<p> <i>A Dangerous Proximity</i> examines the role played by the civil society in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, after Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1941. It seeks to establish different patterns of civilian complicity and discuss their significance in the context of the genocide implemented by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands. My dissertation illuminates the background of the civilian accomplices, their context of involvement and the motivational forces underlying their actions. </p><p> Integrating survivor testimonies, witness accounts and perpetrator viewpoints is the methodological cornerstone of my dissertation. The evidence I present and analyze was generated during my archival research and comes from war crimes trials, oral history testimonies, official correspondence exchanged between private petitioners or denouncers and the authorities, as well as survivor memoirs. </p><p> The various collections of documents I examined at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum revealed the magnitude of the cooperation between the local population and the military authorities in Bukovina and Bessarabia. The actions of Christian locals were murderous as well as undermining or destructive in non-physical ways. People from different walks of life became involved from the very beginning of the re-annexation until late after the deportations concluded. </p><p> The complete destruction of Jewish life in Bukovina and Bessarabia after July 1941 was not informed by vertical, top-down enforcement of policy or recourse to coercive measures but facilitated by the horizontal cooperation between the military establishment and the civil society. Throughout Bukovina and Bessarabia, various Christian locals assisted the Romanian and German authorities in the search for Jews, escorted and guarded them, but also participated in their plunder and murder. They denounced the Jews who were in hiding, those exempted from deportation and petitioned the authorities against Jewish specialists brought back from Transnistria. Civilian authorities used their power to expedite the physical removal of the Jews from the two regions and to extort the victims. The civilian perpetrators differed in their gender, age, ethnic identity or occupation. The victims did as well. Both Jewish men and women, young and old, poor and rich were subjected to betrayal, torture, plunder, sexual violence and murder by their Christian neighbors. Eliminating the Jews socio-economically and physically was regarded by some as a test of loyalty to the government who put them in positions of authority. For those who were morally corrupt, it served as an opportunity for personal advancement or enrichment. However, for many it was an attitude rooted in personal conviction.</p><p>

<p> <i>Fossoli di Carpi: The History and Memory of the Holocaust in Italy</i> analyzes the role and function of an Italian deportation camp during and immediately after World War II within the context of Italian, European, and Holocaust history. Drawing upon archival documents, trial proceedings, memoirs, and testimonies, <i>Fossoli di Carpi</i> investigates the distinct functions of Fossoli as an Italian prisoner-of-war camp for Allied soldiers captured in North Africa (1942-43), a Nazi deportation camp for Jews and political prisoners (1943-44), a postwar Italian prison for Fascists, German soldiers, and displaced persons (1945-47), and a Catholic orphanage (1947-52). This case study shines a spotlight on victims, perpetrators, Resistance fighters, and local collaborators to depict how the Holocaust unfolded in a small town and how postwar conditions supported a story of national innocence. My dissertation trains a powerful lens on the multi-layered history of Italy during the Holocaust and illuminates key elements of local involvement largely ignored by Italian wartime and postwar narratives, particularly compensated compliance, the normalization of mass murder, and the industrialization of the Judeocide in Italy.</p><p> The buoyancy and longevity of the <i>"brava gente"</i> myth in popular Holocaust memory has obscured Italian participation in the Judeocide. This study of a camp, from its origins to its postwar functions, exposes not only the pattern of silence that facilitated mass murder, but also the national and international political sources of that silence. Italy's wartime past is far from a single-note narration of benevolence. This emerges clearly as we scrutinize a decade of uses of Fossoli.</p>

