From Victim to Survivor: The Origin of Holocaust Testimony

Please join us at Melbourne Holocaust Museum for an evening lecture by Dr Margaret Taft.

The last thirty years has seen an explosion in Holocaust survivor testimony, oral history projects and Holocaust museums and memorials. This contemporary memory boom has led to a false consensus – that victims and survivors never spoke nor wrote of their horrific experiences either during or immediately after the Holocaust, and that this trend was only reversed by the Eichmann trial in 1961. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust began speaking and writing of their experiences even during the war itself and later in its immediate aftermath. This not only produced a prodigious body of testimonies but led to the development of a new genre of Holocaust memoir. In this lecture, Dr Margaret Taft will speak of the evolution of Holocaust survivor testimony and will consider the ways in which survivor testimony and survivor identity have changed over time.

Dr Margaret Taft is an historian and a research affiliate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization, Monash University. Her interests lie in the development of Holocaust testimony, the retelling of life stories, the cultural history of Yiddish Melbourne and the reconstruction of Jewish life in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Her publications include From Victim to Survivor: The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness 1941-1949; A Second Chance: The Making of Yiddish Melbourne which was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Community History Awards; Leo and Mina Fink: For the Greater Good, and The Woman in the Photographs, a personal account of her mother’s Holocaust experiences.


Image | Courtesy of University Archives & Special Collections, Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology.