English
Język Polski
Emotions as testimony: Documenting the psychological aspects of witnessing in an early survivor historical commission
Victoria Van Orden Martínez
victoria.martinez@kultur.lu.se Author BiographyVictoria Van Orden Martínez – dr, pracuje jako badaczka na Uniwersytecie Lund w Szwecji. Pracę doktorską pt. „Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945–56” obroniła w 2024 r. Jej badania koncentrują się głównie na życiu, działaniu i sprawczości ocalałych z nazistowskich prześladowań żyjących jako przesiedleńcy w pierwszych latach powojennych, ze specjalnym uwzględnieniem roli płci i innych różnic. Autorka artykułów w czasopismach szwedzkich i zagranicznych oraz rozdziałów w pracach zbiorowych, w tym tekstu Monuments cast shadows. Remembering and Forgetting the ‘Dead Survivors’ of Nazi Persecution in Swedish Cemeteries [w:] Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials (z Malin Thor Tureby, 2023).
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4491-5520
Lund University, Sweden
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 20 (2024), Pages: 276-292
Submission Date: 2024-01-30Acceptance Date: 2024-07-10
Publication Date: 2024-12-17
https://doi.org/10.32927/zzsim.1017
Abstract
In 1945–1946, nine Polish former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps (one Jewish and eight non-Jewish) living in Sweden as refugees were employed to record other Jewish and non-Jewish Poles’ experiences of persecution for history and justice. Although none of these individuals were psychologists, they believed recording the psychological aspects of witnessing was essential to their documentation work. The written testimonies they recorded, which are preserved in the archive of the Polish Research Institute in Lund, Sweden (PIZ), thus include revealing and often caring comments about the witnesses’ emotions and emotional responses during the interviews. I argue that this method made emotions integral to the testimonies and validated emotions as testimony. The significance of this argument is magnified when non-Jewish Poles interviewed Jewish Poles and vice versa since the comments reveal how they were relating to one another on a personal and sensitive level. This article builds on the author’s previous and ongoing analyses of these witness testimonies through close readings of the comments that consider the psychological aspects of witnessing. By contextualizing these comments and the testimonies they refer to alongside theories on the value of emotions for knowledge, the author explores what knowledge the method of recording witness testimonies contributed to creating in the early postwar period and what knowledge it creates now.
References
Żródła archiwalne / Archival sources
Google Scholar
Lund University Library (LUB), Sweden, The Polish Research Institute in Lund (PIZ) Archive
Google Scholar
Literatura przedmiotu / Studies
Google Scholar
Michael S. Brady, “Learning from Adversity: Suffering and Widsom,” Chapter 9 in The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, ed. Laura Candiotto, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 197–214.
Google Scholar
Laura Candiotto, ed. The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Google Scholar
Laura Candiotto, “Emotions In-Between: The Affective Dimension of Participatory Sense-Making,” Chapter 11 in The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, ed. Laura Candiotto, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 235–260.
Google Scholar
Beth B. Cohen, “The Helping Process: Mental Health Professionals' Postwar Response to Survivors,” Chapter 7 in Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007, pp. 133–54.
Google Scholar
Boaz Cohen, “The Children's Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21/1, pp. 73–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcm004.
Google Scholar
Marc-Antoine Crocq & Louis Crocq, “From shell shock and war neurosis to posttraumatic stress disorder: a history of psychotraumatology,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2/1, pp. 47–55, https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2000.2.1/macrocq.
Google Scholar
Izabela A. Dahl, “Witnessing the Holocaust: Jewish Experiences and the Collection of the Polish Source Institute in Lund,” Chapter 3 in Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden: Archives, Testimonies and Reflections, eds. Johannes Heuman and Pontus Rudberg, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 67–91.
Google Scholar
Paul Friedman, “The Road Back for the DPs: Healing the Psychological Scars of Nazism,” Commentary, December 1948.
Google Scholar
Eugeniusz Stanisław Kruszewski, Polski Instytut Żródłowy w Lund (1939-1972): Zarys historii i dorobek, Londyn; Kopenhaga: Polski Uniwersytet na Obczyźnie; Instytut Polsko-Skandynawski, 2001.
Google Scholar
Victoria Van Orden Martínez, Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945–1946, Ph.D. diss., Linköping University, 2023.
Google Scholar
Victoria Van Orden Martínez, “Survivor-Refugee Humanitarianism: A New Perspective of Second World War Humanitarianism in Sweden,” Women and humanitarian aid - a historicizing perspective Conference, Örebro University, 2021.
Google Scholar
Victoria Van Orden Martínez, “Witnessing against a divide? An analysis of early Holocaust testimonies constructed in interviews between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles,” Holocaust Studies 28/4, pp. 483–505.
Google Scholar
Cecilea Mun, “How Emotions Know: Naturalizing Epistemology via Emotions,” Chapter 2 in The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, ed. Laura Candiotto, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 27–50.
Google Scholar
Alan Rosen and Neal Lipsitz. “Oral Memoirs: The Testimony of Holocaust Survivors.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. 27 Aug. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.480.
Google Scholar
Jerome Rosenberg, “Holocaust Survivors and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: The Need for Conceptual Reassessment and Development,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 11/4, pp. 930–938, https://doi.org/10.15453/0191-5096.1683.
Google Scholar
Paul Rudny, ”Zygmunt Lakocinski och polska källinstitutets arkiv i Lund 1939–87,” in Skandinavien och Polen. Möten, relationer och ömsesidig påverkan, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund: Lund University Press, 2007, pp. 177–201.
Google Scholar
Murray B. Stein, and Barbara O. Rothbaum, “175 Years of Progress in PTSD Therapeutics: Learning from the Past,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 175/6, pp. 508–516, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17080955.
Google Scholar
Andrzej Nils Uggla, I nordlig hamn: Polacker i Sverige under andra världskriget, trans. Lennart Ilke. Uppsala: Centrum för multietnisk forskning, Uppsala Universitet, 1997.
Google Scholar
Netografia / Websites
Google Scholar
American Psychiatric Association, “What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),” https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd/what-is-ptsd, last accessed 8 January 2024.
Google Scholar
Lund University Library (LUB) “Witnessing Genocide” digital archive: https://www.ub.lu.se/hitta/digitala-samlingar/witnessing-genocide, last accessed 6 January 2024.
Google Scholar
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Similar Articles
- Jacek Leociak, Understanding the Holocaust. A Task for Generations , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials
- Editors Journal, Jan Grabowski, From the editors , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: 2010: Holocaust Studies and Materials
- Jan Grabowski, Editors, From the editor , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials
- Jacek Leociak, Marta Tomczok, Affective Holocaust Kitsch – Introduction , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 17 (2021)
- Dan Michman, Dutch Society and the Jewish Fate: A Puzzling Record , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 12 (2016)
- Klaus Peter Friedrich, Nazi Murder on the Jews in Polish Communist Press (1942–1944) , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 2 (2006)
- Jan Grabowski, Barbara Engelking, Warsaw Jews Expelled from Switzerland to the General Government , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 1 (2005)
- Roni Stauber, Philip Friedman and the Beginning of Holocaust Studies , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 11 (2015)
- Dariusz Libionka, Alina Skibińska, “I swear to fight for a free and mighty Poland, carry out the orders of my superiors, so help me God.”Jews in the Home Army. An Episode from Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials
- Jacek Leociak, Literature of the Personal Document as a Source in Holocaust Research (a Methodological Reconnaissance). , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 > >>
You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.
