Holocaust Testimonies

For this entry, I am looking at the testimonies of Lena Kuechler found here: http://voices.iit.edu/frames.asp?path=Interviews/&page=kuech&ext=_t.html and Esther Bem found here: http://college.usc.edu/vhi/otv/otv.php


Lena was a school teacher in Poland who eventually chose to care for some 60 Jewish children displaced by the genocide and war. She cared for the children as her own, and hopes to relocate the entire group, including herself, to Palestine. Esther speaks about liberation and how difficult it was to negotiate her identity following the war. Esther was never in a concentration camp, but spent the war in hiding in Italy. I was unclear as to Lena's situation, but I don't think she was in a concentration camp either.

I chose these two testimonies because I was interested in the experiences of women. I think women have particularly interesting things to say because many of them were able to hide in ways that were impossible for men. I think women can more easily pose as Aryan because they do not bare any physical signs of being Jewish, whereas circumcised men can be easily identified.

Lena was able to remain in public sites because she had false papers declaring her Aryan. As a result, she was able to remain well-informed about about the political climate during the war. Such knowledge made Lena's resistance efforts possible. She knew what was going on and knew how to work around it. I believe that access to knowledge probably aided her in her ability to maintain a strong sense of identity. By aligning herself with her work for the children, she was able to remain proud of being Jewish, though she had to hide it. In contrast, Esther speaks about not even knowing the war was over prior to her liberation. Kept in hiding, she may not have been liberated had villagers not told the Palestinian soldiers where her family was. She talks about her identity being a difficult thing to deal with once she was freed. Kept in seclusion and made to feel terrified and ashamed of who she was, identity dissonance seems a likely outcome.

Given these two different experiences, I can see why identity formation may have been more difficult for some. Lena had an active role in shaping her fate during the war. She had access to outside knowledge and was able to accurately situate herself within a larger context. For her, shifting identities was a daily reality given the nature of her hiding. This is reflected in the multiple languages she uses in her interview. Esther spent the war in a house where it was too dangerous to know what was occurring on the other side of a wall. She had no opportunities for active identity creation and was left only able to fill the role of a victim. Following liberation, these women had two different goals. Lena knew who she was, but needed to continue her efforts to rescue children. Esther had no pressing project following the war and so had a difficult time reevaluating who she was after years of contact with only a small group of people.