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doi: 10.1093/ohr/ohq050. Advance Access publication 22 July 2010

The Oral History Review 2010, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 191214

The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.

All rights reserved. For permissions, Please e-mail: [email protected].

Only Human: A Reflection on the Ethical

and Methodological Challenges of

Working with Difficult Stories1Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki

Correspondence to be sent to: E-mail: [email protected] and

[email protected]

Abstract: As oral historians, we devote a great deal of time to painstakinglydesigning our projects, cognizant of the fact that our research requires us to interact

with human beings in often intimate ways. For this same reason, though, our careful

methodology and meticulously designed projects are constantly being tested. This

article is a reflection on some of the ethical and methodological challenges that

the authors faced during their life story interviews with Holocaust survivors in

Montreal, Canada. In particular, it explores three major themes: the elaborate process

of learning to share authority and build trust with interviewees; the limitations of

deep listening and their implications; and the struggle to deal with contentiouspolitics, such as perceived racism, that emerged out of some interviews. Reflection

on these methodological and ethical challenges not only opens up a wider and

important discussion among researchers about how practice relates to theory but

also teaches us about our interviewees. For example, what does an interviewees

refusal to engage deeply about his or her past tell us about how he or she formed

his or her identity in the aftermath of mass violence? Challenges, such as this one,

are part of the story. They shed light on questions of narrative formation, the identity

politics that result from survival, and how individual memory interacts with dominant

narratives about atrocity. They force us to recognize that both our interviewees

and ourselvesare human beings, and not just collections of stories.

Keywords: Holocaust survivors, oral history ethics, oral history methodology,

racism, sharing authority

Embarking on an initial meeting with an interviewee for an oral history interview

can often feel like a blind date. We walk into this space unsure of what will


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192 | SHEFTEL AND ZEMBRZYCKI

transpire, both in terms of the research that we will undertake and the

interpersonal dynamics that we will find ourselves negotiating. Will we hit it off

immediately and have a productive exchange? Or will we sit awkwardly, unable

to relate to each other and posing robotic questions that are met with curt

responses? Will we quickly become comfortable, assuming a familiar tone by theend of the first cup of tea? Or will the relationship take time, as we attempt to

prove ourselves trustworthy, and the interviewee decides how deep he or she

may want to go? Just as with any other initial social encounter, these meetings

can be exciting spaces in which we form meaningful relationships, or they can

be awkward encounters with people we might hope to never meet again.2

As oral historians, we spend a great deal of time painstakingly designing our projects,

cognizant of the fact that our research requires us to interact with human beings

in often intimate ways. For this same reason, though, our careful methodology

and meticulously designed projects are constantly being challenged. What we

plan on paper is never the same as what we experience in practice. While our

interviewees have a connection to the subject of our projects, we tend to begin

by nevertheless knowing little or nothing about their lives, perspectives, politics,

and values. We also do not know how our own views will complement or conflict

with those of our interviewees, and how we might react to such potential conflicts.

This kind of research thereby demands the highest level of both self-awareness

and sensitivity to others, forcing us to constantly contemplate our methodologicalapproaches and the ethical implications of our interviews.3Interviewing survivors

of genocide and mass violence can add to the complexities of this space. In addition

to lacking experiential expertisewe can never understand because we did not

experience itmemories can be raw and emotional, either for the interviewee or

sometimes for the interviewer.4 Tensions within these spaces can be tough to

negotiate, and thereby necessitate a thoughtful and self-critical approach to our

work. These are professional relationshipsthough they may develop into

friendships over timethat have clear boundaries.5

This article is one attempt to answer this call for sensitivity and self-awareness.

It discusses some of the methodological and ethical challenges that we

encountered during our recent work with Holocaust survivors in Montreal,

Canada. As oral historians, we are trained to make the best of every interview

space, no matter how imperfect. We work to build trust and share authority so

that we may truly collaborate with our interviewees and understand their

experiences. But how does this happen in practice? And what are the implications

of the deviations that we take from our carefully planned methodologies?

Here we explore three major themes: how we have learned to share authority

and build trust with interviewees; what the limitations of our ethos of deep

listening have been, and how we have and have not managed to overcome


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Only Human: A Reflection on the Challenges of Working with Difficult Stories | 193

them; and how we have struggled to deal with contentious topics that emerged

from our interviews, both within the interview space and when we have interpreted

them afterwards. We entered our interviewees homes decades after the violence

and after decades of art, writing, and debate about the meaning of the Holocaust.

This article is therefore about arriving for the blind date to find that you are not,in fact, starting your relationship from scratch. We argue that the methodological

challenges that we experienced with some of our interviewees speak to how they

structured their narratives in light of their own experiences and of the larger

social discourse about the Holocaust.6 Our challenges are interesting for two

reasons. First, they contribute to our understanding of oral history, and particularly

its strengths and limitations as a practice, including those issues that remain

unspoken among researchers in the field. Second, they give us insight on the

process of taking on stories with sixty-plus years worth of baggage, negotiation,and renegotiation; for all of these reasons, we believe that what we learn from the

process of interviewing is an important part of the story itself.7This work attempts

to problematize the difficult stories that we hear while humanizing the complex

people who tell them. People are more than just the sum of their stories.

The Montreal Life Storiesproject

Since November 2008, we have been conducting interviews with Holocaustsurvivors in Montreal who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the postwar period,

and who went on to become educators, sharing their experiences in various

public settings. The goal of our project is to understand how, when, and why

survivors of mass violence construct and then recount their stories; how does

intimate memory become public testimony? This research is a subproject of Life

Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights

Violations, an ambitious project that aims to collect 500 life stories of Montrealers

who have been displaced by mass violence.

8

Founded in 2007 by a group ofcommunity activists and local scholars interested in understanding stories of

forced migration as they relate to their own communities and to the city's

multicultural dynamic at large, Montreal Life Stories, based at Concordia University

in Montreal, is dedicated to collaborative community-university life story research.

As such, the project is fairly decentralized, encouraging communities and

researchers to set their own research agendas. What unites the various actors in

this project is a humanistic approach to oral history interviewing; we are all

attempting to close the distance between researchers and the researched, while

looking for the larger meanings of violence in life course narratives.9

In order to achieve a well-rounded understanding of interviewees lives, all of the

project's participants are trained in humanistic life history interviewing techniques;

everyone in the project, regardless of previous experience, must undergo the


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same training and conduct at least one interview.10 The training process

encourages interviewers to build meaningful relationships with their interviewees

over multiple sessions.11 For example, we have spent anywhere from four to

twenty hours with those we have interviewed. Additionally, the project's ethos is

premised upon sharing authority in both the interview space and throughout theresearch process.12 Interviews are characterized as interviewee-led, and the

direction an interview takes should result from the collaboration that occurs

between interviewers and interviewees. The Montreal Life Stories project

emphasizes that the interviews are not fact-finding missions. Rather these are

spaces where survivors and scholars can work together to not only understand

the stories that are told but also determine their significance to the larger

community. We are focused on knowing and learning withnot frominterviewees.13

The project's model, of encouraging people to speak about their lives and notjust about the violence, is a big part of this; in our own interviews, we encouraged

survivors to reflect upon their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust, and

then asked them how all of these experiences had influenced their educational

work. The Montreal Life Storiesmethodology will be discussed in further depth

in the following sections as we problematize our experiences with it.

At the outset of our research, neither author had a formal connection to the

Holocaust survivor community in Montreal. We began by forging links with the

Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC), asking staff members todisseminate information about the project.14It took some time for survivors to

become interested. Many had done interviews in the pastfor the Canadian

Jewish Congress, the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the MHMC, and McGill

University's Living Testimonies Projectand thus wondered why they ought to

do another interview.15How was our project different? Others had had bad

interview experiences and were distrusting of the process. Most survivors did

not become interested in the project until Stacey Zembrzycki gave a presentation

at the MHMC Speaker's Committee meeting; this is a gathering of survivors whogive public testimony. Impressed by the purpose of the project and endorsed by

a handful of survivors who had already become involved, interest soared. While

neither of us were insiders to the survivor community, Anna Sheftel is Jewish

and is the daughter of a survivor. However, we never intentionally emphasized

her identity. As we built relationships with survivors and tried to make connections

with them, we revealed details about ourselves organically, as one would in any

other budding relationship. Nevertheless, we surprisingly found that Sheftel's

Jewishness and her family's personal connection to the Holocaust, andZembrzycki's Polish roots and Catholic upbringing, played little to no role in the

interview spaces. Arguably, our gender and youth, our use of open-ended

questions, our ability to work as co-interviewers, and our sensitivity played

larger roles in establishing relationships.16


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This article is, in many ways, an attempt to formalize the sorts of reflective

conversations that we, as co-interviewers, had before and after interviews, trying

to make sense of what was happening in the interview space. We hope to open

up a larger conversation about the questions that we discussed among ourselves,

since these issues are rarely discussed in oral history literature. Oral historianshave been so concerned with legitimatizing the craft that we have been wary

about publicly discussing the murky situations in which we sometimes find

ourselves.

In attempting to have some hard conversations about the challenges that we

experienced in our work, while at the same time respecting the people that we

interviewed and for whose stories we have a tremendous amount of empathy,

this article divulges few particulars about them. We do not provide names and

have avoided including any identifying details. We neither quote from interviews

nor do we go into more depth than is necessary to illustrate the scenarios that

we would like to discuss. We hope that what we do share can be fodder for a

productive conversation among and between oral historians.

The hard work of sharing authority

According to Henry Greenspan, a good interview is a process in which twopeople work hard to understand the views and experiences of one person: the

interviewee.17 It is therefore a collaborative space to which the interviewer

brings questions, training, and some distance [from the memories that are

shared] and the interviewee . . . brings life experience and storytelling.18While

the Montreal Life Storiesproject is based upon this notion of shared authority,

formulated by Michael Frisch, it also seeks to broaden it.19We are interested in

sharing authority both within and outside of the interview space, by cultivating

and nurturing trusting and respectful relationships with our interviewees that

facilitate their participation in research production. Building these relationships

is personally and intellectually demanding work that cannot be rushed.20While

we are dedicated to this approach, it can be tricky to implement in practice, and

it is not something that we can force our interviewees to do. They must be

willing participants in the process.

While we have had few problems gaining the trust of most of our interviewees,

it has taken others longer to become engaged in the process. The key variable

in sharing authority, for us, has been time. As a central philosophy of the project,we have prioritized spending quality time with our interviewees. We have also

been regular visitors to the MHMC and its events, where many of our interviewees

are speakers and docents. We are not making solo appearances in the lives of

our interviewees. Rather we are making a concerted effort at having meaningful


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conversations about the past and the present both within and outside of the

interview space.

Building trust and establishing the framework for a relationship begins at first

contact, usually by telephone or by email. We then make arrangements toconduct a preinterview, where we explain the project and address the process of

informed consent. Despite the fact that this can be a rather bureaucratic

encounter, we have managed to have important conversations in these first

meetings. Some interviewees just want to sign the consent forms and get started.

Others, for very understandable reasons, do not welcome us into their homes

already convinced that they want to participate. Preinterviews in these cases are

like the first round of negotiations on how our shared space will work, or if it will

work at all. Such negotiations are healthy, but tenuous; we never know if we willfind any common ground in the end. On one occasion, we met with an interviewee

who was unconvinced of why they ought to participate in their umpteenth

interview project; they had horrible experiences with previous interviews, and

they was skeptical that we, as complete strangers, really had anything to offer

them. Upon reflection, this sort of skepticism seemed fair. Who were we? What

credibility did we have? With a well-written consent form in hand, we could

guarantee certain ethical behaviors, but not that the interview would be worth

their while. We spent over three hours with this interviewee, discussing the

project, its pedagogical implications, and the conditions of consent. During

the course of this conversation, the interviewee went from being quite distant

and at times, standoffish, to being a warm and willing participant. They asked

intelligent questions, forcing us to clearly articulate how our approach would be

different from the others who had come before us.21Undoubtedly, having to so

explicitly justify our research was a useful exercise for us.

During this exchange, our consent form was also deconstructed at length.

Worried about the use of the Internet for research purposes and how aninterviewee's words could be taken out of context by future researchers, this

interviewee insisted on putting conditions on the use of their interview. While

we did not have a problem with the conditions and the vigilance of the

interviewee, it did however force us to have a hard conversation about the future

of the interview, when the interviewee would no longer be around to grant or

deny permission for researchers to access it. Interrupting a conversation with

someone you barely know to give him or her a consent form is always a bit

unnerving and awkward, but in this case we were left feeling especially drained.Nevertheless, this was an essential first step in building trust and establishing a

collaborative relationship with this person. Since that first meeting, they have

become an enthusiastic and warm partner in the research process, albeit always

comfortable setting his limits and being honest about them, as true collaboration


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demands. We feel that the dynamics of this productive working relationship

were very much influenced by the hard work that went into negotiating the

terms of our interviewee-interviewer relationship during our preinterview.

