Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Migration and the Holocaust
- Part 1 Gender, Forced Migration, and Testimony: From ‘White Slavery’ to ‘Trafficking’ via Refugee Domestic Servants
- Chapter 1 From the 1880s to 1945
- Chapter 2 1945 to the Present
- Part 2 Place, Performance, and Legality: Holocaust Survivors and Other Migrant Journeys in the Long Twentieth Century
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - From the 1880s to 1945
from Part 1 - Gender, Forced Migration, and Testimony: From ‘White Slavery’ to ‘Trafficking’ via Refugee Domestic Servants
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Migration and the Holocaust
- Part 1 Gender, Forced Migration, and Testimony: From ‘White Slavery’ to ‘Trafficking’ via Refugee Domestic Servants
- Chapter 1 From the 1880s to 1945
- Chapter 2 1945 to the Present
- Part 2 Place, Performance, and Legality: Holocaust Survivors and Other Migrant Journeys in the Long Twentieth Century
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Contexts, Historiographies, the Personal
Personal testimony runs throughout Journeys from the Abyss. In the following two chapters, however, it is at the forefront, utilising numerous accounts from a variety of genres. It has been suggested by Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame in their study of bakers that ‘one life story is only one life story. Thirty life stories of thirty men or women scattered in the whole social structure are only thirty life stories.’ Yet, they continue that
thirty life stories of thirty men who have lived their lives in one and the same sector of production … represent more than thirty isolated life stories; taken together, they tell a different story, at a different level: the history of this sector of production, at the level of its pattern of sociostructural relationships.
The heart of these first two chapters is devoted to refugees who came to Britain as domestic servants during and immediately after the Nazi era. The number of accounts explored exceeds those suggested by Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame, yet it will query whether their positivist approach to creating a ‘strong body of evidence’ is sufficient to understand this particular refugee experience. Instead, how this testimony was created in relation to context, lifecycle, and individual agency will be the focal points. The approach follows that of literary scholar James Young. As he notes in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988),
without understanding the constructed nature of evidence … and then separating the need for evidence from its actual rhetorical function as that which both naturalizes and is naturalized by a writer's governing mythos, we forfeit a deeper understanding of the interpretation between events, narrative and historical interpretation.
Through such a critical approach to testimony, the fluid and contested nature of identity (individual and collective) will be made manifest. Ultimately it asks how far testimony enables an understanding of migrant identity within the constraints not only of language but also of power – most specifically in this case relating to gender, class, race, and nationality.
Yet, before moving to the particular and the ‘personal’, a more generic question has to be raised with regard to our subject matter: how do we remember and historicize refugees who, by circumstances beyond their control, are transient and placeless?
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- Journeys from the AbyssThe Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present, pp. 39 - 95Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017