<p> An examination of the wartime correspondence of hundreds of Jewish individuals living or interned in France, citizens who denounced or advocated for them, and the response of French officials to these petitions reveals a multifarious discourse regarding who was capable of belonging to the French state. Letters from the camps of France offer an exceptionally rare window into the perceptions and self-conception of the interned as they engaged with friends, family, and colleagues, petitioned officials, demanded the restoration of their legal status, and endeavored to disprove accusations that they constituted a separate and unassimilable group. France experienced an immigration crisis and a period of intense political friction directly prior to the Second World War. These factors stirred anxiety over moral &lsquo;degeneration&rsquo; and a perceived loss of socio-economic control, inspiring exclusionary policy and policing of immigrant and refugee communities. </p><p> This correspondence requested recognition and release, the provision of aid for the interned and their families, and for French and Jewish organizations to explain anti-Jewish measures. Within their letters and entreaties Jews in France consistently confirmed their loyalty and patriotism while decrying the abhorrent nature of the classification, &lsquo;aryanization,&rsquo; arrest, and deportation measures. Within correspondence from the concentration camps traumatic violence, extreme deprivation, and the fervent need to acquire resources for survival (provisions, medicine, news) frequently took precedence. Internees pursued petition as part of their multi-pronged survival strategies. Although it is difficult to gauge intention within such a complex and controlled medium, the sense of shock present in the letters implies authors were often convinced their citizenship, service, or in the perilous case of the &lsquo;<i> juifs &eacute;trangers</i>&rsquo; their motivation to assimilate, held emancipatory power. While officials of the French State rarely responded directly to personal letters, these demands were taken up by leaders of Jewish organizations, the <i>Union g&eacute;n&eacute;rale des Isra&eacute;lites de France</i>, the <i>Consistoire central</i>, aid societies, and delegations of veterans and wives of prisoners, in their meetings with Vichy and <i> Commissariat g&eacute;n&eacute;ral aux questions juives</i> officials. These petitions mobilized familial, friendship, and professional networks in their defense, and give insight into how strategies of adaptation and perceptions of the persecution shifted over time. </p><p> Hundreds of letters of personal correspondence and petition between camp internees and Jewish and French officials from the Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande, Compi&egrave;gne, and Pithiviers camps are primarily found in <i>Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine</i> collections in Paris, the USHMM camp collections, and Yad Vashem. Dozens of letters written by Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and organizations advocating for the rights of the Jewish community can be found in the Archives <i>Nationales- Commissariat g&eacute;n&eacute;ral aux questions juives</i> collections.</p><p>

<p> We live in a frantic, fractured, ever-quickening, and violent world that is at the end of the era in which we will be able to talk with survivors of the <i>Shoah</i>. To date, there have been approximately 100,000 recorded interviews of Holocaust survivors. The vast majority of these interviews&mdash;such as the 52,000 done for Steven Spielberg's and USC Shoah Foundation Archive&mdash;have used traditional, single-session, and "neutral" methods of oral history interviewing to "capture" and "preserve" the legalistic, historical "testimonies" of survivors. The present study responds to this situation and unique moment in time by slowing down, listening, speaking repeatedly and intimately, forming interpersonal relationships, and storytelling with three Holocaust survivors in the Tampa Bay area: Salomon Wainberg, Manuel Goldberg, and Sonia Wasserberger. I do this in order to see those I work with as experiential authorities able to help me address the classic and post-modern issues of human meaning, connection, and value in the post-Holocaust world. I first contextualize this work within extant and related research in the field of communication. Then I situate this project in the broader intersections of work on the history of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. This is followed by an outline of the particular collaborative oral history and ethnographic theories and methods that influence this work. These contexts lead to three chapters, the ethnographic stories of each survivor I have worked with for the past three years. Each story focuses on: a) the oral history and ethnographic significance of sharing particularities of each survivor's experience through our dialogues together; b) broader insights and explorations of the central themes (compassion, identification, and affinity) that emerged from our interviews and relationships. The final chapter concludes by reflecting on and synthesizing the values and limitations of this project. As a whole, this dissertation cultivates and exemplifies: a) a unique understanding of humane and humanistic approaches to ethnographic methods in the fields of communication and oral history; b) compassion, identification, and affinity as important lenses and motives to consider in research with individuals (in particular individual survivors of mass atrocities); c) the historical value and need to continue developing diverse approaches to scholarship that centralize personal stories, dialogue, peace, wisdom, and work that represents marginalized experiences and experiences of marginalization in a violent, oppressive world. This dissertation is offered as a token of remembrance of the Holocaust and to those who shared their stories with me.</p>

Abstract not available.

This dissertation explores where historical memories concerning colonization, genocide, and racism intersect, merge, and overlap in multidirectional ways. The text opens by exploring the possibilities of using a multidirectional model of world history and then moves to a discussion of certain aspects of world political history that interrogates why some nations have dominated others. The focus then shifts to England's attitude toward perceived "others" in the crucial late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by examining contemporary theater drama. From there, the text moves on to current voices that have spoken out against the racism and genocide that have emerged as byproducts of empire building. Finally, possibilities for where we, as citizens of the world, can go from here in thinking through framing justice and equality for all its occupants is given the final voice in this text. My approach may be thought of as somewhat philosophical.

