For my Ph.D. dissertation in history (defended January 2024), I wrote about how people whose stories are too messy for some historians documented stories that most people refuse to hear because they are too chaotic. Surprisingly, it is a history of stories many of us can relate to.

By Victoria Martínez

You don’t have to be a writer to know that every story, no matter its form – book, play, film, etc. – ends with a resolution, also known as the denouement of the narrative arc, that provides clarity or closure. Whether the ending is happy or not, the resolution of a story can leave you feeling any number of emotions, including dissatisfaction with the conclusion and disappointment that the story ended. One thing is certain, if you’ve reached the end, it was a story you wanted to hear.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and what we now refer to as the Holocaust, many surviving victims of the Nazis and their collaborators felt compelled or obligated to tell their stories. But, contrary to the long-held and oft-repeated claim that survivors were silent, the reality was that few people wanted to hear their stories. Apart from varying degrees of public curiosity as to their experiences, survivors were expected to – and often told to – simply move on with their lives and not look back.[1]

The problem was – and still is, to a great extent – that the stories of those who survived Nazi persecution and genocide had no resolution, no denouement. They were what medical sociologist Arthur W. Frank calls chaos narratives and characterizes them as the stories “no one wants to hear.” Told by “wounded storytellers” – vulnerable and suffering in myriad ways – chaos narratives have no plot, no narrative arc that promises or brings comfort to the listener.[2] Instead, they cause anxiety and are difficult to hear “not only because listeners have trouble facing what is being said as a possibility or a reality in their own lives” but also “because the chaos narrative is probably the most embodied form of story.”[3]

This means that the stories survivors had to tell were as difficult to tell as they were to hear. The suffering inflicted on those telling them was not over. Their physical, mental, and psychological wounds were still open. With their families, homes, livelihoods, and way of life destroyed, many survivors had nowhere to go. Their stories reflected the grim realities of the immediate past and present, with no immediate possibility of resolution or redemption for the speaker or listener. As Frank puts it, chaos narratives are thus not “proper” stories; that is, stories with a resolution.[4]  To make these stories “hearable,” they have been reshaped more recently as stories of resilience and the irrepressibility of the human spirit, what Frank calls “restitution narratives” that make the suffering, trauma, and loss bearable for the listener.[5]

Back in the early postwar period, among the few who did want to hear survivors’ stories were a relative handful of psychologists and other social scientists and, in much greater numbers, other survivors. The latter group was composed of what historian Laura Jockusch has characterized as a European-wide phenomenon of survivor historical commissions and documentation centers. These were disparate efforts organized by Holocaust survivors to document the Nazi atrocities that shared a common inspiration in previous efforts by Eastern European Jews to document pogroms and other antisemitic violence, known as khurbn forshung (destruction research).[6]

During and after the Second World War and the Holocaust, these efforts involved Jews – often historians and other intellectuals as well as activists – gathering evidence and testimonies from other Jews who were being or had been persecuted by the Nazis for justice and history. Non-Jewish individuals and entities affected by Nazi occupation and persecution also documented the Nazi atrocities, both as they happened and afterward, though these usually utilized different methods and followed other traditions.[7]

Amongst these efforts during the immediate postwar period was an anomaly or hybrid. The Polish Research Institute (PIZ) in Lund, Sweden (as it is best known today) was founded in Sweden – a nominally neutral country – during the war by non-Jewish Poles who had not directly experienced Nazi persecution to document the Nazi occupation of Poland from the relative safety of Sweden. In the spring of 1945, when nearly 31,000 survivors of Nazi persecution began streaming into Sweden as refugees – including approximately 13,000 Jewish and non-Jewish Poles – their involvement transformed PIZ into a survivor historical commission. Or, at least, this is the argument I made in my Ph.D. dissertation in History, Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945-1946, which I defended in January 2024.[8]

My research was, in part, an examination of PIZ in the context of the phenomenon of postwar survivor historical commissions; something that had not previously been done, or at least not in any depth. My argument that PIZ was a survivor historical commission was just one part of my work to understand how the postwar documentation and collection work of PIZ operated and, perhaps most importantly, to shed new light on how the Polish survivors associated with PIZ – most of whom were women – were key actors in this work. For me, this was especially important to do since the survivors had been marginalized in the historical narratives around PIZ nearly to the extent of invisibility.[9]

This was at least partly because, in a similar way to survivors’ “chaos narratives,” the stories of migrants and refugees are frequently left out of national histories because they are considered, as anthropologist Liisa Malkki writes, “too messy, subjective, unmanageable, hysterical” and therefore irrelevant to supposedly concrete and objective political histories.[10] Like the survivors I researched, however, I am not averse to unresolved stories without a neat narrative arc and an inevitable sense of closure. After all, real life is not only messy but is always without resolution. The same is true of historiography, which means my job as a historian is to contribute to the writing of history, not attempt or claim to provide a resolution.

One element I have contributed to historiography with my dissertation is insight into how the individuals associated with PIZ – survivors and non-survivors alike – created an initiative that adopted elements of both Jewish and non-Jewish documentation efforts developed before, during, and after the Second World War and the Holocaust. In PIZ, there are indications of the influences of pre-war Polish sociological methods, Jewish khurbn forshung methods, and the nationalist efforts of the Polish government-in-exile.[11] There can be little doubt that this was because PIZ was one of the few – and perhaps even the only – survivor historical commissions of the postwar period that involved Jewish and non-Jewish survivors collecting and giving testimony.[12]

Their knowledge of the various efforts to document the Nazi atrocities – gathered through their experiences and carried with them to refuge in Sweden, where it was involved in cultural translations[13] – and their involvement in networks of support and resistance contributed to making PIZ an effort that was at once distinctive from and intimately connected to other survivor historical commissions of the period.

