Memory and the Holocaust: Descendants of Survivors and Family History

The importance of recording testimony of Holocaust survivors is well understood. While empowering the survivor and adding another layer of documentation about the cataclysm, it also serves as a bulwark against Holocaust denial. The same holds true for helping survivors pen their memoirs, or when writing their history. At the same time, this process also impacts upon the person recording the testimony, assisting the survivor in writing his or her memoirs, and certainly upon those who write about the survivors.

What happens when the interviewer, biographer, translator, or memoir transcriber is a child or grandchild of that survivor? This book is based on the premise that a collection of personal narratives of descendants of Holocaust survivors who interviewed their parents\grandparents, wrote their history, or helped them with their memoirs, narratives in which they describe and analyze the impact of these activities on their personal trajectories, can greatly contribute to our understand of the Holocaust and, particularly, its aftermath. Each of the book's 14 chapters is a personal narrative by a child or grandchild of Holocaust survivors who analyzes the impact that their interviewing, writing about, or writing with their surviving parents\ grandparents had upon their lives.