In other instances, the pre-interview has not been the issue. In fact, many peoplehave pushed us to skip this stage and jump right into the interview. While this

can be challenging, especially when we know little to nothing about the person,

we have done our best to be as flexible as possible. This was the case with

another one of our interviewees. After months of trying to get an interview with

this personwho was busy with various community and familial engagements

and expressed little interest in the projectwe finally made an appointment

with them. While we knew a little about this person from conversations with

other interviewees, we remained nervous about this first meeting. We werewarmly greeted at the door and invited in, but our interviewee then spent our

first moments together fielding phone calls as well as other concerns from

another person in the room. We struggled to begin our conversation while their

focus was divided. We remained optimistic and set up our equipment, but we

wondered whether this would be a fruitful encounter.

However, once we described the project and signed the consent form, things

became easier. As soon as we pressed record on the video camera, our interviewee

focused on the task at hand. Beginning with their earliest memories, they tookus through a methodical account of her prewar and wartime experiences. We

asked few questions at the outset, giving them the space that they needed to

establish the foundation of their story. As the interview progressed, and the

interviewee became noticeably more comfortable, we began to ask more

questions, enabling more of a conversation. It was clear that our interviewee was

quite open-minded and respected us, as we did them. As we sat across from our

interviewee and listened to their story, we also watched the space change, as

trust was built. By the middle of the interview, the rehearsed account shifted toan impromptu exchange where we shared thoughts, feelings, and emotions and

encouraged the interviewee to delve deeper into their memories. They shared

very personal details of their experiences with us, stories that would not be told

to strangers. As we left the space, having arranged another meeting for the

following week, we felt exhilarated and inspired and looked forward to continuing

the conversation over a number of future meetings. Upon exiting the interviewee's

home, we remarked at how this had been one of the most perceptible and

explicit experiences of building trust and sharing authority that we had evergone through; we had all needed to give each other time, and listen to each

other, before going into more depth into this person's intimate life experiences.

We left excited to have met an interesting person, sure that there was a great

deal more just waiting to be explored. Perhaps we liked them too much, but it


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was because they had really engaged in the process, allowing us to get to know

each other, to have meaningful exchanges, and to take each other's work

seriously.22

We were therefore quite surprised when we arrived for our second interview, tohear that it would be our last and that we ought to ask all of our remaining

questions during this session. Shocked by the turn of events, we tried to adapt,

but we were admittedly reeling for most of the exchange. Given this constraint,

we did the best we could, but knew that the interview went too long, to the

point where we were eventually all tired and just hanging on to cover as much

ground as possible. We did not go as deep as we would have liked, which was a

huge disappointment given the potential we had identified in this relationship.

Put simply, our interviewee believed in the project and in the importance of

telling their story, but they had no interest in sharing authority with us. Perhaps

we did not do a good job explaining the process, or they simply did not have the

time or energy to give to the project. Perhaps their past experiences with being

interviewed, and of interviewing other survivors themselves, had given them a

strong impression of how much of a commitment interviewing should and should

not be, and they did not see why we were asking so much. Indeed, we left this

encounter acutely aware of just how much we askof our interviewees when we

try to share authority with them; this interviewee had previously participated in

oral history projects in which interviews lasted one session, rarely went longerthan two hours, and the questions asked had been mostly about the facts of

their survival and did not demand a more in-depth conversation. Our way of

interviewing is longer, more intense and demands a great deal from the

interviewee. Is it reasonable to expect that interviewees will always want to do

this?

In retrospect, and after having many positive public encounters with this

interviewee, we are on excellent terms and look forward to future collaboration

with them. We are quite sure that this refusal to share authority was not a

rejection of us; we think it is possible, simply put, to not want to share authority.

Perhaps they were not interested in partaking in this laborious ideal for personal

reasons. Furthermore, as we have gotten to know them better, we feel that the

potential for our collaboration keeps growing, reminding us of the importance

of giving this process as much time as it needs. As Frisch states a commitment

to sharing authority is a beginning, not a destination.23

It is important to remember that while a truly trusting, collaborative space maybe the highest ideal for any oral historian, we cannot assume that our interviewees

aspire to the same goal. Sometimes we may have to work hard to convince them

that we mean what we say and that they should trust near strangers with their

stories. In other cases, no matter how much trust is established, an interviewee


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might have perfectly good personal reasons to put limits on our relationships

with them. Limits are rarely set in stone, but researchers should still respect

them even if they may dash our high expectations; we should never assume that

our objectives ought to be the same as those held by our interviewees. We

would do well to remember that they are within their rights to prioritize differentissues in the interview space.

Is deep listening always possible?

Another key principle of the Montreal Life Storiesmethodology is the idea of

deep listening; that is, listening for meanings, not just facts, and listening in

such a way that prompts more profound reflection from the interviewee.24This is

a particularly salient goal when working with Holocaust survivors who have beeninterviewed multiple times; often their previous interviews focused more on the

whatthan the why, and the very purpose of our revisiting their experiences with

them has been to enable further reflection, particularly by bringing the discussion

into the present day and looking back on all that they have learned. We both put

a strong emphasis on this idea in our own interpretation of the Montreal Life

Storiesmethodology, precisely because we feared going into people's homes and

unwittingly leading them to reiterate the same interview that they had given

many times before. More than the worry that this would be unproductive for usas researchers, we did not want interviewees to feel like we were wasting their

time or that they were not getting anything out of the process.

We had various strategies for setting up a space that facilitated deep listening:

we were sympathetic and sensitive; we gave our interviewees time to think

through what they wanted to say; and we ensured that the interview was

interviewee-led, so that we would be helping them go where they wanted to go,

rather than fitting their rich life experiences into a rigid questionnaire. Zembrzycki

formulated an interview guide that asked mostly reflective questions meant tostimulate discussion.25We intentionally treated it as a guide, rather than a list of

obligatory questions, and thus we often did not rely on it during our interviews.

Knowing the past interview experiences of many of our interviewees, we also

tried to do little things that would help us avoid treading the same ground as

before; in addition to watching any interviews that they had already done, we

usually asked our interviewees where they wanted to begin; when interviewees

wanted guidance, we would ask them to start at the end of the war or even at

the beginning of their journey to Canada. We hoped that this would communicatethat we were interested in more than their stories of violence and that they did

not need to feel obligated to stick to a chronological account of their lives. We

wanted to help interviewees feel comfortable sharing stories that they may not

have shared before.


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This method proved to be as challenging in practice as it seemed promising on

paper. In one of our very first interviews, the interviewee requested that we

suggest an appropriate starting point. We turned on the camera, and Sheftel

asked them to tell us about their journey to Canada. The interviewee immediately

responded by instructing us to turn the camera off. Concerned that we had done

something completely inappropriate, we asked them what the problem was, and

they replied that they were afraid that they could not give us what we wanted;

their story of arriving in Canada was not typical or what they thought would

interest us. Maybe we should start from the beginning?

