Memories of Mass Repression; Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity

Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity presents the results of researchers working with the voices of witnesses. Its stories include the witnesses, victims and survivors; they also reflect the subjective experience of the study of such narratives. The work contributes to the development of the field of oral history, where the creation of the narrative is considered an act of interaction between the text of the narrator and the listener. The contributors are particularly interested in ways in which memory is created and molded. The interactions of different, even conflicting, memories of other individuals and society as a whole are considered.

In writing the history of genocide, "emotional" memory and "objective" research are interwoven and inseparable. It is as much the historian's task to decipher witness accounts, as it is to interpret traditional written sources. These sometimes antagonistic narratives of memory fashioned and mobilized within public and private arenas, together with the ensuing conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions that they unleash, are all part of efforts to come to terms with what happened. Mining memory is the only way in which we can hope to arrive at a truer, and less biased, historical account of events.

Memory is at some level selective. Most believers in political movements that turned out to be the opposite of what they promised confront such emotions. When given a proper forum, stories that are in opposition to dominant memories, or in conflict with our own memories, can effectively battle collective forgetting. This volume offers the reader a subjective vision of history without falsifying the objective reality of human survival.

Nanci Adler is Division Head, Holocaust and Genocide Studies/Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an organization of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam.