We suffered and can understand and orient this material.1
This quote suggests that suffering serves a key function in the circulation of knowledge because it can make sense of what might otherwise be disorienting material. The notion that suffering has epistemic value is progressive. Yet, this statement was made in 1948, not by a philosopher but by a Polish-Jewish survivor of Nazi persecution, Luba Melchior, who was a refugee in Sweden. Melchior was one of nine Polish survivors of Nazi persecution employed by the Polish Research Institute (PIZ) in Lund, Sweden. The mission of this institute, which was most active in 1945 and 1946, was to document Nazi atrocities. It did this in part by interviewing survivors about their experiences and documenting them in written testimonies.2
This blog post highlights the potential of using conceptions of the epistemic value of emotions in analyses of knowledge circulation, not least where migrants are concerned. Drawing on my ongoing research about the PIZ initiative, I use the theory that “emotions are vehicles of knowledge”3 to argue that the Polish refugees working with PIZ in Sweden were engaging with emotions – their own and others’ – to go beyond their remit of gathering objective facts and chronologies about Nazi atrocities. I will also demonstrate that emotions served as vehicles of knowledge about the effects of Nazi atrocities – namely, the suffering of those who survived and were displaced in the early postwar period.
Knowledge Beyond Facts
Efforts to document and record Nazi atrocities began while they were occurring and continued in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, often led by those who had endured them personally. The primary goals of the diverse survivor historical commissions were largely similar: gather facts about the atrocities the Nazis inflicted on Jews and other victim groups that could be used as evidence in courts of law and by future historians, as well as to commemorate the victims.4 PIZ shared these goals and began fulfilling them by collecting testimonies and objects in 1945 and 1946.
In my research, I have sought to gain a better understanding of how the survivors who worked with PIZ conducted their documentation and collection work. One intriguing finding is that the written testimonies reflect a concern with recording not only the facts presented by the witnesses but also their emotions as they recounted their experiences. The documents and personal letters of the survivors associated with the PIZ indicate that the Polish survivors conducting the interviews recognized the witnesses’ emotional state as valuable evidence for courts of law and future historians and not just for future psychological studies – their stated purpose.5
The PIZ interviewers were instructed to follow a methodology designed to ensure that the witnesses’ accounts were objective, reflected only facts and chronologies, and differentiated between firsthand experiences and secondhand accounts. In practice, however, among the collection of 512 testimonies designated “complete,” there are many examples of the interviewers acknowledging that the witness’s subjectivity and emotions enhance rather than detract from the facts of the testimony – even to the extent that they justify an absence of facts. The following are just a few examples of interviewers’ comments appended to survivors’ testimonies.
Witness …, although very intelligent, becomes nervous when recounting all her ordeals; she is not quite able to bring her nerves under control and gives her testimony in a chaotic manner. Often, she will resume a topic after having abandoned it. She is clearly reliving her grim past. She tries to wring as many facts as she can from her memory, and to render them as faithfully as possible in order to bear witness to the truth. Her testimony is entirely credible.6
And, from another testimony:
Events are described and seen from the personal perspective of a young girl who was arrested along with her brother and father. It is this very subjectivity and directness of feeling that gives this testimony its particular value, despite the relative paucity of facts.7
Finally, after detailing several inaccuracies in a witness’s testimony, the interviewer writes:
In no way do these inaccuracies diminish the value of this record. Memory impairment as it is experienced by former concentration camp prisoners – particularly with regard to dates and names – is a completely normal and justifiable phenomenon. In [the witness’s] case, its basis can be found in the beatings she was subjected to during interrogation and in her ordeal in the forest where sixteen prisoners were executed.8
The PIZ survivor-interviewers’ acceptance of the witnesses’ emotions , I argue, indicates that they had a conception of emotions akin to Cecilea Mun’s – that emotions are vehicles of knowledge because they “tell us about the world.”9 In the case of the PIZ, the witnesses’ emotions were vehicles of the knowledge they shared because the emotions conveyed the suffering inflicted by the Nazis as well as – and sometimes better than – dry and objective facts about the crimes alone would have done.