Indeed, we then started from the beginning, and the interviewee guided us

through their Holocaust experiences for approximately two hours. After the

interview, we understood that we had been too quick in pushing this intervieweeout of their comfort zone; as ugly as Holocaust memories may be, they tend to

be interviewees familiar territory for recounting. Additionally, we learned that

no matter how much we had explained the ethos of the project, interviewees

still expected us to want the factual, narrative recitation of their Holocaust

experiences, which they had been asked to recount many times before. Whether

or not the account had been committed to video previously, it was nevertheless

important for our interviewee to give it again. This is what made them comfortable,

and this was their understanding of what was supposed to happen in an interview.

We realized that for this particular interviewee, this was how the story had to

begin, and when we returned for a second session, we had a very interesting and

productive discussion about issues relating to Canada, their sense of Jewish

identity, and their role as a Holocaust educator.

We, of course, learned quickly to be flexible with our methodology; the more

survivors that we interviewed, the more it became clear that many wanted to

remember chronologically, for similar reasons to the interviewee discussed

above, whether or not we thought that we were freeing them from suchconstraints. Often interviews would start with more formal recitations of

memories, and we would build from there. We listened for their cues regarding

what they felt was important to talk about and tried to go deeper from that

starting point. However, there were some interviewees with whom we never

managed to go deeper. Part of this may have been that our approach, no matter

how flexible, did not fit them, and part of it may have been that we simply were

not well matched as interviewers and interviewees. However, we would like to

reflect more seriously on the reasons why sometimes, even when interviewersare prepared to listen deeply, interviewees are not necessarily prepared to speak

deeply. It is worth remembering that oral historians have the habit of writing

most about the interviewees with whom they really connected, and thus it can

be intimidating to feel like the only interviewer who is struggling to go deeper.


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This is why we believe that this discussion, about interviewees who do not

engage on a deeper level, is worthwhile.

We know that memory is not straightforward and that when we ask survivors to

recount their memories of violence, the stories are necessarily constructed. Onone level, the stories are constructed because difficult and nonlinear memories

are nearly impossible to communicate, and they have to be made a story.26On

another level, stories are constructed in the interest of making sense of these

experiences: giving them meaning, finding a place for them in one's identity and

within the larger community's narrative, being able to live with these memories,

and perhaps feeling that torture experienced did not happen in vain. If the

stories are constructed for such powerful reasons, then we as interviewers must

recognize that when we ask to go deeper, we are often requiring interviewees to

transgress narratives that have tremendously influenced the course of their lives

and, at the same time, form a large part of who they are. In our own research,

we found that some interviewees, for this reason, did not want to go deeper,

while others did not seem to be able to do so.

Some survivors were very straightforward about their limits and simply told us

that there were areas that they would not discuss with us; for two of our

interviewees, these areas included anything to do with their wartime experiences.

We respected this as we did not feel that it was our role to push them to speakabout parts of the past that they did not wish to revisit. In both of these cases,

our conversations about their postwar lives and their perspectives on the past

proved to be fruitful and reflective, and they did in fact go deeper when it came

to discussing the parts of their stories with which they were comfortable. Such

openness about limits helped us as interviewers, giving us a clear sense of where

we could and could not go.

With other interviewees, limits were unspoken and more ethereal and abstract

than discrete events that we were not allowed to discuss. One of our intervieweessurvived the war as a child, away from their family, by passing as a non-Jew.

They was extremely intelligent and well educated with interesting reflections on

survivor memory and how it is expressed through testimony, the arts, and

literature. We came to realize that their method of survival and their intellectual

keenness were part and parcel of the same story; they survived and succeeded

in life because of their wits and their talents. This interviewee's story often led

us to explore how they had managed to overcome odds, before, during, and far

after the war, by being talented, and their impressive reflections on that life andon the subject of the Holocaust in general certainly confirmed this. One would

expect, then, that this interviewee would have been an easy person with whom

to connect on a deeper level. We found the opposite to be true. While they were

happy togo deepon the topics that aligned with the above narrative, they were


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unwilling to problematize their narrative; they evasive and often brought us

back to where we had started. The interviewee knew exactly what they were

doing; they had had over sixty years to decide what they did and did not want

to think or talk about, and we could not do anything to get them to open up.27

For us, this was a case of refusing to go deeper. As we suggested above, it

seemed to us that a person whose narrative is so entrenched in the idea of their

strength and their talent would not be willing to cede control of their story so

easily, particularly asgoing deeperis often taken to mean admitting to weakness,

fear, bad behavior, and other unflattering attributes. A story of unqualified

strength does not lend itself well to excavation.

Another interviewee similarly framed their story around uniqueness; they was

less focused on cunning and more interested in their unique ability to bestronger, more moral, and more civilized in the face of unspeakable denigration.

It seemed important to this interviewee that their story of survival did not end

with the war, but that they lived a brave life afterwards until the present day,

never sacrificing their dignity. This was a powerful narrative to which to listen,

but again it was one that did not take kindly to introspection. The context of

these interviews told us a different story; the interviewee, off the record,

confessed to loneliness, a distant relationship with their children, and other

sources of sadness that implied that they had not pulled their life together as

thoroughly as they had argued on camera. This survivor's recitation of their

story, from their Holocaust experiences to their current role as an educator,

was something that they did to tell us who they thought they were and what

they thought they were capable of. Our questions, no matter how well tailored

to the interviewee's expressed interests, were almost never addressed, and the

discussion became repetitive, revisiting the seemingly limited list of stories

that the interviewee wanted to tell us. We were not allowed to build on any of

them. While we do not believe, as part of our methodology, in pushing

interviewees to explore topics that they do not wish to discuss, in this scenario

we were practically talking past each other.

Was this interviewee refusing to do deeper, or were they incapable of it? It is

hard to know, and perhaps not a particularly important question to answer. It

seemed clear to us, however, that his sense of identity and pride, which was an

important part of his continued survival, was held together tenuously and that

there was not a lot of space to dig deeper.28Oral historians, interested in the

academic potential of these stories, also tend to assume that there must besomewhere deeper to go with an interviewee, which may not always be the case.

While deep listening is a difficult methodological practice to cultivate, and we

recognize that our own limitations as interviewers can affect the interview space,

we nevertheless believe that the extent to which people choose or are unable to


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go deeper is often influenced by how they survived, how their memory influenced

their sense of self, and how secure they feel in their present lives.

