Who writes Holocaust memoirs?

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 11:47 am by Jane the Actuary

Who writes Holocaust memoirs? 2017-03-09T11:47:08-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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How many Holocaust survivor narratives have you read? I can think of:

Night

Clara’s War

Hidden in Plain Sight

A Promise at Sobibor

The Girl in the Green Sweater

The last of these I’m reading right now, and I’m sure I’ve read more in the past that I just can’t call to mind. But here’s what occurred to me:

Holocaust memoirs seem to be written predominantly by individuals who were teens, or children, at the time.

Why?

Possibility 1: it’s just a fluke. There are tons of memoirs written by those who were adults at the time, and I’m just not aware of them.

Possibility 2: there were plenty of memoirs written by survivors who were adults at the time, but these were written decades ago, and no single one of these was so much better than any of the others as to mean that it has stayed in print, or in circulation at the library (vs. being deaccessioned). The simple passage of time has meant that it is those who were younger, who then reached retirement age, reflected on their lives, and wrote memoirs which were published recently enough that they are still in print or on the library’s shelf. As to the others, scholars can still access them, but not ordinary readers.

Possibility 3: Adults surviving the Holocaust were less willing to write about it later, either because they were less willing/able to revisit the experience or because a child’s narrative is more about the heroic adults who kept them safe, and an adults’ narrative would be about their own heroics.

Possibility 4: Adults’ narratives are just less sell-able. The direct experiences of an adult in a Polish ghetto, or suffering the brutality of a concentration camp, are just too awful to sell a mass-market book that makes its way to the library. Children’s/teens’ narratives are not as singularly awful because, to at least some degree, they were sheltered from the horrors by their parents.

Possibility 5: it was the younger survivors who made their way to the U.S.; the older ones were more likely to immigrate to Israel.

Possibility 6: demographically, teens were a disproportionate number of the survivors.

Admittedly this is all speculation. Readers, do you have any ideas?

Image: children at a DP camp. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DP_class_at_Schauenstein_camp.jpg; public domain

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