Knowledge Actors as “Companions of Misery”
In addition to considering the witnesses’ emotions vehicles of knowledge, the interviewers also believed that their own experiences of suffering at the hands of the Nazis made them uniquely capable of gathering full and accurate testimonies. A letter – extracted in the epigraph – PIZ survivor-interviewer Luba Melchior wrote to her former colleague, Krystyna Karier, in 1948 makes this clear. In it, Melchoir discusses the importance of the work they conducted.10 Her sentiments are echoed in other extant documents relating to the PIZ initiative, such as in the following quotation from the minutes of a working group meeting:
For it is common to see people whose reluctance to describe their experiences is overcome by the fact that the person receiving the testimony was in the camp himself, and thus he is a companion of misery. There is no danger that the testifying person, having revealed his soul, will be misunderstood.11
The survivors of Nazi persecution involved with the PIZ believed that shared suffering was essential to the process of gathering knowledge about what the Nazis did to their many victims during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Correspondingly, they believed that individuals who gathered testimonies who had not themselves suffered risked gathering incomplete or inaccurate testimony or, worse, no testimony at all.12 The interviewers were, thus, also aware that as “companions of misery,” they and the witnesses they interviewed were contributing to the production and circulation of knowledge about the Second World War and the Holocaust as what we now refer to as knowledge actors.13
Suffering and Displacement as Knowledge
It was as companions of misery that the survivors associated with PIZ were able to understand that witnesses’ emotions were vehicles of knowledge because they told of the suffering inflicted by the Nazis. But their shared subjectivity also enabled them to understand that their suffering did not end at liberation. While their remit was to document the Nazis’ crimes, they took the extra step of documenting the ongoing effects of those crimes. These effects included, of course, the physical, emotional, and psychological damage the survivors carried with them. While various authorities usually paid close attention to the physical damage, they frequently overlooked the other two types. The PIZ survivor-interviewers were not only concerned about all three, but they also often carefully described them in their comments to the testimonies, which they knew lawyers and historians would read. The following are just two examples:
[The witness] is mentally stunted and emaciated; she is not capable of relating her experiences in a precise manner. The terrible scenes she witnessed are ever-present before her eyes. She says that everything was terrible and that [she] was constantly beaten and tormented. Nothing more can be obtained from her. She does not remember her date of birth.14
And,
The witness is a wreck of a woman; the marks left by her ordeal are huge. Infirm and sick, she has difficulty speaking at length. Her signature reveals the weakness of her hand, which I saw shaking presumably due to nerve inflammation. Mentally, too, she has broken down. She feels desolate; she has lost her family. She is travelling to Poland in the hope that her husband might return from Russia.15
The physical, emotional, and psychological suffering wrought by Nazi persecution were also accompanied by the suffering caused by displacement, as the second quote above begins to demonstrate. The comments the PIZ survivor-interviewers made to the testimonies reveal that they were aware and wanted to highlight that the witnesses’ suffering had other causes beyond the atrocities themselves, above all, displacement.
There are many examples in the PIZ testimonies of interviewer comments emphasizing the witnesses’ fear of returning to Poland, where they faced desolation and political and racial persecution. The interviewers were well aware that the witnesses were under pressure to return because they experienced it, too. As politically informed individuals, they also knew exactly what awaited those forced to return. But, with limited recourse and no political power as repatriates – they were, after all, guests of the Swedish state – there was little most of the survivors could do. Those associated with PIZ did at least have the ability to preserve the profound fear many survivors felt, perhaps with the hope that it could effect some change.
There is an incredible example of this among the complete testimonies. The testimony document contains no actual testimony but only basic information about the witness, who initially agreed to give her account but then demurred. The interviewer’s comments explain her reasons:
[S]he is afraid to give testimony because of the conditions prevailing in Poland. … I am preserving the completed form, unsigned and unaccompanied by any testimony, as a testament to the times we live in and to the uncertainty which imprints itself so deeply on a person’s mind that even the statement of known facts from the German occupation arouses fear of repression.16
In this case, the witness’s emotions – fear being primary among them – are not about the suffering she experienced in the concentration camps but rather about the suffering caused by her displacement, forced repatriation, and the postwar conditions in Poland. Emotions, thus, not only became a vehicle of knowledge about the suffering caused by the Nazi atrocities during the Second World War and the Holocaust but also about the suffering caused by displacement in the aftermath.
