This thesis explores the history of one German family during World War II, using the inspiration and background knowledge gained from historic scholarship and literature to create narrative closely following actual experiences and memories to help understand the peculiarities of war narrative and war memory. The sources are interviews with relatives, existing literature on the subject matter, and the writer’s imagination.

From June 1940 until May 1945, Guernsey children either lived under German occupation or were evacuated to England for the duration of the war. This thesis presents a small case study that uses oral testimony and resilience theory to describe Guernsey children’s experiences during World War Two. Its intent is to contribute towards the larger picture of British children’s experiences during this period. This thesis also aims to understand how the majority of those who were children on Guernsey during this time judged that, despite the obvious challenges related to wartime, their experiences had a net positive effect on their lives. Findings suggest that, consistent with resilience theory, children found the support they needed both internally using optimism, empathy, comparison, and the attitude of ‘getting on with it’ and externally from family, teachers, and the local people with whom they lived during evacuation or occupation. / Graduate

This thesis brings together two disciplines—creative non-fiction memoir and literary/historical critique—that seek to open avenues of discourse with regard to the legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust for subsequent generations. Ruth Kluger’s Holocaust memoir weiter leben: Eine Jugend and its English Language version written ten years later, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, are analyzed for their postmodernist challenge to traditional notions of testimony and genre. W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants is examined for its “imagetext” constructions that act to elucidate aspects of mourning and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (dealing with the past). This thesis is a post-structuralist approach that performs, through memoir, the construction of identity/subjectivity, but it is also a journey, performed in the spirit of belated mourning, that is part of the larger historical postwar discourse regarding the inability to mourn. / Graduate / 0311 / 0298 / vbhandar@uvic.ca

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The aim of this thesis is to explore the way in which sexualities and identities are involved in the creation of patriarchal relations, ethnic hierarchies and colonial power in the context of "Comfort Women". The women were considered sexual slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II. I attempt to show the It) ways in which masculinity, femininity, and national identity were re/constructed through the enforcement of the subject-positionings of gender, colonialism and nationalism. The questions I raise and attempt to answer are: What kinds of masculinity and femininity of the Japanese soldiers and Korean "Comfort Women" respectively, and the national identities of both, were re/constructed through the comfort station system? How were the positionings of the "Comfort Women" enacted through daily practices and ideology, and what were the consequences of the re/construction of their identity? Finally, how did the "Comfort Women" position themselves in the face of the imposition of gender and national identities, by Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist power? I use personal narratives, including testimonies and life histories of the former Korean "Comfort Women" and Japanese veterans obtained from my interviews with them as well as from testimonies already released. I interviewed thirteen former Korean "Comfort Women" and seventeen Japanese veterans. Thirteen out of the veterans were 'rehabilitated' in China after World War El, the remaining four were not. I also occasionally use official documents on the comfort station system, which were issued by the Japanese military and the Western Allies. I argue that the development of gender and national identities contributed to the construction of Japanese colonialism, and that the "Comfort Women" system helped to produce and reproduce Japan as an imperial state with power over the lives and human resources of the colonies. In particular, the maintenance of the military system depended on the circulation of these concepts of masculinity and femininity. The regulation of masculine and feminine sexuality and national identities through the military comfort station system was a crucial means through which Japan expanded its colonies by military means.

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