Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity

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Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity presents the results of researchers working with the voices of witnesses. Its stories include the witnesses, victims, and survivors; they also reflect the subjective experience of the study of such narratives. The work contributes to the development of the field of oral history, where the creation of the narrative is considered an act of interaction between the text of the narrator and the listener. The contributors are particularly interested in ways in which memory is created and molded. The interactions of different, even conflicting, memories of other individuals, and society as a whole are considered. In writing the history of genocide, "emotional" memory and "objective" research are interwoven and inseparable. It is as much the historian’s task to decipher witness accounts, as it is to interpret traditional written sources. These sometimes antagonistic narratives of memory fashioned and mobilized within public and private arenas, together with the ensuing conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions that they unleash, are all part of efforts to come to terms with what happened. Mining memory is the only way in which we can hope to arrive at a truer, and less biased, historical account of events. Memory is at some level selective. Most believers in political movements that turned out to be the opposite of what they promised confront such emotions. When given a proper forum, stories that are in opposition to dominant memories, or in conflict with our own memories, can effectively battle collective forgetting. This volume offers the reader a subjective vision of history without falsifying the objective reality of human survival.

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Nancy Adler is associate professor at the Center for Holocaust Genocide Studies, an organization of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam. Selma Leydesdorff is professor of oral history and culture at the University of Amsterdam and co-editor of the Memory and Narrative Series for Transaction Publishers. Mary Chamberlain is the professor of modern social history at Oxford Brookes University and former co-editor of the Memory and Narrative Series for Transaction Publishers. Leyla Neyzi an anthropologist and oral historian, is associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, Istanbul. Table of Contents Introduction Part I: Truth-Seeking and Memory Failure in Stories of Chaos and Misery Srebrenica in the History of Genocide: A Prologue When Communities Fell Apart and Neighbors became Enemies: Stories of Bewilderment in Srebrenica Localizing the Rwandan Genocide: The Story of Runda Mempries and Silences: On the Narrative of an Ingrian Gulag Survivor Part II: Aftermath: Trauma and Emotions "My Entire Life I have Shivered": Homecoming and new Persecution of Former Slave and Forced Laborers of Nazi Germany Resisting Oppression: Stories of the 1980s’ Mass Insurrection by Political Activists in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa Struggling with a Horrendous Past: Rwandans Talk about the Aftermath of the Genocide Leaving Silence behind? Algerians and the Memories of repression by French Security Forces in Paris in 1961 Part III: Transmission and Distortion of Memory "Privatized Memory?" The Story of Erecting the First Holocaust Memorial in Budapest Recalling the Appalling: Mass Violence in Eastern Turkey in the Twentieth Century Multiple Framings: Survivor and Non-Survivor Interviewers in Holocaust Video Testimony.