An Unexpected Fraternity: An Approach to Holocaust Memoirs in English Through Animal Metaphorization

This paper examines autobiographical texts written by Nazi concentration camp survivors to explore the authors’ metaphorization of animals as a means of conveying their own suffering. The authors whose memoirs are analyzed migrated to America after the war, and significantly chose to pen their traumatic experience in English, which must have been a challenging endeavor for them as non-native speakers. Since academic discussion on the Holocaust is mainly conducted in an Anglophone framework, it is vital that we pay attention to English-language memoirs, and listen to the survivors’ genuine words, rather than merely relying on translations. I suggest that animal metaphorization allows them to overcome in some way the ineffability inherent to all Holocaust memoirs. Moreover, by exploring animal images it is possible to inquire about their personal attitudes regarding other species, as authors often sympathize with –and relate to– animal suffering. My main goal is thus to decide whether this rhetorical resource points at the emergence of an interspecies empathy, based on the shared ability to feel pain and, as sentient beings, to suffer.

Adjusting to new “truths”

In this article, we study the diachronic (re)construction of repeated WWII-testimonies. Specifically, we scrutinize how shifting master narratives in the social context may affect how stories are told in a particular time and place. We selected testimonies by two Belgian concentration camp survivors – one Flemish and one Walloon – who both wrote down their story twice, namely in 1946 and 1985. By comparing the “same” diachronically dispersed stories – thus addressing the temporal dimension – and the differences in the narrators’ regional background – thus incorporating the spatial dimension – we study how overlapping and differing storytelling environments influenced the narratives’ construction. In the analyses, we adopt an interactional-sociolinguistic approach to illustrate the storytelling environments’ influence upon the story formulations and the relativity of what is presented as the “truth”, since the narrators continuously adjusted their stories and identities to fit with the ever-evolving storytelling context.

Social categories, Standardized Relational Pairs and identity work in World War II-narratives

Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we aim to tease out how narrators talk into being the social group constellations in their storyworlds and how these – potentially shifting – constellations can be related to the narrator’s identity constructions. We investigate two World War II-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors and scrutinize whether the expected Standardized Relational Pair of victim-perpetrator – viz. the camp prisoners versus the Nazis – is in operation, how these two categories are talked into being, whether other social groups are mentioned and how all these processes affect the narrators’ identity work. It proved to be the case that, even though the victim-perpetrator Standardized Relational Pair is indeed present in both testimonies, it functions very differently in both stories, resulting in almost opposing identity work by the two narrators.

Splittringen mellan polska judiska och icke-judiska överlevande från koncentrationsläger. Det svenska samhällets reaktioner våren och sommaren 1945

När ungefär 20 000 överlevande från nazisternas koncentrationsläger togs emot i Sverige under våren och sommaren 1945 visste flyktingpersonalen och beslutfattarna bland svenska myndigheter mycket litet om deras bakgrund, kultur och etnicitet. I början dominerade inställningen att antagonismen mellan judar och icke-judar från Polen var en religiös eller etnisk ömsesidig motsättning. Efter ett par månader mognade insikten om splittringen i två separata polska identiteter, samtidigt som antisemitismen hos icke-judiska polacker började nämnas vid sitt rätta namn. En liberalare samhällssyn, flyktingpersonalens personliga erfarenheter samt internationella faktorer samverkade till en bättre förståelse för flyktingarnas situation och för deras behov av att bygga upp ett nytt liv i Sverige där många så småningom rehabiliterades.* * *The division between Polish Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp survivors: reactions from the Swedish society during the spring and summer of 1945 • As approximately 20,000 survivors from the Nazi concentration camps where received in Sweden during the spring and summer of 1945, the refugee workers and decision makers knew very little about their background, culture and ethnicity. Initially, the general opinion held that the antagonism between Jews and non-Jews from Poland was a mutual religious and cultural conflict and only a few observed the harsh verbal antisemitism that was common among non-Jewish Polish refugees. Over the coming months, an awareness of two separate Polish identities developed and the prevalent antisemitism was recognised for what it was. All persons, who lived within the borders of Poland before the war, were initially classified as Poles but gradually a classification according to religious and ethnic belonging developed. After a few months, the govern­ment and authorities realised that it was impossible to demand that all refugees return to their country of origin. A study of the archives of state authorities and aid agencies in Sweden reveals how an in­creasingly liberal view of society, the personal experiences of the aid workers as well as international circumstances contributed to a deeper understanding of the situation of the refugees and their needs to build a new life in Sweden, where many of them eventually where rehabilitated.