifth-floor ceiling.
Consisting of 1,500 photographs duplicated in their original condition from the personal

550
This was explored both with Raye Farr, Director, Film and Video, Collections
Division, USHMM, interview by author, 29 March 2007, Washington, DC, USHMM;
and in Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s
Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 193.

551
Farr, interview by author, 29 March 2007.
 
305

collection of the Holocaust scholar, Yaffa Eliach, the images chronicle the life of
inhabitants in the shtetl of Ejszyszki in Lithuania. The fifty-four-foot-high tower space is
covered on all four sides with images ranging in size from one to three-feet high, placed
against enamel panels. Because ninety-five percent of the shtetl’s inhabitants featured in
the photographs perished during the Holocaust, Eliach considered the exhibit to be a form
of familial and communal reclamation, restoring life to those who were lost. These
“survivor photos” are some of the few remaining traces of Jewish life in Ejszyszki. As
Eliach wrote in an essay published in the Jewish Study Network:
Intended simply as mementos of happy times and family occasions, the tower of
survivor photos now has the weightier task of restoring identity and individuality
to the otherwise anonymous victims of the Nazis. Together with the pertinent
documents and captions, the photographs ‘rescue’ these victims and their lost
civilization posthumously, redeem them from the conflagration that left behind
mere ashes, smoke, and pits filled with bodies. The photographs in the tower will
become their memorial, a visual record of Jewish life.
552

These images serve a restorative function by providing both an overwhelming collective
and personal perspective on the life that both thrived and perished in that shtetl.
Yet the Tower of Faces presentation ultimately lacks the accompanying “pertinent
documents and captions” mentioned in Eliach’s essay, which was published before
completion of the exhibition. In a letter to then Permanent Exhibition Director Raye Farr,
Eliach had pressed for the inclusion of captions to accompany the photographs, noting:

552
Yaffa Eliach, “The Ejszyszki Tower: The Tower of Faces,” Jewish Study Network 5,
no.1 (Spring 1991): 4. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files
of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box 13; Yaffa Eliach.

 
306

“A photo without a caption loses much of its impact.”
553
Yet Farr convinced her to omit
captions, thus conferring on the images a more universally identifiable value. The
opening didactic panel makes clear the photographs’ context, but the individual images
remained uncaptioned in order to encourage a more immersive experience. In other
words, the historical specificity of the images had to be balanced against the need for a
visceral impact. While the tower’s images stand in for their corporeal referents, the
identities of those in the photographs remain unknown to the majority of museum
visitors. Their emblematic quality makes them representative of the shtetl experience and
of Jewish life in Eastern Europe more broadly.
The fact that the tower exhibit includes images of those who survived, as well as
of those who perished leaves the interpretation open to viewers. The enormity of the
space conveys the feeling of being immersed in and overwhelmed by both the individual
details of the photographs and the total mosaic quality of the piece. The result is a
powerful visceral and emotional experience, but one that is grounded less in historical
specificity than in broader tropes of Holocaust experience. The tower itself is segmented
into two parts: “A Shtetl,” on the fourth floor, and “End of a Shtetl” on the third floor.
But the photographs on each of the floors are indistinguishable in that all capture
moments of everyday life in Ejszyszki, ranging from families out on bike excursions to
workers posing with the tools of their trades. They chronicle Jewish life as it existed in
the looming shadow of the Holocaust—that which was present and then irrevocably lost.

553
Letter from Yaffa Eliach to Raye Farr, 14 May 1991. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-
1997; 1988-011; Box 13; Yaffa Eliach.
 
307

Without captions, however, these images are deprived of their specificity, for the most
part relegating the particularities of individual experiences and names to the display’s
larger emotional, experiential appeal.
The design of the Tower of Faces thus accommodates the exhibition’s overall
narrative framework—providing referential, experiential anchorage for a story of Jewish
life in Eastern Europe before and after the war—while also enabling visitors to project
their own interpretations onto the images, creating their own stories for those who are
represented in the panels. The individual images in the mosaic have their own individual,
inescapably unique gazes, features, and gestures, but first and foremost they exemplify
Jewish and human experience more broadly. This in turn makes the subjects captured on
film a source of interpersonal connection spanning the spatial and historical divide of the
Holocaust.
If the Permanent Exhibition represents the “soul of the museum,” then the Tower
of Faces constitutes its emotional core. During a walkthrough of the display with Raye
Farr, she recounted to me how during the exhibition’s construction, workers who were
emotionally drained by its stark images would frequently head to the Tower of Faces as a
“restorative spot,” where they could regain perspective on their task at hand and attend to
the psychic effects of their work.
554
This function continued after the museum’s opening.
In Farr’s words: “This is where the life-force is for the exhibition.”
555
It is also one of the
few places within the Permanent Exhibition that includes images of Jewish life as

554
Farr, interview by author, 29 March 2007.

555
Ibid.
 
308

captured by Jews and not by perpetrators or liberators. Eliach’s grandparents, Yitzhak
Uri Katz and Alte Katz, composed most of the photographs, and the images capture a
sense of comfort and intimacy that would be difficult to imagine with a photographer
who came from outside of the community.
The Tower of Faces also complements the museum’s use of more official visual
images. It is in this respect that the display, like the screening of Holocaust testimony
that I will analyze later in this chapter, advances the Holocaust Museum’s mandate as a
“living memorial,” one that renders Holocaust commemoration in terms of an official
American narrative, while at the same time emphasizing the interpersonal and the
experiential dimensions of remembrance. The collection of photographs from Ejszyszki
constitutes an archive of shtetl life lost and yet salvaged. Initially recovered as part of
Eliach’s personal collection, these images—like the museum’s Holocaust testimonies—
constitute a public, institutional archive housed within the walls of the USHMM. While
less numerous than the testimonies, the photographs provide a rich and overpowering
illustration of the human dimensions of history. Also like their counterparts in the
audiovisual archive, they have the potential to be instrumentalized for institutional
pedagogical and commemorative purposes, as exemplars of a more universal, viscerally
inflected experience, at the expense of engaging the particularities of history. Their value
for embodying traces of the Holocaust is not inherent, but rather is contingent upon their
use. That is the primary focus of the following segments of the chapter, which explore
how the museum subjects the holdings of its oral history department to institutional
mediation in ways that activate their memorial potentiality.
 
309

The Filmic Embodiment of Testimony
The “Testimony Amphitheater” that concludes the Permanent Exhibition
embodies the museum’s efforts to mediate the impact of its testimonies. While the
exhibition uses audio-recorded testimonies throughout its various sections (as I described
in the case of the “Voices from Auschwitz” installation), the amphitheater is the only
segment that displays audiovisual—and I would argue, more fully embodied—
testimonies. The evolution of the “Testimony Amphitheater” concept also speaks to the
larger challenge of balancing thematic and narrative coherence with the interpretative
complexities of trauma. In Martin Smith’s original concept, a multi-screen installation
with a computer program would randomly display pre-edited segments of testimony from
the holdings of the oral history department. The interviewees would vary in their
backgrounds, religions, and categories (survivors, liberators, rescuers), and their
testimonies would be edited to correspond with a particular theme or event. The
installation would cycle through twenty-four hours of footage before resetting, thus
replicating a fundamental temporal measure of human existence. Smith thus intended it
to be a permanent body of individual and collective memory within the exhibition.
Like the Tower of Faces, the Testimony Amphitheater would present a mosaic of
human experiences to complement the exhibition’s more “traditional” sources. As Smith
described his conception:
‘Testimony’ [the installation] must be more than a film or video. It has to be a
timeless presentation about the Holocaust from the victims themselves…It is

 
310

essential that ‘Testimony’ breaks the shackles of the usual media time frame—
and not even [the film] Shoah did that.
556

For Smith, it was vital that the installation break new ground, even if that meant pushing
the temporal boundaries of Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary. He wanted both to
capture the complexity and multi-vocality of Holocaust memory and experience and to
create a rationale for visitors to return to the museum, eager to explore the “fresh
evidence” gleaned from a growing display of survivor testimonies.
557
The Testimony
Amphitheater could capture the rawness and spontaneity of traumatic memory—avoiding
the “artificial linkages” of film editing to present stories in their unadorned immediacy.
558

It was precisely the dynamic and unanticipated quality of the installation, Smith argued,
that would prevent the false imposition of closure on the traumatic excesses of testimony.
After Smith’s departure, and with the deadline for finalizing the Permanent
Exhibition looming, the newly named exhibition director Raye Farr began to assess plans
for the amphitheater. In particular, a review of the museum’s existing interviews
revealed the technical and aesthetic limitations to Smith’s concept. Many testimonies
lacked the required polished production values. Moreover, they often lacked the thematic
coherence or the dramatic punch needed for editing together the randomly displayed
clips. Farr considered integrating segments from testimonies recorded at other archives,

556
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Shaike Weinberg, RE: “Testimony”—A
Rationale and an Appeal 7 May 1990, p. 1. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of
Raye Farr Relating to the Segment Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-
1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral History.

557
Ibid.

558
Ibid., p. 2.
 
311

but that presented issues of aesthetic consistency. The solution was Testimony, a more
traditional, feature-length film consisting of newly recorded interview segments, based
on—but not including actual footage of—existing USHMM testimonies. Farr would be
able to draw on the museum’s network of witnesses, while at the same time reframing
their testimonies to better suit the needs of the exhibition. The new testimonies would
also have enhanced aesthetic quality and dramatic impact. Accordingly, Farr mandated a
film rather than a video format. Composing the subjects in tighter close ups would place
greater emphasis on survivors’ faces as sites of screening memory.
As I have argued earlier, this emphasis on capturing facial expression can expand
the scope of physical expression and convey a fuller picture of memory as a labored
process of translation and reenactment. Though Farr wanted the new interviews to be
shot so that personal details would “jump off the screen,” I would contend that the range
of physical expression delimits what constitutes the “personal.”
559
In my discussions
with Farr, she stressed that she did not intend for the new film to have an uplifting and
redemptive conclusion. Unlike Smith’s randomized images, it would be a linear three-
part assemblage of fifteen-to-twenty-minute interview modules based on themes of
defiance, rescue, and resistance. At the same time, Farr considered it crucial that the film
capture the ambivalence and darkness of survivor experiences, while also making them
comprehensible and accessible to the visitors.

559
Farr, interview by author, 20 December 2006, Washington, DC, USHMM.

 
312

Farr laid out her ideas in 1991 in the official proposal to authorize Testimony and
its placement in the final segment of the exhibition’s three-act structure.
560
The film does
not itself fit the exhibition’s chronological structure, since it covers events from before,
during, and after the Holocaust in a segment of the exhibition that is primarily dedicated
to the aftermath. However, it offered a way to integrate individual, eyewitness accounts
into an exhibition that otherwise relegated testimony to the periphery, indeed that
deliberately avoided audiovisual testimony and personal narratives. I use the term
“deliberately” since the designers were conscious of the museum’s previous preference
for official or “expert” perspectives on history. Recognizing the glaring absence of
survivor accounts throughout the exhibition, the proposal touted the film’s value as a
strategically-placed supplement to the wider sweep of history already covered, thus
“giv[ing] voice to individual witnesses of the Holocaust.”
561

The film would also facilitate a convergence of the cognitive and visceral:
“Museum visitors will have the opportunity to come closer to the events of the Holocaust
as they see the faces of survivors and listen to accounts of a world full of contradiction,
confusion, and choices.”
562
Farr’s proposal emphasizes the acts of seeing and hearing as
modes of deciphering and interrogating memory, alongside the more official forms of

560
Request for Proposal No. CX-1100-RFP-1020-Title: “Motion Picture on Testimony,”
Issued 20 June 1991. This and other documents on the development of the Testimony
film were generously made available to me from the personal files of Raye Farr, formerly
USHMM PE director and currently director, Film and Video, Collections Division.

