Collective memory as an interactional practice: The case of the Czech-Jewish experience in Switzerland during the WWII period
Abstract
In 2017/2018, I was working on a project "Collective memory as an interactional practice: The case of the Czech-Jewish experience in Switzerland during the World War II period", carried out at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. My research consisted of three successive stages with mutually interrelated aims: (1) Analysis of oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors born in the former Czechoslovakia, who have spent time in Switzerland as refugees, asylum seekers or displaced persons during the World War II period.
The oral history interviews were selected from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. (2) Short clips of interviews were then incorporated into on-line educational material, accompanied by text and images. The resulting on-line lesson had the following structure: (I) The context (Why did people leave Czechoslovakia?); (II) The decision (How do the narrators reflect the decision to leave Czechoslovakia?); (III) The journey (How was the emigration practically accomplished?); (IV) The memory: (How is the migration retrospectively reflected by the narrators?). (3) The on-line lesson was tested at five schools in Switzerland and in the Czech Republic between January and March 2018.
The sessions were videotaped and analysed in detail: not only to evaluate and improve the developed activities, but also to explore the interactional specifics of the educational setting. The research project provides an example of using oral history interviews as cases of narrative expression of the refugee experience during the World War II period.
It explored one of the possible ways of utilizing large archives of oral histories for the transmission of historical knowledge on refugeedom, focusing on personal aspects. Moreover, it highlights several issues in educational use of archival interviews, such as the necessity of sufficient context for the students' comprehension, and also the more general topics of incorporating digital technologies into classroom interaction.