Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations...

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MATERIALCULTURE

Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

Carol A KidronUniversity of Haifa, Israel

AbstractDeviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather than act as conduits for ‘continuing bonds’ with the past and the dead, survivors are expected to disentangle the self from souvenirs of difficult pasts facilitating separation and recovery. Ethnographic interviews with descendants depict the way discursive framing elides the semiotic potential of domestic material traces of the Holocaust and parent–child–object relations engendering intimate inter-corporeality and embodied memory. Object relations are central in the passage between life- and deathworlds, allowing survivor families to sustain the lived memory of the past in everyday life. Findings problematize the discourse of genocidal suffering that overshadows micro-moments of lived experience.

Keywordscorporeality, genocide, Holocaust, memory, person–object relations, trauma

Introduction

Scholars of material culture and memory have explored the way objects endure through time and encapsulate a ‘silent’ trajectory of human–object relations, sustaining the past in the present. As traces of times gone by, mementos (Saunders, 2000), souvenirs

Corresponding author:Carol A Kidron, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, 31905 Haifa, Israel.Email: [email protected]

432989 MCU17110.1177/1359183511432989KidronJournal of Material Culture2012

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(Stewart, 1993) and family heirlooms (Miller, 2008) fix the presence of the past in everyday domestic materiality and familial social relations. Objects not only remind the owner/user of past practices and situations but also act as ‘portable places’, transporting the self back to distant places and times (Bell, 1997: 821). Moving beyond the traditional conceptualiza-tion of commemorative artifacts as ‘dormant bearers’ of the past (Parkin, 1999: 308) that prompt the individual to nostalgically long for or virtually represent what cannot be restored (Stewart, 1993), Turnbull (2002: 130) asserts that objects function as vital repositories of the past via active performance and enactment of human–object relations that bring the past sensuously, viscerally and emotively alive for rememberers (Seremetakis, 1994: 11). Having conjured up landscapes, lost homes, one’s heritage and the dead, the object is capable of bridging existential boundaries not only between past and present but also between deathworlds and lifeworlds (Hecht, 2001; Saunders, 2000: 45).

Objects that silently encapsulate and perform pasts that have culminated in death or near-death experiences are particularly complex. Some of these objects do not evoke natural or anticipated death but, rather, dramatic and unexpected ruptures in the texture of the self and the family, such as forced migration, combat, genocide, or mortal illness. Consequently, these memento mori are characterized by unique ambiguities and resultant auras. They may materially evoke terrible moments of a survivor’s violent past and concomitantly recall the valiant forces of survival. Saunders (2000) presents an account of ‘trench art’ – artillery shells and bullets recycled by soldiers into works of art. Person–object relations with trench art evoke both the horrors of the battlefield and the miraculous and regenerative force of survival and/or the commemoration of loved ones.

Moreover, for survivors of genocide, warfare or forced migration, souvenirs of death-worlds retain a no less subtle balance between the representation of difficult memories of rupture from loved ones and the valorized commemorative evocation of pre-war or pre-migration relations or longed-for landscapes. Parkin (1999) explores the death-related ‘souvenirs’ of wartime refugees, who take with them emotionally valuable domestic objects or photographs that then become relics of their devastated world. After depositing their displaced identities within these ‘mementos in flight’, Parkin posits, refugees await reset-tlement and the emotional recovery that would allow eventual disentanglement of the self from the objects so that they may reclaim their identities. Having inscribed their pre-war selves and memories of previous lifeworlds in the objects, however, they find themselves ambiguously positioned on the border between past and present lifeworlds and past death-worlds. So long as the refugee retains self-object entanglement, the object, as silent reposi-tory of the past, prevents forgetting and allows the owner to be linked to the trace of his or her previous lifeworld, metonymically evoking the whole. However, if the refugee wishes to proceed into the present and restore independent subjectivity, ties to the object must be relinquished, allowing for closure and historicity.

These analyses of material relations with death-related objects exemplify the growing body of literature pertaining to traumatizing events and resultant person–object relations (Bennett, 2005; Hirsch, 2002). However, a critical examination of the literature discloses what I assert are three problematic core assumptions regarding the ‘failure’ of material-based traumatic memory work. The first assumption, grounded in trauma discourse (Caruth, 1995), Holocaust and genocide studies (Friedlander, 1992) and cultural studies, is that traumatic experience is beyond representation and, therefore, that surviving material traces

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cannot fully capture and ‘contain’ the sublime and unknowable past. According to Doss (2002), traumatic events such as child abuse, warfare and the loss of loved ones can lead to the failure of memory, the traumatic experience remaining unspeakable and unknow-able. Although Hirsch (1997) traced the way person–object relations attempt to virtually conjure the presence of the traumatic past, constituting a post-memory of what is otherwise ineffable, mainstream scholarship has nevertheless concluded that the traumatic past can-not be fully integrated into experience or assimilated into personal narratives. Material objects such as photographs and person–photo relations are thought to fail to fully capture what is destined to ‘remain apart from lived reality’ (Baer, 2002: 9).

Echoing Parkin’s (1999) work, the second assumption, also grounded in therapeutic trauma discourse and Euro-Western perceptions of death and bereavement, is that although temporarily therapeutic, extended entanglement of the traumatized self with surviving material traces of difficult pasts may be deleterious to emotional well-being. Trauma survivor and descendant well-being is dependent upon a normative trajectory from remem-bering and the continued presence of the past to at least partial forgetting and absencing. Moshenska (2008) describes how children growing up in social contexts of violence collect shrapnel as a temporary coping mechanism, and Schiffrin (2009) discusses the therapeutic yet transitional grief work accomplished by tattoos, which can at once embody and exter-nalize loss, easing the passage from bereavement to recovery. Although memory work with these transitional objects and physical traces must eventually be marginalized, recovery need not always entail the total absencing of material relations with the past. Rather, survivor testimonies about past relations with objects and the objects themselves may be distanced and spatially relegated to monumental sites of memory. Beyond the critiques of Halbwachs (1980) and Nora (1989), scholars rarely consider the fate of private familial memory work subsequent to the public enlistment of personal pasts, as this ‘duty memory’ is thought to contribute to national reconciliation and rejuvenation of war-torn nations and peoples (De Jong and Rowlands, 2008; Förster, 2008) and, again, to liberate the individual from silent over-entanglement with the past.