561
Ibid.

562
Ibid.

 
313

history already presented in the exhibition. The film could literally and figuratively flesh
out the museum’s presentation of history by closing the exhibition with a living, albeit
highly mediated, presence of survivors who would give a face and voice to their stories.
And while Farr intended that the film would reflect the multiple voices and contradictions
of individual experiences, thus countering a redemptive or homogenizing closure, her
proposal tries to ground the film in undeniable, coherent moral lessons. As the proposal
contends: “The strength of human courage and the power of the human spirit to prevail
in spite of unimaginable evil should emerge from the memories presented in this film.”
563

The Testimony film then illustrates a larger set of tensions. While seen as both a
corrective to a more fragmented format and a vehicle for providing closure for the
exhibition, it nonetheless introduced an element of openness by running on a continuing
loop with no formal introduction or conclusion. Ultimately, I would argue, its fixed
thematic and linear structure, coupled with the use of voice-over narration to provide
historical and individual exposition, makes any pretenses to an open format illusory. By
shedding light on the “contradiction, confusion, and choices” of individual experiences,
the film is the one segment in the exhibition that introduced a semblance of self-
reflexivity. However, that aim is complicated, though not necessarily completely
undermined, by the pull of redemptive humanism and moral pedagogy.
564

Once the film proposal was approved, the museum contracted the services of the
filmmaker Sandy Bradley as producer-director. Bradley opted for an approach that

563
Ibid.

564
Ibid.

 
314

combined both open and structured dimensions, much like Farr’s proposal. Thus the film
would play on a continuous loop with no clearly marked beginning, middle, or end,
leaving visitors free to enter and leave the space at their own will. Testimonies would,
however, be organized around the themes of resistance, rescue, and defiance. As
described by Bradley, it would be an “amoeba without structure” that underscored the
fluidity, contradictions and paradoxes of the Holocaust: “It is to have no formal structure
or storyline…essentially no visual, no sound effects, no music, in short, nothing to aid the
raw content of what is said other than the careful weaving of film editing….”
565
But the
process of mediating the interviews belies this notion of rawness. Bradley’s work plan
stressed that the film would be a new experience for witnesses, since she only wanted to
capture segments of their experiences, not their “whole story.”
566
Homing in on core
experiences would give a sense of witnesses as “powerful, moving, warm, terribly real,
and connected.”
567

Bradley’s strategy—like the museum’s approach to collecting testimony—
suggests that there is a core experience to be extracted and segmented from a survivor’s
experience. But rather than looking to identify historically consequential or dramatic
events in her re-interviews, Bradley sought to capture the perceptions, feelings, and
“deeper reflections” that emerge in recalling previously forgotten memories.
568
In other

565
Sandra Bradley, “Amendment to the Work Plan,” Testimony film, 21 October 1991.

566
Ibid.

567
Ibid.

568
Ibid.
 
315

words, she sought to document the individual workings of memory and not simply the
transmission of information. Bradley allowed her witnesses to choose the interior spaces
for filming, in order to put them at ease. But by using tight close ups, the background’s
importance was minimized and viewers’ attention would be on the faces of the survivors.
As Bradley explained, “I think most people in the audience will only see and hear the
survivor him/herself. The film will seem to be purely: people.”
569
The assumption
behind this approach is that the filmmaker and in turn the viewer can acquire direct
access to the essential elements of witnesses’ experiences. While she recognized that
framing and editing techniques guide the interview process, Bradley discussed those
aspects less as mediating factors than as means to achieve a pure extraction of testimony.
Once the new testimonies were recorded, in May 1992, Bradley and the main
museum planners, including Raye Farr, Shaike Weinberg, and Michael Berenbaum,
collectively reviewed the new footage to select segments for inclusion in the final cut.
Farr, Berenbaum, and Weinberg were particularly attentive to how well particular
witnesses would advance the film’s thematic structure of defiance, resistance, and rescue.
Weinberg, for example, raised questions about testimony by Abe M., a Polish Jew who
recalled witnessing a woman with whom he was hiding smother her child in order to
prevent her from crying and revealing their location to the Nazis. Weinberg argued that
the event came under the rubric “hiding,” rather than defiance, resistance, or rescue, and

 

569
Ibid.
 
316

thus strayed from the “spirit of the film.”
570
After a prolonged debate, the committee
expanded the definition of defiance and resistance to encompass the courage needed to
endure experiences in hiding. The footage of Abe was ultimately added to the film, and
constitutes one of its most dramatically compelling moments.
The reviewing committee was less receptive to footage that challenged the
museum’s commitment to historical authenticity. At issue in one testimony—the notes
do not provide a name—was the suspicion that the witness had embellished, if not
outright concocted his story.
571
In arguing against inclusion, Farr referred to the witness
as a “fantasist”: “It’s genuine and sincere but he is imagining.” Michael Berenbaum
agreed: “If in doubt, leave it out.”
572

The rejection of a “fantasist” as witness underscores the museum’s shifting
criteria for defining the veridical character of evidence depending on the category of
artifact. It was sufficient that the Polish boxcar was “of the kind” used for deportations,
and the Warsaw Ghetto film footage was displayed to illustrate Jewish life without citing
its Nazi provenance, but audiovisual testimony of survivors was held to a higher standard
of authenticity. Here the burden of evidence was proportionate to the survivors’ role as
experiential anchorage and moral authority for the museum, where they served as living
delegates.

570
Farr’s notes on Testimony screening held on 6 May 1992, with Farr, Berenbaum,
Weinberg, and Bradley present.

571
Ibid.

572
Ibid.
 
317

The selection committee acknowledged that the merits of a particular testimony
often relied on the abilities of a witness to perform her or his memory. Notes taken
during the process of screening dailies describe a process often akin to film or television
casting, based on whether or not a subject had the right look or delivery for the project.
Descriptions of Gerda K. in her white sweater and pearls as “handsome,” or Emanuel T.’s
“handsome, intelligent face,” demonstrate the considerable attention paid to finding
witnesses who could capture the eye and imagination of the viewer.
573
As “primary
interviews,” Emanuel T. and Gerda K. were given more screen time; “secondary
interviews” would provide color, but not serve as main characters: “Some stories are
marginal but can be kept in the film for pacing and effect, as long as [the] main focus
remains on themes.”
574

Conceived as the culmination of the Permanent Exhibition and the most fully
embodied expression of personal and collective memory within the Museum, Testimony
is the exception in an exhibition otherwise dominated by more official accounts of the
Holocaust. While the film’s footage of survivors is no less mediated or segmented than
the written documents or found footage on display within the exhibit, it nonetheless
provides the only moments within the exhibition when witnesses are shown to be telling
their stories through both audio and visual representation. After traversing the
exhibition’s three levels, the visitor has seen many personal artifacts, photomurals of

573
Farr’s notes on Testimony, taken on 24 March 1992.

574
Farr’s notes on Testimony screening held on 6 May 1992.

 
318

human hair, implements of torture and death, but rarely the faces and voices of victims
who endured and witnessed the experiences from which those traces are composed. It is
startling to finally come across Testimony with its embodied human quality.
Testimony retroactively personifies the preceding exhibition history by projecting
human voices and figures back onto the historical fragments in the exhibition, endowing
them with visceral charge and moral authority. I am not trying to argue that the film
provides a complete counterpoint to the operative epistemology of the preceding
segments of the exhibition. Edward Linenthal has argued that the collection of individual
voices and experiences captured in the film complicate the dominant narrative of the
USHMM: “In the midst of moving and horrible accounts of resistance, rescue, near
rescue, theological certainty, and theological doubt, the presence of the Holocaust as a
living thing is overpowering.”
575
Visitors do find it overwhelming to confront the
burdens of memory in the faces, gestures, and voices of survivors as they reanimate the
artifacts of that history with a semblance of living memory. But the film as a whole, I
argue, does not necessarily undermine the more universalizing and unifying impulses of
the museum or preclude certain impositions of redemptive closure.
The concept of Testimony as a multi-screen work without a clear beginning,
middle, or end is belied by the caption that appears each time the film completes a loop:
This film exhibit is a living legacy: eyewitness testimony from survivors
of the Holocaust. It concludes the Permanent Exhibition of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, running continuously without

575
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 253-254.

 
319

beginning, middle, or end. Visitors to the Museum are free to
enter and leave at will.
576

Whereas Smith’s approach would have maintained the more associative and less
structured aspects of testimony, its current incarnation strives to anchor spectatorship
even when making gestures towards temporal openness. The captivating faces, gestures,
and voices provide a compelling antidote to the exhibition’s less personalized aspects.
They are, however, subject to a rigorous thematic structure, which is in turn aided by the
integration of a female voice-over narration that provides historical exposition and
signals the changing of thematic segments. While the film is introduced as a “living
legacy,” the process of selecting and editing footage circumscribes the scope of that
commemorative function according to the pedagogical investments of the institution.
From the Archive to the Screen
Comparing Testimony footage to its respective archival source makes clear that
the process of instrumentalization that frames survivor narratives works in conjunction
with a particular institutional narrative of history. In their archived interviews, for
example, survivors featured in Testimony are often more interested in telling the stories of
others than in recounting their own experiences. Although much of Abe M.’s original
archived testimony focuses on remembrances of his father and the profound loss suffered

576
Opening caption for the film Testimony. Film directed by Sandy Bradley, 1993.
Screened within the USHMM Permanent Exhibition, Closing Segment.

 
320

as a result of his death, his appearance in Testimony involves only the harrowing story of
his survival in hiding, redefined as “defiance.”
577

The interviews conducted for Testimony also have a more public dimension than
the originals, in large part because witnesses were aware that a large number of museum
visitors would see their interviews: in effect, they were addressing a public audience
with extremely intimate, private remembrances. Yet the process of editing testimonies
for the film involved screening survivors’ accounts in ways that withheld traces of the
labor and, often, frictions that mark the process of giving and receiving testimony. This
is clear if we continue to compare the segments of testimony created for the film to the
interviews originally recorded for archival purposes.
Consider the previously mentioned Gerda K., one of Testimony’s primary figures.
Her initial interview for the oral history department in 1991 contains a handful of
moments when she asks the interviewer to cut the camera because she cannot bear the
emotional burden of recalling an encounter with her father wearing a yellow star and then
seeing him for the last time. At one such point during the archived interview, she turns to
the interviewer just off to the side of the camera and remarks: “There’s just one more
thing I want to mention. Before my father left, he asked me…” Unable to continue, she
begs the interviewer: “Cut. Please. Will you cut it out.” The interviewer replies: “This
will all be edited. It will not be seen by the public.”
578
The screened footage for

577
Abe M. segment in film Testimony; and Testimony of Abe M. 10 May 1990,
Videotape 50.030*0145.

578
Testimony of Gerda K. 11 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0105.

 
321

Testimony excludes all such messy exchanges from archived recordings. The typed
transcript in the museum’s oral history database also omits Gerda’s full exchange—like
other “off-camera” comments—which it designates as “technical conversation.”
And yet this exchange does appear to those who view the original archived
testimony in its entirety. The moment underscores the contestation between the
institutional call for remembrance and the personal difficulties faced by survivors in
reenacting traumatic moments from their past. It reveals the challenging, dialogical
nature of testimony in which survivors cannot always accommodate the preferences of
the institution recording their testimony. However defining these moments are, they are
largely absent from the film Testimony and from most other incarnations of interviews,
including those of the Wexler Learning Center that I will discuss shortly. Obviously, the
film version requires some editing of witnesses’ stories. Nonetheless, it is important to
underscore that the film’s thematic framework based on resistance, defiance, and rescue
often leaves out moments that, while not falling inside those headings, are nonetheless
crucial to our better understanding of survivor experiences.
Again citing Gerda K. as an example, the film highlights the story of her
liberation from a concentration camp near Volary, Czechoslovakia, by a German Jew
who, after fleeing to the U.S., returns to Europe as a GI. We learn of their encounter
through a series of crosscuts between Gerda and Kurt, the GI, who is later dramatically
revealed as her husband. That revelation culminates the melodrama that juxtaposes her
profound devastation with a romantic bond between her and Kurt amidst the ashes of the
 

