Arlene Stein is the author of the new book Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness. Her other books include The Stranger Next Door and Sex and Sensibility. She is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers, her blog can be found here, and she has co-edited the American Sociological Association's journal Contexts.
Q: In Reluctant Witnesses, you state that one of its main themes is
“the powerful role that shame played in the lives of many survivors, and in
their children’s lives as well.” How did shame affect many of the survivors,
and did it affect their children in similar ways, or in different ways?
A: As you can imagine, survivors did not think about their
experiences in an affirmative way. Many experienced guilt for having survived
when most did not.
And as I show in my book, they also experienced shame—a
sense of being judged negatively by others. Those around them told that Jews
“went like lambs to the slaughter.” They were certainly not viewed
as war heroes—except, perhaps, those who had joined resistance movements. So
there really wasn’t much of a place for them in the U.S.—except among
communities of other survivors.
Children often picked up on these feelings of shame, and
came to learn not to talk about their families’ losses. This was during the
first few decades after the war, before survivors were the revered figures they
are now.
Q: What do you think is likely to happen to public
perceptions of the Holocaust once all the survivors have passed away?
A: Museums and memorials will play an even more important
role as representations of the genocide. And of course the existence of
survivor testimony projects, such as the Shoah Visual History Foundation, will
mean that tens of thousands of survivor stories will “live" on in
posterity. This is a good thing in many respects, particularly for their
descendants.
But one of the things I worry about is that this is a
somewhat skewed sample of survivor stories—it over-represents survivors who
were quite resilient. But many, if not most, survivors probably would not have
chosen to share their stories—it would have been too difficult for them to do
so.
Q: You write of your family’s Holocaust legacy, “It haunted
me, and saddened me, and entered my world at inopportune moments: as I brushed
my teeth, embraced friends, rode on trains.” Why did you decide to write this
book, and how did writing it affect you?
A: I thought about writing about the Holocaust’s formative
effect on my family early in my career but I put it aside—I wasn’t yet ready to
delve into that difficult part of my history. It took me many years to muster the
courage, and the perspective, to take it up again.
The process of writing this book, which has taken over 10
years, has been challenging intellectually. How could I integrate history,
sociology, and memoir? How could I say something new?
And of course, it has been difficult emotionally —but useful
too. It has helped me organize my thoughts and feelings and make some sense of
a history that was just too chaotic before. It also brought me closer to a few
family members—of my generation—who have appreciated my work, especially my
brother.
Q: How did you research the book, and what particularly
surprised you in the course of your research?
A: I probed my own memories, analyzed interviews with
survivors that had been conducted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and
interviews with children of survivors that had been conducted by a group of
psychologists in Philly.
I also conducted some interviews with descendants myself,
and with Holocaust experts. In addition, I participated in support groups for children
of survivors, and wrote about them.
What was most surprising? How many books and articles have
been written about the Holocaust—what a huge field of study it is. Of course
that should not be all that surprising, but when I first started working on
this subject, or at least contemplated working on it 20 years ago, it was not
nearly as huge.
The other thing that I was not nearly as aware of was how
much the Holocaust has become a subject of fascination for non-Jews.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am researching the lives of three generations of women
from one Warsaw family and the story they tell about the meanings of
Jewishness, gender, marginality, and cosmopolitanism in post-Communist Poland.
What does it mean to be Jewish in Poland today, where there
are only scant vestiges of what was once one of the world’s largest, most
vibrant Jewish communities, and where the vast majority of those who identify
as Jewish are from mixed, highly secular backgrounds? How has the collapse
of communism offered new openings and greater personal freedoms, facilitating a
Jewish “revival”?
A memorial culture has taken root in different ways in the U.S.
and Poland, in relation to very different national histories. But there are
also some interesting parallels as Poland, in recent years, has been influenced
by western conceptions of personhood, self-fulfillment, and
introspection.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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