Meet the researchers: The stories we tell

Interview with Professor Debórah Dwork
Professor Debórah Dwork, director of Clark’s Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, was one of the first historians to study the Holocaust and to collect oral histories from Holocaust survivors. In a recent conversation, summarized below, she discusses how the study of history—the stories that societies tell about themselves—enriches her life.

What drew you to the study of history?

I became interested in the study of history because I began to realize that every story we tell about ourselves starts somewhere. Even when I’m speaking with a friend and telling her what happened to me that day, there’s always the antecedent that led up to that moment. I began to look at this in a larger way when I was in college, and to see that societies do exactly the same thing. So I became interested in the stories that societies tell about themselves, and thus became a historian.

What was your initial area of focus?

European history. I lived in the United States when I was young, but I also lived in Europe. We had the Italian period in my family, the French period, and then the Italian period again! I did my doctoral research and degree in England, so I have always been back and forth between Europe and the United States.

I ended up studying European history, initially the World War I period. My first book was about the development of child welfare systems prior to the establishment of the welfare state. What did adults do for children at that time to ensure that they would develop into healthy adults? I was looking particularly at children in England, but also in France and Germany. And although the United States never had a welfare state, it provided a point of comparison.

As I worked on this, I realized that what adults do for children is not necessarily identical to the way children experience the world. So I moved to what I call child-centered history. Just as women’s history tells us as much about men as it does about women, and just as the history of black America tells us as much about white America as it does about black America, so it is that if we look at the history of children themselves, it will tell us as much about the adults who framed and shaped their lives as it will about the internal and external everyday experiences of children.

When I forged ahead in the early 1980s with a study of children’s experiences, my colleagues thought I was totally crazy. There was no such thing as children’s history—women’s history itself had only just got started. As it turned out, the study of children’s experiences was a very fruitful way to proceed.

What eventually drew you to the study of the Holocaust?

No historian of my generation became a historian of the Holocaust straight away. That’s because, until Clark started its doctoral program in Holocaust history, there was no place in the world to get a Ph.D. in it. Therefore, those of us who became interested in this field came to it from different routes. Some came from modern German or modern Jewish history, others from modern French history. I came via my study of children.

I could, of course, have studied the history of children at any time or place. As I said earlier, we all have a story, and it’s not accidental that I chose to study the history of Jewish children caught in the net of Nazi-occupied Europe. While my mother was safely in the United States during World War II, her oldest sister, my aunt Sara, was incarcerated in the ghetto in Lodz, Poland with her brothers and parents. Of all her family in Lodz, only Aunt Sara survived the Holocaust.

As I was growing up, Aunt Sara told me stories about how she and other young people, with the Germans’ knowledge, established a kibbutz in Marysin, a suburb in the Lodz ghetto, and grew vegetables on unused land. There they were, young people in their late teens and early 20s, singing Zionist songs, dreaming of the Jewish homeland, and hoping the war would end. My aunt believed that these vegetables provided them with the vitamins and calories to survive the famine of ghetto life. Eventually, the Germans shut down the garden and the young people went back to their families’ homes. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. When I began my research in 1984, I had never read anything about this ghetto kibbutz.*

Similarly, the mother of my graduate student colleague Robert Jan van Pelt, was a Jewish child in hiding in the Netherlands during World War II. She was the youngest of her siblings and quite small as a result of the malnutrition of those years. It fell to her to go out onto the streets and forage for food for the family. And again, while I heard stories from her, I had never read about such experiences in an analytic history. Memoirs, yes, but analytic history, no.

These stories set me on the road to writing the book that became Children with a Star, a history of Jewish youth in Nazi-occupied Europe. It is a child-centered history focusing on their internal and external lives. In the course of writing the book, I learned as much about the adults—parents, righteous gentiles, national collaborators, Nazis and their allies—as I did about the children and how the children saw the world in which they lived.

Where did you go from there with your research?

Aside from small projects, Children with a Star was the last major work that I authored by myself. After that, Robert Jan van Pelt and I joined forces. We’ve written two books together, as well as a number of articles and monographs. Now we’ve embarked on another project, called Flight from the Reich, which is a history of refugee Jews during the Holocaust. It’s an enormous project, covering as it does Jews of all social classes, degrees of religious observance, ages, males and females--all sorts of people seeking to flee at different times from point A to point B. But A was constantly changing and B was constantly changing.

We also bring in the perspectives of both the refugees and the officials in the countries that are willing to assist them. Are these officials willing to host Jews solely at a point of transit, on the understanding that they will go somewhere else permanently? Or are they willing to accept Jews as permanent immigrants? There are many questions and many different perspectives. It’s an incredible jigsaw puzzle of a history. We’ve been researching this project for 15 years and every country has its own archive relevant to this subject.

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How have you decided to combine these many stories in one account?

All of our other works have been what historians call “grand narratives,” meaning that they start somewhere, tell a story, and end somewhere. In the case of the refugees, the story doesn’t start or end in just one place or at just one time. We had to think of another way to present the material.

We finally decided to organize the story according to pivotal moments: 1933, when the Nazis came to power; 1938/39, which included Germany’s annexation of Austria (the Anschluss), the November Pogrom (the so-called Kristallnacht), and the German invasion of Czechoslovakia; and 1942, when the murder machinery of the Holocaust was in full operation. We’ll conclude with a focus on 1946--about six months to a year after the war was over, when all these refugees who had survived were “displaced persons,” on the move yet again.

Each pivotal moment will be organized into four different points of view, each focused on a person, a place, the importance of papers, or a significant problem key to that period of history. Each of these short chapters will open with a vignette. Our hope is that people will remember the story, and that the analysis that comes after will hook them back into the story.