 
322

Holocaust.
579
The story of Gerda and Kurt marks the restoration of both her feminine
identity and some semblance of hope in humanity. And while it is an incredibly powerful
moment in Testimony, it emerges not through a sustained engagement with Gerda’s or
Kurt’s testimony, but rather through the imposition of institutional authorship, as
expressed in the selection and intertwining of what the film’s planners and producers
considered to be the defining moment of these two witnesses’ experiences.
Consequently, what is missing from this sequence is the overflowing of emotions and the
breakdown in narration that accompanies the return of memory throughout Gerda’s
original archived interview. While the film moves these two stories beyond the archive
and through editing enables the two subjects to speak to each other, the excesses of
trauma ultimately are left on the cutting-room floor.
The essentialization of Gerda K.’s experience actually began even before the re-
recording of her testimony for the film. During her initial archived recording, the
interviewer was already familiar with many details of her story, not only through the pre-
interview process but also because of Gerda’s prominence in the survivor community and
her many public addresses about her wartime experiences. With that prior knowledge in
hand, the interviewer tended to guide Gerda’s testimony in the direction of what the oral
history department had judged to be the core aspects of her Holocaust experience,
specifically her dramatic liberation and romantic union with Kurt. It is as if the interview
had been leading up to this point all along, and when it arrives, Gerda’s performance of
memory suddenly seems more polished and restrained. She appears to have recounted

579
Segment of Gerda K. and Kurt K. in film Testimony.
 
323

this part of her story many times before, and it largely lacks the uncertainty and
unsteadiness that mark her earlier recollections of losing her father. The moment of
liberation and romantic renewal appears to serve as a grounding memory that relieves her
of the burdensome aspects of telling her story. The familiarity and accessible
melodramatic conventions steer her, as well as the interviewer and spectator, through
these iconic events.
A comparison of Kurt’s footage in Testimony with his original interview reveals a
similar process of extraction.
580
Based on my interpretation of the original archived
version, he has clearly not delivered his testimony nearly as frequently as his wife Gerda.
He reveals some discomfort with the process, often turning his eyes away from the
interviewer and towards his lap, sighing, and struggling as he tries to collect his thoughts.
Like Gerda’s original archived interview, Kurt’s testimony was guided toward the camp
liberation and his meeting with her. Yet this effort comes at the expense of engaging a
profound element of his wartime experience: his flight from Germany to the U.S. before
1938. He painfully recalls leaving his parents behind and the letters he received from
them with their accounts of Kristallnacht. He speaks here, not so much of his own
experiences, but of his parents’ fate as mediated through the letters he received and
preserved after the war. They are the only surviving traces of his parents’ experiences,

580
Segment of Kurt K. appearing in Testimony. Film directed by Sandy Bradley, 1993.
Screened within the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Permanent Exhibition, Closing
Segment; and in Testimony of Kurt K. 11 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0106,
Collections Department, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

 
324

and the interview provides him with the prospect of giving them a voice as well as
fulfilling his obligation to remember.
Yet the interviewer shows little interest. She hurries him along, pressing him
towards his wartime experiences as an American GI: “What did you, what did you do
now? This is after Kristallnacht…tell us very briefly [about prewar experiences] so that
we can move into the war experience for you.” But Kurt is reluctant to move forward in
the chronology without first devoting more time to the memory of his parents: “Well, I
should however, also mention that you know we kept on trying by every means to get
them [his parents] out.”
581
Kurt makes repeated mention of his failed attempts. He has
kept the letters that his parents sent to him during their time in a concentration camp in
France and he notes his own letters to them:
One of my letters was returned…address un…unknown. Left no
forwarding address. And as we found out through a tracing bureau after
the war they were in fact deported to Auschwitz, along with all the
thousands and thousands who were there. This was the time when I
was inducted into the Army. So that was … it all happened
together.
582

Kurt’s failure to rescue his parents and his coming to terms with their loss is thus
entangled with the “key” experience of Gerda’s liberation. The deep memory of his
parents’ loss is something he struggles with; his memory of Gerda is more comforting or
at least more familiar in that it has been incorporated into common memory, although it
nonetheless sparks a return to a far less stabilized recollection of loss.

581
Testimony of Kurt K. 11 October 1990. Videotape 50.030*0106, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

582
Ibid.
 
325

At no point does the Testimony film reveal that Kurt is a German-Jewish refugee
who lost his parents to the Nazis, nor is there is a glimpse of his struggle to confront the
enormity of his loss. The narrative of liberation and romantic courtship overwhelms the
entanglements of his deep and common memory. While the story of the liberation is a
key part of Kurt’s and Gerda’s testimonies, it has a heightened charge in the film through
the use of crosscutting that culminates in the revelation of their marriage.
The testimonies of Helen W., a German-Jewish survivor forced to place her
young daughter in the care of a non-Jewish family before being deported to Auschwitz,
similarly exemplifies the conflict between the museum’s institutional preferences and the
agency of witnesses. In her initial interview, she reflects on her arrival at the camp:
Probably the most upsetting was this being changed into a different person
with losing your hair, losing everything you had, just as you are born. I
think that was the greatest shock. You couldn’t see yourself, but you saw
the others, so you know what you were looking like.
583

With that, the first half of the interview officially ends, as preparations are made to insert
a second tape. Yet the camera is left running for a time, capturing an off-the-record
moment between Helen and the interviewer, which like other encounters of this nature is
noted on the transcript only with the designation “technical conversation.” In this down-
time, the interviewer comments: “You’re doing very well. And you look great on the
screen. It really looks very good.”
584
And at that moment, Helen turns to her right and

583
Testimony of Helen W. 14 November 1989. Videotape 50.030*0246, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

584
Ibid.

 
326

sees her image on the studio’s playback monitor. She appears startled at discovering her
mediated image, which echoes the recollection of seeing her new identity mirrored in the
appearance of other Auschwitz inmates. And at this formative moment, the interviewer
interjects to caution Helen not to look off camera: “…You’re really not supposed
to…we’re back at the camera!”
585

Helen has thus transgressed a representational boundary by viewing herself and
thus her new identity as an archived witness by calling attention to the mediated
components of the interview. Just as her encounter with the other victims allowed Helen
to see herself as the prisoner she had become, so her view of the playback monitor
opened a window into the formation of her identity as a “survivor.” Those two positions
converge and surface between the official and peripheral boundaries of Helen’s
testimony, between the seemingly off-camera and on-camera transitions. Helen’s
description of her self-recognition as prisoner is not included in the Testimony film,
which instead uses her story of putting her daughter in the care of a non-Jewish family—
an event that more clearly fits the film’s tripartite thematic structure.
586

As I pointed out earlier, the performative aspects of a witness’ interview—
specifically, eloquent and forceful accounts—were among the criteria for footage used in
Testimony. Fluency could, however, in some cases undermine a sense of the witness’
authenticity. Every witness included in the film had previously recorded their USHMM
testimonies, and the museum was careful to select for re-interviews those witnesses they

585
Ibid.

586
Helen W. segment in Testimony.
 
327

felt presented a credible, authentic perspective on the Holocaust. This often involved
working with witnesses who could convey a dramatic sense of grappling with memory,
yet who expressed their thoughts with consistency and emotional control. Ultimately, the
museum looked for subjects who were able to perform their testimonies with emotional
intensity and composure, even while it tried to efface the very traces of that performance.
Consider, for instance, the two versions of testimony given by Agnes A., a
Hungarian Jew who survived the war by working closely with Raoul Wallenberg during
his time as a diplomat in Budapest. By USHMM criteria, Agnes embodies an exceptional
survivor, in terms of both her clear and dramatically compelling delivery and the
harrowing and courageous circumstances of her wartime experiences. Extremely sharp
and articulate and speaking with a refined Hungarian accent, Agnes is at once foreign and
yet accessible to an American audience. She exudes an urbane and cosmopolitan air,
delivering her testimony in an upright manner and with evident confidence, and she
seems to derive a degree of comfort and mastery from performing her testimony.
Throughout most of her original archived interview, Agnes appears to inhabit the realm
of common memory, though at key moments she triggers the more rupturing and
immersive onset of deep memory.
Agnes allows a glimpse into the labored interaction between those two streams of
memory only near the end of her archived testimony, at the same time revealing the
tensions that often emerge between the voice of the Holocaust Museum and that of an
individual witness. This occurs when she reflects on her encounter long after the war
with a man whose life she had saved after he and a group of other Jews had been tied
 
328

together and thrown into the icy Danube River by members of the fascist Arrow Cross.
During her archived interview she expresses amazement not only that she had survived
the rescue attempt, but also at such a chance encounter so many years later:
Because you know, after awhile, you don’t believe it
yourself because years going by and I was sick and it [the
river] was frozen. But I was the only woman. So, and that
is a life. And I thought it was a wonderful life and I am
glad I lived through it.
587

This comment ends Agnes’ official testimony. As in the earlier examples, the camera
then captures an exchange that does not appear in the typed, catalogued transcript.

In that
moment, Agnes turns to the interviewer for an expression of affirmation:
Agnes: Well, how was it?
Interviewer: Fine. (Delayed pause followed by a sigh). Never before
have I...Bonnie (addressing her assistant) I hope we are off
tape. I have never felt so much like screaming.

Adachi: Well, why didn’t you?
588

The videotape then abruptly cuts away from this “off-the-record” exchange to the
“official” photo and document-sharing segment of the testimony. It is a striking moment
on many levels, but most relevant here is how it reveals the Holocaust Museum’s
approach to representing the mediations of memory. The closing exchange appears as a
breach in the museum’s preferred mode of testimony, laying bare for one brief moment
the performed, dialogical underpinnings of the interview. It also shows how the museum

587
Testimony of Agnes A. 29 November 1990. Videotape 50.030*0003, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

588
Ibid.

 
329

searches out the deep reflections of Holocaust memory, all the while effacing the
processes of testimonial production and reception that mark their transmission. In this
moment, the interviewer withholds and then silences any official traces of her own
emotional investment in the process. Analytical sobriety rather than a mutual exchange
of pathos take precedence, and thus one of the most riveting and revealing parts of
Agnes’ testimony is shunted to the periphery. That moment, which documents not only
what Agnes recalls but how she recalls it—representing what James Young refers to as
“received history”—is relegated to the realm of “technical conversation” in the library
transcript and later to the cutting room floor for Testimony.
589
During her interview and
in the exhibition film, Agnes’ historically exceptional and heroic work for Wallenberg is
given precedence, keeping at the margins the traces of the emotional and psychological
labor shared between interviewer and interviewee.
590
However, the interviewer’s dogged
insistence on keeping her visceral reactions off the official record ultimately brings to
light the tensions that can emerge between the agency of a witness and the preferences of
an institution.
Although Testimony rarely speaks to the more rupturing aspects of the interview
process, it does reveal other dimensions of testimonies that often remain isolated and
unseen within the archive. The screening of archived witnesses is important in making
possible, if in a limited way, the entry of selected accounts into the more public realm of

589
James Young, “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust,” History and Theory 36,
no. 4 (December 1997): 40.

590
Agnes A. segment in Testimony; Testimony of Agnes A., 29 November 1990.
Videotape 50.030*0003.

 
330

the museum, thus in a sense activating their commemorative potential. This extends to
something as fundamental as including a recovered photograph or personal artifact into
the body of the film. For instance, the film’s inclusion of a photograph of Abe M’s father
is integral, not only to restoring an image of a loved one, but also to understanding the
story of Abe’s survival. Namely, in his testimony Abe, a Lithuanian Jew, recalls how he
was saved from selection for execution only because he closely resembled his father, who
along with the family had been spared due to a personal connection to one of the SS
officers. With no firsthand knowledge of the family, only Abe’s appearance could verify
that he was in fact his father’s son.
591

In another powerful segment, Cecilie K.P., a Czech Jew, recalls the painful
memory of selections at Auschwitz, which she experienced along with her family.
Realizing that women with children were being selected for execution, Cecilie’s mother
took her grandchild from Cecilie’s sister, thus saving her own daughter. No photograph
documents that moment as it is recalled within the archived testimony. Yet it turns out
that a photograph taken by a German guard captured the moment that Cecilie describes in
her testimony, and in the film we can see the image of her grandmother carrying her
grandson towards the selections. The film’s voice-over narration captions the image:
“This photograph is of Cecilie’s mother, Reisel, and Danny (her grandson) shortly before
they were gassed.”
592
With its resources, the museum had recovered the image and