The third assumption is that survivors who silently sustain and privately covet silent relations with material traces of their traumatic past ultimately withhold that past from their descendants, failing to constitute parent–child–object relations that might allow for empathy, the transmission of an embodied knowledge and a material familial legacy. The material traces of violent pasts are depicted as unable to breach the wall of silence between trauma survivors and their descendants. According to Hirsch (1997, 2002), the material signifiers of traumatic suffering, such as the embodied scars of slavery or the photographic representations of the Holocaust past, cannot be fully translated or communicated to those who have not personally experienced that suffering. Despite empathy, identification and even the affect produced in the other, trauma ‘solidifies difference’ (Hirsch, 2002), making the material transmission of familial legacies of difficult pasts impossible.1

These assumptions deviate from foundational understandings of the function and practice of person–object relations. If material objects have been thought to facilitate the semiotic representation of the past in the present (Hallam and Hockey, 2001; Miller, 1998; Pels et al., 2002), enable the performative embodied and emotive presence of the past (Stewart, 1993; Turnbull, 2002) and transmit the meaning and feeling world of the past via genera-tional material relations (Miller, 2008; Seremetakis, 1994), then the trauma literature does


challenge the scholarship on the commemorative role of material culture. Problematizing the assumptions of trauma literature, one might critically ask if trauma-related objects do fail to encapsulate the traumatic past, if survivors are not committed to and capable of maintaining ‘continuing bonds’ with memento mori, perpetually shifting between lifeworlds and deathworlds without endangering their own and their children’s emotional well-being, and whether survivors emotively breach the supposed ‘wall of silence’ to transmit a mate-rial legacy to their children in the silent material relations of everyday life. In keeping with Miller’s (1998: 10) and Hallam and Hockey’s (2001: 23) assertions regarding the potential of discourse to elide everyday mundane materiality, I argue that mainstream trauma dis-course regarding bereavement, memory, commemoration and testimonial voice has framed a reductionist reading of everyday material-based memory work. Except for Hecht’s (2001) work on the creative material memory work of traumatized Scottish women, the literature has elided the complexity and viability of familial genocide commemoration, intergenera-tional object relations and transmission capable of preserving the normative presence of death in everyday life.

With the aim of deconstructing these discursive assumptions and exploring the dynamic role of ‘dormant’ yet still vital bearers of the genocidal past, I present an ethnographic case study of descendant recollections of the everyday material person–object relations of Jewish–Israeli Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

Trauma theory

Trauma victims may suffer from a multitude of emotional and behavioural symptoms diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (DSM-IV, 1994). Although non-clinical findings have shown no evidence of psychopathology (Sagi-Schwartz et al., 2003), both clinical and non-clinical studies have found that descendants of Holocaust victims and Vietnam veterans may suffer from maladaptive behavioural patterns and a damaged sense of self (Zilberfein, 1995). According to the logic of the PTSD paradigm, if it is left untreated, the long-term psychosocial effects of survivor and/or shell-shock trauma can be transmitted from generation to generation (Barocas and Barocas, 1973). A familial ‘conspiracy’ is often said to shroud the history of parental suffering. A ‘wall of silence’ (Bar-On, 1992) is often erected between psychologically damaged survivors and their children, the metaphor signifying not only the absence of verbal interaction regarding the genocidal past but also the absence of alternative forms of non-verbal intersubjective shared experience that might materially or sensually evoke and transmit emotive and corporeal traces of difficult and ‘unknowable’ pasts. The majority of scholars of memory, mental health practitioners and humanitarian workers worldwide have encouraged trauma survivors and their descendants to verbally articulate their repressed and silenced past. Talk in therapeutic settings and public forms of testimony aims to liberate the silenced past and is put forth as not only psychologically healing but also socio-politically redemptive (Herman, 1992) for the individual and the collective. Even in the face of critique of the pathologizing profile of PTSD (Young, 1995), the trauma construct (and paradigm of silence, pathology and talk therapy) has retained its standing as a central discursive frame defining the way scholars and practitioners interpret and treat responses to potentially traumatizing experience.

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This scholarly focus on pathological silence and redemption through verbal articulation has overshadowed the phenomenon of silent, material and visceral lived experience of genocidal pasts. Logocentric readings of traumatic legacies (highlighting the centrality of the spoken word as the primary form of representation) obviate attempts to chart non-verbal taken-for-granted processes in which traumatic sensibilities may be intergeneration-ally transmitted (Kidron, 2009). Hoping to disclose these processes, I undertook an ethnographic study of Israeli Holocaust descendants.

Methods

From 2000 to 2005, I explored Holocaust descendant memory work in Israel through a multi-sited ethnographic study. I conducted 55 in-depth interviews with adult children of Holocaust survivors using a semi-structured thematic format. Accessing the sample using the snowball method, I interviewed descendants ranging in age from 35 to 55, with equal gender representation. The great majority were born in Israel to survivor parents who immigrated there from Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s after surviving Nazi extermina-tion camps, forced labour camps, ghetto incarceration or extended periods of hiding. Interviews took place either in respondents’ homes or in cafés. I asked respondents open-ended questions about themselves and their families, allowing them to narrate and present the self as they saw fit. I also engaged in participant-observation at survivor and descendant monumental and meso- and micro-local sites of memory. I found that Holocaust descend-ants depict the survivor home as embedding the non-pathological presence of the Holocaust past within silent embodied practices, person–object interaction and person–person inter-action. These practices form an experiential matrix of Holocaust presence that functions to sustain familial ‘lived memory’ and to transmit tacit knowledge of the past within the everyday private social milieu (Kidron, 2009).

I focus here on findings regarding survivor-descendant object relations. Thirty-seven of my 55 respondents recounted memories of such relations, involving two categories of material phenomena: the first category includes physical traces embedded within the sur-vivor body, such as the tattooed number on a parent’s arm and wartime scars. The second category includes surviving artifacts of the deathworld, such as a tablespoon from Auschwitz and pre-war family photographs.

