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Diaspora from the Inside Out: Litvaks in Lithuania Today
Author(s): Pollin-Galay, Hannah
Editor(s): Gitelman, Zvi
Date: 2016
Topics: Diaspora, Main Topic: Identity and Community
The Holocaust is a Foreign Country: Comparing Representations of Place in Lithuanian Jewish Testimony
Author(s): Pollin-Galay, Hannah
Date: 2013
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust, Oral History and Biography, Interviews, Geography, Diaspora, Yiddish
Abstract: This article explores discourse on the Holocaust as a ‘placeless’ event. Analyzing survivor testimony delivered in different cultural contexts, I ask whether or not the idea of strange or vanished places is culturally specific or universal to memories of Holocaust victimhood. As a case study, I analyze the testimony of Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors. I compare the more commonly heard testimonies of survivors living in North America and Israel to the lesser known voices of survivors who have remained in Lithuania—witnesses who live and testify ‘on the scene of the crime.’ I demonstrate how important the idea of estranged geography figures in the testimony of émigré witnesses. By contrast, the survivors who have remained in Lithuania draw a different narrative map of the country, one in which past and present interact on the same sites. Their home landscape, however, also has black holes, dark places that they consider untouchable in everyday life. The article thus points to a tension between contextual particularities and universal challenges in depicting Holocaust places.
Ecologies of Witnessing Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony
Author(s): Pollin-Galay, Hannah
Date: 2018
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Memory, Yiddish, Oral History and Biography, Interviews
Abstract: An innovative reassessment of Holocaust testimony, revealing the dramatic ways in which the languages and places of postwar life inform survivor memory

Based on the oral histories of Lithuanian Jews who survived the Holocaust, this book explores how the languages and places of postwar life shape personal narratives. Comparing the testimonies of survivors who remained in Lithuania and those who resettled in Israel and North America, Pollin-Galay’s groundbreaking work demonstrates how people draw from their linguistic and physical environments in order to understand their own suffering on emotional, political, and cultural levels.
Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators
Author(s): Pollin-Galay, Hannah
Date: 2016
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Oral History and Biography, Yiddish, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust, Interviews
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