Perhaps one of the most important elements that linked PIZ and other survivor historical commissions was the desire to document the stories that no one wanted to hear. As I demonstrated in my dissertation, the survivors associated with PIZ believed that they, qua survivors, were uniquely qualified to document the experiences of other survivors – Jewish or non-Jewish – because, as they put it, they were “companions of misery.”[14] As such, they believed that the witnesses would be less reluctant to tell and that they would be able to listen to and comprehend the chaos narratives. In this and other ways, I have argued that the PIZ survivor-interviewers were practicing what is called a relational ethics of care, a feminist alternative to hegemonic, masculine forms of moral theory.[15]

Ultimately, the public’s lack of interest in (or unwillingness to listen to) the chaos narratives contributed to the demise of most of the survivor historical commissions, including PIZ. Lacking large-scale public interest and the necessary funding to continue their work, all but a few of these initiatives continued beyond the first few years following the end of the war.[16] PIZ lost funding from the Swedish government in 1946 due not only to a lack of interest but also to the fact that the work was perceived as having little to do with Sweden and the Swedes.[17]

The recent establishment of a Holocaust museum in Sweden has begun to change this perception. Whether the chaos narratives will be incorporated into this and other initiatives remains to be seen. If the history I have contributed to writing about tells us anything it is that it is not enough for institutions to care about these stories. It is also necessary for people to be willing to listen to them. And here is where the ethics at the heart of PIZ and other survivor commissions becomes especially important now.

To comprehend the meaning and value of chaos narratives, one does not necessarily have to be a “companion of misery” – someone who has suffered in the same or similar way – one only needs to be willing to listen. This is because, according to Frank, wounded storytellers are also wounded healers whose stories (when heard) create empathy between themselves and listeners.[18] In other words, it is in and through these stories – including the chaos narratives – that an ethics of care is enacted, benefitting not only the speaker and listener but many others. As Frank writes:

“In stories, the teller not only recovers her voice; she becomes a witness to the conditions that rob others of their voices. When any person recovers his voice, many people begin to speak through that story.”[19]

This statement speaks to me not as a historian but as someone who has experienced traumatic injury and lives with its consequences. “Sooner or later, everyone is a wounded storyteller,” Frank writes.[20] As painful as it can be, there is a certain power and freedom in finding your voice amidst pain and suffering, and at least part of that comes from how it enables us to connect to others in real or imagined communities. For the Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors I write about in my dissertation and elsewhere, this meant creating communities of care across a variety of cultural and experiential divides.[21]

Our lives may be defined by narratives – they may even be narratives[22] – but our lives are not stories with neat narrative arcs. For that matter, neither is history. In different ways and at different times, our lives are chaos narratives, often without any resolution. To accept and embrace this – both in ourselves and others – is not only empathetic but is also a form of agency and empowerment; something the survivors of Nazi persecution I write about in my dissertation exemplified in abundance.

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[1] See, for instance, Cesarani, D., & Sundquist, E. J. (Eds.). (2011). After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence. London: Routledge.

[2] Frank, A.W. (2013) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (2nd ed.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 97-114.

[3] ibid 101

[4] Ibid 97

[5] Ibid 75-86. Recommended reading: Greenspan, H. (1998). On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger; Langer, L. L. (1991). Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. Yale University Press.

[6] Jockusch, L. (2012). Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[7] For example, on the efforts of the Polish government-in-exile, see Fleming, M. (2022). The Polish Government-in-Exile: The United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Holocaust. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 36, 19-34. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcac012.

[8] Martínez, V. V. O. (2023). Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945-1946. (Ph.D thesis.). Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.

[9] ibid, 1-6. See, for example, my blog post from 2018 on Gemma LaGuardia Gluck.

[10] Malkki, L. (1996). “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 385. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050.

[11] Martínez, Afterlives, 117-151.

[12] Martínez, V. V. O. (2021). “Witnessing against a divide? An analysis of early Holocaust testimonies constructed in interviews between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles.” Holocaust Studies, 28(4), 483-505. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2021.1981627.

[13] Martínez, Afterlives, 117-151. On the concept of cultural translation of knowledge, see, for example Lässig, S., & Steinberg, S. (2017). “Knowledge on the Move: New Approaches toward a History of Migrant Knowledge.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 43(3), 313-346. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26381960.  

[14] Martínez, Afterlives, 153-175. See also, Schmidt, C., & Martínez, V. V. O. (2022). “Survivor-Interviewers as Companions of Misery: A Comparative View from Post-war Sweden and England.” Paper presented at the Survivors’ Toil: The First Decade of Documenting and Studying the Holocaust, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), Vienna, Austria. “Companions of misery” is a translation of the Polish term used by the group in a memorandum: “współtowarzyszem niedoli.”

[15] On ethics of care, see, for example, Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press; Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global: Oxford University Press.

[16] One prominent exception is The Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

[17] Dahl, I. A. (2007). “‘…This is material arousing interest in common history…’: Zygmunt Łakociński and Polish survivors’ Protocols.” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, 223, 319-338.

[18] Frank xx.

[19] Frank xxi.

[20] ibid

[21] Martínez, Afterlives; Martínez, Witnessing.

[22] Recommended reading: Kristeva, J. (2001). Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative (F. Collins, Trans.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.