591
Abe M. segment in Testimony.

592
Cecilie K.P. segment in Testimony.

 
331

restored it to the witness, who had been left with few material traces of those who had
been lost to her. Moreover, the image has also been restored to the public record.
Cecilie’s testimony concludes the film that itself ends the Permanent Exhibition.
Although as I noted earlier, the film runs on a continual loop, so that viewers can enter
and leave the theater as they wish, its text includes a final moment when the collective
and imperative voices of survival, which are undercurrents throughout much of the
original archived testimony, enter into the museum’s public arena. In that moment
Cecilie implores the audience in the amphitheater to absorb and teach the lessons of the
Holocaust when they leave the museum:
If anybody comes to the Museum and will see the mementos that we left behind.
Whether it’s a little shoe, whether it’s a letter, whether it’s a torn prayer book—
remember—these are our precious, precious valuables. Remember that from
these books, these children studied. From these prayer books, our families
chanted their prayers. And remember them. Remember them when we are gone.
Remember the agony of the survivors who had to live with these memories and
could never touch them, could never have them back. And we hope that future
generations will never know of our pain and everybody will stand up to any form
of persecution. I taught my children love and not hate. But I could never forget. I
could never forgive.
593

These words resonate with the urgency of Cecilie’s call for remembrance and her
invocation of the ethical obligation of future generations to respect the sacred legacy left
to them. But her words are also notable because they oscillate between singular and
collective modes of address, so that “we hope that future generations will never know our
pain” fluidly mixes with the personal declaration that “I taught my children love and not

593
Ibid.

 
332

hate.”
594
Her words represent not only her personal experiences but also a larger
communal identity of survivors. Although Cecilie’s final remarks in the film are virtually
identical to those in her original archived interview, Testimony provides her with a wider
venue for declaring with greater urgency the immediacy of this obligation. The social
and pedagogic potential of her testimony, which to some extent had lain dormant within
the archive, was eventually mobilized in service of the larger institutional project of the
Holocaust Museum.
At the same time, it is important to note that the most extreme and anti-
redemptive traces of Cecilie’s anguish remain largely unscreened. In a moment that is
captured only in her archived testimony, she speaks not only of the impossibility that
another person could fully understand her experience, but also of her awareness that she
cannot comprehend what her loved ones went through: “We as survivors, we survived;
but our lives were destroyed…. Though we look like you, we can never be like you.”
She follows up that comment with a revelation: “I used to inhale the gas from my stove,
just to feel the agony of their deaths, how they died.”
595
Thus Cecilie reminds us that the
survivors, because they escaped the Final Solution, are witnesses not only for themselves
but also for those who perished. In effect, this portion of Cecilie’s archived interview
embodies the necessarily incomplete and daunting nature of prosthetic memory.

594
Ibid.

595
Testimony of Cecilie K.P. 7 May 1990. Videotape 50.030*0107, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.

 
333

Cecilie’s re-interview for Testimony nonetheless serves an authorizing function
for the museum, particularly given its placement within the Permanent Exhibition. She
and other survivors featured in the film, anticipating their eventual passing, bestow the
material traces of the Holocaust with an experiential resonance. At the same time, the
artifacts that are displayed throughout the exhibition, and that will ultimately remain after
the last survivor has passed on, lend historical grounding and institutional stability to the
recorded testimonies. In short, there is a process of mutual authorization and
authentication between survivors and the USHMM.
Testimony’s thematic, narrative, and formal structure attempts to forge
pedagogical and dramatic coherence from the testimonies of archived witnesses. The
film essentially evokes the presentational form adopted in the archived testimonies, but
adds an authoritative voice-over, familiar from “talking head” documentaries. This
narration in turn serves an expositional and thematic purpose by introducing the larger
historical contours and background, effectively creating a transition to individual
witnesses whose stories will exemplify those themes. Thus, a voice-over introduces the
theme of resistance: “Many Jews were part of the underground resistance in France.
False identity papers were critical to survive.”
596
The film then cuts to an interview with
Leo B., a Viennese Jew who worked on false identity cards for the French Resistance.
However, a review of Leo’s archived testimony seems to provide a counterpoint
to its filmed iteration. In both versions, Leo is a strikingly urbane, articulate, and
charismatic figure, with dark, handsome features and a youthful yet elegant appearance.

596
Leo B. segment in Testimony.
 
334

However his original testimony reveals an intense vulnerability and depth of reflection
that is not nearly as prevalent in the film version. For instance, the film does not recreate
the moment from his archived interview when Leo wells up with emotion as he discusses
going into therapy after the war. He sighs deeply and in a hushed voice struggles to put
his words together as he wipes away tears, recalling his mother’s decision to send him
away to Belgium:
My mother was very much bent on sending me away and frankly, it is
constantly a source of guilt for me, to know that she had sent me away and
they couldn’t do it. But then when I consulted a psychiatrist, because I
didn’t want to have to live with feelings such as these, he confirmed to me
that: “Would your mother be able to speak today, she would still say…she
was glad she did it.” I’m breaking down because she never had a chance
in life. She and my sisters and fifty-five others of my family never had a
chance in life…She was instrumental in saving my life.
597

Leo’s remarks demonstrate how this unbearable memory continues to inform his postwar
life. Rather than simply remembering, he returns to the experience, one that he inhabits
when he gives testimony. Leo shares this story in the first third of his testimony, thus in
proper sequence, but its shattering legacy of guilt takes him forward to the aftermath of
the Holocaust. Rather than to extend discussion of the pivotal issue of his tragic legacy,
the interviewer intervenes to keep the story on its narrative track:
Leo: But, I got to get myself together to make this thing.

Interviewer: Let’s pull it back. Pull it back.

Leo: Pull it back.

597
Testimony of Leo B., 28 September 1989 and 31 July 1989; Videotape 50.030*0038.

 
335

Interviewer: What happened?...You are now in Belgium… What
did you do?
598

On one level, this exchange illustrates both the individually and institutionally
imposed regulation of emotion and cognition—the attempt by both witnesses and
interviewers at the Holocaust Museum to contain the excesses of trauma for the benefit of
transmitting a story. The unfolding of common memory—the initiation of a narrative
sequence in an effort to recall how things were—functions as a gateway to deep memory,
marking Leo’s journey back to a past trauma and revealing the interpenetration of past
and present and the impossibility of keeping those temporalities discrete. Leo’s
reflections on guilt and the anti-redemptive aspects of traumatic memory are not of
primary interest either within the archived testimony or for the testimony produced for
the film. Rather, both testimonies emphasize Leo’s compelling performance of memory,
his charismatic demeanor, and his dramatic and exceptional story, in particular his escape
from the boxcar en route to Auschwitz. Yet, as I have described in my discussion of
overlapping interviews, this story is one that Leo has mastered through public talks and in
at least three different formal testimonies. In telling this story of escape—unlike his
discussion of therapy and feelings of guilt—he conveys a sense of mastery over the
narrative. Yet earlier in that archived testimony for the USHMM, before the museum’s
designated “key segment” appears, Leo expresses the impossibility of describing the
separation of a family at the Drancy camp:

598
Ibid.

 
336

The trauma of that family is indescribable. I can say words; they are not
answerable. I can express thoughts; they are unthinkable. Even to express them
is almost a ludicrous endeavor. Dehumanization to the worst
degree.
599

The rawness of his delivery here conveys a sense that he has told this particular fragment
of memory far less often than his story of escape. Though both memories resonate with
authority and authenticity, his recollection from Drancy refers back to the original
experience but maintains the impossibility of ever fully recovering it.
The archived and film versions of the Belgian Jewish survivor Lilly M.’s
testimony further reinforce this point. Her interview for the film pays considerable
attention to her dehumanization at the hands of the Nazis, particularly upon her arrival at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
600
However, it does not address either the lingering legacy of that
humiliation or her ambivalent feelings about having survived. By contrast, her first
archived interview makes painfully clear that the introduction to Auschwitz continued to
haunt her:
They had shaved our heads; and I felt so ashamed. And also when they
told us to undress and to shower, they made us feel like…like were
animals. The men were walking around, and laughing and looking at us.
And you take a girl at that age, who was never been exposed to a
person…to a man, and you stay there naked…I wanted the ground should
open, and I should go in it. It took me many, many years for me to get
over this. My husband always wondered why I would go into the
bathroom and get undressed, and come out in my nightgown. And I never
told him why, except recently.
601

599
Ibid.

600
Lilly M. segment in Testimony.

601
Testimony of Lilly M., 10 May 1990. Videotape 50.030*0146.
 
337

The film does not include this detail about her self-consciousness around her husband,
which relates to the realm of intimate, postwar experience. Its absence not only
minimizes the extent to which Lilly’s present condition is affected by experiences from
her past; it also obscures her mixed feelings about the burden of her memories. Lilly’s
archived testimony contains an “off-camera” moment when she turns to the interviewer
and remarks: “Yet each person who tells his story has a different story and yet more or
less the same.”
602
The complexity of that insight, which neither the transcript of the
original interview nor Testimony captured precisely, is available only when Lilly’s voice
as survivor brushes up against the institutional voice of the archive and museum.
Testimony represents Lilly and other subjects as both exemplars of a broader
historical experience and as witnesses to their own personal stories. They carry not only
the weight of a singular trauma but also the burden of communal remembrance. At the
same time, the film carefully employs contrasts and counterpoints among its multiple
subjects to underscore the fact that they did not have the same options, that no single
approach to survival was effective everywhere and throughout the war, and that each
survivor developed his or her own perspectives on their pasts. The film does not,
however, present the dialogue and friction that often emerge between interviewer and
interviewee. As a result, there is little indication of the testimonial process that may have
generated the anguished expressions and tears that we do see and hear. Thus Testimony
complicates what Lawrence Langer calls the “intuitive shared intimacy” between

602
Ibid.

 
338

historical witnesses and interviewers who are able to draw out the subtext of traumatic
narratives.
603

The Interactive “Conversion” of Testimony
The USHMM’s Wexler Learning Center (Learning Center or LC), which is part
of the museum’s Education Department, aims to harness the interactive potential of its
collected audiovisual testimonies. Located outside the Permanent Exhibition, adjacent to
its exit, the Learning Center is nonetheless an integral extension of that core exhibition
space. As such, its purpose is to enable visitors who have just experienced the PE to
more closely engage with some of the human, social, and moral issues introduced by the
Testimony film. The LC, in other words, is a space where the instrumentalization of
Holocaust memory is strategically practiced in conjunction with the guiding narrative of
the Permanent Exhibition.
From the outset, museum planners foresaw distinctions between the Learning
Center’s educational and interactive functions and the more scholarly domain of the
archives and library that are housed within the museum’s research body, the Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies. Since the museum was developed as a less traditional,
more “conceptual museum,” its planners sought to create a narrative bridge between the
Permanent Exhibition’s story and the LC’s hands-on tools. The archives and libraries, by
contrast, would foster rigorous historical scholarship, generating research that reinforced

603
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research
Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; 1988-011; Box
20; Lawrence Langer.

 
339

the historical authority and credibility of the institution and its exhibitions. In the words
of the planners’ “Learning Center Overview”: “Distinct from the Center for Holocaust
Studies, which will be devoted to scholarly research and teaching on an academic level,
the Learning Center will be of interest to virtually all museum visitors.”
604

While it is understandable that museum planners would make these distinctions of
access and purpose, I am more interested in their implications for the uses of testimony.
Clearly, testimony is used by those within and those outside the academic community,
and they do so with different interests and agendas in mind. The substantive
consequences of making distinctions in the uses of testimony beyond the archive are
evident when we consider the populist language of LC planners:
It will be a dynamic user-friendly facility where visitors will be able to
engage in an array of information retrieval activities. By speaking a
language which is attractive and increasingly familiar to the general public,
especially to young adults and children, the Learning Center will serve as a
magnet for a rapidly growing audience.
605

In addition to accessibility and usability, the planners emphasized the museum’s
mission to address emerging events and themes, particularly raising awareness of
contemporary genocides and conducting tolerance education. The LC’s interactive
dynamic would promote both those aims. The Learning Center, the Permanent
Exhibition, and the Committee on Conscience (which I will examine later in this chapter)
would be the vital sites for fulfilling the museum’s mandate as a living memorial. And

604
“The Learning Center: An Overview with Preliminary Budgets,” 26 August 1988.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—
Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; Box 20; 1988-011; Learning Center.