The embodiment of memento mori

The blue number tattooed on a survivor’s arm has become one of the more powerful symbols indexing the authentic presence of the Holocaust. It epitomizes the physical trace, metonymically signifying the presence of the past. Unlike the footprint, if not surgically erased, it does not fade with time. In 1950s and 1960s Israel, the tattooed number ‘gave away’ survivors who, in the socio-political context of the new Israeli state, were made to feel ashamed of their past, as those who went passively to the camps like ‘sheep to the slaughter’. These survivors were considered the antithesis of the ideal-type, physically empowered and valiant ‘new Hebrew’ engineered by the nation-state. Many survivors hid their tattoos under long sleeves and others had them surgically removed. Today, however,


changing discourses surrounding victimization and the impending demise of the survivor generation have transformed public response to veneration as iconic material witness to the dehumanization of genocidal trauma. As Primo Levi (1989: 118) asserts: ‘After forty years my tattoo has become a part of my body. I don’t glory in it … but I don’t erase it since there are not many to bear witness.’

Scholars, however, have paid little attention to the more mundane and micro-experiential role of the tattooed number in the everyday lives of survivors and their descendants. Beyond brief confessions in descendant memoirs to public embarrassment or morbid curiosity regarding the tattoo, little is known of emergent survivor parent and descendant relations to it. How did children react when first noticing the tattoo as a ‘foreign’ imprint on the parental body? Could the tattoo materially evoke the Holocaust past, engendering empathic parent–child–object relations and some form of intergenerational transmission, or was the traumatic past incommunicable and ultimately withheld from the descendant?

When I ask her about the presence of the Holocaust in her home, Hannah begins her account with her ‘discovery’ of the tattoo on her mother’s arm:

H: The first time I remember noticing it was when we were on the bus … I looked at other people’s arms and saw that they didn’t have one. I asked her why the others didn’t have a number like hers. She answered, ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’ I got upset and told her to take it off. When she didn’t respond, I touched it to see if it was connected … or you know like a Band-Aid, that you could take off. She got very angry at me and pulled down her sleeve.

C: Did you ask her about it again?H: No, you know, you just figure out somehow when you’re not supposed to push

something sensitive. Of course, later on … I knew, but somehow I never forgot that feeling of wanting to rub it off, like … like a stain or something.

Hannah’s text recounts her discovery of her mother’s Otherness. Difference lies in the ‘corporeal ambiguity’ of her mother’s tattoo as something physically embedded in the visceral self, totally blurring the boundaries between human subject and material object (Seaton, 1987). Its permanence and seamless yet disturbingly incongruent presence on and in the body are revealed as Hannah touches it, attempts to remove it and discovers that it is inseparably ‘entangled’ within her mother’s visceral self. When asked to explain why she wanted to ‘rub it off’, Hannah referred to the incongruence between body and object: ‘It just didn’t seem to belong on her arm.’

One might also read Hannah’s text as signifying the exposure of the innocent child to unintegrated psychological traces of the traumatic past (Auerhahn and Laub, 1998), forced to come to terms with the altered semiotics of the deathworld and with its traumatizing consequences. Although valid, such ethically loaded and psychologically pathologizing frames (Kidron, 2009) elide more mundane and emotive responses critical to an under-standing of the descendant experience of parent–child–object relations and the transmission of embodied and material memory.

Depicting her discovery of her father’s tattoo, Penny recounts with a smile on her face, ‘I remember … when I first … I mean when I noticed my father’s number. I must have been about four. I asked him why I don’t have one too.’ Seeing my surprise, Penny giggles

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and says, ‘Sure why not? … he had one! … why are you surprised? … kids don’t know.’ She continues, ‘He laughed … and said I don’t get to have one. I said, but I wanted a number too, like his [long laugh] … He looked at me very seriously and said bad people did it to him and that I shouldn’t want one.’

Penny’s story is almost shocking in its depiction of a child’s healthy curiosity. In sharp contrast to what we might think of as a traumatic constitutive moment, her account not only normalizes the discovery of the tattoo but also depicts Penny, the now adult descend-ant, still irreverently amused by the incident. Her response forces the listener to reconsider the child’s taken-for-granted lifeworld, where a number on a parent’s arm, devoid of historical or cultural reference, might appear to be a coveted accessory.

Echoing Levi’s (1989) reference to the number as ‘part of his body’ and Hannah’s descrip-tion, descendants only notice the tattoo when comparing their parent’s arm with other arms, including their own. At first, the tattooed arm is all they ‘know’ as a parental arm. Although it later becomes ambiguous when compared with others, it is then re-conceptualized, the marks seen as an inseparable part of the parent’s arm but not as the observer might suppose – as a walking ‘lieu de memoire’ (Nora, 1989). Its ontological status begins not as a symbol but as a mark, not different perhaps from a birthmark or mole. Yet, if the tattoo, for Penny, is not a site of Holocaust memory, can we speak of the representation of the genocidal past and of material or sensual intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memory?

Ricki’s experience of her father’s tattoo is clearly guided by the number’s historical trajectory and symbolic significance:

I used to sit with my father and stare at his number … long and hard … [very long pause and tears well up in her eyes]. I would try to imagine what it was like to be … branded. What it felt like when they burned it into his flesh … Did it hurt? Was he scared? I would stare until [her voice breaks] until … I could … [she can’t speak, long pause] … until I could … [she composes herself with difficulty] … feel it on my arm.

In what appears to be a mundane and habitual domestic practice (‘I used to sit and stare’), Ricki utilizes the tattoo as Bell’s (1997) ‘portable place’, as a medium of chronotopic travel taking her back to her father’s Holocaust past. Unlike the growing number of grandchildren of survivors who choose to tattoo their survivor grandparents’ numbers on their arms, Ricki does not wish to commemoratively brand herself. She does not seek factual documentary knowledge of why or when or who did this to her father but, rather, if ‘it hurt’ or if ‘it scare[d] him’. Ricki longs for what Young (2002: 25) describes as a shared experiential world via the ‘memory of the flesh’. Ricki’s memory work with the tattoo thus clearly recalls Latour’s (1996) ‘actant’, the object whose ‘relational will or force’ affects Ricki as agent, as she interacts with her father ‘through material culture in the practices of everyday life’.

