Oral history and the Holocaust January 17 Dr Anna Hájková Making History Oral history and the Holocaust January 17 Dr Anna Hájková
Berthold Brecht, Questions from a Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the name of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished. Who raised it up so many times? In what houses Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song, Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis The night the ocean engulfed it The drowning still bawled for their slaves. The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not have even a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his armada Went down. Was he the only one to weep? Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War. Who Else won it? Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions. Transl. by Michael Hamburger
German history from below Lutz Niethammer & coll, “Those Years, You Don’t Know Today Where to Put Them” Experience of Fascism in the Ruhrgebiet: Life Experience and Social Culture
David Boder’s interviews, 1946 http://voices.iit.edu
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985)
… and the “leftover,” Benjamin Murmelstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLbtdQsHxcI
Erna Frischerová, 1945 (in Richard Feder, Jewish Tragedy: The Last Act) “The thing I feared came, quite early on. On September 1, 1942 my parents received summons for the transport. This may have been the blackest day of my life. I remember it like today, ot was Saturday morning, dad turned up in my office, all pale, and said. ‘we are in it.’ In a bit my mum came, with the same news. I cannot describe what followed. I was trying to find a reason to petition my parents from the transport, but it did not work out, there were then so few Czech Jews in Terezín and I did not have a genuine reason for reclamation. I knew the only wish of my parents was that I volunteer to go with them. On the other hand, all my friends were telling me to stay. […] I know that many people judged me for going without deliberation. So on the September 1, 1942 on the express wish of my parents I left Terezín.”
Erna Frischer-Meissner, 1980s British Library, Oral History Division, 28:30 http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Jewish-Holocaust-survivors/021M-C0410X0055XX-0200V0
Erna Friesová, 1941
Erna née Friesová 2013
Linda Breder Visual History Archive of the University of South California https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_vlj-Mek0o
Linda Breder: “Although we had in Birkenau also lesbians I can say homosexuals […] which I knew from Elsa [Manci Schwalbová] she is still alive and a very good friend of mine, […] she was a physician in Auschwitz […] and I know one Reichsdeutsche Politische with whom she was a very good friends and there was rumors that they were lesbians [break] Then I know kapos — the German kapos —which were also rumors— But I can, I didn’t have, I mean, any experience from the Jewish girls which were, you know, close, at our work or in the barracks with me that I know about, but I know there were rumors that there are homosexuals there. Question: Did these homosexual — lesbian kapos ever hit upon the inmates? LB: Probably they did, I don’t know because I always had the same kapo. And working in the unit that I was, she never hit us. Q: Not hit, I mean, try to seduce some of the inmates? LB: I don’t know, I don’t know. This, in this field, I really don’t know. If somebody from the Germans was a homosexual hit or she wasn’t, but mostly they were very cruel. So hard to say. Hard to say.”