Grandma’s Tales: Young People’s Configurations of Holocaust Memory

Abstract

The Holocaust ended in 1945, but subsequent generations have inherited memories of the atrocities through a range of intersecting and contradictory cultural practices and mediations that include historical sources, autobiographies by survivors, films, memorial sites and museums. These mediations, as we have seen in the previous chapters, hand down discourses about the past that are gendered in complex ways to people in their everyday lives. This chapter considers what people themselves remember of these mediations: it looks at the processes involved in the configurations and generation of socially inherited memories of the Holocaust among young people sixty years on from the events. It explores the connections and disjunctures between people’s gendered subjectivities and their identification and articulation of aspects of history. The chapter explores how men and women who have no direct experience of the Holocaust develop historical memories from different media. It looks at the differing connections between men and women and different media forms and contents, and considers whether men and women both equally articulate remembered facts as well as feeling; whether men and women remember different aspects of the Holocaust or make identifications and articulations more readily with perpetrator, victim, witnesses or bystanders.

‘My grandmother always describes with tears in her eyes the moments when crowds of Jews were taken to concentration camps and how they were killed in the streets and how German soldiers, Gestapo, raped Jewish women.’

Monika,¹ aged 21, Gdansk, Poland. Written Life History, April 1999.

‘Identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of culture.’ (Stuart Hall, 1987:44)