Yet how can Ricki possibly feel the branding of her own arm? One might refer to this vicarious experience as a ‘phantom of desire’ (Young, 2002: 45). Just as an amputee may feel a missing leg, Ricki might ‘break apart objective reality to create an alternative one’ of the phantom experience. But, as Ricki has never been branded, how can she imagine the experience? Psychological discourse might diagnose her as suffering from heteropathic identification, the pathological ability to take on the memory of others. In cases of what Csordas (1993: 149) terms ‘somatic modes of attention’, the sensuous act of ‘turning toward’ the other body constitutes the body of the other not as distinct object of attention but, rather,


as real product of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. Intersubjectivity is fuelled by what Young (2002: 45) terms ‘patterns of love, yearning and desire’ that can create a sense of embodiment even if a past has not been personally experienced. Ricki’s loving link to her father and empathy with his pain thus allows for the constitution of the object of her imagi-nation, at once an imagined, yet very ‘real’ lived experience (Csordas, 1993).

My second example of embodied memento mori is the scarred body of the Holocaust survivor, signifying not only great pain but also the trauma of almost unbearable endurance and, at times, near-death experience. Like a tattoo, at first glance, a scar does not seem to fit the category of object. However, it is a semi-external marker of suffering, forcibly inscribed upon the body from without, and as portrayed dramatically in the ‘tree formation’ on Sethe’s back in Morrison’s (1987) novel Beloved, it takes on a distorted shape and form of protruding and hardened scar tissue. According to Burnett and Holmes (2001: 21), wartime or torture-inflicted scars become ‘heritage sites’ of physically and emotionally traumatic pasts. Once again, their permanence forces their victims to perpetually come to terms with the ambiguity of suffering better forgotten and the body as inescapable testament to survival. In contradistinction to Burnett and Holmes’s study of scar victims who com-modify their infliction, Ethan recounts his father’s attempt to hide his grandfather’s scars:

E: My grandfather lived with us. He survived a work camp and he and my father were reunited after the war. One day when I was little I walked in on my father helping my grandfather take a bath. I saw these terrible scars on my grandfather’s back. I froze where I stood. They both turned around … and looked at me and my father shouted at me to get out of the bathroom.

C: Why did you freeze?E: I guess I was shocked. I didn’t know … and actually I still don’t know what happened

to him in the camp … how he got those scars. But as a kid, it was just maybe, you know, a kind of fascination with … the scars.

C: What do you mean by fascination?E: Well, first it’s just shocking, you don’t expect to see the body of someone … close

to you … distorted like that. Then you start thinking, how did it happen, what did they beat him with, how badly … did it hurt him … you imagine and wonder … how he survived that.

As ‘heritage site’, the grandfather’s scars signify even to the young Ethan that they are Holocaust-related wounds, spatially and temporally relocating the victim and the observer in the distant past (Burnett and Holmes, 2001). They are markers of the ‘poisonous knowl-edge’ of brutality that is silenced and hidden from view (Das, 2007). Ethan appears to have inadvertently become a voyeur in an intimate and emotionally complex albeit super-ficially mundane domestic practice. What appears simply to be a son bathing his aging, invalid father is, in fact, a survivor son washing his survivor father’s scarred back; father and son once assumed one another to be dead. More importantly, Ethan’s arrival leads the son to protectively shield his father’s scars and his past (and perhaps their unique relation-ship) from his son’s curious gaze.

Like Ricki, Ethan does not seek out ‘withheld’ historical knowledge but attempts to imaginatively and empathically re-conjure the phenomenological experience of suffering

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and survival. If empathic person–object–person relations are conceptualized as the trans-mission or exchange of emotions and virtual pain and as the momentary sharing of the ‘heritage site’ and even more fleeting co-presence in a virtually conjured past, then the sensuous immediacy (Seremetakis, 1994) of Ethan’s glimpse of the visceral presence of the Holocaust on his grandfather’s back may be understood as a form of somatic com-munication. Descendants’ recollection of their own sensorial experiences of painful, shocking and immobilizing discovery of and interaction with parental/grandparental tattoos or scars constitutes an additional layer of embodied memory, not of the past but of the intergenerationally shared corporeal experience of remembering the past. These two layers of experience intertwine to engender a transmitted legacy of descendant emotive and embodied ‘knowledge’ and memory of the Holocaust.

Mementos in flight from the deathworld

Descendant narratives describe artifacts or ‘souvenirs’ carried away ‘in flight’ from the deathworld, including a tablespoon and a book of Psalms from Auschwitz, a Vaseline jar from a forced-labour camp and pre-war family photographs. Like embodied mementos, these objects function to make the absent past present for the family. Rather than empathic sensations of touch or imagined vicarious feelings of bodily pain and physical discomfort, such artifacts invoke the past through the imagination of the kinetics of everyday material activity and object-related practices. Rather than imagining what something felt like, one imagines what it was like to use something or do something with an object.

When telling me about the presence of the Holocaust in her home, Michelle proudly shows me a tablespoon. I stare at the spoon, wondering why she is showing it to me in the middle of our interview. She tells me smiling, ‘This was my mother’s spoon.’ Still confused, I respond noncommittally, ‘Really.’ Realizing I do not understand, she explains, ‘This was my mother’s spoon in Auschwitz. This is what she ate with, you know THE SOUP.’ Attempting to restore my professional composure despite my surprise, I ask her where the spoon is kept in her parents’ home, thinking to myself that it must be in some closed cabinet for safekeeping. She explains with a broader smile, ‘It was in the kitchen, in the drawer, with the other utensils … we ate with it. My mother fed me my morning oatmeal with it.’

