Holocaust survivors’ dilemma over speaking out

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it’s clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time,” Elie Wiesel wrote in his memoir, Night, published in 1960. 

For some Holocaust survivors, however, being open about their war experience can be extraordinarily difficult and, in some cases, can lead to them waiting until the winter of their lives to share it. 

“We can, of course, imagine that it’s not an easy process, and that it’s a point that people reach at different stages of their lives,” said Jakub Nowakowski, the director of the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre. 

Survivors begin telling their stories for numerous reasons, Nowakowski said. One is that by doing so, it helps them cope with what they went through. 

Some feel survivor’s guilt, so they start telling their stories because many others didn’t survive to tell theirs. 

“There’s also an understanding that the Holocaust was such a monumental event in history. However, now there’s this sense that it’s mystified through denialism,” said Nowakowski. “So we need survivors to speak about it otherwise people will forget the real things they went through. Sometimes people feel that by sharing those memories, they can bring back the memories of family members that died.” 

One such survivor, Iby Knill, who passed away in 2022 in England, took 60 years to share her story of how she fled to Hungary to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, but was later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was liberated on a death march on Easter Sunday, 1945. 

“I had locked those years away, good memories as well as bad ones, and lived a normal life. I didn’t think I would ever talk about it,” she said in a podcast. “But then something happened, and I had to stand up and own up to my past. Why did I survive when so many died? I still don’t know the answer. Perhaps I survived to bear witness, to tell the tale, hoping that people would listen.” 

Director and founder of the Durban Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Mary Kluk, said that for a long time, Holocaust survivors didn’t have the psychological support to be able to share what they went through, and thus didn’t share openly. 

“There are many survivors who never shared their stories,” said Kluk. “The pain of survival meant beginning a new life and not looking back, not burdening family with your heartache, creating a positive new start. This was a common theme among the survivor community, but thankfully, in later life, as the world became more open and interested, many families were able to hear their stories. Many survivors explain that they suddenly realised that if they didn’t share, the world wouldn’t know the truth of what had happened to them, and it could happen again, so they began to open up.” 

Tali Nates, the director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, said many survivors shared their testimonies or parts of their Holocaust experiences with their family or other people at different stages of their lives – soon after the war; after the trial of Adolf Eichmann; or in the 1990s after the film Schindler’s List came out and Steven Spielberg began the project of collecting Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. 

“After the Eichmann process and the BBC Holocaust series, people actually started to recognise that, first of all, the fate of the Jews was different from the fate of the other victims of the war and that, actually, survivors are heroes,” said Nowakowski. “So we’re remembering that it took many years all over the place including in Israel for people to be willing to or have the time and energy to be interested in those stories.” 

Nowakowski said Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe often hid their Jewish identity and stories for decades because antisemitism and violence continued long after the war, making it unsafe and emotionally devastating to reveal lives rebuilt under false identities even to their own children and grandchildren. 

“Other survivors, whom we sometimes describe as ‘silent survivors’, found it difficult to share their experiences with close family members,” said Nates. “Some of them could share certain stories only with strangers or people they didn’t know well, or through an interview with Holocaust-related projects. Others couldn’t share their testimonies at all until their death. For many, the traumatic events they experienced or witnessed were so horrific, they couldn’t relive the trauma by talking about it. For others, speaking about their experiences brought back the pain, fear, and vulnerability which they didn’t want to experience again or show to their families.” 

Nates said that her father, Moses Turner, didn’t tell his story of how he survived the Holocaust in full, telling only a few stories to her mother. She was able to learn about what her father went through only from stories from other survivors, including her uncle, as well as researchers, archives, photographs, and letters. 

“He was a teenager during his traumatic experiences in six camps, and the trauma presented itself in later years with nightmares, fear, and silence,” she said. “On the other hand, my uncle, Heinrich, who was four years older during his Holocaust experiences, spoke, wrote, shared, and expressed himself to various audiences. I’m grateful to my uncle for sharing with me the many stories which allowed me to piece together the family’s history. My father’s silence filled my mind for many years with images, dreams, and fears.”