The First Human Gesture among Us: Rethinking Agency among Holocaust Survivors

Who freed the prisoners of the Holocaust? In most historical accounts, memorials, and museums, the liberation of prisoners from Nazi camps and ghettos is represented as having been at the hands of the Allied forces. Such moments are typically recounted and understood as ones filled with joy and jubilation as survivors came out to greet their liberators. Liberation is portrayed as something that was done to survivors, rather than by them in acts of personal or collective agency.

A close reading of memoirs and interviews with survivors, however, complicates this version of events in a significant way. It does not dispute the essential (and often inadvertent) role that Allied forces played in bringing an end to the murder of European Jewry and other groups targeted for destruction. Yet the traditional narrative overlooks an important historical moment in the process of liberation. An examination of diaries, memoirs, and testimonies reveal that as US, British, and Soviet armies were closing in on German forces, there existed a temporal or geographic gap between them. This gap occupies a profound place in most first-hand accounts. As the works of Victor Klemperer, Hannah Levy-Hass, Ruth Kluger, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, as well as oral testimonies reveal, this gap in which prisoners were under the control of neither Nazi nor Allied authorities provided opportunities for self-determination, a return to one’s humanity, and – however short lived – a chance to make decisions about the course and direction of their lives. This talk explores this moment in which the absence of military authorities allowed for a level of self-expression, agency, and freedom that is generally overlooked in the dominant accounts of liberation.