At this point, I am shocked. The spoon from Auschwitz strikingly recalls the way in which Greek grandmothers chewed the food to be placed in the grandchild’s mouth so that, via the intimate bodily experience of nurturance, intergenerational transmission of memory and meaning may take place (Seremetakis, 1994). It is precisely the silent sensory experience of sharing food that encapsulates the personal, familial and collective past without narrative. Seremetakis’s analysis suggests that the mundane use of an object infused with ‘sacred’ symbolism is not blasphemous. Rather, when the trajectory of the object moves forward into the present and future, enmeshed in the everyday sensuous life of the household, its semiotic meaning is preserved, enabling the embodiment of relations of love and caring.

Nevertheless, I wondered how and why Michelle’s mother turned evidence of genocidal suffering into a souvenir or trophy. As Stewart (1993) recounts, souvenirs such as a key chain of the Eiffel Tower allow the one-time tourist to evoke memories of irretrievable visits to attractions he or she nostalgically longs to return to, at least, in the mind’s eye.


The ‘portable place’ conjures up the presence of the absent pleasurable chronotope. Similarly, trench art, a trophy of prowess and endurance, evokes the soldier’s glories of combat and survival. Although the art evokes death and suffering, it clearly elicits positive memories of camaraderie, strength and pride in one’s victory over death (Saunders, 2000). Displaced refugees’ objects ‘in flight’ also have positive sentimental value as souvenirs of the pre-displacement lifeworld, not of the actual traumatic events of displacement (Parkin, 1999). Michelle’s spoon, in contrast, conjures memories of hunger, feared starva-tion and humiliation. Why keep it, and if kept, why not place it on display in a museum?

I ask Michelle how she understands her mother’s choice to keep the spoon in use at home. She replies, ‘Look, she won, she survived with that spoon. Every time she fed me or my sister she probably said to herself: “Hah, I won – not only didn’t I die, but this spoon that kept me alive is now feeding my children.”’

The spoon is, in fact, a war trophy, yet unlike the trench art, its material functionality allows it to perform in ‘its relational force or will’ in the home precisely so that the family may routinely re-enact the relief of hunger, nurturance and survival. They are ‘living’ with and through the Holocaust, and, in this way, surviving the Holocaust becomes perhaps the most tacit and ‘present’ experience of the body enacted between mother and child, becom-ing perhaps the most basic and life-giving of ‘transmissions’. Thus, rather than being displayed behind glass in frozen sites and times of memory, the spoon remains woven into the daily practices of the home so that it may perpetually inscribe within the lived body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) the sensual experience of survival. The materially constituted and sustained embodied memory of survival, thus tightly interwoven in the everyday domestic social milieu, depicts what Nora (1989) and Halbwachs (1980) term ‘lived memory’.

Family photographs: visual portals into the past

Despite the mnemonic potential of objects, children of survivors depict the remembrance of the Holocaust dead as particularly problematic. The painfully present–absent dead are difficult to fully evoke, yet nonetheless are sorely ‘felt’. Rebecca describes her discovery of photographs of her dead relatives:

One day when I was alone at home I went into my parents’ bedroom to try to get a look at their pictures from before the war. They were hidden in a trap drawer underneath some books in an antique desk … I felt … you know, like I was invading their privacy ... more than that, like I was breaking into something holy. There were two old black-and-white worn-out pictures of people that looked, you know, from old times. I sat down and stared at the pictures, thinking wow, so these are the people my parents left behind. In one of them I recognized my father as a teenager with a lot of children around him, I guessed his brothers and sisters, and his parents in the centre of the photo. I could not get over how BIG his family was. I knew he had a lot of siblings, but suddenly they became real – they had faces, personalities, one looked shy, another precocious. I kept thinking how amazing it was that all these people had literally disappeared. I looked at the faces, tried to see if my brother or I looked like any of them. One of them looked a bit like me. I stared at her for a long time. You know, it kind of feels like being in another world … when you stare long enough at their faces. The other picture was one of a couple. They looked much richer than the other family. The women had a fancy dress on, she looked very much like my mother, especially her eyes, she had my mother’s piercing stare, kind of scary. She seemed to look back

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at me. For a second it was as if … she was really looking at me, really there. The man looked like a nice man. At least I could say I knew what they looked like but … to say they were my grandparents … my aunts and uncles … I couldn’t do that. They were strangers ... from another world. I had no idea who they were … what most of their names were … how they died. But at least I knew that they were part of my parents’ life before …

Rebecca’s monologue articulates the complexity of person–photo interaction. The photos are well hidden under and behind multiple protected ‘gateways’: the intimacy of her parents’ bedroom, an old desk, books and trap drawer, all provide layer upon layer of ‘security’. To access the photos, Rebecca must gradually move from more public family space to the inner sanctum (Turnbull, 2002; Yates, 1978), excavating in stealth to reveal the secret family images. Using her teenage father as a familiar anchor to enter into this entirely ‘other world’ of his past, she begins to stare at its inhabitants, examining those she identifies as his relatives ‘left behind’. Although they were left behind in the death camps of the 1940s, the photographic frame encloses them in pre-war eastern Europe.

Despite their shallow and static two-dimensionality (Hirsch J, 1981; Hirsch M, 1997), Rebecca’s gaze animates the faces in the photo. Searching for family resemblance and recognition, evidence of a familial bond and genetic link, her gaze triggers an illusion of being in the past and the momentary fantasy that her grandmother is ‘looking back at her’. Their mutual gazes (Hirsch, 1997: 5) provide the sensation that the dead grandmother is ‘really there’. According to Julie Hirsch (1981: 131), all photos suggest bonds enduring through time because ‘the dead and the dying live forever in our family photos as long as our eyes see them … it is our glance that bestows the final gift of life.’ Barthes (1981) depicts the mesmerizing process of recognizing resemblance in a photo when gazing, after his mother’s death, into her eyes. This familial look is ‘affiliative and identificatory’, the viewer not only desiring to recognize the relative in the photo but also to be recognized. ‘A familial look engages nonetheless a particular form of relationship that is mutually constitutive’ (Hirsch, 1997: 11). In the process of this mutual silent looking, the past is resurrected and, with it, the network of self–other relationships.

