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HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE
Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein
HOLOCAUST
MEMORY
IN T HE
DIGITA L AGE
Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices
JEFFREY SHANDLER

Stanford University Press ❙ Stanford, California

Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2017 by Jeffrey Shandler. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shandler, Jeffrey, author.
Title: Holocaust memory in the digital age : survivors’ stories and new media
practices / Jeffrey Shandler.
Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. |
Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016052823 (print) | LCCN 2016053579 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503601956 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602892 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781503602960 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and
Education—Archives. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. |
Holocaust survivors—Interviews. | Collective memory. | Digital media.
Classification: LCC D804.348 .S45 2017 (print) | LCC D804.348 (ebook) |
DDC 940.53/18072—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052823
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Author’s Note ix

Introduction 1
1 An Archive in Contexts 9
2 Narrative: Tales Retold 43
3 Language: In Other Words 87
4 Spectacle: Seeing as Believing 125
Conclusion 167

Appendix: Interviews Referenced 175

Notes 183

Index 205
This page intentionally left blank
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began exploring the Visual History Archive (VHA) at Rutgers in 2010, when,
thanks to the initiative of Douglas Greenberg, the university first gained online
access to the Archive. I am indebted to Doug not only for his sparking of my
interest in the VHA but also for his continued encouragement of my work.
Conversations with Rutgers colleagues Ethel Brooks, Michael Levine, Karen
Small, and Yael Zerubavel have also stimulated my thinking about the VHA,
and I am particularly grateful to Yael for prompting me to write my first paper
on the topic for a conference at Rutgers in 2011. In addition, I thank the School
of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers for providing me with a sabbatical and a fel-
lowship leave, which were essential to the research and writing of this book,
and Department of Jewish Studies staff members Sherry Endick and Arlene
Goldstein for their help in bringing this book to fruition. During the final year
of work on the manuscript, I benefited greatly from the assistance of Valerie
Mayzelshteyn, my Aresty Research Assistant at Rutgers, who diligently and
thoughtfully examined dozens of segments of VHA interviews and compiled
the information in the appendix.
The USC Shoah Foundation provided invaluable assistance to my research,
including the opportunity to spend several months in 2013 at the University of
Southern California as a visiting fellow. This visit enabled me to learn about the
workings of the VHA from its dedicated staff and to discuss my work in prog-
ress with them. I am deeply grateful for the generosity with which the Foun-
dation’s staff—especially Douglas Ballman, Crispin Brooks, Renée Firestone,
Georgiana Gomez, Ita Gordon, Kia Hayes, Karen Jungblut, Dan Leshem, Kim
Simon, Stephen Smith, Anne-Marie Stein, Kori Street, and Ari Zev—shared
their advice and expertise. During my stay at USC, I also benefited from the
counsel of faculty members Wolf Gruner, Tara McPherson, and Michael Renov,
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and I am particularly grateful to Tara for inviting me to write an essay on some

of this research for a special issue of American Literature, which she edited, on
new media. Part of this essay, “Holocaust Survivors on Schindler’s List; or, Read-
ing a Digital Archive against the Grain,” originally published in the journal’s
December 2013 issue (vol. 85, no. 4), appears in chapter 2 of this book and is
reproduced with permission of Duke University Press.
For their kind assistance during the writing and research of this book, I
also thank Rachel Baum, Sarah Bunin Benor, Esther Brumberg, Hinde Burstin,
Elizabeth Castelli, Alexandra Garbarini, Bonnie Gurewitsch, Louis Kaplan,
Marjorie Kaplan, Judith Keilbach, Todd Presner, Alasdair Richardson, and
­Melissa Shiff, as well as all the participants in the seminar on Video Interviews
of Holocaust Survivors: Intersecting Approaches, convened at the annual
Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2013. I am especially indebted
to Ayala Fader and Diane Wolf for their insightful comments on drafts of the
manuscript. Opportunities to present lectures on aspects of my research at
Vassar College, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Humboldt-Universität,
the American University of Paris, and Universität Wien afforded me invalu-
able occasions to learn from audience comments and questions. At Stanford
University Press, David Biale, Margo Irvin, Nora Spiegel, Sarah Abrevaya Stein,
and Kate Wahl provided vital support and guidance for the development of this
publication.
Last, but foremost, I thank Stuart Schear, my partner in life, who has been
this book’s first reader, sharpest editor, and greatest enthusiast.
 AUTHOR’S NOTE

All transcriptions from VHA interviews are mine, except where indicated.
Transcriptions of English-language interviews preserve speakers’ grammatical
irregularities. Ellipses indicate abridgements made by me. Translations from
interviews in languages other than English, except where indicated, are mine
as well. Names of people are spelled per the listing in the VHA, except where
indicated.