In a series of writings in the 1950s and 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno shaped German debates about art's role in coming to terms with genocide. Questioning the capacity of traditional aesthetic forms to convey such horror and, even more, the morality of using the Holocaust as artistic content he specifically directed his critique towards lyric poetry, famously stating that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The reactions to Adorno's statement and its later modifications have ranged from sharp criticism to agreement with his central premises that the rupture in the continuum of German history must not be forgotten, and that the limits of traditional aesthetic evaluation do not extend to that kind of suffering. One category of lyric poetry, however, has only rarely been evoked in discussions of the problem raised by Adorno—that produced by the victims themselves while the events of the Holocaust unfolded. German literary and cultural critics have for the most part neglected poetry written in the camps. Lacking an appropriate interpretive framework, they have often viewed these texts as aesthetically “inferior” and deemed them to be inadmissible representations of the Holocaust. This dissertation hopes to correct the narrowly-defined aesthetic valuations currently in place and proposes instead to study camp poetry as valuable repositories of memory. It introduces German poetry from the Theresienstadt concentration camp, places the texts within their specific environment and historic context, and introduces a critical framework for their analysis. In this way, the dissertation does not only examine the role of poetry in the construction and perpetuation of historical memory, but it investigates as well the mechanisms by which texts are canonized and forgotten.

This thesis investigates the stories of Jewish women and men living in Europe during the Holocaust who made decisions related to pregnancy, abortion, birth, and ‘parenting’ in ghettos, concentration camps, and in hiding. By reviewing existing, publicly accessible survivor testimonies, and by interviewing still-living survivors, I analyze the various ways Jewish women and men used available but limited forms of reproductive assistance to preserve their own lives and to secure the safety of their unborn or born children. Jewish women and their doctors or other ad-hoc medical providers weighed the risks of possible illness or diseases resulting from clandestine care against the seemingly greater or graver risk of Nazi exposure. By highlighting stories from Holocaust survivors who speak about experiences receiving or providing reproductive “health care” during the Holocaust, this study emphasizes what survivors say about seeking or providing abortions under conditions they might not have otherwise accepted, pursued, or suggested. Women who became pregnant during the Holocaust embody the unspeakable dilemma of “birthing into death,” as reproduction often meant murder for Jewish mothers. Pregnant Jewish women and their partners, the medical providers who attended to them, and their witnesses during the Holocaust all have unique perspectives on their own in-the-moment responses to pregnancy under extreme conditions. Their testimonies speak to how the decisions they made involved Jewish cultural notions of childrearing in Europe during the time of the Holocaust, and to the complex shaping of traumatic memory.

This dissertation examines contemporary responses by Austrian theatre makers from the free theatre sector, that is, those working outside of the state theatre establishment, to the outcome of what came to be known as ‘the big lie’ on which Austrian national identity was built following liberation from German rule by the Allied forces in 1945. The ensuing problem for the post-war generations of having to claim a past that was buried under the carefully constructed official version of history but mediated through the silence of their parents and grandparents – shaping their (inner) lives – and possibilities for representing such experience through the medium of theatre are core issues explored in this study. The main focus of the dissertation is analysis of a selection of three pieces of theatre produced by two free theatre companies in Austria, Auf der Suche nach Jakob / Searching for Jacob / Szukajac Jakuba, and Pola, both by the Projekttheater Studio based in Vienna, and Speaking Stones: images, voices, fragments… from that which comes after by Theater Asou in Graz, Styria. Apart from contextualization of the central thematic concerns of the selected pieces of theatre within the historical events of 20th century Austria, and discussion of the theoretical framework within which the pieces are analysed, this study also offers a consideration of the phenomenon of the free theatre sector in contemporary Austria as a complement and an alternative to the state theatre sector, its roots and development since the post WWII period through to the early 21st century. Interviews with theatre artists, arts administrators and a Holocaust eye witness are also drawn upon to investigate how free theatre can provide a medium though which memory-work, the subtleties of damage and the inexpressible, and the difficult task of claiming the past can be explored.

<p> Interdisciplinary war trauma research suggests wars involving ethnic cleansing have debilitating and serious impacts on the physical and mental health of survivors. There has been a lack of focus on female-specific victimization, although female-driven cultural practices are altered as a result of traumatization. The South Slavic female survivors of the Balkan War partake in extensive cultural practices that have been shaped by their experiences of trauma. The current study used a qualitative approach to understand how women's traumatic experiences are manifested in and ameliorated by their oral memory traditions, or the cultural practice of sharing transgenerational information. Specifically, data from psychosomatic clinical sessions spanning a ten-year period were analyzed to identify how the somatic practice of the Kolo, or the round dance or sharing of information in a circle, has provided the women an outlet for their cultural expression and healing. Results are discussed in terms of psychosomatic themes that help us understand the effects of trauma.</p>