Collective Experience: World of Possibilities from the Victims’ Perspectives
Cite as: Gabor Mihaly Toth, In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust (Yale Fortunoff Archive, 2021), lts.fortunoff.library.yale.edu
I remember often hearing a story from my mother’s aunt, a survivor of the Budapest ghetto. As a young kid she spent the winter of 1944 and 1945 in a so-called "protected house" in Budapest. The safety of Jews residing in these houses was guaranteed by foreign diplomatic missions in the city. Nevertheless, as she recounted, one day a group of Hungarian lads showed up at her protected house; they started to gather the Jews to take them to the Danube. At that moment, she faced the prospect of something that often happened in Budapest during the winter of 1944 and early 1945. Another survivor of the Budapest ghetto described this in the following words.[1]
At the last moment, she was saved. As she related, the Christian husband of the housekeeper intervened and somehow managed to send the lads away. Nevertheless, the sheer possibility of being taken to the Danube and shot over the river was burned into her memory. She kept retelling this never realized possibility, which for her was as important as what actually happened.
Survivors often recall not only what happened, but also what might have happened to them. The phrase could have been me is the hallmark of these recollections.
Maximilian K., who was born in Vienna in 1925, recalled the following episode.[2]
Gunther Katz, a German survivor, tells how the possibility of antisemitic insults impacted him as a young child.[3]
Finally, Barbara Bregman, a Polish survivor described the experience of constantly facing the possibility of death.[4]
As the examples above show, collective experience defined as set of possibilities is not an abstract idea. Life in a very specific world of possibilities was actually the heart of persecutions from the victims' perspective. A Polish survivor, Charlene Schiff, put this into words.[5]
From the perspective of the victims, persecution was not only a chronologically ordered sequence of real and concrete events and episodes. It was also a manifold of concurrently existing possibilities that any victim, both the survivor and the Voiceless, had to face. What by and large gave rise to their mental and emotional suffering was the fact they were forced to live together with these possibilities.[6]
"Tell the world what happened to us" should therefore also involve the narration of possibilities that were involved with the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the collective experience through possibilities raises the same challenge as the voice of the Voiceless.
Even though a certain world of possibilities is a significant dimension of human existence, it is intangible. In this sense, world of possibilities is an invisible layer of human history. Historical accounts usually address the factual, the real, and not the possible. It is not that possibilities are completely absent from historical accounts, but they are usually present only once they are concretized. For instance, the possibility of deportation is usually discussed by survivors not as a possibility but as something that actually happened. The heart of the matter is that once we see the realization of a possibility, it ceases to exist as a possibility. This has a notable parallel with the Voiceless. In testimonies, once the victim destined to die speaks and asks future generations to remember him or her, he or she is not the Voiceless anymore.
In short, neither the Voiceless nor the collective experience defined as a set of possibilities are available for direct observation. They both belong to the invisible layer of history and express the intangible general lacking concreteness and particularity.
Next, I will demonstrate how we can extract the world of possibilities in which victims lived from accounts of survivors; but first I recall a memory fragment that is burned into my own memory.
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1. USHMM RG-50.462*0031, Oral history interview with Eva Bentley.
2. Fortunoff Archive, HVT-78, Maximillian K. Holocaust testimony.
3. USC Shoah Foundation, 19690, Oral history interview with Gunther Katz.
4. USC Shoah Foundation, 25912, Oral history interview with Barbara Bregman.
5. USHMM, RG-50.233*0120, Oral history interview with Charlene Perlmutter Schiff.
6. Freud pointed out the traumatic effect of facing certain possibilities. In Moses and Monotheism, he writes, "it may happen that someone gets away from, apparently unharmed, the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which one can ascribe only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a ' traumatic neurosis.' " Sigmund Freud, Moses and monotheism (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of psycho-analysis, 1939), p. 109. See also, Cathy Caruth's analysis of Freud and trauma in her Unclaimed Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), p. 5.