605
Ibid.

 
340

the LC’s interactivity was crucial to the activation of that embodied memory: “Learning
is active rather than passive; it is at the visitor’s choice rather than in pre-prescribed form;
and it is multidimensional rather than limited to words or texts.”
606
With the LC’s
preference for sources beyond the “traditional” written documents, audiovisual testimony
would play a particularly important role, allowing museum educators to develop
exhibitions and programs that could draw from a searchable database that organized
testimony according to specific subjects and curricula.
Like Testimony’s focus on “key segments” or witnesses’ core experiences, as
against the more labored, discursive aspects of testimonial exchange, the Learning Center
was designed to mine the most compelling aspects of memory, abstracted from the
context of the interview process. Rather than encouraging the sustained viewing of
testimony—that is to say, an engagement with how testimony is produced—the Learning
Center was designed to stimulate reception. Users would work interactively with
testimonies, not watching them as individual stories so much as accessing them as bits of
content subordinate to the interactive framework.
The planners’ preference was often for material that captured the most extreme
experiences of the Holocaust—testimony that got as close as possible to the destruction.
Again citing the Learning Center Overview: “For instance, while we have the Testimony
of many people who served in the Sonderkommando, no such testimony has been
gathered from those who were inside the gas chamber when the gas did not work. Once

606
Ibid.

 
341

all of this oral history material is gathered, it will have to be edited for the Learning
Center to use.”
607
In the absence of voices that could testify to the end-experience of
genocide, the Learning Center tried to locate testimonies that came as close as possible.
Planners also searched for testimonies that fit the Learning Center’s interactive
framework. Records of the Learning Center Advisory Committee reveal illuminating
discussions about the interactive potential—or “convertibility”—of testimony. In one
exchange concerning the education-related criteria for a “good” testimony, planners
pressed for the acquisition of segments dense with “an avalanche of terms, concepts, and
ideas, presented very rapidly.” This view is described at length in an un-attributed
Learning Center Memo entitled “The Peanut Butter Theory: Evaluating the Potential of
Existing Video Testimonies for Conversion to Interactive Delivery”:
As we continue to examine individual oral histories, I think it would be
helpful to articulate several general criteria for evaluating their potential
convertibility. What are the qualities that constitute good oral history
from an interactive point of view? They are the same qualities that make
good peanut butter. It should be thick, chunky, and easy to spread…. A
dense, substantial testimony should include a virtual avalanche of terms,
concepts, and ideas presented very rapidly…. Smooth peanut butter is
amorphous stuff. It just goes on and on. What you need are chunks.
These are small, identifiable segments that have clean beginnings and
endings and which can serve some purpose. Deliciously chunky video is
built in small units of information that stand alone very usefully. It has the
following attributes: Chunks are less than two minutes long; the survivor
starts and stops cleanly; the video starts and stops cleanly in relation to the
narration; the information stands alone, with related bits of content close

607
Ibid. Emphasis in original.

 
342

together… Is the oral history thick? Is it chunky? Is it easy to spread?
Three “yes” responses lend a very powerful endorsement to conversion.
608

This passage’s focus on shaping the usability of testimony helps explain the
museum’s previously discussed “silent” approach to conducting oral histories—
minimizing the voice of the interviewer in order to achieve more easily edited segments,
all the while withholding the more dialogical aspects. The emphasis on “clean” breaks
and condensed chunks attempts to reduce testimony to its pith, but assumes that the core
contains only the witness’ individual utterances rather than the exchanges between
interviewer and interviewee. Furthermore, within this interactive framework, there is a
particular emphasis on testimonial content that “does double or triple duty within a
program.”
609
With this intent, planners necessarily turned to survivors as avatars of a
wider historical experience, one that served a thematic, pedagogical imperative.
Rather than arguing against any effort to segment or instrumentalize Holocaust
testimony, I contend that fostering new modes of testimonial usability is necessary if
interviews are to have any role beyond the archive. At the same time, we must be aware
of the underlying ethical choices that shape the process of segmentation, central among
which is how to capture the mutual labor of giving and receiving testimony. To do so
requires a process that selects testimony footage not only for the useful “chunks” of

608
Memorandum from Steven Koppel to Learning Center Advisory Committee Re: “The
Peanut Butter Theory: Evaluating the Potential of Existing Video Testimonies for
Conversion to Interactive Delivery,” 9 February 1989. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-1997; Box
20; 1988-011; Learning Center.

609
Ibid.

 
343

information it provides, but that also sheds light on the form of an interview. Perhaps the
museum wished to withhold traces of mediation that might undermine the direct authority
of witness testimony, a particular concern given the museum’s concern with defending
the historical record against Holocaust revisionists and deniers. Nonetheless, it places an
unnecessary and unrealistic burden on testimony.
That is to say, testimony cannot be reduced to history. Rather it is one element in
a much wider constellation of historical and cultural sources that include official and non-
official documents, personal artifacts, topographical remnants, and other traces.
Individual testimonies, if evaluated on their own terms, are rarely, if ever, able to
maintain traditional historical standards of consistency: they are inevitably marked by
the fissures created by the extremity of events and the passing of time. In focusing too
closely on the core or “key” segments of testimonies, archives, museums, and their
patrons can lose sight of that process, in turn obscuring the ethical bond that must be
generated between witnesses and audiences/users. Engaging with testimony in ethically
grounded ways, I would argue, demands a close examination of its form and content
beyond the conventional frame of the camera and outside the institutional preferences
that can guide the archive. As illustrated by my discussion of the Testimony film, some
of the most revealing aspects of this process take place outside the boundaries of official
testimony, in particular during what are often deemed “technical” transitions. The oral
history department’s protocols for establishing silence or “convertibility,” including
preferences for emotional reserve and “clean” breaks, cannot account for the emotional
excesses that often manifest themselves during the course of interviews. Rather than
 
344

serving as a distraction from our search for knowledge, these interruptions underscore the
degree to which testimony is a shared and mediated labor. It thus provides a framework
for considering how to look beyond the Holocaust to other instances of suffering that
require ethical and socially engaged documentation.
Despite their pedagogic preference for segments of testimony, the Learning
Center planners wanted to maintain the personal, experiential quality of witness
testimony, fitting its service as a more embodied extension of the Permanent Exhibition.
Prior to its opening, the museum commissioned a Holocaust educator and historian, a
children’s book publisher, a user interface design expert, and educators in the field of
curricular development to report collectively on the design of the Learning Center in
terms of its functionality and pedagogical possibilities. Their findings determined that
the initial designs for the LC relied too heavily on interactive display tools that could
potentially overwhelm users who had just emerged from a grueling journey through the
Permanent Exhibition.
610
At the same time, the report concluded that—in moderation—
audiovisual testimony could not only draw in these visitors, but also bring them closer to
the human dimensions of the official history. While interactive tools could deliver the
content of testimonies, the embodied nature of the interviews could help to counteract
sensory overload from the exhibition. The report also criticized the excessive

610
“Report on the Evaluation of the Learning Center—The United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum,” Prepared by Rachelle S. Heller and Jon McKeeby, 13 December
1991, and Memorandum Re: “The Peanut Butter Theory.” USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-
1997; Box 20; 1988-011; Learning Center.

 
345

segmentation of oral histories, noting that certain testimony footage was too truncated or
began midstream: “Care needs to be taken . . . that the materials begin on a whole
note.”
611

Despite these concerns, the report’s critiques were expressed in terms consistent
with the museum’s preference for “clean breaks.” They also failed to address the
possibility that the voice of the interviewer or any larger reflection on the process would
enter into the learning plan. I want to argue that this method of forging interactive
testimonial content extends the museum’s larger efforts to calibrate the visceral and
cognitive demands of testimony as it attempts to reach the widest possible audience
without compromising its moral or historical credibility. Planners conceived both the
Testimony film and the Learning Center as embodied counterparts to what they regarded
as a largely disembodied exhibition space. Considering the prevalence of perpetrator
perspectives within the Permanent Exhibition, which offers far more coverage of the
process of destruction than of lives and cultures that existed prior to the Holocaust, the
appearance of surviving witnesses on film provides a glimpse into the lost world,
revealing the personal textures of memory in a space where history is largely conveyed
from the top down. Anne Millen, a staff member in the Education Department, told me
that both the Testimony film and the Learning Center were intended to provide a “punch
in the gut” to visitors who were cognitively overwhelmed by historical information. In
addition, each allowed witnesses to author their own experiences rather than relegating

611
Memorandum Re: “The Peanut Butter Theory.”
 
346

them to a role as objects in a perpetrator-driven narrative. Otherwise, Millen noted:
“History will be reduced to dying in the Holocaust.”
612

Whereas the Permanent Exhibition has remained almost unchanged since it
opened, the Learning Center has continued to evolve. During my discussions with Edna
Friedberg, one of the Education Department staff most responsible for the LC’s
development, she noted its growth from a more enclosed exhibition based on a largely
static collection of media sources to a more dynamic environment featuring eyewitnesses
that include liberators, survivors, and rescuers and providing both live and recorded
testimony. As against the more encyclopedic intention of earlier incarnations, the current
Learning Center is more thematic and aims to provide visitors with an emotional
entryway into the material, slipping in historical information along the way.
613
The
Permanent Exhibition was designed to be precisely that—a permanent display of an
official history. The Learning Center was to generate active or living memory that would
address the changing demands on Holocaust memory, including efforts to confront
contemporary genocides. In the assessment of Edward Linenthal: “Boundaries could be
permeable in the Learning Center, but not elsewhere.”
614

A sign “Documenting the Path of American Liberators” marks the archway into
the first room of the LC, which contains a large screen showing testimonies by American

612
Ann Millen, Historian, Education Department, USHMM, interview by author, 26
March 2007, USHMM.

613
Edna Friedberg, Historian, Education Department, USHMM, interview by author, 26
March 2007, USHMM.

614
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 125.

 
347

soldiers who came upon a concentration camp in their push into Germany.
615
A nearby
inscription invokes the authority of the witnesses: “Explore history through the lens of
those who were there.” The next room houses “The Nuremberg Trials: What is Justice?”
an exhibit covering the judicial perspective on the Holocaust. It serves as transition to the
next section, designated as the “Genocide Emergency Room,” which features interactive
programming as well as documentaries covering contemporary genocides, including
events in Bosnia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. Although it includes computer monitors
dedicated to “responding to threats of genocide today,” the events of the Holocaust are
never far from reach, with links to a page from the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the
USHMM’s on-line reference work. This section’s location in the middle of the Learning
Center, preceded by exhibits on liberation and postwar trials and followed by a section on
Holocaust eyewitness testimony, reinforces the Shoah’s central and authorizing role of
framing the museum’s engagement with contemporary genocide.
Genocide awareness as a pressing aspect of the museum’s educational and
outreach initiatives is largely anchored as a rhetorical extension of Holocaust
commemoration, particularly through the creation of survivor networks and the collection
of oral histories. The LC underscores this perspective through its Ben and Vladka Meed
Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which includes registry databases for searching
the names of survivors within North America. A miniature amphitheater across from the
registry monitors houses a display entitled “Explore Eyewitness Testimony.” In contrast
to the Testimony amphitheater, this interactive installation allows visitors to choose

615
The following descriptive passages, including quotes, are taken from my notes as I
explored the Wexler Learning Center on March 26, 2007.
 