What kinds of sources do you use for this research?

We use a wide range of materials, including traditional archival materials from government and non-governmental organizations; local, national, and Jewish community newspapers; oral histories, and unpublished personal papers such as letters and diaries. The archives of philanthropic agencies are particularly useful. Many philanthropies with arms in different countries sent investigators into the field who reported back to the home office what they saw happening on the ground. Such reports are sometimes even more informative than local newspapers that were under government censorship.

I understand that you, personally, have been recording oral histories.

Yes. For decades now, beginning when I embarked on Children with a Star, I have been recording oral histories of Holocaust survivors. At one time, before major organizations like Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation got involved, I had the largest collection of oral histories of now-adult child survivors anywhere. I’m very glad I had the opportunity to gather these stories, because while these organizations do terrific work, they tend to record video interviews that are usually quite short. My oral histories are not time-constrained. Some encompass as many as 24 hours of recorded time with the same person.

Doing oral history has a number of positive effects. First, I learn an enormous amount. While I might know the historical context of a person’s life, what happened to that particular person is a mystery. I learn about that mystery from that person.

Second, nearly every person whose history I recorded had papers or photographs from that time that he or she was willing to share. Thus I’ve had access to diaries or fragments of diaries, letters and photographs that will never be published, but are enormously illuminating. Sometimes a photograph or letter was sent to family members living in a safe place. For example, my Aunt Sara told me about my cousin Mirka who died in the Holocaust and whom I had never seen. It turned out that my aunt’s mother had sent a photograph of Mirka to her cousin then living in Philadelphia. That picture is in Children with a Star.

My students joke and say I read other people’s mail for a living! In fact I came upon an extraordinary cache of over three thousand letters written mostly to a gentile woman living in Switzerland. She was seeking desperately to help trapped Jews primarily in Germany and France. The cache contains their letters to her, a couple of her letters back to them, which got saved through extraordinary means, and also letters that she wrote to philanthropic organizations and officials in her quest for help. These letters will be the basis of our next project, which will be called An Extraordinary, Ordinary Woman.

Working with these sources from many different countries must require a lot of language skills. How many languages to you read? French and Italian are very easy for me, and because of that, Portuguese and Spanish aren’t too difficult, either. I’m okay in German and Dutch, but since my colleague Robert is fluent in those languages, he works with the German and Dutch material. Our combined knowledge of Hebrew and German makes an understanding of Yiddish possible. But neither of us knows the languages of eastern Europe, and in those countries there’s an enormous amount of work to be done.

The good news is that students in the doctoral program are going in directions that I cannot go, nor perhaps would I have the imagination to go. And that’s what we all want, for our students to carry the field forward.

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In researching the Holocaust, are there any particular obstacles that you and other researchers tend to run into on a routine basis?

Language fluency obviously is an issue. That’s number one. The second obstacle is accessing archives in eastern Europe. Some countries, like Poland, are fairly open about making their archives available, while others are not.

Another obstacle is getting information on the experiences of people whose personal experiences and private documents are not part of a publicly accessible library or archive collection. In this regard, time is of the essence, because survivors of Holocaust are reaching the end of their lives. Sixty years have elapsed since the end of the war. I’m so glad I began this work 22 years ago and I’m so grateful for and appreciative of the work that has been done by institutions in gathering oral testimony. And while many scholars have analyzed the quality of these testimonies, I look for a convergence of evidence among them. Using, for example, the 52,000 video testimonies of the Shoah Foundation, I can get convergence of evidence on various points.

I feel that is it a privilege to be able to do the work that I do, and that brings us back to our first question. What do I think history has to offer? It enriches my life. Every single day, it enriches my life, just as I find my life is enriched by the life narratives and experiences of my friends. Those stories may or may not resonate with my own experience of life, but they enrich my understanding of what life is. And so it is with history.

I find, too, that the study of history enriches my understanding of the present as I read the newspaper everyday. It’s not because I think that history is a blueprint for the present. What happened then, happened then. And what’s unfolding now, is unfolding now. But when we see patterns from the past, we can look at the present and see whether those patterns apply. It gives us another tool for analyzing the present. And it also gives us some ideas about how we might want to give shape to the world in which we would like to live.

So was I in New York for the rally about the genocide in Darfur last Sunday? You bet! Because having a voice, and being allowed to express that voice, is something that I hold dear, since I study a period when people were prohibited from the free expression of their views.

What research opportunities are available for undergraduates who might want to participate in research in Holocaust and genocide studies?

There are many different areas in which undergraduates can do independent research or research with faculty. While the Holocaust and genocide program is oriented primarily toward graduate study, it is also true that many, many undergraduates take courses offered by the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Concentration every single semester, not just every year, but every term.

Undergraduates, like all researchers, face the challenge of language limitations for doing research in Holocaust and genocide studies. But that limitation actually pertains more to Holocaust than genocide study. For example, if a student wants to research what’s happening in Darfur, or the genocide in Rwanda, much of the reportage about those events was or is in English. So there’s actually quite a bit of research that can be done by students, because English is now the common language for political processes.

There are also a number of interesting questions about the Holocaust that can be investigated even with language limitations: questions surrounding the post-Holocaust period, memories of the Holocaust, or displaced persons who went to English-speaking countries or to Palestine, where English is also a dominant language.

Here at Clark, we offer the richest education in the Holocaust and Genocide studies anywhere, bar none. We have 16 different professors in six different departments who offer a total of about 27 or 28 courses in this area. It is truly an interdisciplinary field. I think Clark should take a lot of pride in that. There are huge opportunities for students to learn and participate.
*Information is now online at http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/lodz/during.html

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