Survivor testimony as source of information about the Holocaust did not garner widespread public attention until after the Eichmann trial in the 1960s that provided a global stage for Holocaust survivor testimony.[1] Historical interest in Holocaust narratives constructed from victim testimonies lagged behind even further and did not truly speed up until the 1980s.[2] The social position attained by survivors as “authoritative witnesses” and the attention given to their testimonies in recent decades is a relatively new phenomenon, especially in the central place the “Holocaust survivor” now holds within the public consciousness.[3]
The lack of engagement with non-survivor communities in the immediate post-war period does not mean that survivors were silent until the world was ready to hear their stories. Margaret Taft in her book, From Victim to Survivor: The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness, 1941-1949, explores the early work done by survivors to tell their stories, first through secret diaries while trapped in the ghettos and camps as victims of the Holocaust and then within their own reconstructed communities through networks called, landmanschaftn, that connected survivors through their shared experience of the Holocaust.
During this period, certain factors prevented survivors from engaging broader audiences. The main obstacle was a disinterested and distracted public that was not willing or able to listen to their stories. It can be argued that the public had been overexposed to the horrors of World War II through media reports of war crime trials, and were too desensitized to truly absorb the stories Holocaust survivors had to tell. The public wanted to move on to rebuilding their lives and focusing on peace, rather than dwelling on the atrocities that had been committed in the past decades.[4]
Some survivors did garner an audience through their memoirs and testimonies as “public” witnesses”, but these survivors were the ones that fit into the restrictive public presentation of a “Holocaust survivor” at the time. Even until the 1970s, the public “Holocaust survivor” included those who had witnessed and survived the full brunt of the Final Solution through the death camps or had resisted heroically in the traditional sense of armed resistance.[5] Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became emblematic of the Holocaust experience in the post-war period and survivors of comparable camps and resistance efforts were the sources for public witnesses.
Now, the term “survivor” is broader and more inclusive including those who survived in forced labour camps, in hiding, or through escape. This diversity of experiences is reflected in the work of Adara Goldberg, who explores in detail the variety of groups that made up Holocaust survivor refugees and transmigrants to Canada in her book, Holocaust Survivors in Canada : Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955. Beyond their roles as witnesses, survivors took part in the labour market, provided professional expertise to academic institutions and business ventures, and introduced diverse national cultures and languages to post-war Canadian communities.[6] It is important to note the complexity of Holocaust survivor’s identities beyond the cultural role some survivors take on by choosing to share their stories among a wider audience.
[1] Margaret Taft, From Victim to Survivor: The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness, 1941-1949 (Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013), 4.
[2] Taft, From Victim to Survivor, 2-3.
[3] Taft, From Victim to Survivor, 121.
[4] Taft, From Victim to Survivor, 124-5.
[5] Taft, From Victim to Survivor, 165-6.
[6] Adara Goldberg, Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), 235.