Annette W. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Annette W., a historian and research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, who was born in France in 1948, one of four children of Holocaust survivors. Ms. W. recounts her mother surviving in hiding and her father in Nice and Switzerland; the deportation and/or deaths of three of their parents and some of their siblings; her early Maoist sympathies; teaching in China from 1974 to 1976, which changed her mind; learning Yiddish at Columbia University in the early 1980s in order to do research on her grandfather, which led to her interest in French attitudes toward the war, deportations, and genocide; writing her dissertation on this topic which became her first book; partnering with the Fortunoff Video Archive to found and direct a testimony project in France that recorded 137 testimonies between 1991 and 1996; her ambivalence as a historian toward testimonies despite her fascination with them; the diverse projects resulting from the testimonies confirming their importance; the focus on respect for the survivors resulting in the deep trust of survivors in the project; and resolution of the conflict between witnesses and historians. Ms. W. discusses Holocaust studies and antisemitism in France; her concern with the danger of bureaucrats institutionalizing the Holocaust; and conflicts between Jewish and non-Jewish deportees in France.

2 videocassettes