Ruptures in remembrance : trauma, utterance and patterns in survivor testimony

As eyewitnesses and victims of the Holocaust, survivors have been traumatised by
their experiences; indeed, memories of this time continue to haunt them into the
present day. But whilst a great deal of research has been conducted into the
transferential and representational problems survivors encounter whilst giving voice
to their experiences, fewer studies have questioned how the trauma of living through
this genocide may have affected the ways in which eyewitnesses remember - and in
turn relay - their turbulent pasts. Mark Roseman has recently examined how
‘interesting inaccuracies [often occur] in...[survivor] memory’ which seem to follow
a recognizable ‘pattern’. However, no one has yet compared the different testimonies
produced by a single survivor over time, in order to determine whether a ‘pattern’
occurs consistently in their Holocaust narrations. In this thesis, I compare the different
oral and written testimonials that three survivors - Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Trade Levi
and Leon Greenman - have given since the end of the war. I have found that there are
a series of interesting ‘variations’ and speech disturbances that can be tracked through
these survivors’ utterances from their earliest accounts to their most recent
depositions. I posit that these discrepancies are the result of the trauma of Lasker,
Levi and Greenman’s Holocaust experiences, and have found ‘patterns’ in their
testimonies which endorse the theory that whilst recounting certain memories these
survivors are plagued by symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In asserting this,
I am not attempting to undermine or dispute the validity of these survivors’ memories.
In fact, by focusing on how eyewitnesses re-configure their recollections in discourse,
my findings support the veracity of their accounts - by showing that survivors sculpt
their testimonies into a defensive framework that enables them to counteract ‘the pain
of remembering’, by paradoxically giving voice to these very memories of distress.