348

among a series of pre-edited testimonies, many of which are based on interviews from the
film, as well as to search them according to various historical and experience terms.
I want to draw attention to a section of LC testimony catalogued under the
heading “Survivor Voices,” which features the stories of Kurt and Gerda K., whom I
discussed in analyzing the film Testimony. As previously noted, the film footage
emphasized the melodramatic aspects of Kurt and Gerda’s courtship, but did not cover
Kurt’s life in Germany before his immigration to the U.S., despite its importance in his
archived testimony. These pre-war experiences come to the surface in the LC’s three-
minute long segment, which at the bottom of the monitor provides a running text with
biographies for Kurt and Gerda. As Kurt tells his story of liberating Gerda from the
camp, a caption informs us that: “Kurt left Germany for the U.S. in 1937, but his parents
were unable to leave before the outbreak of war. Kurt’s parents were eventually deported
to Auschwitz. In 1947, Kurt joined the U.S. Army.” This citation, despite its brevity and
less prominent location, provides a window into Kurt’s personal history that is absent
from the film but that must have affected him as he returned to Europe in his role as
American liberator.
Projecting Testimonial Authority
The USHMM’s Committee on Conscience (or COC), an official department
charged with the responsibility of raising awareness of contemporary genocides,
augments the efforts of the Learning Center to activate the museum’s resources beyond
its institutional walls. The idea for a Committee on Conscience dates back to 1979 when
Hyman Bookbinder, who later became a member of the COC and the USHMC, suggested
 
349

that the museum assemble a committee of “distinguished moral leaders” from the U.S.,
with the mission of alerting the world to emerging genocides.
616
This idea was
incorporated into the Presidential Commission Report to President Carter on September
27, 1979. As described in that report:
The Commission recommends that a Committee on Conscience composed of
distinguished moral leaders in America be appointed. This Committee would
receive reports of genocide (actual or potential) anywhere in the world. In the
event of an outbreak, it would have access to the President, the Congress, and the
public in order to alert the national conscience, influence policy makers, and
stimulate worldwide action to bring such acts to a halt.
617

Despite the COC’s authorization by the USHMC, its vaguely defined jurisdiction remains
a contentious issue.
On July 23, 1980, the first exploratory Committee on Conscience convened to
discuss how to advance its aims, in particular, whether it would serve as an extension of
the museum or as an organ of the federal government.
618
Officials within the State
Department and the National Security Council who were consulted expressed concerns
about the COC’s political leverage. More specifically, they feared that giving the COC

616
Transcript of Meeting of the Ad Hoc Exploratory Group on the Committee on
Conscience, USHMM Council, 6 December 1993, p. 11. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike”
Weinberg; 1979–1994; 1997–014; Box 22; Committee: Conscience.

617
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, President’s Commission on the
Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, Chairman, Report to the President, 27 September 1979,
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/faq/languages/en/06/01/commission/#principles
(accessed 6 April 2009).

618
Transcript of Meeting of the Ad Hoc Exploratory Group on the Committee on
Conscience, USHMM Council, 6 December 1993, p. 12.

 
350

the authority to designate certain events as genocides would complicate and constrain
administration efforts to address issues at a diplomatic or political level.
619
With this
issue settled, over the following decade the museum attempted to formulate a politically
acceptable framework for its operation.
The central question facing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council was
how to draw on the museum’s moral authority and institutional history in confronting
contemporary genocides. If the Permanent Exhibition was conceptualized as the
museum’s “soul,” then the Committee of Conscience was envisioned as its moral
amplifier. Carrying the legacy of the Holocaust and the federal mandate of the USHMM,
the COC could bring contemporary suffering to public consciousness. Yet this would
require a delicate balance among the museum’s multiple constituencies. As an institution
mandated and partially funded by Congress as the central commemorative site of
American remembrance of the Holocaust, the museum is firmly entrenched at the federal
level. This status provides the museum’s political and cultural capital. Its moral
authority, however, derives from the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust and its obligation
to commemorate that singular event. This dual mandate creates internal and external
frictions, which in turn underscore the limitations of mobilizing the Holocaust as a source
of living, interventionist memory.
The limits to that moral authority are entangled in the museum’s institutional
history, and they arise most often around questions of defining genocide against the
paradigm of the Holocaust. This tension between the particular and universal nature of

619
Ibid.; pp. 3-4.

 
351

the Holocaust played out throughout planning discussions for the COC. As Hyman
Bookbinder commented during meetings of the ad hoc exploratory group, “When we
identify something as genocide, we are not saying it is a Holocaust. Holocaust is still
another one. It is another kind of definition.”
620

Other members expressed concerns that comparison with other events would
dilute the Holocaust’s singularity. In the words of Leo Melamed: “You can’t demean
our Holocaust with anything else.”
621
In a more moderate voice, Ben Meed echoed these
sentiments. He did not necessarily oppose extending the museum’s agenda to genocide
awareness, but he thought more time was needed:
My heart was not yet ready to bring this into the museum. Maybe two years from
now, maybe three years from now. I was not ready yet in my heart to bring it in
yet…. So I feel if I tell you what I feel, I am representing the feelings of a lot of
people.
622

Meed thus invoked not only the power of his own experience but also that of the survivor
community. Like Helen Fagin objecting to the display of human hair in the Permanent
Exhibition, Meed couched his objections in individual and communal terms. Although

620
Transcript of the Meeting of Ad Hoc Exploratory Group on the Committee of
Conscience, USHMM Council, 24 May 1994, p. 7. USHMM; Institutional Archives;
Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike” Weinberg;
1979–1994; 1997–014; Box 22; Committee: Conscience.

621
Ibid.; p. 8.

622
Transcript of the Meeting of Ad Hoc Exploratory Group on the Committee of
Conscience, USHMM Council, 25 October 1994, pp. 20-22. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike”
Weinberg; 1979–1994; 1997–014; Box 22; Committee: Conscience.

 
352

the community of Holocaust survivors is hardly monolithic, internal debates about
fulfilling the museum’s mandate were often framed in ways that suggested the contrary.
Miles Lerman, a former chairman of the USHMC, once proclaimed: “To begin
with, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council is a federal institution. We are not a
Jewish one.”
623
Yet those distinctions are often blurred. The museum’s commemorative
and pedagogical emphasis on the uniquely Jewish aspects of the Holocaust coupled with
the strong Jewish leadership presence underscores the deeply embedded parochial, indeed
sectarian, investment in an ostensibly American institution. Furthermore, one of the
central foundations for the federal charter, as laid out in the Presidential Report and
Recommendations, is not only that the U.S. government failed to take sufficient action to
save Jews during the war, but also that the nation has a special obligation to Holocaust
commemoration because of the large numbers of Jewish survivors who immigrated to the
country in its aftermath. That is to say, the two main justifications for the creation of the
museum are embedded in the particularity of Jewish suffering. Although the museum’s
narrative is framed to fit the American landscape in which it is housed and although it
espouses moral lessons consistent with that national context, it is the communal
dimensions of the Holocaust, most specifically the Jewish experience, that provide a
central justification for importing the Holocaust to the American landscape.
A related issue involves the museum’s dual function as both a memorial and a
museum. The conjoined commemorative and pedagogical aims of the museum/memorial
often fracture, as illustrated by debates over the display of hair and graphic images. The

623
Transcript of the Meeting of Ad Hoc Exploratory Group on the Committee of
Conscience, 24 May 1994, p. 88.
 
353

friction is also highlighted by the proximity of the Permanent Exhibition, a space of
historical pedagogy, to the Hall of Remembrance, an area dedicated for reflection and
events of remembrance. Opponents of forming a Committee on Conscience tended to
invoke sacred rather than pedagogical issues. Skeptics were concerned that the COC
would dilute the museum’s institutional authority by extending its mission beyond the
history of the Holocaust and outside its institutional walls, thus running the risk of being
relegated to the more common realm of popular memory. Harold Gershowitz, a member
of the ad hoc exploratory committee, summed up this position: “The reality seems to be
that when we get beyond the Museum function, or the Museum aspect, we begin to
distance ourselves very rapidly from what we are really qualified to do.”
624
Countering
this objection, Hyman Bookbinder argued that by addressing the mainstream, as
Schindler’s List had, the museum could reach a wider audience, thus “pricking the
conscience of the world again.”
625
Other members continued to distinguish between the
educational efforts of the museum as an “institution” and the influence of Schindler’s List
as a “cultural vehicle.”
626

Echoing my earlier discussion about the Holocaust Museum’s response to
Schindler’s List, this discussion reflects the notion that the museum recognizes the noble
effort behind the popular film, but sees itself as the arbiter of an authentic representation
of the Holocaust. And in its own use of cinematic and audiovisual media, the impulse for

624
Ibid.. p. 12.

625
Ibid., p. 200.

626
Ibid., pp. 200-201.

 
354

visceral impact is carefully regulated. The COC responded to the same impulses, as in a
work plan drafted for the body in 2000:
The Committee takes a reasoned approach, basing its public statements on
a studied application of first principles to the facts of a given situation.
The Committee’s work reflects a profoundly emotional commitment to
combating mass violence. But that emotion is channeled, and thus made
more forceful, by discipline and by sobriety.
627

As in the museum’s collection and display activities, its external public engagement is
carefully calibrated in terms of emotions, in concert with a more analytically grounded
and traditional historiographic approach to evidence. The COC would respond to the
visceral demands of ongoing genocide, but without compromising the moral authority,
historical standards, and institutional credibility of the museum.
Finally, the COC debates reflected the particular cultural moment when the
USHMM emerged—specifically a time when the Holocaust’s legacy was being
established in urgent anticipation of the passing of survivors and their living authority.
For people like Shaike Weinberg, Michael Berenbaum, and Hyman Bookbinder, that
impending paradigm shift brought a unique opportunity to transfer the moral authority
embedded in the legacy of the Holocaust and its survivors before the full emergence of a
postmemory moment. Rather than using the Holocaust as a measure of contemporary
horrors, they advocated on behalf of the Holocaust as a source of moral capital, in doing
so supported by the museum’s institutional credibility and public visibility.

627
“Responding to the Future: Work Plan 2000.” 3 May 2000. USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Director’s Office; Records of the Museum Director—Jeshajahu “Shaike”
Weinberg; 1979–1995; 1997–014; Box 22; Committee: Conscience.

 
355

Although Congress mandated the USHMM to commemorate a particular
historical event, it also conferred a mission to engage ongoing atrocities. Thus it is worth
examining the museum’s efforts to document and call attention to other genocides. As
the direct or living connection to the Shoah continues to fade, there has been a dual
impulse within the museum to both concretize and sacralize those events, while at the
same time opening a path for looking beyond that history and outside the walls of the
museum—to make the Holocaust legible and relevant to the contemporary moment.
Accordingly, the COC’s scope has continued to evolve, and in 2000 a new work
plan, entitled “Responding to the Future,” extended the initial focus on genocide in
specific terms to considerations of “related crimes against humanity,” as delineated by
the International Criminal Court to encompass—but not be limited to—widespread or
systematic attacks against civilians, including murder; enslavement; forced transfer; and
sexual assault.
628
In the process, the museum explicitly acknowledged that the conditions
under which genocide and other atrocities were occurring had radically changed. In
particular: “Agents for the collecting and disseminating of information about mass
violence now exist that could only have been imagined then.”
629
The plan recognizes the
presence of an established human rights network—ranging from organizations like
Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch—and reflects on how the “CNN Effect”
has allowed for a more rapid and advanced coverage of suffering around the globe.
630

628
Ibid.

629
Ibid.

630
Ibid
 
356

With that in mind, the plan explained that the COC’s aim is to inform and frame how
those depictions of suffering might be made actionable. Recognizing an “information
overload,” the COC would focus on the most pressing cases and then mobilize the unique
moral authority of the Holocaust Museum to promote awareness and effect change.
631

As I have repeatedly argued in regard to the overall epistemology of the
Holocaust Museum, including the COC, its efforts to address contemporary issues are
directly shaped by a highly structured merger of analytical and affective modes of
address. To quote the work plan for the COC:
As the subject of genocide can seem both overwhelming on an emotional level
and intrinsically hard to understand, people frequently express the need for
specific tools to help and to find their bearings in dealing with this topic. These
educational tools [those prescribed by the COC] are needed to help people
understand the story of modern genocide and answer questions such as these:
“Who created this concept of genocide?”, “What role did Holocaust survivors
play in the struggle to prevent genocide from happening again?”...”Why has the
post-Holocaust vow of ‘Never Again’ failed?”
632

Note here the emphasis on penetrating the overflow of information on genocide on both a
cognitive and emotional level, and the COC’s aim to ultimately ground engagement with
genocide through the construction of an institutionally embedded narrative. The COC’s
guidelines acknowledge the overflow of traumatic representation and attempt to anchor
the exposure to genocide not only in Holocaust history, but also in the history of the
Holocaust Museum and American Holocaust commemoration more broadly.

631
Ibid.

632
Ibid.
 
357

Two relatively recent events highlight the challenges of recasting Holocaust
testimony beyond the confines of the Holocaust Museum in order to address
contemporary issues. The first relates to a Holocaust denial conference held in Iran in
December 2006. Titled “Holocaust: A World Prospect,” the event brought together
seventy participants including Holocaust deniers, discredited scholars, white
supremacists, and a few members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish fringe groups, who gathered
in Tehran under the guise of “debating” the Holocaust.
633

One of the more striking aspects of the ensuing public controversy was the
response by the North American survivor community. The Simon Wiesenthal Center
convened a counter-program called “Witness to the Truth,” a videoconference of seventy
Holocaust survivors, each giving a brief testimony to challenge the seventy participants at
the Tehran conference—a body for a body, if you will. The USHMM hosted a group of
local Muslim leaders, each of whom—after a tour through the Permanent Exhibition—lit
memorial candles in the Hall of Remembrance. With three Holocaust survivors at their
side, the Muslim clergy invoked the moral lessons of the Holocaust, calling for tolerance,
understanding, and the need to relate to the suffering of others. USHMM Executive
Director Sara Bloomfield appealed to the three primary forms of evidence that granted
the museum the authority to address the dubious conference in Iran:

633
Simon Wiesenthal Center, “Holocaust Survivors in Three Cities Across North
America Join Together to Confront Iran’s Conference of Holocaust Deniers and
Revisionists,” Simon Wiesenthal Center press release, 11 December 2006,
http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/s/content.asp?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4442915&ct=5
849251 (accessed 15 December, 2006).

 
358

We stand here in this Hall of Remembrance, America’s national memorial
to the victims of the Holocaust … And right behind us, under this eternal
flame, we have the ashes from the camps, the ghettos, and from American
military cemeteries for those soldiers who died in the fight against Nazi
tyranny. We stand here in this building that houses millions of pieces of
evidence of this crime, perhaps the most well documented crime in human
history….We stand here with three survivors of the Holocaust, and with
our great Muslim friends, to condemn this outrage in Iran.
634

Bloomfield’s comments underscored how the physical remains of the Shoah, the
federal mandate, and the living, verifying power of the survivors converged to situate the
museum as a public sphere for addressing intolerance and Holocaust denial. Yet these
discourses reveal the underlying anxiety that marks the transition to post-memory when
survivors of the Holocaust can no longer attest in person to having “been there.”
Recorded testimonies will preserve their performance of memory, but their embodied
presence will be to a large extent transferred to archival and commemorative
institutions—no longer able to match one living body for another in the cause of
remembrance. In the growing absence of living subjects, the physical traces of the
Holocaust—the shorn hair, the human ashes, and the Polish boxcar—will increasingly
serve the cause of giving witness.
The second event emerged from the Committee on Conscience, pursuant to its
mandate to address contemporary genocide though public programs, temporary
exhibitions, and public and private communications with policy makers. During

634
USHMM, “United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Denounces Iranian
Conference on the Holocaust,” press release, 11 December 2006, http://www.ushmm.org/
museum/press/archives/detail.php?category=07-general&content=2006-12-11 (accessed
15 December 2006).

 
359

Thanksgiving week of 2006, the COC sponsored a photo installation, Our Walls Bear
Witness: Darfur: Who Will Survive Today? Curated by Chicago architect Leslie Thomas,
using photographs from her traveling exhibit Darfur/Darfur, the event featured rotating
images of that genocide projected onto three forty-square-foot panels on the museum’s
exterior walls. Accompanied by mournful Sudanese music, the photographs presented
such images as malnourished bodies, burning villages, and heavily-armed child
soldiers.
635

The large-scale projection raised a series of concerns for the COC relating to the
delicate balance between representational sanitization and humanization. A handful of
the exhibit’s more graphic images, particularly a photograph of a murdered three-year-old
boy with a crushed face, were omitted from the outdoor display for fear of offending
passersby. This approach was consistent with the museum’s policy to exclude or conceal
behind privacy walls excessively graphic images, particularly those of non-decomposed
corpses. It also reflected the mandate for the museum’s architectural design, which stated
that the structure should be prominent but non-threatening, imposing but not disorienting.
It should evoke the Holocaust, but not at the expense of compromising the American
narrative of the National Mall. Rather than frightening people away from the horrors on
or inside its walls, the museum should inspire a sense of awe and sanctity.
636

635
Our Walls Bear Witness, USHMM, 20 November 2006. Personal observation.

636
Typed Transcripts of the Meeting of the Museum Concept Planning Committee; 6
November 1985, pp. 42-43. USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of the
Chairperson—Elie Wiesel, 1978-1986; 1997-013; Box 21; Museum Concept Planning
Committee Minutes 11/6/85.

 
360

The museum launched the installation with an opening-night event in the Hall of
Remembrance. It featured speeches by the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios,
as well as Holocaust survivor Nesse G., Rwandan genocide survivor Clemantine
Wamariya, and Darfurian refugee Omer Ismail, each of whom gave accounts of his or her
respective genocide. As with the museum’s response to the Tehran conference,
Holocaust survivors played a pivotal role in the Our Walls Bear Witness event. Before
the opening address, organizers asked survivors in the general audience to stand and be
recognized, inspiring steady applause. And the presence of Nesse Godin, as one of the
museum’s exemplary survivors, provided the crucial, authorizing link in the chain of
other genocide survivors on the dais.
One of the more striking aspects of the Darfur photography installation was the
absence of descriptive captioning to accompany the images projected on the outer walls
of the museum. There was a consensus within the COC that the large-scale, viscerally
charged projections would speak for themselves.
637
But who are the children carrying
guns in the photos? Which village is being destroyed, and by whom? These and other
questions remained largely unanswered by the installation, which appeared to be more
heavily invested in drawing attention to the intensity of the suffering represented in the
images than in providing historical or political expositions. This particular approach to
visual pedagogy underscored a dilemma: how to present extreme images in ways that not

637
Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Project Director USHMM Committee on Conscience,
interview with the author, Washington, DC, 23 February 2007.

 
361

only spark an affective response but also make legible potential forms of analysis and
action.
Furthermore, the event did not emphasize the specific experiences of the
Holocaust survivors who were present. Primarily, they served as personal markers of
historical trauma, attesting to the paradigmatic status of the Holocaust and authorizing
engagement with more recent genocides. Their symbolic presence was thus in keeping
with the COC’s overall approach to evoking the Holocaust, which instead of drawing a
direct line from that historical event to crises in Bosnia, Rwanda, or Darfur, channels the
moral authority of the Holocaust through the general rubric of genocide awareness.
638
In
that sense, the COC filters the ethical imperative of the Holocaust in ways that evade
comparisons of suffering, yet still informs the moral imagination when encountering
other atrocities. Within this framework, the Holocaust is the paradigmatic genocide
while remaining on a separate level register of experience. To repeat Hyman
Bookbinder’s explanation: “When we identify something as genocide, we are not saying
it is a Holocaust. Holocaust is still another one. It is another kind of definition.”
639

While survivors’ embodied authority is primary to the museum’s mission as a living
memorial, I have emphasized how the institution has carefully and precisely managed the
ways in which living and dead bodies are presented both within and outside its walls.
Whether by withholding the more graphic photographs from Darfur/Darfur, shielding

638
Ibid.

639
Transcript of the Meeting of Ad Hoc Exploratory Group on the Committee of
Conscience, 24 May 1994, p. 7.

 
362

certain representations of destruction within the Permanent Exhibition, or segregating as
“technical conversation” the overflow of emotion from its video testimonies, the
Holocaust Museum has continually negotiated the delicate balance between analytic and
visceral forms of address.
An Exemplary Survivor
The presence of Nesse G. at the Darfur exhibit opening illustrates the Holocaust
Museum’s efforts to balance the analytic and the visceral. As one of the museum’s most
active Jewish survivors, Nesse delivers talks to a wide range of visitor groups including
students, political dignitaries, and military cadets. Examining her testimony in its
archived video form alongside her involvement as a living witness “in the flesh,” one
cannot help but notice how her performance of testimony, in both its recorded and live
forms, clearly corresponds with the driving epistemology of the museum. Her initial
testimony, videotaped at the USHMM in 1989, established her appeal as a witness who
could carry out the museum’s larger pedagogical and commemorative aims. In that
sense, Nesse is a compelling example of how the roles of survivors—both archived and
in-person—are intertwined and subjected to overlapping mediating forces.
A Lithuanian Jew born in 1928, Nesse experienced life in a ghetto, the horrors of
the concentration camp Stutthof, and the unfathomable hardship of a death march before
being liberated. Her archived testimony was one of the interviews that museum staff, in
anticipation of the museum’s opening, reviewed in determining how to best develop the
oral history program. The oral history department assessed her testimony as having
“good” exhibition quality, particularly in terms of its “key segment,” annotated as:
 
363

“Death March—eating undigested grain from dried cow manure,” explaining how she
had survived.
640

Despite the dramatic quality of Nesse’s story, her testimony and her subsequent
appearances in person are noteworthy for her poised and measured self-presentation. In
one notable moment during her video interview, for example, she recalls that a Jewish
man in her ghetto was scheduled to be hanged by the Nazis in 1942 after being accused
of smuggling bread:
Well this man was marched in like this. He walked over to the table. He said to
the two men ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ you know in Yiddish, ‘I will do it myself.’ He
hopped on the table, on the chair, they did not even have a chance like you know
in some places they tie their hands back or they put cover on their face. Nothing.
He hopped, he put a string of his own, the loop you know over his, the noose,
whatever it’s called, over his neck, and to the assassin, the Gestapo, he said ‘you
are not going to win a war by killing me,’ and somebody pushed or he pushed a
chair from under his feet and I remember his body dangling like this. I remember
it so. Linda, it was terrible times. You know, I always try to control myself, not
to be too emotional because otherwise if I get too emotional, I cannot bring the
message. You know, you know, this what people have to think about.
641

Reading the archived transcription does not convey the intensely visual and aural
dimensions of the videotaped recollection. Throughout her description of the hanging,
Nesse freely uses gestures, using her hands to mimic the motions of the condemned man,
tying an imaginary noose around her neck and speaking with intense defiance in
repeating the words: “Thou shalt not kill…. I will do it myself.” And then, as she begins

640
Summaries of Completed USHMM Oral Histories (undated). USHMM; Institutional
Archives; Research Institute; Subject Files of the Director—Michael Berenbaum; 1989-
1997; 1988-011; Box 26; Oral History.

641
Testimony of Nesse G. 8 May 1989. Videotape RG-50.030*0080, Collections
Department, USHMM, Washington, DC.
 
364

to absorb and reflect on the tragic nature of this memory, she shakes her head from side
to side in a struggle to remain composed. She teeters on the edge of despair, almost
succumbing to her emotions but ultimately presses ahead with her story without breaking
down. She speaks plaintively, but with the fluency of someone who, as she informs us,
has told her story several times and is accustomed to negotiating its terrain.
Her remark that “I always try to compose myself, not to be too emotional…this
what people have to think about,” speaks directly to one of my primary arguments—that
the Holocaust Museum weds the emotive, viscerally charged authority of survivor
testimonies with a more sober approach to storytelling. The museum’s audiovisual
pedagogy is developed to evoke and yet contain the excesses of traumatic memory,
enhancing the pathos of its holdings, while ultimately preventing its overflow for the sake
of narrative coherence and educational transmission. Nesse displays a keen awareness of
this need to regulate affective and analytic impulses, which explains her utility as a
historical interlocutor and exemplary witness for the museum. In contrast to Agnes A,
who in her previously discussed archived recording questions why the interviewer has
repressed her emotional reactions to the testimony, Nesse seems to embrace the
sequestering of pathos, realizing that doing so serves a pedagogical aim.
Nesse’s testimony also underscores the interpretative consequences of the
museum’s formal framing of interviews. As discussed earlier, Exhibition Director Martin
Smith and Oral History Director Linda Kuzmack engaged in heated debates concerning
the techniques for shooting video testimony. Smith criticized Kuzmack’s standardization
of medium close ups as against his preference for a tight close up. In one memorandum
 
365

on the use of medium shots, Smith noted: “There was too much shirt/blouse and not
enough human face for the impact I would like.”
642
For Smith, the face should be the
primary screen for representing the emotional textures of Holocaust testimony. Yet in
one of the few victories for Kuzmack in these debates, the medium close up was
preserved as the museum’s standard framing format. As Kuzmack saw things, a closer
shot was “too tight and too close to the neck, giving me a bit of a choked feeling.”
643

In the case of Nesse’s testimony, however, it is the wider framing that animates
that “choked feeling” (as she reenacts the hanging of the condemned man). The use of a
medium close up captures her viscerally charged performance of memory. Had Smith’s
position prevailed, our encounter with Nesse would be quite different, most certainly
muting the physically intense nature of her recollection. That is not to suggest that the
medium close up utilized here and in the other two Holocaust testimony archives
examined in my research somehow captures a witness’s physical expressions. In fact, it
is a narrow format that often conceals the performance of memory—the movements of
the arms and feet, for example, in expressing the labor of remembrance and the corporeal
traces of trauma (such as tattooed arms that are mentioned by survivors but left out of the
frame). Yet in Nesse’s testimony, the movements captured on camera—including

642
Memorandum from Martin Smith to Linda Kuzmack, 16 October 1989, p. 2.
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History.

