Last week marked 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. In Canada, Israel, Europe and the United States, ceremonies marked the end of the torment and murder there. Survivors shared their recollections of that notorious place, and the impact of the traumatic loss of family and community on their subsequent lives.
Because seven decades have passed, living survivors of Auschwitz are overwhelmingly those who were children or adolescents during the war. Many found themselves impossibly bereft, negotiating their freedom without the guidance of parents, support of family, and familiarity of mother tongues and motherlands. The political philosopher Theodor Adorno famously wondered whether “after Auschwitz,” can you go on living. Most survivors of Auschwitz and other camps and deportations, did, indeed, go on living, building richly rewarding lives, establishing families and laying new roots.
By “after Auschwitz,” a phrase that became popular in postwar thinking about the Shoah, Adorno and others meant not only the nefarious labour and death camp complex near the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland, but the Holocaust in its entirety. And in marking the liberation of that camp and making space to listen to its survivors, we are, by extension, remembering the unbearable toll of the Shoah more broadly, and also the subsequent lives of all who escaped the genocidal net.
The voices of those who were children at the war’s end remind us of the chaos and confusion that defined the moment of liberation. Looking at Holocaust survivors today, often surrounded by generations of extended family established after the war, we can forget that liberation was not pure relief, but brought waves of anxious existential questions. Who else is alive and how can I find them? How will I get along alone? Where will I live? What will I live on? Many organizations stepped into the breach and helped resolve those issues. But it’s easy to underestimate the disorder and unknowingness of the mid-1940s.
One thing that gives us a sense of those fraught postwar years are the tape-recorded interviews of displaced persons conducted by David Boder, beginning in 1946. Boder, a Latvian-born Jewish American psychologist, visited DP camps in western Europe, preserving his conversations with European Jews from a range of countries using what was then state-of-the-art technology, wire tape recordings.
Boder’s audio recordings allow us to hear people whose future lives had not yet been resolved, who did not yet know what would become of them or what had happened to their parents, wives, husbands, siblings and children. We hear how they crisscrossed Europe, looking for the child deposited with non-Jewish neighbours, for the wife reportedly sighted in her hometown. We hear people thinking through where to go and what to do next. We hear raw trauma, and we hear amazing resourcefulness.
We hear, as well, the shock felt by those who did not experience the Shoah themselves, as revelation after revelation surfaced about what the Jews of Europe were subjected to. In one tape, for example, Boder talks with a survivor of Auschwitz who describes the process of selection – the way in which Jews were divided into those who would be used for slave labour and those who would be killed immediately. The speaker describes the line of people walked toward the gas. Boder does not understand the reference. “Die Gasse?” he asks? The street? The lane? What street? He does not immediately understand that the speaker has not said “die Gasse” but “das Gas,” the gas. Listening to the tape, we feel his horrified struggle to absorb that information.
About 15 years ago, the Illinois Institute of Technology began the process of digitizing Boder’s tapes, eventually putting them online at the Voices of the Holocaust website: http://voices.iit.edu/voices_project. Taken together with the voices of living survivors among us, we see the chaos and bereavement and also the miraculous rebuilding of survival.