‘Off the record’: conversations with survivors of the Holocaust

It has been through my work interviewing and working with survivors in various settings: research and educational ones-in which there are many "off the record" conversations-that have taught me something that interviews don't usually offer; what it means to live with and negotiate the past. They have also taught me that while some survivors feel an urgent imperative to transmit memory, there is a gnawing self-consciousness as to how their words will be received. It has been argued that testimonies humanize and individualize the suffering of the victims and survivors, both during the Holocaust and in their postwar lives. However, through my own work interviewing survivors, I now understand that it is our conversations together that humanize the survivors. Sadly, it is these "off the record" conversations that are not recorded in the massive corpus of archived testimonies, and our ability to have them that is receding. In this presentation I will reflect on these "off the record conversations" and what they have taught me in the hope that I will understand the survivors, their lives, and their testimony and recounting a little more.