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This article discusses the symbiotic, though uneven, relationship linking scholarship on journalism and memory. Though work on collective memory has yet to recognize the centrality of journalism as an institution of mnemonic record, memory creeps into journalistic relay so often that it renders journalism's memory work both widespread and multi-faceted. This renders journalism a key agent of memory work, even if journalists themselves are averse to admitting it as part of what they do and even if memory scholars have not yet given journalism its due.

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The past compels us for what it tells us about the present. It is no wonder, then, that nearly everyone with a voice claims territoriality for it -wide-ranging collectives like nation-states; large-scale interested groups bonded by ethnicity, class and race; professional communities driven by expertise, like historians, filmmakers or journalists. Each strives to colonize connections to the past as a way of lending credence, cohesion or even a simple perspective to life in the present.But the past's compelling aspects -in particular, its lived and experienced dimensions -do not begin when we position ourselves as members of groups. Rather, they draw us already as individuals, amateur presences who connect through a personal need to interact with the past. This need makes us act in atypical ways, particularly when we face public events of a traumatic nature. Situated as bystanders to history-in-the-making, individuals in such cases often respond in ways that are out of the ordinary. They hoard and store newspapers from events of days long past. They compile personal videotape archives of television news broadcasts from events as wide-ranging as the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf War or the death of Princess Diana. And, as in the recent case of thousands of New Yorkers and others who painfully plodded to the site of the World Trade Center attacks, they allow time to stand still as they search for a way to respond to the trauma that unfolded there.What is it, then, that propels actions that are so out of the ordinary yet patterned in their typicality across space and time? This article attempts to clarify what it means to forge a personal connection with a traumatic public past. It ponders whether there is a space for connecting as individuals to the past that in turn shapes its ensuing collective appropriations. The project is unevenly structured, considering two very different kinds of traumatic pasts -one long gone, the other which we are still experiencing. It uses the responses by individual liberators to the liberation of the concentration camps in the Second World War as a template for considering the responses now being shaped to the 11 September World Trade Center attacks by residents, firefighters, police and emergency medical personnel. In each case, the personal need to respond to traumatic public events generates individual acts of bearing witness that unify the collective, forged primarily through one mode of