643
Memorandum from Linda Kuzmack to Martin Smith, 18 October 1989, p. 1;
USHMM; Institutional Archives; Records of Raye Farr Relating to the Segment
Development of the Permanent Exhibition; CA 1990-1994; 1998-038.2; Box 13; Oral
History.
 
366

markers beyond her face—provide revealing glimpses into the emotional and physical
labor of her testimonial reenactment. Her gestures lend an intense immediacy to her
story and position her as a proxy of sorts, giving voice and living presence not only to her
own experience, but also to that of the hanged victim unable to tell his story.
Conclusion: The Inheritances of Testimony
In examining my sampling of testimonies from the Holocaust Museum, I have
tried to underscore the extent to which testimony in forged through the intersection of
individual and institutional practices. To invoke Lawrence Langer again, audiovisual
testimony illuminates not only because of the historical knowledge it generates, but also
for the challenges it presents—for the witness who must grapple with her or his
memories, for the interviewer who shares responsibility for facilitating the testimonial
dialogue, and for the audience who will ultimately assume responsibility for inheriting
these resources. But I would add a fourth agent to this dynamic: the institution—
whether archive or museum—that organizes its own history, practices, and predilections
for the mission of collecting and transmitting testimony. Again, citing Langer’s written
remarks to Michael Berenbaum in 1991: “One of the many challenges of these
interviews is watching and interpreting the interaction between witness and interviewer,
which is part of the story of ‘understanding’ the testimonies.”
644
I would elaborate on
that point by stressing the need to consider how that interaction—and hence, in Langer’s
terms, “understanding testimonies”—is also subject to modes of institutional authorship

644
Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence
Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991.

 
367

that are operative at each phase of the process. Whether in its preference for “quiet
empathy” or its standardization of the medium close up, the Holocaust Museum as an
institutional actor structures its collected testimonies. Langer has written eloquently
about the narrative and psychological textures of testimony and the shared labor that
brings them to the surface. He reminds us that deep memory and common memory are
not isolated from one another, but are interdependent. However, the conditions of that
labor and the entanglement of those two forms of memory do not simply result from an
encounter between interviewee and interviewer, but rather are products of a much larger
constellation of epistemological preferences and practices.
Langer does not delve deeply into the institutional framing of testimony, however
he does stress that an “intuitively understanding audience” must conduct careful analysis
to detect the subtexts of interviews.
645
This level of analysis must be extended to relevant
institutional histories and practices in order to more fully understand the agency and
specificity of witness accounts and the ways in which they can mesh or clash with
institutional guidelines.
An analysis of individual testimonies from the museum calls into question the
institution’s expectation that testimonies necessarily serve redemptive or morally
instructive aims. Prior to the museum’s opening, Elie Wiesel remarked in a public
address to political figures:
The survivors advocated hope, not despair. Their testimony
contains neither rancor nor bitterness. They knew too well

645
Ibid.
 
368

that hate is self-abasing and vengeance self-defeating. Instead
of choosing nihilism and anarchy, they chose to opt for man.
646

Yet actual video testimonies often reveal a resistance on the part of survivors to
redemptive humanism and an aversion to structuring their story in concert with the
museum’s preferred agenda and its determination of what constitutes “key segments.”
The particularity of individual witness experience often resides in suppressed, less
foregrounded, or “unofficial” moments of interviews. The richness and complexity of
testimony depends not on discrete content, but rather on an integrated evaluation of how
and what a witness conveys about his or her story, as influenced by media- and
institution-related aspects of the recorded testimony. Such analysis is crucial, but also
necessarily elusive and incomplete as survivors and other witnesses confront the
challenge of both reenacting their experiences internally and struggling to translate those
interior fragments into comprehensible narrative threads. It is, as Langer contends, a
painstaking effort to detect the subtext of their experiences. In that sense, analyzing these
interviews demands something like testimonial literacy, or an eye and ear for sensing the
layers, ruptures, and tensions that mark the process. It also requires awareness of the
messier, more unplanned moments that emerge throughout the testimony process but do
not necessarily make their way into the exhibited or officially transcribed testimonial
product. These include the exchanges caught between takes, as the camera continues to

646
Elie Wiesel speech, “The Holocaust: Beginning or End?” USHMM; Institutional
Archives USHMM Council: Records of the Chairperson—Elie Wiesel, 1978 – 1986; Box
27; 1997-013; Wiesel, Elie: Remarks [Various].

 
369

roll but the interviewer is unaware of the recorded exchange. And it extends to the sighs
and screams that are withheld from the transcript for fear of suggesting emotion at the
expense of sobriety. In other words, precisely those moments that capture a sense of
mutual labor but that are often consigned to the periphery rather than the center of the
archival process. Uncovering those traces embodies what James Young refers to as
“received history,” by which he means not only what history is told, but how it is told.
647

It reconstructs the past but also demonstrates the impossibility of fully capturing that past.
Edward Linenthal has registered some of the concerns that museums like the
USHMM privilege the increasingly instrumentalized nature of experience, rather than
fostering a more direct encounter with the “moral traumas of history.”
648
More
specifically, he questions encounters that are vicarious and appropriative—perhaps
fulfilling a thirst for horrific spectacle—rather than transformative social encounters.
While he holds out hope that the Holocaust Museum has the potential to cultivate
empathy and civic engagement, he worries that it will fuel voyeurism. I would argue,
however, that the presence of survivors, particularly through their testimonies, helps to
counter those concerns. Indeed, the faces, gestures, and voices of survivors and other
witnesses present a source of textured complexity to counter any tendencies toward
simplistic, redemptive, and monolithic narratives. The Holocaust Museum may not
promote the messier aspects of testimonies; however, these less unified and unifying

647
James Young, “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust,” History and Theory 36,
no. 4 (December 1997): 40.

648
Linenthal, Preserving Memory, xiv.

 
370

moments often surface, generated by the shared labor and frequent frictions that mark the
collection of testimony.
As previously cited, Alison Landsberg has argued that “piles not people are the
legacy of the Holocaust.”
649
In other words, the artifacts left behind, charged with the
resonance of once living subjects, will constitute the primary materials through which we
engage Holocaust memory. I would expand on that claim by arguing that the institutional
structures and practices of memorials such as the Holocaust Museum will also be
positioned as new bodies of memory in a postmemory landscape. As we attend to this
process of institutional reconstruction, however, we must also remember and be attentive
to the traumatic referents involved, the individual experiences that anchor the mediations
of testimony. It is also necessary to develop the sensitivities and intuitive skills necessary
to bear witness to the act of witnessing by encountering survivors and understanding the
processes and labor of traumatic memory—cultivating our ears and eyes to the
conventions of Holocaust testimony, enabling us to pick up on the ruptures and
deviations.
As the film and media scholar Janet Walker reminds us, we must also consider the
frailty of traumatic memory—the unavoidable gaps in recollection that make us work to
reconstruct the past, rather than assuming an immediate, unvarnished performance of

649
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004),
118.

 
371

memory.
650
In this regard, the Holocaust Museum continues to register profound anxiety
towards the vicissitudes of testimony. Ellen Blalock, the director of the museum’s Office
of Survivor Affairs, told me that she is increasingly concerned about the failing memories
of certain witnesses who have been enlisted to tell their stories to visitors. She has even
considered pulling such speakers from circulation, fearing that their faltering delivery
will undermine their historical credibility.
651

Just as the Holocaust Museum has struggled to preserve the original condition of
its disintegrating collection of shoes and other artifacts, it also faces the daunting task of
embalming the living traces of trauma. To compensate for this challenge, the museum
has placed an even greater emphasis on its holdings of material artifacts and documents
to lend authenticity to survivor recordings. This marks a major reversal in the flow of
testimonial authority. Whereas in its early development period, the Holocaust Museum
had turned to survivors as the source for authorizing its collections, the material artifacts
have now increasingly assumed that role, lending both institutional and evidentiary
legitimacy to testimonies.

650
Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), particularly her compelling argument for a mode of
engaging representations of traumatic memory, including testimonies, in ways that can
account for their subjective and rhetorical dimensions.

651
Ellen Blalock, director, Survivors Affairs and Speakers Bureau, USHMM, interview
by the author, Washington, DC, 26 March 2007.
 
372

Chapter 4
The Cinematic Framing of Testimony by the Shoah Foundation
Introduction
The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation was established by Steven
Spielberg in 1993, following the release of his highly acclaimed film Schindler’s List,
and though not directly related, coinciding with the opening of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. As I discussed in the introduction to
this dissertation, 1993 was a particularly active year in the institutionalization and
popularization of Holocaust memory in the United States. Of particular relevance to this
chapter is the fact that the Shoah Foundation’s archival endeavors emerged from the
release of Schindler’s List and its distinctly Americanized representation of survival and
redemption arising out of the destruction of European Jewry.
While a more extensive discussion of Spielberg’s film would fall outside the
scope of this dissertation, it is critical to recognize its operative narrative elements and
how they might inform our understanding of the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History
Archive (or VHA). In short, Schindler’s List is a redemptive story cut from the cloth of
classical Hollywood cinematic conventions in which a singular protagonist (in this case,
Oskar Schindler) serves as the primary agent of historical change. Although media
scholars such as Miriam Hansen have suggested that it constitutes a more modernist film
text, I would argue that its character-centered causality, linear presentation, and firm
imposition of closure clearly position it within the classical mode of representation laid
out by David Bordwell’s description of the Classical Hollywood Cinema narrative
 
373

form.
652
Equally pertinent, Schindler’s List embodies Steven Spielberg’s mimetic and
immersive approach to representation and reflects his consistent interest in fostering
experiential and participatory forms of reception. These points are essential to my
argument that Spielberg’s film serves as a source narrative for the VHA, linking the
archival project with its own narrative stakes in humanistic redemption and tolerance.
With that argument in mind, one of the central premises of this chapter is not only that
the VHA constitutes an assemblage of narratives, but also that the archival database is
itself a narrative form embedded within a broader constellation of memorial and
representational discourses.
Illustrating this point, the Shoah Foundation’s initial website invoked Schindler’s
List as a cinematic gateway through which to access the VHA. When one arrived at the
main search page for the database, a short film narrated by Anthony Hopkins appeared at
the center of the screen, showing Steven Spielberg working on location in Krakow,
Poland. Hopkins’ narration explained how Spielberg’s creation of the film and his face-
to-face encounters with Holocaust survivors provided him with the central motivation for
establishing the Shoah Foundation. The archive’s debt to cinema was further
underscored by the foundation’s moving logo: a celluloid filmstrip with flash
photographs of Holocaust survivors and victims appearing within the frames. Invoking
Janet Murray, the flash imagery foregrounded the archive’s intertextual position as one of

652
See David Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), 6, and Miriam Bratu Hansen,
“Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and
Public Memory,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia
Landy (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 211.

 
374

several “marketing windows” in a broader network of Spielbergian Holocaust
enterprises.
653

The Mandate and Scope of the Shoah Foundation
Like the mandate that shaped the formation of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the
Shoah Foundation aimed to become the central repository of Holocaust testimonies in
this country and has indeed developed into the largest collection of audiovisual histories
in the world.
654
From its inception in 1994, the Shoah Foundation set as a primary goal
the collection of at least 50,000 testimonies, spanning up to 16 regions worldwide, with
the ultimate aim to digitize the interviews and make them globally available through
interactive multimedia archives connected through an Internet2 network.
655
While still in
formation, the foundation developed a pilot program that, from July to December of
1994, developed collaborative relationships and received consultation from several
Holocaust organizations and testimony repositories, including the Museum of Jewish
Heritage in New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Fortunoff Archive at Yale, and Yad Vashem
in Jerusalem. Around that same period, the foundation also opened up regional offices in
Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto, initiated training sessions, and soon thereafter,

653
Janet Mu