Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators
Author(s)
Publication Name
Publication Date
Abstract
Psychoanalyst Dori Laub asserts that for camp inmates the Holocaust extinguished the possibility of “I-thou” interaction. Address and response, the basis of human subjectivity, became impossible for the prisoner to imagine. The author of this article uses victims’ descriptions of perpetrators to investigate this assertion. Do survivors at times conceive of a wartime assailant as “you”—as an addressable human agent? Comparing two clusters of testimony by Lithuanian Jews, the author finds that contemporary language and social context shape the victims’ stance toward Holocaust perpetration—that is, how they weigh human versus structural wrong. She also points out various ethical traps inherent in each of the two methods of remembering wartime aggressor
Topics
Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial Memory Oral History and Biography Yiddish Holocaust Survivors Holocaust Interviews
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Original Language
Volume/Issue
30(3)
Page Number / Article Number
506-531
DOI
Link
Link to article (paywalled), Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators
PDF (via academia.edu), Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators
PDF (via academia.edu), Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators
Bibliographic Information
Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators. 2016: 506-531. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1093/hgs/dcw069
