Fifty Years of Return: Accounts of Jewish Holocaust Survivors to France, 1945 to Today (2012)

Undergraduate: Abigail Lewis

Faculty Advisor: Donald Reid
Department: History

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In 1945, Jewish Holocaust survivors returned from concentration camps to a society, which viewed its role in the Holocaust as a people in resistance and not as collaborators. However, in the case of the Holocaust, return is not as simple as going home. For survivors it is rather a longer process of reconstructing identities, coping with traumatic experiences and loss, and ultimately transmitting their experiences to others. France’s dominant narrative of the Holocaust, which centered on French resistance and the “national suffering,” thus suppressed the transmission of survivors’ testimonies in the postwar period. In this thesis, I analyze the memoirs of French Holocaust survivors written after the war and the oral histories they have given more recently to study the experience of return in France. I explore how the historical context and medium in which a testimony is given affects the presentation of memory and in turn what this reveals about the “return.” I find that memories given at different times, namely the postwar period, the 1960s and the 1990s to today, each have their own specific characteristics that are ultimately tied to France’s confrontation with its past. Additionally the medium in which a testimony is given, such as video interview and written memoir, also reflects historical context and audiences. In the 1980s and 1990s, French society finally began asking survivors questions about their experiences, most visibly through video interviews, and thus French survivors were able to tell their stories, fifty years after the war.