Recurrence: the Way to Discover the Collective Experience of Persecutions
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
Once I asked a survivor in my family, what was the worst experience you had during persecutions? I was staggered to hear her answer. She told me something I had never heard before from her or from other survivors in my family. Since I am unable to convey what she told me, I am citing a Lithuanian survivor, Lily Margules, who went through the same experience in a different camp.[1]
The painful experience of being forced to be naked recurs through the testimonies of survivors. While some men and women address the mental and emotional weight that this episode had for them, others are silent about it.
Henia Bryer, a Polish survivor, was deported to Plaszow, a concentration camp close to Cracow. Her words echo what I heard.[2]
Similarly, Shari B., who was deported from the Slovakian town, Kosice, shared the mental impact of forced undressing.[3]
G. Hirschfeld was born in Berlin and went through the same procedure, but his account does not address the mental and emotional aspects of forced nakedness.[4]
The experience of forced nudity was definitely part of the victims’ collective fate. Millions, both the survivors and the Voiceless, had to undergo this procedure. The sheer fact that it happened often is well-known and well-documented. The same cannot be said about the emotional and mental weight of this episode. This resists any effort of documentation. As a matter of fact, we do not know how and what victims felt at the moment they were forced to undress; any effort to document this intrinsically subjective aspect of the experience would sound absurd.
Nevertheless, as the examples above demonstrate, the narration of the emotional and mental weight does recur through the testimonies of the survivors. Sometimes we hear about it, sometimes we do not;we can definitely observe its recurrence in the testimonies of the survivors.
From a quantitative point of view, recurrence can be approached as probability. Recurrence describes the probability of observing the same thing again and again. Recurrence is in fact the key to reconstructing collective experience as a set of possibilities: given a reasonably large corpus of survivors’ testimonies, pieces of the collective experience must recur.
Continuing with the previous example, the emotional impact of forced nakedness occurs in some but not all victims’ accounts. Whether every victim experienced this deep emotional impact we do not know; however, given that it recurs in the testimonies of survivors we can definitely know that any victim, including the Voiceless, was likely to experience it. In other words, the tangible recurrence gives the proof and evidence of that the emotional and mental experience that the testimony excerpts above address could have been the experience of any victim. We can thus document forced undressing as an emotional experience by drawing on recurrence.[5]
With the help of recurrence, we can also break the silence on painful memories. Again, not all discuss the painful experience of forced undressing, but those who do speak up on behalf of others, including the Voiceless.
To sum up, through recurrence we can reconstruct the world of possibilities where the victims were forced to live. Through recurrence we can also reconstruct the possible mental and emotional experiences of the Voiceless. Finally, through recurrence we can document these experiences. Recurrence as probability is the backbone of the epistemological turn we need to hear the voice of the Voiceless.
In the Methodology section I outline how text and data mining techniques helped me retrieve recurrent experiences in the 2700 testimonies that this digital publication contains.
But recurrence itself does not answer another question that the recovery of the collective experience involves: what are the aspects of the collective experience that connect the survivor and the Voiceless with us?
The collective experience of the victims is anchored in a remote past that is fundamentally different from our present. To hear the voice of the Voiceless through collective experience we need to find a bridge that can cross the gap between the past and present. To find this bridge, I again return to my own memory.
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1. USHMM RG-50.030*0150, Oral history interview with Lily Margules.
2. USC Shoah Foundation, 5970, Oral history interview with Henia Bryer.
3. Fortunoff Archive, HVT-66, Shari B. Holocaust testimony.
4. USHMM, RG-50.150*0015, Oral history interview with G. Hirschfeld.
5. Geoffrey Hartmann has for instance suggested that the purpose of testimony archives is to record not only individual stories but also to "record and value a collectively endured history." Hartmann, “Learning from Survivors”, p. 137.