Barthes (1981) claims that, as a material emanation of a past reality, the photo is not a representation or copy but a material aspect of past reality reaching into the present and future. Thus, the photograph may be perceived as retaining a synecdochical relationship to the dead, the image preserving a material part of the whole person. The animated pres-ence of the ancestor thus allows the viewer to ‘enter’ the picture as through a portal into the past, making present descendants and deceased ancestors co-present.

Yet the temporarily resurrected living dead cannot provide more than the illusion of identification, interaction and, especially, knowledge. Although stupefied by their presence, the observer is left frustrated by the ‘impenetrable façade’ (Hirsch, 1997) of the image, unable to ascertain the deceased’s histories, access and recall their names or even conjure them up as separate individuals. Later in the interview, Rebecca explains that she cannot even recall her ancestors’ names but ‘remembers them only as a group of people frozen in the pyramid formation’. Apparently, temporary and partial animation of silent ‘affective viewing’ cannot combat the ‘flat death’ that both attracts and repels us, inviting us in and expelling us from shared presence (Hirsch, 1997: 4). Although both objects in flight and photographs are metonymically linked to the Holocaust and thus capable of evoking that


whole, one may consider the photograph an ‘inferior’ trace – like Magritte’s pipe – actually evoking the whole through the guise of the mimetic simulacrum. Barthes (1981: 96), too, succumbs to what he terms the ‘punctum’, or puncture, of the image, namely, the realiza-tion of the ultimate death signified in all photographs. The dead remain forever liminal – both magically present in photos and painfully absent beyond their frames.

In survivor and descendant interaction with pre-war photos, the tension between presence and absence is intensified. For most survivors, the sudden rupture in the linear flow of their own and their relatives’ life courses is compounded by the fact that they did not witness the deaths of their loved ones or experience the process of mourning, allowing for the illusion that the dead – indeed, the life prior to the rupture – continue to be present. Thus, the magical resurrection of the dead is intensely desired, but the gap between past and present realities made evident by the photo only serves to intensify the finality of their absence.

Can the tension between the presence and absence of the dead be bridged in survivor homes? How may one keep the dead present – ‘hovering over’ their photographic images – without succumbing to the reality of absence? Beth tells me that the presence of the Holocaust in her home ‘was concentrated in a drawer in her parents’ bedroom’. Her father periodically entered the room and locked the door. Having occasionally been allowed to accompany him during these visits, she recounts:

B: The drawer was in his dresser, next to his bed. It was his secret place, where he kept things close to his heart … He would open the drawer and begin taking out a picture of himself with his parents from before the war and a collection of toys he had salvaged from his childhood. The toys included magnets, a train, stamps and marbles. The minute he opened the drawer his face changed. He became softer, more gentle, and … more alive. In our everyday life he was … a zombie … you could see the death in his eyes, like he had lost control of his life. But when he opened the drawer and took out his things it was like he was taken back to his life before the Holocaust – before the rupture … to his childhood. He re-enacted intimate moments of his childhood, playing with his magnets, smiling at his family in the picture. The drawer for me was like an enchanted forest … not just because of its content but because I could be with the person I never really knew. We would sit together on his bed while he ‘played’ with his things. It was really … intimate … I guess you could say that symbolically he opened himself up when he opened up the drawer. It was his black box, you know, like a plane, what made him who he was. He never told me anything about the toys, or the people in the picture, no story, but by the way he acted … like a child … and the way he wouldn’t let any of us open the drawer ourselves or touch his things, we knew he was back there.

C: I don’t really understand what you mean about him being a zombie and coming alive with the drawer?

B: The way he was when he played with the drawer, so different, so alive … we had to realize that his life with us was not real to him … because he never really left his past. That drawer was a miniature of his real life. With us outside the drawer he was … dead. There was no connection between his two lives – just the drawer – when it was closed it separated the before and after the Holocaust and when open, like a gateway into his past it let him go back to his childhood.

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Moving into the bedroom, into the drawer and finally into interaction with the childhood relics, Beth’s father travels in time back into his pre-war life and to his revivified pre-war self. The use of domestic space to activate chronotopic shifting into the past recalls both Yates’s (1978) analysis of the use of topographic architectural layouts as material scaffold along which one may gradually trigger recall and Turnbull’s (2002: 131) account of the movement through architectural space as constituting and embodying a non-verbal spatial and temporal narrative that can be performed by the subject and read by spectators. This movement thus resurrects the past in and through space just as the exposure of the objects in the drawer, to different degrees ‘approaching’ access and practice, not only constitutes the past in the present but also transforms ‘and makes the consciousness of subjects’ as they move back into and perform the past (Turnbull, 2002: 134).

Here again, person–object interaction semiotically and sensuously resurrects the past. Beth’s father’s smiling gaze at the images of his parents and his ritual play with childhood toys animates the images and objects and makes the absent past virtually present. Unlike Turnbull’s monolithic public structures, however, these mundane objects are private, hidden from view and forbidden even to his own children without supervision. How can one under-stand the extreme sequestering of the images and relics of the Holocaust past? Moving beyond psychotherapeutic frames regarding secretly coveted transitional objects (Parkin, 1999), one may consider Law’s (2002: 95) claim that, to preserve the structural integrity and semiotic meaning of material objects, one must maintain the original person–object relations, thereby preventing object deformation. Unlike Michelle’s tablespoon, the toys in the drawer could be used only by Beth’s father, just as his pictures could only be looked at in private through protective eyes. Although hidden, he maintained repetitive ritual practices of interaction with both the images in the pictures and his surviving toys, making sure to return the objects to the drawer at the end of each visit. Unlike Derrida’s and Peirce’s traces, which signify the passage of time and are gradually deforming remnants of a presence that is no longer, the contents of Beth’s father’s drawer were protected from exposure to sur-rounding objects in the present that would have created a progressive linear temporal reality culminating in their ‘pastness’ or ‘flat death’ (Barthes, 1981). As long as the contents did not interact with the present and the father retained his original relations with them, they remained ‘frozen’ in the virtual chronotope of his 1930s childhood in Poland. Once frozen and preserved, rather than surviving parts signifying the absence of the whole, the objects continued to evoke the whole that includes Beth’s ancestors and her father’s childhood.

