The Influence Of Oral History On The Victims Of The Holocaust

Oral history is based on the process of interviewing those who participated or simply observed historic events in an attempt to reconstruct the past. It is a phenomenon which came about in the latter half of the twentieth century and has challenged existing historical studies by essentially giving a voice to the ‘people without history’ who have previously been overlooked in written works or interpreted differently due to a lack of evidence. Their memories are used as an aural record for the use of future generations in understanding different perspectives of the past which have formerly been glossed over. This essay will argue that oral history has given a voice to the victims of the Holocaust as in the past, there was no recorded evidence

Kushner first acknowledges in his article, that we know much more about the victims of the Holocaust nowadays thanks to the emergence of oral history which makes a conscious effort to interview the survivors. He makes the point that ‘there are now over 100,000 Jewish testimonies collected in written, oral, and video form’ which is ‘perhaps the largest total gathered on one specific historical subject’. It is undeniably true therefore that oral history has therefore given the victims of the Holocaust a voice in history, given the sheer volume of accounts. However he goes beyond the numbers in asserting that even though oral history can be traced back to 1945 and the Holocaust, attention has been turned in more recent years from the 1950s onwards, from the perpetrators to the victims. Before, the perpetrators lacked a great deal of emotion and therefore meaning which can be now be seen in the accounts given by the survivors. Whilst therefore more recently since the end of the war, oral attention has focussed more on the victims, it has also progressed and transformed in the quality and variety of evidence, in which case what is said nowadays is treasured and worth a lot more. He points out that from 1945 to 1949 around 75 Holocaust memoirs were published. However whilst they gave them a voice, these were mainly used in war crime trials so were again restrictive. He also elaborates on the given fact that 'the early Holocaust research institutions were starved of funds and mainstream publishers were not interested in producing testimony related material’ so it is only more recently that they have been given a voice. Additionally ‘in the early stages, those collecting Holocaust testimony were more concerned to document the geographical scope of the destruction process and