Spectrum Study
Home
Spectrum Study
Methodology
Researcher
Profiles
Selected
Bibliography
Selected
Quotations
About
Spectrum
FAQ

 

Spectrum Initiative Longitudinal Study
 
  Selected Quotations : Trauma  

Diverse Personnel in Libraries

Diversity

Identity

Interviewees

Interviewing

Life History

Memory

Mentoring

Oral Historians: Tasks and Roles

Oral History

Oral History: Definitions

Shared Authority

Spectrum Initiative

Storytelling

Trauma

Validity


  • “Survivors live with countervailing pressures: the struggle to forget and remain silent, and the need to tell and to memorialize.” i
  • “Survivors often go to great lengths to silence themselves and to ensure that their memories remain sealed.” ii
  • “Survivors are probably more likely to tell their story not because they understand it as a form of psychotherapy for their own suffering (an alien concept), but because they see that in telling they are participating in a collective process of truth telling.” iii
  • “The survivor struggles with a compelling need to rebuild the link to his self and to another (to recapture in memory and in thought, at least, what has been lost) and with an equally compelling sense that restitution is impossible.” iv

i Nutkiewicz, Michael, “Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony,” The Oral History Review 30 (1) (Winter/Spring 2003), 3.
ii Nutkiewicz, 15.
iii Weine, Stevan, “Universes of Testimony: Considerations for Bosnia-Herzegovina,” In R. Mollica and R. Lavelle (eds.), Trauma Training Textbook (Soros Publishers, 2002), 11.
iv N. Auerhahn and Dori Laub, ‘Holocaust Testimony,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies Vol. 5 (1990): 448.