Comparative analysis of testimonies in the transfer of memory of the gas chamber victims from Yugoslavia and Poland during II World War

Neda, Radoičić

Kultura

164

281

305

0023-5164

10.5937/kultura1964281R

http://scindeks.ceon.rs/article.aspx?query=ISSID%26and%2614727&page=0&so...

2019-2021/07/05/09:37:04

After June 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the mass shootings of civilians by the Einsatzgruppe, the Nazis experimented with gas vans for mass killings. The use of gas vans began after Einsatzgruppe members complained of battle fatigue and mental anguish caused by shooting large numbers of women and children. Einsatzgruppen gassed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews, Roma, and mentally ill people. According to Wievorka, the Eichmann trial conferred on the witnesses the social identity of survivors and transformed them into bearers of history. Jovan Byford asserted that the authors selected from each testimony confirmed the existing "truths" and perpetuated the dominant culture of remembrance. According to Rothberg, Felman and Laub, the focus should be on the links between testimony and trauma. They emphasize, as adopted from Elie Wiesel, that our era is the age of testimony, which relies on the experience of the Nazi genocide. The goal of the testimony thus becomes helping to create the missing Holocaust witness. The research problem of this work is exploring the dynamics of memory creation in Yugoslavia and in Poland, about the victims of gas vans, and examining their consequences, as well as the process of solidification of the wartime rumours and their integration into historical remembrance, due to the value of testimonies. The research question of this work is how the problematics of the dynamics of an individual and the collective memory is manifesting in the shadow of the "traumatic past", caused by brutal deaths by gas vans. The primary hypothesis of this paper is that "Oblivion" was a tendentiously applied cultural strategy in relation to the issue of "dusegupka". The main goal of this qualitative study is contributing to the study of memory of victims who were killed in such a brutal way, and remembering, to prevent any possibility of it happening again.