Description
Book SynopsisOver the last several decades, video testimony with aging Holocaust survivors has brought these witnesses into the limelight. Yet the success of these projects has made it seem that little survivor testimony took place in earlier years. In truth, thousands of survivors began to recount their experience at the earliest opportunity. This book provides the first full-length case study of early postwar Holocaust testimony, focusing on David Boder''s 1946 displaced persons interview project. In July 1946, Boder, a psychologist, traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps and what he called shelter houses. During his nine weeks in Europe, Boder carried out approximately 130 interviews in nine languages and recorded them on a wire recorder. Likely the earliest audio recorded testimony of Holocaust survivors, the interviews are valuable today for the spoken word (that of the DP narrators and of Boder himself) and also for the song sessi
Trade ReviewIn its close examination of Boders unique project, Rosens book becomes the first full-length case study of early Holocaust testimony, and firmly calls into question long-held characterizations of Holocaust testimony as belated rather than immediate. * Holli Levitsky, Holocaust and Genocide Studies *
a beautifully written, thought-provoking account of the interview project. * Nicholas Chare, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Boder's Happy Idea ; Chapter 1: I Could Not Help But Wonder: On Boder's Biography and the Idea of Testimony ; Chapter 2: Summer, 1946, Part I: The European Expedition and the Ethnography of Testimony ; Chapter 3: Summer, 1946 Part II: The Expansion of Testimony ; Chapter 4: From Listening to Reading: Publishing the Interviews ; Chapter 5: The Wonder of Their Voices: Testimony, Technology and Wire Recorded Narratives ; Chapter 6: Making a Study of These Things: Boder's Interviews in the Context of Psychology ; Chapter 7: In Divergent Tongues and Dialects: Multilingual Interviews and Literary Experiments ; Epilogue: Rewriting the History of Holocaust Testimony ; Appendix I: Chronology of Interviews: July 29-October 4, 1946 ; Appendix II: The Disputed Number of Boder Interviews ; Appendix III: Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People: Volumes I through XVI ; Notes ; Bibliographic Note ; Index
