Remembering Jasenovac: Survivor Testimonies and the Cultural Dimension of Bearing Witness

Accounts of a troubled past: Psychology, history, and texts of experience.

“…The manner in which Holocaust experience is organized in testimony is not independent from the conditions of testimony production, from the assumptions and agendas of testimony collection projects, or from the status of testimony as an archivable, culturally relevant object. In other words, testimonies always reflect, while at the same time helping to shape, the ways in which a society, its institutions and publics (including scholars, archivists and academics) attribute relevance to individual life histories and negotiate what it is that is memory-worthy about the survivor's experience (Byford, 2014).…”

“…The manner in which Holocaust experience is organized in testimony is not independent from the conditions of testimony production, from the assumptions and agendas of testimony collection projects, or from the status of testimony as an archivable, culturally relevant object. In other words, testimonies always reflect, while at the same time helping to shape, the ways in which a society, its institutions, and publics (including scholars, archivists and academics) attribute relevance to individual life histories and negotiate what it is that is memory-worthy about the survivor's experience (Byford, 2014). Therefore, the act of remembering, its capture on tape or film and subsequent dissemination, interpretation, and consumption should be treated as a set of dynamic, interacting social practices, which establish the survivor as a source of epistemic and moral au-thority, and help to sustain, or challenge, established cultures of Holocaust memory.…”

“…We will draw on our own research that looked at two very different kinds of 'vital memories': testimonies of Holocaust survivors (Byford, 2010(Byford, , 2013(Byford, , 2014 and accounts of involvement in state oppression in communist Romania provided in the context of (written) public apologies or disclosures (Tileagă, 2009(Tileagă, , 2011(Tileagă, , 2013a. We selected these examples for two reasons.…”

“…In particular, we are interested in what Brown and Reavey (2015) have termed vital memories: aspects of the past which are simultaneously essential to a person’s identity and sense of self, and problematic, in that that they are painful, threatening or disruptive in some way. We will draw on our own research that looked at two very different kinds of ‘vital memories’: testimonies of Holocaust survivors (Byford, 2010, 2013, 2014) and accounts of involvement in state oppression in communist Romania provided in the context of (written) public apologies or disclosures (Tileagă, 2009, 2011, 2013a, 2013b). We selected these examples for two reasons.…”