Syllabus
Class Schedule: 1. What is Oral History: Oral History as a Method (Jinonice Campus)
Students acquire a basic introduction into the history, usage and methods of research within oral history.
Required Reading:
Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson. The Oral History Reader . London: Routledge, 2002, 21-29.
Dunaway, David K, and Willa K Baum. Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Aalnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1996, 7-22.
Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 19-46. 2. What is a Testimony: Forms of Recounting (Jinonice Campus)
Students will learn more about a testimony as: 1) "a statement or declaration of a witness under oath or affirmation, usually in court," 2) "an evidence in support of a fact and statement; proof" or 3) "an open declaration or profession, as of faith." [Webster's 1996: 1961]
While definitions of "testimony" vary, two aspects of the term - a legal and a declamatory (with broader focus on the public, community and/or family) one - seem to be at the core of most of them. The relationships and interaction between the specific act of testifying for the purpose of legal investigation or in court and testimony intended for the public, family or community will be explained in basic lines.
(Location: Jinonice Campus)
Required Reading:
Waxman, Zoe. Writing the Holocaust Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 152-184.
Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1998, 3-28. 3. Audio(Visual) Archives of Holocaust Testimonies: From VHA to Centropa (Jinonice Campus)
Students will get a basic orientation in various with Archives of Holocaust Testimonies, including the VHA, the Fortunoff Video Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Centropa Archive, the Yad Vashem Archives, the Voices of the Holocaust as well as local collections of different Jewish museums. 4. VHA Archive: Introduction (Malach Center for Visual History)
Students will be introduced into the work in the VHA:
- How do I work in the VHA?
- How do I register?
- What is included in the VHA?
- How do I search in the VHA? 5. VHA Archive: Extended Information (Malach Center for Visual History)
- How do I build my own project?
- How do I filter my results?
- How do find what I need (bibliographic profile, segments, indexing, search in the testimony)?
Oral Accounts of Three Survivors:
Livia Bitton-Jackson was born as Elli Friedmann in Šamorín, Czechoslovakia in 1931. Following the 1938 First Vienna Award, Šamorín became Samorja and part of Hungary. She was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 13. Her father died in Bergen-Belsen two weeks before the camp's liberation. Livia, her mother and brother survive the war and return to their hometown but emigrate from Czechoslovakia soon. Along with her mother, Livia managed to escape to the United States on a refuge boat in 1951. In 1977, Livia moves to Israel. Livia Bitton-Jackson is the author of five autobiographical books.
Shony Braun is a violin virtuoso, who was born in 1930 to a Jewish family from the Romanian town Cristuru Secuiesc. He participated in a resistance movement and survived several concentration camps including Auschwitz. His written testimony was published as From Concentration Camp To Concert Hall. His wife Shari Braun was born in 1930 to a Jewish family from the Hungarian city Miskolc, and survived Auschwitz along with other camps.
Erika Kounio-Amariglio (born 1926) and her brother Heinz Kounio (born 1927) were born to a German speaking family in the interwar period, Erika in Greek Salonika and Heinz in the Czech town Karlovy Vary. Soon they and their parents moved to Salonika again where they were exposed to the anti-Jewish measures once the German occupation started and after that all deported to Auschwitz. They managed to survive, returned to Greece and later on belonged to the most active Holocaust survivors in Greece. Both of them told their accounts to various interviewers in Greek, French and English. They also published their memories in a written form and the books were translated (often under their supervision) to numerous languages. 6. Eyewitness Account (1): Elli Friedmann (Livia Bitton-Jackson)
(Malach Center for Visual History) 7. Eyewitness Account (2): Shony Braun and Shari Bauer
(Malach Center for Visual History) 8. Eyewitness Account (3): Erika Kounio-Amariglio and Heinz Kounio
(Jinonice Campus - Fortunoff Archive Testimonies)
Their Written Accounts: 9. Livia Bitton-Jackson
(Jinonice Campus)
Required Reading:
Jackson, Livia Bitton. Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust. New York: Times Books. 1980.
----. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust. New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997.
----. My Bridges of Hope: Searching For Life and Love after Auschwitz. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1999.
----. Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Home to Reclaim her Ancestry. Guilford, Conn: Lyons Press, 2009.
----. Hello, America: A Refugee's Journey from Auschwitz to the New World. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006. 10. Shony Braun and Shari Bauer
(Jinonice Campus)
Required Reading:
Braun, Shony Alex. From Concentration Camp to Concert Hall. Los Angeles: S.A. Braun, 1985. 11. Erika Kounio-Amariglio and Heinz Kounio
(Jinonice Campus)
Required Reading:
Kounio-Amarilio, Erika. From Thessaloniki To Auschwitz And Back: Memories of a Survivor from Thessaloniki. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000.
Kounio, Chaints Salvator. A Liter of Soup and Sixty Grams of Bread: The Diary of Prisoner Number 108565. New York: Published for Sephardic House by Bloch Publishing, 2003. 12. Imaginative Literature on the Holocaust
(Jinonice Campus)
Does - and if yes, how - witness testimony feed into literary representations of the Holocaust? Is fiction a less truthful account of the past when compared to testimonies? And can testimonies be influenced by fiction as well?
Required Reading:
Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 1-19. 13. Concluding Class
Reevaluating the class, discussing individual projects final comments and conclusions.
Annotation
Course Aims and Objectives:
The course "On Life History: Memory, Testimony and Fiction" has two major objectives. First, to investigate the Holocaust - including its aftermath - by going beyond purely political history.
While historical, socio-economical and political context will be remain important for us, the focus of this class is on studying the past through individual and thus also subjective
"histories". Second, to compare and challenge different forms of Holocaust recounting - testimony (both oral and written) as well as fiction. Does (and if yes, how) testimony feed into literary representations of the Holocaust? And does witness testimony provide us with a more
"direct" access to the past? Hence, studying and analyzing oral and written testimony as well as
Holocaust fiction, written by both survivors and non-survivors, this course explores the recounting of the Holocaust from multiple angles.
Apart from reflecting on video testimonies from the Visual History Archive - Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation (VHA, both as part of our class and outside of it, for the individual projects), students will be also asked to read all of the assigned literature and discuss it in class. All required readings will be put on reserve at the local Charles University library in
Jinonice.
This course will consist of 13 sessions, each of them 80 minutes long. Please note that classes held at the VHA will be longer both due to travel from/to our campus. First three sessions will raise theoretical questions (what is oral history, how to study oral history and what are some of the important oral history sources for our topic, as well as what are the different forms of
Holocaust recounting and how to understand them.) Following three sessions will take place at the Malach Center for Visual History - VHA, first making an introduction into the work on VHA collection (2 sessions) and later on focusing on individual life "histories" of Elli Friedmann (later
Livia Bitton-Jackson) as well as Shony Braun and his wife Shari Bauer. Following session will approach the accounts of Erika Kounio-Amariglio and her brother Heinz Kounio from the collection of Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. (At the VHA, their testimonies are available only in Greek). When we meet again in our Jinonice campus - for additional four sessions - we will discuss what we have seen and investigate the links between the different forms of recounting, focusing now on the survivors’ interviews, their written testimonies as well as imaginative literature on the Holocaust.