Jovan Byford (Open University, UK)
Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic rise in the institutional collection of testimonies of Holocaust survivors. At the forefront of this development were a number of US-based institutions, most notably the Fortunoff Archive, the USHMM and the Shoah Foundation. Existing writing on these projects focuses mainly on the American context, and the way in which the testimony collection reflected, but at the same time also helped to determine, the specific trajectory of post-war representation and understanding of the Holocaust in that country. And yet, these projects have had, often from the outset, a distinctly international dimension. Testimonies were recorded in Eastern Europe, Israel, South America and elsewhere, and therefore in countries where the culture of Holocaust memorialization was often radically different to that prevalent in the US.
The seminar explores the institutional, ideological and cultural context of the production, collection, dissemination and reception of testimonies recorded in Serbia, the first Eastern European country where survivors’ accounts were recorded by US-based institutions, as early as in 1989. It uses the Serbian example to consider the cultural ‘encounter’ implicit in the international efforts of US-based projects, especially in Eastern Europe, and explores the way in which the importance attributed to the practice of ‘bearing witness’ fitted with established local traditions of Holocaust memorialization and the perceived relevance of survivors as witnesses, mediators of memory, and interpreters of the Holocaust. The seminar also considers how the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia affected the way in which survivors remembered the Holocaust and explores the shortterm and long-term impact of the testimonies and their collection on the reception of the Holocaust in Serbia.