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Lhe recent commemoration of the discovery of the Auschwitz camp eighty years ago was an opportunity to return, in interviews with historians and historians, on the history of Nazi concentration camps, their discovery by the Soviet troops and slow and irregular publicization they have been the subject of. Also resurfaced by the stories of the survivors of the camps, who go out one after the other. These individual stories, taken separately and together, constitute the pillars of a memory both collective and conflictual. But they are not only historical objects.

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Michael Pollak looked into a sociologist there, to wonder about “Maintaining social identity” in what he designates as “An extreme experience”. The book published in 1990, entitled Concentrationary experience (Metalié editions) and become a classic of the social sciences, opens up a space for the analysis of the collective dynamics which underlie these individual life stories.

Michael Pollak underlines how much the apparent silence of some-he has carried out interviews of more than thirty hours each with three survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp-cannot be reduced to a simple oblivion. This silence, which he describes as “Management of the inexpressible” (this is the title ofAn article published in 1986 in Social Sciences Research Proceedings), reveals deep social tensions: those linked to the difficulty of transmitting experiences that challenge ordinary frameworks of understanding, but also to the fear of judgment or misunderstanding.

Social processes of transmission and oblivion

The story of Ruth A., who remembers and tells of his experience of persecution and camps at the same time as she wonders what she “Could have been or think”thus shows how “Jewish” and “German” identities, lived and assigned, contradict each other, comfort and fight. This difficult intimate articulation, both necessary and bulky, encouraged it, after the war, in silence. How to explain the adaptation to the life of the camp, the balance between obedience and resistance, friendship, the rescues of some implying the abandonment of others, the refusal of emigration? He has better earned what one is not sure of being able to or know how to explain, and focus on what has constituted the engine of survival, namely life, social interactions, the refusal of dehumanization.

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Source: Lemonde

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