Eleanor Polak photos
Survivors and witnesses speak (clockwise from top left): Krystyna Gil, Edith Plakins, Renee Hartman, and Jan Karski.
How do we talk about something for which we have no words? How do we develop a vocabulary for a tragedy of such volume that the human language does not encapsulate it?
The Beinecke library’s new exhibit, In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, has perhaps the only answer: We let the survivors speak for themselves.
The exhibit features 19 video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, displayed to commemorate the 45th anniversary of their taping. The videos are from the archives of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a New Haven grassroots community initiative that became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
Elie Wiesel.
The first video is of the inauguration ceremony of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, at Yale University on November 15, 1982. It features, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, sharing his experience with the crowd. He spoke to the impossibility of understanding what happened in the Holocaust for those who weren’t there, and the need for a new vocabulary to communicate its horrors.
“Our duty has not been to understand,” said Wiesel. “Simply to remember.”
On the first floor of the Beinecke, informational plaques outline the history of Jewish experiences from the first World War to after the end of the second. The exhibit focuses on the efforts of various groups to preserve their history and leave a record for communal memory of the atrocities visited upon Jewish communities.
The story as the Beinecke tells it begins in 1903 Kishinev (nowadays Chişinǎu, Moldova), when poet Hayim Nahman Bialik was sent by Jewish intellectuals in Odesa in the wake of a horrific pogrom.
Bialik’s mission was to document the tragedies in Kishinev, and create a record of what the Jewish community had undergone. In the words of the Beinecke, “It marks the beginning of a recurring and ongoing practice in Jewish Culture to systematically gather documentation of acts of destruction against Jews.”
Pinchas Schuldenrein poster: "Remember what Amalek did to you!: Collect and record!"
In the following years, other Jewish groups and individuals carried on the tradition of preserving memories. From July 1945 to October 1947, a magazine entitled Our Voice spread awareness of politics, world news, survivor testimony, and the day-to-day life of people in a DP-camp following the war. The issue on display was entitled Our Voice: Organ of the Liberated Jews in the British Zone 14 (Bergen-Belsen, 1946). It speaks to the importance of highlighting and centering survivor voices in the discourse around the Holocaust.
David Boder's recording device.
David Boder was a Jewish psychologist who, in 1946, also tried to document the lives of the people in DP-camps. He used a 60-pound magnetic wire recording device, and 200 spools of carbon-steel wire, to record interviews with the people in the camps. The transcripts of those interviews are contained within Boder’s 1949 book, I Did Not Interview the Dead.
“The verbatim records presented in this book make uneasy reading,” Boder said. “And yet they are not the grimmest stories that could be told — I did not interview the dead.”
On the second floor, those voices were given center stage. Nineteen screens displayed nineteen survivors or witnesses to Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, each of them with a devastating story to tell.
Hanna Feiler.
Hanna Feiler was born in Czemierniki, Poland, in 1923. She grew up in a mixed neighborhood of Jewish people and non-Jewish people, before her family was forced into a ghetto and then a forced labor camp. After an attempted escape, Feiler was sent to Auschwitz. In the camp, food was scarce. Feiler recalled a bunkmate who had saved a “tiny tiny slice of bread,” which Feiler stole and then never admitted to stealing.
“I was very sorry because I was hungry and she was hungry,” Feiler said. “What choice did we have?”
“People did not invent an expression of what Auschwitz was,” said Edith Plankins. “It was hell on Earth.” Plankins’s home town of Michalovce, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) was transferred back to Hungarian control before being occupied by the Germans. She and her family were interned in a brick factory before they were deported to Auschwitz.
Renee Hartman had two deaf parents and a deaf younger sister. As the hearing member of the family, she often had to gather information and make her parents aware of the danger around them. Her parents were eventually deported to Auschwitz, and Hartman and her sister to Bergen-Belsen.
At Bergen-Belsen, a doctor offered Hartman oranges and chocolate to send her sister to a hospital, where he was planning to perform scientific research on her. Hartman refused, and threatened to kick the doctor, discouraging him from his intent.
Still, the horrors of the camp were far from avoided. “It got to a point where I realized I had to close my eyes to a number of things or I would not have survived,” said Hartman. She remembered a house near her that was overflowing with corpses, and how at a certain point she had to shut her awareness of the tragedies around her off for her own sanity.
Jan Karski was a member of the Polish underground resistance and a diplomatic courier for the Polish government-in-exile. His reports on the conditions in ghettos and camps helped raise awareness of the Holocaust during WWII, at a time when much of the world claimed ignorance of the situation.
He explained that escape wasn’t just a question of leaving a ghetto, it was also about finding a way to safety when a person “looked Jewish” and had a “Jewish accent.” “For a Jew to get out of a ghetto, he had a problem: now where do I go?” said Karski.
Not all of the victims of the Holocaust were Jewish. Krystyna Gil became a Roma rights activist after the War, during which the Nazis killed the entire Romani community in her village. In her conversation with the Polish and Jewish interviewer Michal Sobelman, the two discussed the terminology of identity, and the ways in which hate twists words. Both of their communities had been called names by the Nazis that afterwards left a scar on their understanding of their identity, leading them to choose to claim or reclaim words for who they were.
Leon Bass.
Leon Bass became a member of the U.S. army in 1943, at age eighteen. He experienced racism both within and without of service, where he served in a segregated unit. Bass spoke of the struggle of fighting for rights that he didn’t even possess.
When he entered the concentration camp at Buchenwald, Bass had no idea what he was walking into. He recalled the stench of dead and dying bodies, the sense that he was witnessing something unlike anything he could have imagined before.
“I walked through the gates and I saw walking dead people,” Bass said. “It’s hard for me to try and understand how anyone could be treated this way…I had no frame of reference.”
There is no frame of reference for the atrocities of the Holocaust. No vocabulary, and as Elie Wiesel explained, no way to really understand. All we can do is listen, absorb the stories of the witnesses and survivors, and keep them alive in our memories. The Beinecke does not attempt to explain the tragedy, or to contextualize it to make it more accessible for a modern-day learner. What it does do, is present it openly and honestly, and allow the testimony and documentation to take center stage. It allows those who experienced the Holocaust to speak for themselves, and tell their own stories, in their own words.