Lived experience and the Holocaust: spaces, senses and emotions in Auschwitz

Wachsmann, Nikolaus

doi:10.5871/jba/009.027

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 29 publications

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“…Wachsmann points out how the individual experiences that make up the fabric of camp life contribute to the complexity of our knowledge of these places. 12 Research on sensory memory shows that olfactory experiences can be much more durable than audio and audiovisual memory. An odour or smell can trigger a series of events from memory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Taste of Freedom, the Smell of Captivity: Sensory Narratives of the Hungarian Camp of Bergen–Belsen

Huhák

2023

Journal of Contemporary History

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This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the role of sensory impressions in narratives of the everyday lives of prisoners in a concentration camp. I examine the narrative strategies in a diary and an early postwar memoir in the so-called Hungarian camp of Bergen–Belsen. I focus on how the survivors who produced these texts included references to sensory impressions in their accounts. By paying attention to mention in the survivors’ narratives of the more neglected elements of human experience (such as hearing, taste, smell and touch), I consider the ways in which non-visual sensory impressions were used in the narratives to convey experiences, observations, and feelings. I argue that in their depictions of everyday life in the camp, these testimonies used references to changes in their sensory impressions to represent processes and subtle changes in the social lives of the prisoners, which created a discursive space for the authors to express their emotions. This paper also attempts to introduce the term ‘sensory narratives’ into Holocaust studies in an effort to move beyond interpretations of historical narratives as representations of bodies and to engage with them as accounts that were created by bodies, including the senses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Taste of Freedom, the Smell of Captivity: Sensory Narratives of the Hungarian Camp of Bergen–Belsen

Huhák

2023

Journal of Contemporary History

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The social web of Transnistria’s ghettos: local and remote networks of survival

Bărbulescu

2024

Holocaust Studies

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Finding the archival traces of “misery trains”: Early accounts of train transport before the Holocaust

Schmidt

2024

The Journal of Transport History

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This article analyses a collection of eyewitness accounts by survivors of Nazi persecution gathered in the mid-1950s by the Wiener Library in London, narratives that were elicited about lived experiences of railway transport and trauma, as well as the implication of railway personnel and structures in resistance activities. The accounts provide an opportunity to interrogate early postwar narratives that reveal emerging constructions of refugee identity, agency, and survival through key memories deemed particularly “valuable” to the Library, an institution created by Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution. Through a case study approach framed by Ketelaar's distinction between archivalisation and archivisation, this paper argues that narratives of trauma, displacement and resistance associated with deportation by train were of special interest to Library staff already in the 1950s. This is striking due to a lack of scholarly focus on these themes until decades later. The recent publication of the collection as a digital resource has the potential to further expand and recontextualise “tacit narratives” of transport embedded in the collection.

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Lived experience and the Holocaust: spaces, senses and emotions in Auschwitz

Cited by 6 publications

References 29 publications

The Taste of Freedom, the Smell of Captivity: Sensory Narratives of the Hungarian Camp of Bergen–Belsen

The Taste of Freedom, the Smell of Captivity: Sensory Narratives of the Hungarian Camp of Bergen–Belsen

The social web of Transnistria’s ghettos: local and remote networks of survival

Finding the archival traces of “misery trains”: Early accounts of train transport before the Holocaust

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