Lyn Smith - Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived

I first became aware of the Holocaust sixty years ago as World War II ended. In particular it was the newspaper and newsreel images of the emaciated bodies being bulldozed into mass graves in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that shocked me into an entirely different perspective of the war which I had spent in relatively sheltered circumstances as a child evacuee in the Sussex countryside. Yet, although thousands of inmates Jews and non-Jews perished there of starvation and disease in the most terrible conditions, Bergen-Belsen did not reveal the full horror of the Holocaust because it was not a Nazi death camp as such. There were no planned massed killings, gassings or crematoria. The Final Solution the mass extermination of Jews and gypsies took place farther east in the six designated death camps situated in occupied Poland, Auschwitz being the most infamous.

Working as a freelance interviewer for the Imperial War Museums Sound Archive in 1978 gave me the opportunity and privilege of recording testimonies of men and women who had been directly affected by the Nazi Holocaust. This was a pioneering project on the topic; it covered refugees who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and who had been interned as enemy aliens during the invasion scare of 1940, as well as their pre-war lives and experiences of the rise of Hitler.

Over the next two decades, along with other interviewers, I continued recording the Holocaust story. By then Holocaust was interpreted by the Sound Archive to include not only the millions murdered or imprisoned by the Nazis during the period 193345, but also those whose lives were affected by Hitlers policies, or who were witnesses to the persecution and atrocities. Therefore, refugees, families of the murdered and of survivors, aid workers and troops who liberated the camps were included. It was due to this broad definition that I came full circle when meeting and recording the late Bill Essex the soldier who had the gruesome task of bulldozing the piles of bodies into the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

When planning for the permanent Holocaust Exhibition started in the mid 1990s, the recording programme was expanded. Survivor testimony was to have a key role in the exhibition which was opened by HM The Queen in the Millennium year. Today there are 785 Holocaust-related recordings in the Sound Archive. It is from this extensive, rich and varied archive that over a hundred voices have been selected for this book. In order to give as full a picture as possible, these have been supplemented with a small, complementary range from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Throughout my interviewing and transcribing work, I have been impressed with the unique nature of each survivors experience. Every man, woman and child experienced and coped with their ordeal in their own way Roman Halter, for instance, who summoned his murdered family to his bedside each evening to give account of his survival for yet another day; or George Hartman, whose desire to experience love and sex gave him the will to live. Different reactions are given to wearing the Star of David: the pride expressed by Janice Ingram and Anna Bergman compared with the shame and humiliation felt by Jan Hartman and Harry Lowit. Each person experienced their own particular portion of Holocaust history and not one had a complete overview of the monstrous system in its entirety.