Oral memoir and the <span class='italic'>Shoah</span>

Alessandro Portelli

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139022125.016

Chapter 12 - Oral memoir and the Shoah

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Alessandro Portelli

Edited by

Alan Rosen

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Alessandro Portelli: Affiliation:
University of Roma “La Sapienza”

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Summary

Time is running out

Recording the voices and filming the faces of Holocaust survivors has been perceived as necessary in order to establish this memory as the metonymy of the history of our time and to anticipate the risk of its extinction. “At least 100,000 survivor accounts have been collected since 1944 in many languages, contexts, and formats,” with most of them ending up in major or minor archives in dozens of countries. No scholar can even think of mastering them all.

In this chapter, I will try to outline a few questions of method, based primarily on interviews I have listened to or recorded myself, focusing on the Italian examples with which I am most familiar. One thing that makes oral history different is that the historian does not simply “collect” the stories, but also contributes to their creation and is inevitably involved in the result. Shoah narratives especially challenge the interviewer to cultivate a form of listening that combines personal empathy with historical objectivity, thus making such empathy an essential part of critical understanding.

Type: Chapter
Information: Literature of the Holocaust , pp. 193 - 210

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022125.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

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Chapter 12 - Oral memoir and the Shoah

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