It should be clear that, when opening the drawer, the survivor animates the frozen past, making it dynamically present, ready for person–object interaction. However, Beth’s reflexive account adds a layer to the resurrection of the past, namely, the concomitant transformation of the demeanour and selfhood of the survivor as he enters and exits his past. When accessing the drawer, the survivor becomes ‘softer, gentle and alive’, in sharp contrast to his everyday cold, distant, dead or ‘zombie-like’ behaviour. A very sharp dichotomy exists between her father’s daily self-presentation as someone who had no control and ‘who had death in his eyes’ and his playful, happy moments when reunited with his past. Beth’s labelling of her father as a zombie recalls the Musselmen (‘Muslims’)2 – the living dead who stalked the concentration-camp deathworld. Yet unlike those living dead, Beth’s father was capable of negotiating the border between life and death, para-doxically childishly alive when in his virtual deathworld and dead when moving among


the living. Beth, however, goes one step farther, implying that even when leaving the virtual past of the drawer, he never totally disconnected from it or fully experienced his life in the present.

The drawer – and in other accounts I received, boxes hidden in closets, attics and so on – must be understood as a highly complex mechanism. Not only is it capable of encapsulating the frozen past and of becoming animated during survivor visits, but it also functions as a powerful ‘gateway’ or portal, separating temporal and spatial dimensions and activating the alternative selves of the survivors as they move in and out of its space. In contrast to the transitional object, which temporarily acts as a repository of the traumatized and displaced self and later returns the contents to the resettled self, the drawer is a permanent ‘black box’, periodically dormant and unactivated, and peri-odically animated and fluid.

Beth admits to sitting in total silence with her father, unable or unwilling to elicit stories about the family photographs or his toys, forbidden from directly interacting with his relics. Her moments with her father allowed her to ‘enter his enchanted forest’, ‘to be with the person she never really knew’ and to share, albeit passively, in the ‘intimacy’ of his playful imaginary world. By no means belittling the empathic challenge of relating to and interacting with the ‘zombie’ that he was during most of her childhood, Beth nonethe-less paints a picture of parental emotional absence alongside moments of intense emotional presence and sharing when he ‘opened up’. As with Ricki’s empathic exchange via her father’s tattoo, one must move beyond the death-related context of interaction to uncover the underlying silent connection, interaction and ‘communication’. It is during moments of virtual co-presence in the past that children can ‘go back there’ with their parent and encounter, in Beth’s words, ‘what made them who they are’. Thanks to the mediation of material objects, the intensely intimate process of parent and child movement into the Holocaust past and the joint feat of synchronizing chronotopic worlds to ‘be together in time’ (Sharon, 1982) breaches the trauma-related wall of silence and engenders corporeal and emotive forms of knowing in lieu of narrative history.

Discussion

I have shown that tattoos and scars, souvenirs of flight and hidden photographs sustain the co-presence of the genocidal past in the Holocaust survivor home. Despite varying degrees of exposure to view, all these objects share the ability to engender person–object interaction, empathy and imagination. Just as bodily markers and objects in flight constitute the embodied or imagined presence of past deathworld sensations, practices and events, photographic images of relatives allow for the imagined presence of the dead to ‘take shape’ in the present, providing a face, a gesture and an interfamilial bond to what might otherwise be experienced as the presence of absence.

Descendant accounts also disclose the way different objects utilize dissimilar mnemonic mechanisms to make the past present. In the case of Michelle’s spoon, the virtuality of the living presence of the past is sustained by embedding the artifact in the mundane domestic space of the kitchen, in everyday use and in intimate and open corporeal parent–child interaction. In great contrast, hidden photos, toys and scars resist public display and explicit and/or vocal parent–child interaction, yet they nevertheless evoke the presence of the past

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via empathic and emotive person–object relations, somatic modes of attention to loved ones’ corporeality and imaginative silent dialogic interaction with the potential ‘material nar-ratives’ encapsulated in the object. Both mechanisms, in their own ways, appear to shield against the onslaught of temporality and forgetting. Resisting deformation (Turnbull, 2002), the spoon, photos and toys retain their original person–object emotive relations of com-mensality, familial mutual gaze and playful kinetic practices, respectively. Moreover, in keeping with Miller’s (2001) work on domestic everyday lived experience and deviating from the literature on the sanctified aura of genocide-related artifacts in the public domain, whether hidden or exposed, all these objects remain tightly interwoven within the taken-for-granted and social milieu of domestic materiality and phenomenal lived experience of family relations.

All objects also share the potential to simultaneously signify death (or near-death) and animated life, to shift between and conflate chronotopes. Beth’s account of her father’s movement vis-à-vis the drawer suggests that, with the help of their mementos, survivor parents subsist on the border between life- and deathworlds and that descendants can silently (albeit vicariously) share in this experience. If survivors and descendants utilize objects to traverse life- and deathworlds, then, in keeping with Hallam and Hockey (2001), survivor mourning may not follow a linear trajectory of bereavement from intense grief and attach-ment to gradual separation, closure and ‘forgetting’. This finding is most certainly in keeping with the growing interest in ‘continuing bonds’ with the dead (Klass and Goss, 1999; Schiffrin, 2009) and the ruptured past, and with the critique of traditional attachment theory. Yet, trauma discourse, in general, and Holocaust and genocide literature, in particular, have consistently mystified the trauma survivor’s experience either as one of constant pathologi-cal failure to mourn, integrate and separate from what could not be fully owned or as one that has been therapeutically redeemed and disentangled from the oppressive past through testimonial voice and/or ritual commemoration. Critically deconstructing this binary and reductionist reading of traumatic memory, my data show that there is still much to learn regarding the mundane practices through which survivors of near-death situations or those who mourn violently ruptured lives straddle life- and deathworlds to maintain continuing bonds and experience this ambiguity. As I have shown, person–object relations play a critical role in the perpetual and ‘normative’ practices of resurrection and inner talk (Bakhtin, 1981) with the dead and the lived commemoration of pre-rupture lives.