When the personal is political

Many oral historians of atrocity write about listening to things that are difficult

to hear: stories of torture, of brutality, and of the kinds of inhumanity that are

beyond our understandings.29While the ways in which we listen to, and process,

these stories have been thoroughly studied, we ourselves found that the gory

details, to quote one of our interviewees, were often not the toughest parts to

which we listened. Instead, our moments of discomfort came during some

conversations about comparative genocide, race, and other politicized issues.We realize that such discussions are sensitive and contentious, and therefore we

want to emphasize that we are problematizing our perceptions and reactions to

what we heard during our interviews with one particular survivor in this section

of the article. When faced with what we perceived as racist remarks during these

interviews, we constantly asked ourselves how we could negotiate our emotional

and intellectual distress while continuing to build a relationship with this person

and interpret their story.

While getting to know the Holocaust survivors with whom we are working, wehave spent a significant amount of time thinking about who they are, what they

represent, and the relationships that can therefore result from our understanding

of them. We have tried to maintain a delicate balance in these relationships,

recognizing that our interviewees are intelligent people with particular insights

that have been shaped by their harrowing experiences, but that these experiences

do not warrant treating them as heroes, with a sense of morality that eclipses

those who were not there. As theorists like Lawrence Langer stress, these are

human beings and not heroes who are beyond human weakness; they are

capable of being wrong, insensitive, and even racist.30We therefore reject this

extra burden of morality that has been placed on survivors, because it negates

the fact that they have rich lives and experiences that extend beyond the

Holocaust; survivors are people, not just survivors.31Certainly this issue of moral

superiority is often expressed in contemporary society through questions like:

How could a survivor, who has experienced such discrimination, then go ahead

and discriminate against other people? Shouldn't he or she know better?

Holocaust survivors should neither be held responsible for setting a moral

standard nor be required to possess extra-human abilities that allow them toresist prejudice and human weakness.

However, if we reject the idea of setting unattainable moral standards for

survivors, must we therefore reject a discussion of their foibles at all? Are these


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stories off limits? Furthermore, is it possible to discuss these foibles without

being judgmental, a quality that oral history interviewers try to avoid? Our

concern is that in trying hard to create a nonjudgmental space, within both our

interviews and our writing, and refraining from these sorts of discussions, we

may end up being dishonest not only about our interview experiences but also

about the learning that takes place as a result of them. Survivors, like other

people that we interview, have their biases, their opinions, and also their

prejudices, and we believe that avoiding discussions about these issues, so as

not to fall prey to any conceptual traps, obscures, and even misrepresents their

stories. While we are not in the business of making moral judgments, we are in

the business of understanding people's lives, and how their experiences have

formed their identities.

While we have enjoyed fruitful conversations about the greater political meaning

of the Holocaust with many of our interviewees, this section of the article will

examine some of the difficulties that we experienced while working with one

particular survivor whose strong and problematic opinions often dominated the

interview space. While their views should certainly not be seen as any sort of

representation of the survivor community, we argue that there is a salient story

to be told here, about how one person has interpreted their identity as a survivor.

Our aim is not to somehow prove, objectively, that this person was a nefarious

racist, a task which in itself would be deeply ethically suspect, but rather to

elaborate on remarks that we perceived as racist and how they played into our

interviewee's story as well as our interpersonal relations with them. Again, we

must emphasize that for reasons of respecting interviewee anonymity, the

incidents in this section are only described in vague terms.

The interviewee in question experienced the Holocaust alone; after having

been separated from their family members at a young age, they were on their

own for the duration of their often dramatic story of persecution and terror.What came out of their narrative was a real focus on the idea of specialness;

this person believes that they survived a variety of impossible experiences

because there must have been something unique about them. Sometimes

that specialness came up within the context of sexual morality, sometimes

within the context of strength of personal character, and sometimes within

the context of ethnicity. In one interview, this person compared their behavior

during the Holocaust to the behavior of African Americans during the Rodney

King riots. Specifically, their point was that Jews, when persecuted, behavedin a more dignified and nonviolent way than African Americans and that this

had to do with their upbringing and values as Jews. Several times during our

interviews, this interviewee would bring up similar comparisons to varying

ethnicities; to them it seemed that the project of comparative genocide was


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about proving a hierarchy of suffering, with Jews at the top, and articulating

a hierarchy of victimhood, in which Jews made the most noble, moral, and

civilized victims.

As interviewers, this was a very hard argument to listen to. While we will returnto this point shortly, it is first necessary to consider how a statement like this

enables us to interpret our interviewee's complex life story. Despite the problems

inherent in it, this line of reasoning fits seamlessly with the rest of their narrative

of specialness. It allowed them to make sense of everything that they had been

through by making a moral lesson out of it, bringing composure and coherence

to their life. They easily connected the past with the present so as to convey

recovery and survival rather than victimization and defeat.32Although we may

reject the notion that Holocaust survivors are greater moral beings, this

interviewee did not. The assertion of a racially superior identity was key to how

this person saw themselves and made sense of a gruesome history in which they

had had little control over their fate; it also allowed them to maintain authorial

control, selecting memories, keeping secrets, and remaining unemotional and

detached from the past.33Rather than judging, we could see why this interviewee

made such ethnic comparisons, and how this was important to their identity.

Since we must understand identity, as Tony Kushner argues, by examining the

life stories of survivors, not just their traumatic pasts, this discussion of racism is

a vital component of this interviewee's contemporary sense of self and musttherefore be explored.34

Despite the significance of these remarks, they left us conflicted. As researchers

invested in building meaningful and collaborative relationships with Holocaust

survivors, it seemed like a bad idea to speak openly about such incidents of

cultural insensitivity. We recognize that an open discussion about racism within

the survivor community might be damaging to our relationships with survivors,

and thus we write about it here with great trepidation.35Oral history ethics

stipulate the impetus to protect and respect interviewees and communities, and

thus we worry that airing the dirty laundry of an interview, even though we are

abiding by that interview's terms of consent and not passing judgment, could be

failing that engagement.36

Nevertheless, our ethical engagement extends further than our commitment to

our interviewees: since we have been researching within the context of a diverse

research project that involves members of various cultural communities, we

believe that an interview like this one could undermine the project and thevalue it places on cross-cultural dialogue. For example, this interviewee also

denied that the Rwandan genocide was a genocide and made disparaging

remarks about the plight of the Rwandan people. The Rwandan community is a

key partner of the Montreal Life Storiesproject and so we believe that refraining


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from a discussion about racism in the interview space negates the larger ethos

of the project. The challenge therefore is how to simultaneously preserve our

ties with the community with whom we are specifically working and treat all

other communities with dignity. While the interviewee's views are his or hers to

have, and not ours to judge, they must be addressed given the aims of the

project.

Lastly, what about our obligation to be both rigorous and honest in our research?

