Between Remembrance and Indifference: Reflection of the Shoah during the Post-War period as Narrated by the Czech Survivors
Abstract
Survival of the Shoah is often described by scholars as well as survivors themselves as an experience which is transgressing the boundaries of human language and thought. Inmate accounts of the reality of Nazi concentration camps often mention the unreality and extreme rareness of the situations and acts, to which the people were exposed or which they had to witness.
After the liberation and during the Socialist regime, survivors often faced indifference, ignorance or even denial, in relation to their experience during the WWII. The people who did not share the same experience often did not understand or were not interested.
In my paper, I will analyse the ways how this topic is discussed in sample of oral history interviews selected from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, conducted with people born in the Czech lands. I will focus on the accounts of indifference or aversion as well as the survivors' approaches to their own experience, in terms of (not) sharing it with other people and family members.
I will explore if the perception of the fact that ""no-one could understand"" is somehow incorporated into the broader life-history, or presented during the interview as a mere episode - albeit a very bitter one - without considerable consequences for the post-war life course.