Descendant interactions with their parents and with surviving material traces also prob-lematize the trauma literature regarding the impermeable wall of silence between parent and child and the ‘history withheld’. Rather than depicting the transmission of trauma and an emotional void of absence surrounding the familial past, descendant accounts describe material objects as key conduits in the intergenerational transmission of sensorial, emotive and embodied forms of ‘knowing’ the past (Csordas, 1993). Thus, ‘speaking in their stead’ (Appadurai, 1986), objects breach the wall of silence to engender a tacit, yet no less power-ful genocidal legacy. Even in the case of relations involving hidden and apparently ‘silenced’ objects, such as Beth’s father’s drawer or Ethan’s grandfather’s scars, Holocaust mementos and subsequent chronotopic journeys taken via these material conduits constitute descend-ant selves as virtually immersed in the Holocaust past as it is phenomenologically co-present in the survivor home. Thus, these objects trigger descendant vicarious identification, inter-subjectivity and intercorporeality despite the ‘historical narrative withheld’.3


The observer may perceive descendant relations and practices with tattoos, scars, spoons from Auschwitz, hidden photos of the living dead and the concomitant shifting between chronotopic realms as disconcerting or even psycho-socially damaging to the emergent descendant self. However, Beth’s account, for example, calls upon us to further examine trauma descendant narratives for the way they may depict intimate and empowering bonds and ‘normalized’ experiences of conflated life- and deathworlds (Kidron, 2009). Although I in no way intend to make light of the suffering of survivor families, the complexity of survivor–family-specific interaction with the painful past calls upon us to question reduc-tionist pathologizing discourses.

Beyond the issue of pathologization, survivor and descendant resistance to the public display of surviving objects raises questions regarding the public enlistment of trauma victims and their mementos as material testament to the past at monumental sites of memory. Within the moral and politicized economy of public enlistment, it has become more dif-ficult, but all the more important, to unravel the micro-moments of survivor and descendant everyday lived memory from the top-down macro-forces that have captured public imagi-nation. Further research is necessary to explore the everyday processes of person–object relations and to ascertain whether the agendas of intervention and enlistment of survivor tales and objects are not at odds with families’ perceptions of their own best interest.

Survivor and descendant avoidance of the public display of memento mori in the home or in monumental museums raises further questions regarding not only the limits of enlist-ment and monumental representation but also the future of the home as sanctuary for ‘authentic’ memory. What will be the fate of surviving objects with the demise of those who carried them into flight? Subsequent interviews with Beth and Michelle point to the attempt on the part of descendants to preserve the living contexts of the objects in their new homes and of continued resistance to public display. Yet, when Beth preserved her father’s c. 1950s Israeli nightstand and drawer in her very modern bedroom suite, I won-dered if she had not converted her father’s previously mundane and living context into a votive shrine or museum exhibit. Moreover, although the spoon and the toys retain their ‘authenticity’ for Michelle and Beth, what will the careers of these objects be when passed down to their descendants, who did not perform person–object relations with their survivor grandparent? Does Beth sufficiently embody her father’s somatic responses to the drawer to perform them for her children, or will she have to tell her children a narrative account of her more authentic founding event? Although much research has examined how col-lectors transform the home into a museum (Hecht, 2001; Stewart, 1993), we know less regarding the way collectors move in and out of more or less private or hidden domestic space to create different degrees of presence and memory and the way they do or do not transmit this process and the concomitant memory to their descendants.

Finally, resistance to public display implies that monumental ‘dead’ or ‘duty’ memory (Nora, 1989) is perpetually at odds with the phenomenological experience of lived memory (Halbwachs, 1980). Within the museum display or even the family living room display, objects are carried away in the temporal flow of the displayed narrative, no longer free to dynamically move between past and present or perform idiosyncratically with those who relate to them (Hirsch, 1981; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). As long as surviving objects remained interwoven in the social milieu of everyday life, family members continued to dynamically interact with the past as vitally impacting their body-selves, their subjectivities,

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their relations and even their worldviews. Aging survivors have recently begun to donate ‘copies’ of surviving mementos to newly emergent ‘domesticated’ mini-Holocaust muse-ums doubling as community/geriatric centres for Israeli survivors and their families (Kidron, 2010). These sites might be explored as niches of intimate materiality in the meso-public domain in which familial interaction can be sustained outside the home without totally sacrificing the mundane living context that has preserved them.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by The Halbert Exchange Program, The CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services, and The Morris Ginsberg Foundation. I am most indebted to all the descendants who generously shared their intimate memories with me. I thank the anony-mous reviewers for comments that have enriched the discussion. I would like to thank Don Handelman, the late Tanya Forte, Erica Lehrer, Anat Hecht and Giora Kidron for their thought-provoking con-versations, and Linda Forman, Eline Zehavi and Inbal Meudad for their skilful assistance.

Notes

1. The continued qualification of the process of post-memory as simultaneously tenable and inevi-tably limited (sustaining the axiom of the crisis of traumatic representation; see Hirsch, 1997; Luckhurst, 2008; Rothberg, 2000) consistently frames understandings of survivor and descendant traumatic experience and memory work as only partially bridgeable. Although all memory work, certainly that involving transmitted memory, involves mediation and a crisis of representation, the conceptualization of traumatic memory as ineffable mystifies the process of remembering and transmission and thus shifts scholarly attention away from the interesting processes of shared, albeit vicarious, experience to the potential failure of mediated memory.

2. Musselmänner in German, which was Auschwitz slang for people near death from starvation and privation in the camps.

3. Virtual presence does not imply immediate experience of the Holocaust, and identification does not imply identity – or equivalence – with survivor parents. Descendants do not achieve the authentic status of victims and witnesses of the Holocaust past.

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Author biography

Carol A Kidron is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her publications include ‘Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the “House of Being”’ (American Ethnologist, 2010) and ‘Toward an ethnography of silence: the lived presence of the past in the everyday life of Holocaust trauma survivors and their descendants in Israel’ (Current Anthropology, 2009). Kidron has undertaken ethnographic work with Holocaust descendants in Israel and children of Cambodian genocide survivors in Cambodia and in Canada. Her research interests include personal and collec-tive memory work, subjectivity and psychological anthropology.

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