While we did not push our interviewee beyond their comfort zone, and we

certainly have no intention of ever outing them in our writing, we have debated

whether this interviewing experience is better left in corridor talk and not in

print.37As we have argued, sometimes racism is relevant to understanding an

interviewee's narrative. Due to the considerations that we mentioned above, itis, however, an issue that we feel extremely uncomfortable discussing publicly.

When we wrote reflection pieces on these interviews for the Montreal Life Stories

projectas is standard practice for interviewers of the projectwe did not

mention the racist remarks uttered by our interviewee. They have come up only

in informal conversations; in the car after the interviews; over the telephone

hours later when we could not get our interviewee's words out of our minds; and

over e-mail weeks later, as we were trying to make sense of what we had been

hearing. It seemed dangerous to bring these stories up, for fear of damaging our

relationships with our interviewees; seeming that we were buying into the

argument that Holocaust survivors should be held to a higher moral standard

than other people; and otherwise subscribing to the trope that survivors likely

survived by nefarious means and therefore cannot be trusted. Despite these

fears, we value the ethos of the Montreal Life Storiesproject and we believe that

our experience speaks to the challenges that others within and outside of the

project are also facing in their interviews.

Our oral history methodology prides itself on coming down out of the ivorytower and closing academic distance between researchers and those who were

there, but what happens when that closing of distance finds us sacrificing

some of our integrity as scholars? What are we contributing to the understanding

of Holocaust narratives if we all leave large chunks of the stories that we hear

out of the narratives that we write because they are too messy or unflattering

to include? If a hierarchy of victimhood is what helped this particular survivor

make sense of her experiences and of her place in the world, then surely that is

a story worth telling. Scholars often talk about the interpretive power that isheld by oral historians, and how it prohibits the real democratization of history,

but this usually refers to the historian's power to have the last word, to disagree,

or to reinterpret the interview.38In this case, we seem to be facing the same

dilemma from a different angle, in using our interpretive power to protect our


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interviewees and our relationships with them, as well as the institutions

supporting all of us.

To move on to the point we mentioned earlier, another salient part of this

problem pertains to our comfort as interviewers, and in this case what to dowhen we are faced with racist or culturally insensitive statements. When we

began to envision this reflection piece, our primary motivation had to do with

the fact that the interviews we conducted with this particular person had been

bothering us for almost a year. Since we were in the process of embedding

ourselves in the Jewish community, this discomfort had the potential to affect

how we built relationships and otherwise behaved as interviewers. Few oral

historians have openly discussed how interpersonal dynamics between

interviewers and interviewees affect their interviews, especially when it comes todisliking an interviewee.39 This is difficult and we admit that it has been a

struggle for us to write, without making judgments, about our challenges with

this interviewee. We recognize that readers of this article may well view some of

our statements as judgments. We cannot refute such critiques. We are, after all,

humans and not merely detached researchers, and even though we try to be

thoughtful, open-minded, and sensitive, it may be impossible for us to be

entirely nonjudgmental. Nevertheless, we hope that our discussion about this

interviewee can help us reflect on the inevitable limits of our objectivity and

fairness as interviewers. While we tried our best to remain fair and engaged

within the interview space, we were often left feeling drained and upset following

each encounter with this individual, and these sentiments lasted for months.

Furthermore, we did not find ourselves dwelling on these interviews merely

because they upset us. They also lingered with us because we could tell that

behind these uncomfortable encounters, there was a great deal of complexity to

this person's life, which included being a community leader while simultaneously

experiencing a great deal of isolation; being an activist, but also showing anintentional lack of empathy for other activists; and being an educator who cares

deeply for youth but is faced with tense family relations at home. There was a

story here, about one person's complex negotiation of their life, that we could

not seem to access. As the months went on, we discussed the possibility of

returning to this interviewee's home and trying to facilitate a reflective

conversation so that we could examine, dispassionately, why feelings of ethnic

superiority were an important part of their identity; maybe this was something

that we could figure out together? We eventually decided against this ambitiousidea, for two principal reasons. First, we did not have the courage to ask such

difficult questions. We had been blindsided by the original racist remarks, so

stunned that we did not know how to respond to them at the time, and we still

feel unprepared in dealing with them now. Second, we never connected with


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this interviewee. We dreaded the idea of going back. We never felt comfortable

in their home, which was dark and seemed to be cut off from the rest of the

world; our exchanges with our interviewee were not conversations, and we did

not believe that we succeeded insharing authorityor listening deeply. In many

ways, this situation was the culmination of the methodological issues that wediscussed in the previous two sections. Here was a person with an extremely

challenging narrative that was ripe for further exploration, but without a strong

bond and a willingness to engage in a deeper conversation, we felt, and continue

to feel, like this part of the story is off limits, and will thus remain unexplored by

us, or any other interviewers for that matter.

There are silences in every community. None of us wish to air the dirty laundry

of people we hold in high esteem, particularly when we have bigger goals in

mind; in this case, we are focused on furthering our understandings of Holocaust

survivors and how they remember and communicate their pasts. However,

sometimes the dirty laundry has a way of being relevant to the discussion, and

at other times it keeps us, as interviewers, awake at night, because it is both

upsetting and intellectually challenging. When brainstorming our ideas around

this discussion, we met another researcher at a large conference who confessed

to experiencing similar anxieties around racist statements that were emerging

out of their interviews in another community with a different, but also difficult,

past. It became clear to us that there needs to be space within the oral historycommunity to talk about these sorts of contentious experiences. There is no

community in the world exempt from troubling politics, which means that there

is likely no interviewer who has never come up against some of these viewpoints,

and then gone home feeling uneasy. Is it possible to create a space for this

discussion within the discipline? Or would that make our intervieweesand

ourselvesa bit toohuman?

Conclusion

What can we learn from blind dates that get off to rocky starts, or those that

result in unfulfilling relationships? Reflecting on our struggles is not just

instructive for developing our methodology; it is also part of the story itself. It

teaches us about both form and content. While this article raises many questions

that it cannot fully answer, our process of thinking through methodological and

ethical challenges teaches us about the issues that arise when working with

people and their important and sometimes difficult stories. When problematizingour ethos of sharing authority, we learned about the context in which we were

entering people's lives; some were skeptical of sharing their stories with us

because of the long legacy of oral history work with Holocaust survivors, which

boasts both moving successes and demoralizing failures. Others valued speaking


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but did not have the time or energy for in-depth relationship building, for

personal or principled reasons. When contemplating our dedication to deep

listening, we learned that identities built out of violence and vulnerability can be

fragile; people's comfort and discomfort, or openness and reticence, can tell us

a lot about them and how they understand their survival. When considering ourreactions to contentious politics in the interview space, we learned that

uncomfortable interactions such as those involving racist remarks are not only a

challenge when it comes to engaging as interviewers but also a prism through

which we can understand how survivors continually grapple with their experiences

and the unending process of survival.

We hope that our frankness about our own struggles can convince other oral

historians to ask themselves similar questions: What can we learn about our

interviewees when we fail to make a connection or struggle to listen deeply?

How can we become better community-engaged oral historians by negotiating

and arriving at an ethical and intellectual balance between respecting community

taboos and maintaining academic integrity? How can we represent the people

with whom we work, not just as collections of stories but also as human beings?

While there are no clear or universal answers to such questions, working through

them will no doubt make us more rigorous scholars. In raising these issues, we

are thereby encouraging dialogue within the oral history community. We must

learn together and recognize that our practice is an enlightening process of trialand error. When celebrating our successes, we must not be afraid to admit our

mistakes and weaknesses. It is only through reflection that we can truly

understand our interviewees and the stories they tell.

Anna Sheftelis a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at Concordia University, Montreal,

and its Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. She is funded by the Fonds de recherche sur

la socit et la culture. Her postdoctoral research examines the life narratives of Holocaust survivors

living in Montreal, Canada, and particularly how they relate to their experiences of postwarimmigration and integration into the larger Jewish community.

Stacey Zembrzyckiis a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral

fellow in the History Department at Concordia University where she is also affiliated with the

Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Her current research uses life story oral history

interviews to understand the educational activism of Holocaust survivors in Montreal, Canada.

NOTES1 This article originated in the authors postdoctoral research at Concordia University

in Montreal, Canada; Stacey Zembrzycki is funded by the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Anna Sheftel is funded by the

Fonds de recherche sur la socit et la culture Qubec. As will be discussed in the


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article, our research is part of the Montreal Life Storiesproject, hosted by Concordia

University and its Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. We would like to

thank the project's staff for supporting us, notably: Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby,

Sandra Gasana, and Paul Tom. We presented parts of this article in November 2009

in Montreal at the Remembering War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violationsinternational conference as well as at The Future of Holocaust Testimonyinternational

conference at the Western Galilee College in Akko, Israel, in January 2010. We are

grateful to conference participants as well as to Steven High, Erica Lehrer, and Erin

Jessee for their thoughtful comments on the piece. We would also like to thank our

anonymous peer reviewers for their critiques and encouragement.

2 For a fascinating reflection on the comparative experience of being both an

interviewer and an interviewee, see Alan Wong, Conversations for the Real World:

Shared Authority, Self-Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview,Journal

of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 23958; Michael Riordon, AnUnauthorized Biography of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines (Toronto:

Between the Lines, 2004).

3 Valerie Yow, Ethics and Interpersonal Relationships in Oral History Research, Oral

History Review22 (Summer 1995): 66.

4 Numerous survivors and scholars have written about the impossibility of truly

understanding Holocaust experiences and the inherent difficulties of communicating

them, as well as the problematic ethics of even trying to do so. See, for instance, Primo

Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1996); Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Paris: Editions deMinuit, 1965); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive

(New York: Zone Books, 1999); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative

and History(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Dominick La Capra,

Writing History: Writing Trauma(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

5 Yow, Ethics and Interpersonal Relationships, 58.

6 There is a great deal of literature on collective memory and how outside forces

impact its formation. See, for instance, Maurice Hawlbachs, On Collective Memory

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social

Remembering (London: Open University Press, 2003); Paul Ricoeur, Memory,History, Forgetting(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Geoffrey Hartman,

Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity(New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2002); Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory(New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1991).

7 Henry Greenspan and Sidney Bolkosky, When Is an Interview an Interview? Notes

from Listening to Holocaust Survivors, Poetics Today27 (2006): 43149.

8 Undertaken with Montreal's Rwandan, Cambodian, Haitian, Jewish, and other

Diaspora communities, Montreal Life Storiesis funded by a Community-University

Research Alliance grant awarded by SSHRC in 2007. For more information, seehttp://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca.

9 Many interviewers are survivors of violence themselves.

10 Sheftel was the training coordinator for the project from 200809, and thus had a

hand in fleshing out the training process for the project. Those who are interested


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may access the project's principal training document, which is constantly evolving,

here: http://lifestoriesmontreal.ca/en/oral-history-training.

11 For a more detailed discussion of the project see Steven High, Sharing Authority:

An Introduction,Journal of Canadian Studies43, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 1234.

12 Much of the inspiration for our life story and collaborative interview approach can befound in Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life

History (Westport: Praeger Press, 1998); Greenspan and Bolkosky, When Is an

Interview an Interview? Also see Michael Frisch,A Shared Authority: Essays on the

Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History(Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1990).

13 Greenspan and Bolkosky, When Is an Interview an Interview? 432.

14 The MHMC is a community partner of the Montreal Life Storiesproject and its staff

members, led by the museum director, Alice Herscovitch, have been supportive of

the project since its inception.15 Tony Kushner estimates that 100,000 Jewish testimonies of the Holocaust have so

far been collected in written, oral, and video form and he thus pushes us to think of

their future uses. See Kushner, Oral History at the Extremes of Human Experience:

Holocaust Testimonial in a Museum Setting, Oral History 21, nos 12 (Autumn

2001): 84.

16 The qualities of gender and youth seemed particularly influential in our relationships.

As young female researchers, we did not come across as intimidating authorities,

and we often found ourselves treated somewhat like grandchildren in the interview

space. While this perception had both benefits and disadvantages, it did neverthelesshelp us cultivate the informal interview space that we desired.

17 Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, xvii.

18 Montreal Life Storiesproject, Training Workshop Manual, September 21, 2008,

11.

19 On collaboration in the interview space see Frisch, A Shared Authority. Since the

publication of Frisch's seminal work, others have explored the relationships that

develop between interviewees and interviewers. See Shared Authority, Special

Feature in Oral History Review30 (2003); Katharine C. Corbett and Howard S. Miller,

A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry, Public Historian28 (2006): 1538; StevenHigh, Lisa Ndejuru, and Kristen O'Hare, ed., Special Issue of Sharing Authority:

Community-University Collaboration in Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and

Engaged Scholarship,Journal of Canadian Studies43, no. 1 (Winter 2009).

20 Linda Shopes, Sharing Authority, Oral History Review30 (2003): 103.

21 Joy Parr also reflects on her struggles to convince citizens, who had been displaced

by megaprojects, to share their memories with her. Holding views that had been

weathered by time and having experienced past commemorations and communal

initiatives, they pushed her to explain why it was important to speak again. See Joy

Parr, Jessica Van Horssen, and Jon van der Veen, The Practice of History Sharedacross Differences: Needs, Technologies, and Ways of Knowing in the Megaprojects

New Media Project,Journal of Canadian Studies43, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 37.