Concluding Remarks
The survivor-refugees who conducted the interviews and recorded the testimonies of Polish survivors of Nazi persecution in Sweden in 1945 and 1946 understood themselves as knowledge actors because they believed that their own suffering made them uniquely capable of understanding and contextualizing the witnesses’ experiences. The theory that emotions are vehicles of knowledge has enabled me to gain new insight into how the interviewers’ understanding of their relationship with the witnesses impacted their role in the circulation of knowledge about the Nazi atrocities. By observing and recording the witnesses’ emotions as they gave their testimony, the survivors associated with PIZ were contributing to the circulation of knowledge of the effects of the Nazi atrocities and not merely of the atrocities themselves.
Victoria Van Orden Martínez is a researcher at Lund University in Sweden. Her research focuses on survivors of Nazi persecution who were refugees after the Second World War and the Holocaust, with an emphasis on the role of gender and other differences. She has published articles in journals such as Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Scandinavian Jewish Studies and edited volumes like Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials (Routledge, 2023).
Featured image: Group photo taken by Maria Helena Kurowska, 1946. Back row (left to right) Bożysław Kurowski, Ludwika Broel-Plater, Carola von Gegerfelt (Zygmunt Łakociński’s wife), Józef Nowaczyk, almost certainly Krystyna Karier, Zygmunt Łakociński. Front row (left to right): Helena Dziedzicka, Luba Melchior, Halina Strzelecka. Wikimedia Commons.
- Polish Research Institute in Lund (PIZ) Archive, Lund, Sweden, Vol. 49, excerpt from a letter by Luba Melchior to Krystyna Karier, February 27, 1948. Translated from Polish by Roman Wroblewski. ↩︎
- Victoria Van Orden Martínez, “Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945–1946,” Ph.D. dissertation, Linköping University, 2023. ↩︎
- Cecilea Mun, "How Emotions Know: Naturalizing Epistemology via Emotions," in The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, ed. Laura Candiotto, 27–50 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 29. ↩︎
- See, e.g., Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
- See, e.g., Martínez, “Afterlives,” chapter 6 (pp. 153–75); Victoria Van Orden Martínez and Christine Schmidt, “Survivor Interviewers as Companions of Misery: A Comparative View from Post-war Sweden and England,” in Survivors’ Toil/Beiträge des VWI zur Holocaustforschung, ed. Natalia Aleksiun and Éva Kovács (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming); Victoria Van Orden Martínez, “Emotions as Testimony: Documenting the Psychological Aspects of Witnessing in an Early Survivor Historical Commission,” Zagłada Żydów: Studia i Materiały/Holocaust Studies and Materials (under review). ↩︎
- PIZ, Record of Witness Testimony 447, August 14, 1946, attested by Ludwika Broel-Plater and Helena Dziedzicka, p. 27. The quotes are taken from the official English translations of the original Polish documents. All testimonies are available through the Witnessing Genocide website. ↩︎
- PIZ, Record of Witness Testimony 297, May 9, 1946, attested by Halina Strzelecka, p. 5. ↩︎
- PIZ, Record of Witness Testimony 181, February 26, 1946, attested by Krystyna Karier, p. 12. ↩︎
- Mun, "How Emotions Know," 41. ↩︎
- PIZ, 49, Melchior to Karier, February 27, 1948. ↩︎
- PIZ, Vol. 44:6 g, p. 1. Minutes (in Polish) from PIZ meeting, October 2, 1946, signed by Krystyna Karier. ↩︎
- Martínez, “Afterlives,” 157–61. ↩︎
- See, e.g., Johan Östling, David Larsson Heidenblad, and Anna Nilsson Hammar, eds., Knowledge Actors: Revisiting Agency in the History of Knowledge (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2023). ↩︎
- PIZ, Record of Witness Testimony 122, January 13, 1946, attested by Helena Dziedzicka, p. 3. ↩︎
- PIZ, Record of Witness Testimony 322, May 22, 1946, attested by Helena Miklaszewska, pp. 6–10. ↩︎
- PIZ, Record of Witness Testimony 463, September 2, 1946, attested by Krystyna Karier, p. 2. ↩︎
