Remembering the Past
Memory is a critical component of understanding the past. But how is memory different than historical documents? How do testimonies and verbal tellings preserve elements that maybe cannot be captured through text?Memory, by contrast, has no sense of the passage of time;
It denies the ‘pastness’ of its objects and insists on their continuing presence.
-Peter Novick
We touched a bit upon this subject in our previous class, but I believe recording people's testimonies regarding their experiences is a way of recording the essence of that person. In history classes, students learn about thousands of years of past events. There are countless wars and battles and lives lost, but when examining something through a historical lens, it is easy to become detached. The more time that goes by, the more detached generations of people will become. But to give faces to a tragedy, to a genocide especially, can enrich the way people remember the past. It is more humanizing to remember that a slew of individuals were killed, to not think of it as just a number. And remembering the past is important. While remembering alone is not enough to stop future atrocities, it is an invaluable step in learning from humanity's past mistakes.
I think the answer to Marianne Hirsch's question is "yes," the memory of genocide can be transferred into something that stops future genocides from happening. But in order to "remember," we need to do more than just learn. Many people are taught about the Holocaust in school. The world is aware that a horrible event shook humanity, yet, it has no been the last genocide that has ever taken place. For example, the genocide in Rwanda claimed roughly 1,000,000 lives in 1994. Knowing about a genocide isn't enough to understand what can be done to prevent future ones. To know is not the same to remember. In order to form memories of an event, even one we did not witness, we need to absorb the memories of those who did experience it firsthand.Can the memory of genocide be transformed into action and resistance?
(Hirsch 104)
This is where video testimonies work so well. Digital preservations of the stories of survivors ensure that we can still hold onto these stories and absorb them. To see how real people were affected by an event, to place a face and a voice to an experience, more so than reading an anonymous account of it in a history book, can help us connect to past events that would be more limiting in other forms of the archival process. "Memory can be transmitted to those who were not actually there to live an event" (Hirsch 106). Thus, the testimonies of genocide survivors such as those collected by the Shoah Foundation become so instrumental in shaping the memories we form of the past.
"These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present."
(Hirsch 107)
What Hirsch says here captures the message of Peter Novick's quote, posted up above. I think it also reveals the differing effect between facts and testimonies. Facts are bound to the past while memories are living, as long as people continue to preserve them and pass them down through the generations. Because memories don't stay in the past. They live on and stick with us, shaping our identities as much as we are willing to let them. Thus, they can be used as a vessel for future change.
The project, Voices of Vietnam, seeks to find justice for the families affected by the rape of Vietnamese women by South Korean soldiers. The project heavily relies on survivors and their sons giving very personal testimonies about the atrocities they endured, many of whose lives were thereafter ruined. The project seeks for apologies from the South Korean government for these families, acknowledgment that what their soldiers did was wrong. Although these women were raped decades ago, what happened to them still lives on with them. It has affected the outcome of their lives and shaped how these women view themselves, all as a result of something that wasn't their fault. An apology would be small, and though it wouldn't undo years of pain and suffering, it could perhaps allow some of these women and their children solace. Maybe they could get a piece of themselves back that was so brutally yanked away.
The USC Shoah Foundation is another organization that has made efforts to preserve testimonies by recording interviews of tens of thousands of genocide survivors, mostly from the Holocaust. Not all the interviews are available to the public, but many are. Thus, I sat down and watched the interview of Sonia Burstyn, a Polish Jew, a survivor who participated in a partisan group during the war to help the resistance effort in any way that she could. Sonia's story is one of thousands, and though I will never see all of the testimonies recorded, watching hers gave me a small but valuable insight into what it was like surviving the Holocaust. Watching her recall horrible events from decades earlier, about how her family was murdered, how she fled for life, how she knew she had to do something, gave me the type of insight I would not have gathered from reading in a textbook.