22 The quote in this sentence is borrowed from Valerie Yow's fascinating reflection on

the interpersonal relationships that are built in the interview space. See Valerie Yow,


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Do I Like Them Too Much: Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer

and Vice Versa, Oral History Review24 (Summer 1997): 5579.

23 Michael Frisch, Sharing Authority: Oral History and the Collaborative Process, Oral

History Review30 (2003): 112.

24 See, for instance, Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli(Albany, New York:State University of New York Press, 1991); Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past:

Oral History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Greenspan, On Listening to

Holocaust Survivors; Julie Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three

Yukon Native Elders (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990);

Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition As

History(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Luisa Passerini, Fascism in

Popular Memory: The Cultural Experiences of the Turin Working-Class, trans. Robert

Lumley and Jude Bloomfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, The Myths We Live By(London: Routledge,

1990).

25 We would like to thank Steven High for his help in devising this interview guide.

26 See Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; La Capra,

Writing History: Writing Trauma.Also, see Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust

Survivors; Greenspan and Bolkosky, When Is an Interview an Interview?

27 Lenore Layman discusses reticence as a means through which interviewees may

assert power in the interview space, thus balancing the academic and interpretive

authority of the interviewer; according to her, interviewees refusal to address topicsis an important way for them to assert power in the interview relationship, and thus

it is worthy of serious study. See Lenore Layman, Reticence in Oral History

Interviews, Oral History Review36 (Summer/Fall 2009): 20730.

28 A lot of the theory surrounding these questions, of when people can and cannot

speak openly about their experiences, is inspired by the infamous Maslow's hierarchy

of needs, first published in A. H. Maslow, A of Human Motivation, Psychological

Review50 (1943): 37096. Maslow posited a pyramid in which immediate needs

had to be addressed before more abstract ones; it also included five levels of

immediacy. For example, if one was still experiencing family instability, that wouldbe a priority over cultivating creativity and open expression. Many scholars of

atrocity have taken Maslow's work further, exploring how memory plays into other

needs. We do not want to over-emphasize the psychological angle of what we are

discussing here, but would nevertheless like to acknowledge that there may be

mitigating factors preventing a survivor from prioritizing an open approach to their

past.

29 See Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra; Agamben,

Remnants of Auschwitz; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; La Capra, Writing History:

Writing Trauma; Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub, Testimonies: Crises of Witnessingin Literature, Psychoanalysis and History(London: Routledge, 1991).

30 For a discussion of the problem of applying everyday morality to Holocaust survivors,

see Langer, Holocaust Testimonies; Delbo,Aucun de nous ne reviendra; Agamben,

Remnants of Auschwitz.


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31 For a rich conversation about how the memory of the Holocaust in the Canadian

Jewish community moved from indifference to self-identification in the postwar

period, thrusting survivors into positions of prominence, see Franklin Bialystok,

Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community(Montreal and

Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000).32 Pamela Sugiman uses the same line of reasoning when trying to make sense of the

contradictory narratives of Japanese Canadians who were interned during World War

II. See Pamela Sugiman, Life is Sweet: Vulnerability and Composure in the Wartime

Narratives of Japanese Canadians,Journal of Canadian Studies43, no. 1 (Winter

2009): 199.

33 Ibid. Also see Tony Klempner, Navigating Life Review Interviews with Survivors of

Trauma, in The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed., ed., Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson,

202 (London: Routledge, 2006).

34 Tony Kushner, Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problems of Representation,Poetics Today27 (Summer 2006): 291. Others have stressed the important ways

that the past contributes to an understanding of the present and the future. See, for

instance, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses

of History in American Life(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Paul Ashton

and Hilda Kean, ed., People and Their Pasts: Public History Today(London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009).

35 Valerie Yow puts forth an interesting discussion about how community involvement

and academic integrity can find themselves at odds with each other. See Yow, Ethics

and Interpersonal Relationships, 5166.36 Montreal Life StoriesEthics Guide, http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/en/ethics-

guide-summary (accessed October 29, 2009). See also Linda Shopes, Human

Subjects and IRB Review, http://www.oralhistory.org/do-oral-history/oral-history-

and-irb-review (accessed October 29, 2009); Alan Ward, Is Your Oral History Legal

and Ethical? Oral History Society, http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/ethics/index.php

(accessed October 29, 2009); Jill Jarvis-Tonus, Legal Issues Regarding Oral

Histories, Canadian Oral History Journal12 (1992): 1824; Valerie Yow, Legalities

and Ethics, in Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social

Sciences, ed., Valerie Yow, 12156 (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2005).37 See Tracy E. K'Meyer and A. Glenn Crothers, If I See Some of this in Writing, I'm

Going to Shoot You: Reluctant Narrators, Taboo Topics, and the Ethical Dilemmas of

the Oral Historian, Oral History Review 34 (2007): 7193. While we sympathize

with the challenges that these interviewers faced, we were nevertheless concerned

by how they prioritized their research needs above the comfort of the interviewee in

this scenario and also in their use of the interviewee's name and personal details in

their subsequent writing about the ethical dilemmas that they faced in their

interviews. We would not be comfortable ever taking the (nevertheless important)

discussion that far. Also, Valerie Yow discusses the importance of corridor talks asreflection spaces. See Yow, Do I Like Them Too Much, 5579.

38 Joan Sangster, Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,

in The Oral History Reader,1st ed., ed., Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 87100

(New York: Routledge, 1998); Susan Geiger, What's So Feminist About Women's


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Oral History? Journal of Women's History 2, no. 1 (1990): 16970; Personal

Narratives Group, Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal

Narratives(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Franca Iacovetta, Post

Modern Ethnography, Historical Materialism and Decentering the (Male) Authorial

Voice: A Feminist Conversation, Histoire Sociale/Social History 64, no. 132(November 1999): 27593; Katherine Borland, That's Not What I Said: Interpretive

Conflict in Oral Narrative Research, in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of

Oral History, ed., Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 6375 (New York:

Routledge, 1991); Pamela Sugiman, These Feelings That Fill My Heart: Japanese

Canadian Women's Memories of Internment, Oral History34 (2006): 6984; Stacey

Zembrzycki, Sharing Authority with Baba,Journal of Canadian Studies43, no. 1

(Winter 2009): 21938; Caroline B. Brettell, When They Read What We Write: The

Politics of Ethnography(Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1993).

39 Kathleen Blee is one of the few scholars who has discussed this challenge, albeit inthe extreme case of her work with the Ku Klux Klan. See Kathleen Blee, Inside

Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2003). While her reflections are invaluable, we argue that there needs to be a

space to talk about difficult interpersonal dynamics when working within less

problematic or controversial communities. What happens when we do not like or

sympathize with ordinary people?

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