Locating and Analyzing Ethics of Care in Early Survivor Testimonies

Like other historical commissions and documentation centers established during and after the Holocaust and Second World War, the main objective of the Polish Research Institute (PIZ), established in Lund, Sweden, in 1940, was to document and record evidence of the Nazis’ crimes for justice and history.¹ In spring 1945, when tens of thousands of survivors of Nazi persecution arrived in Sweden as displaced persons, this objective was met in part by gathering 512 complete and 76 incomplete or ‘unfiled’ witness testimonies from Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors in just over one year. These important written records, which were primarily the result of in-person interviews conducted by survivor-interviewers with survivor-witnesses, then directly served the objective when some of the material was used in the Ravensbrück war crimes trials in Hamburg in 1946 and 1947, the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in 1947, and the Gross Rosen tribunal in 1948. Since the 1990s, they have also increasingly served researchers.

In this paper, I contend that the PIZ efforts to document the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution served justice (and history) in other ways as well.

In the spirit of reexamining ‘old’ collections of survivor testimonies in new ways, my research involves analyzing evidence of the relational encounters taking place when the PIZ witness testimonies were being created. Scholars including Boaz Cohen and Rita Horváth have argued for the importance and benefits of examining the specific contexts in which testimonies were given through a close reading of the testimonies. Cohen and Horváth argue that “analysing testimonies together with the contemporaneous circumstances of their rendition not only deepens our understanding of the testimonies but teaches us about post-war survivor communities and their sensibilities.”² What I have found in taking this approach is that the survivors engaged with the PIZ initiative to collect and record evidence from other survivors were doing so in ways that demonstrate an ethics of care involving listening and communication. I argue, for instance, that they were providing a unique form of refugee-led humanitarian aid to other survivors that enabled them to begin the process of coping with the trauma and reconstructing their lives.³ In addition, they were mediating difficult and conflicting memories of trauma and persecution through empathy and compassion.⁴ In these and other ways that I am exploring, the survivors of PIZ were serving not retributive justice, but restorative justice, which involves not only justice, but justice with care.⁵ This paper will explore these and other findings of my ongoing research.

¹ See, for example: Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).² Boaz Cohen and Rita Horváth, "Young witnesses in the DP camps: Children's Holocaust testimony in context," Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 209.³ Victoria Van Orden Martínez, “Survivor-Refugee Humanitarianism: A New Perspective of Second World War Humanitarianism in Sweden.” Presented at Women and humanitarian aid – a historisizing perspective, Örebro, Sweden, October 15, 2021. Paper pending publication in edited volume.⁴ 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 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2021.1981627.⁵ Elizabeth S. Parks, The Ethics of Listening: Creating Space for Sustainable Dialogue (Lanham,Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), 109.