❙ ❙ ❙

Bracketed additions to transcriptions include the following.

Definitions and translations: goyim [Yiddish: “gentiles”]. The name of the
language is omitted when it is clear. In interview transcriptions, Yiddish is ro-
manized according to the speaker’s dialect: a yid a seykher [a Jew (who was)
a merchant].
Referents, added to disambiguate pronouns and other references: he [i.e.,
Spielberg].
Insertions and clarifications, added when the meaning of the cited text is
not readily apparent: he came . . . to us [in the factory in 19]44, [he was there
for] just a few months.
Descriptions of interviewee’s gestures and camera movements: I start to
run, and I feel the first bullet here. (He points to his left wrist.) See? The
marks are still here. (The camera pushes in on his forearm, then pulls out
again.)
This page intentionally left blank
HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION

On any given day, individuals around the world sit before computer screens
to watch and listen to videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors. More
than seven decades after the end of World War II, many people approach this
resource with some expectation of what they will encounter, reflecting their
various intents: Descendants of deceased Holocaust survivors view these re-
cordings to learn about their ancestors’ prewar lives and wartime experiences
as well as about relatives killed during the war. High school students are ex-
horted to listen to survivors’ narratives as morally galvanizing exemplars. His-
torians screen these videos to research instances of Nazi persecution that are
otherwise undocumented. Psychologists scrutinize survivors’ storytelling for
insights into how people cope with trauma. Victims of more recent genocides
listen to these recordings to discover how, decades after the Holocaust, its sur-
vivors articulate their memories.
At the same time that screening these videos addresses an array of estab-
lished objectives, the accounts survivors offer are full of surprises. For as much
as these interviews are shaped by the protocols of the projects that produced
them and by decades of accumulating tropes of Holocaust remembrance, each
video documents a singular encounter with an individual who takes a distinct
approach to the task of recalling the past. What, then, are viewers of these v­ ideos
to make of moments when, in the course of describing his or her experience of
the genocide, a survivor bursts into song, starts speaking in another language,
2 INTRODUCTION

or exposes bodily scars of wartime injuries? What is the significance of survi-

vors’ comparing their own experiences during the war to how the Holocaust is
portrayed in a novel or feature film? What might be the value of videos in which
interviewers prompt survivors’ answers or argue with interviewees? How should
one understand those moments when survivors can’t recall the past or resist
doing so? Moreover, what do these moments reveal about the potential signifi-
cance of the videos generally, above and beyond the value invested in them by
their creators and advocates? And how do these moments elucidate the efforts
to record, preserve, and share these memories with this choice of medium?

❙ ❙ ❙

Video recordings of Holocaust survivors recounting their wartime experiences

have become a mainstay of how the most notorious genocide of the modern
age is documented, studied, and memorialized. There are now tens of thou-
sands of these recordings in archives and libraries around the world. Museum
exhibitions dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust show excerpts of these
interviews, filmmakers include them in documentaries, and, thanks to the
availability of these recordings on videotapes, then on DVDs, and, most re-
cently, through online streaming, students around the world examine them in
classrooms or access them on laptops and tablets.
The practice of videotaping survivors arose at a strategic convergence of the
dynamics of Holocaust memory practices and innovations in communications
technology. During the 1970s, the Holocaust became an increasingly promi-
nent fixture of public culture in the Western world. Holocaust survivors were
elevated to a new stature, hailed both as witnesses of unrivaled authenticity
to a defining event of modern times and as models of tenacity in the wake of
unspeakable persecution. This rise in survivors’ prestige correlated with their
aging. A growing attention to their mortality heightened the sense of survivors’
importance and prompted concerns to preserve survivors’ memories in the
face of their imminent passing. Though Holocaust survivors had been relating
their personal histories since the war’s end, the increased sense of urgency to
document these recollections prompted the search for new means to do so.
Concurrently, video cameras and videotape players, previously an expen-
sive technology used mostly by professionals in the broadcasting industry,
became readily available to middle-class consumers. Video quickly replaced
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