With "Holocaust Memory in Spanish," we set out to explore fictional and non-fictional representations of the Holocaust at the intersection of memory studies, trauma studies, area studies, postcolonial studies and geolinguistics. The first two frames invoke specifically human tactics for negotiating a past marked by dehumanization, while the latter three ask what it means to bear witness to that past from a specific site of enunciation, such as Spain or Latin America. Collectively, we analyze representations of the Holocaust in text and film as vehicles for deciphering what has happened or is still happening from positions that are temporally, geographically and/or linguistically distant from the historic event. We ask how these retellings grapple with local historical legacies such as the Iberian expulsion of the Jews on the eve of New World conquest, the genocides of indigenous peoples in Latin America, or national dictatorships in the twentieth century. Our respective analyses highlight the internal conflicts, displacement, linguistic dissonance and suppressed memory that are characteristic of personal and collective reckonings with the Shoah in Spanish.

The idea for this session springs from important developments in national and regional approaches to Holocaust history in both Spain and Latin America. Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust (2012) touched off a controversy about how to frame the Spanish Civil War. The recent Netflix release of the Spanish-produced The Photographer of Auschwitz has brought to the fore the fate of Spanish Republicans imprisoned in Mauthausen and Spain's complicity with the Nazi project. Sara Brenneis' Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp 1940-2015 (2018) studies victim narratives from the last seventy years, and responds to mandates in Spain for Holocaust education and country-wide observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. These works demonstrate that the role of the Holocaust in the realm of Spanish cultural production remains contentious and incomplete.

In Latin America, Holocaust representation has reached new audiences in diverse publishing and museological ventures. The Museo del Holocausto in Buenos Aires, the only museum of its kind in the region, is set to open in a new, expanded space in October of 2019. Critical studies such as Marjorie Agosin's Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America (2009) and Edna Aizenberg's On the Edge of the Holocaust: The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture (2015) have convincingly tied Holocaust memory to Latin American area studies; recent works dealing with family experiences of the Shoah by contemporary authors such as Eduardo Halfón (Guatemala) and Mauricio Rosencof (Uruguay) have benefitted from translation and film adaptations. International Holocaust institutions and organizations, including the Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, have launched educational initiatives across the region.

Autobiographical engagements in Spanish with the Shoah showcase efforts to harness intimacy and proximity across generational and physical distance in order to humanize individuals converted into numbers, statistics, or even ashes. Simultaneously, experiences and memories of the Holocaust have inspired other projects of humanitarian rescue specific to the Spanish-speaking world. Argentine scholar Boleslao Lewin connects the Tupac Amaru Rebellion of 18th-century Peru to his own catastrophic history as a Jewish immigrant in Latin America, while Guatemalan scholar Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil invokes the Holocaust as a mirror for Maya history. Estelle Tarica shows how both thinkers tie the Nazi past to indigenous self-determination, holding up the Shoah as a not-so-distant mirror to Latin America.

For Guatemalan-born author Eduardo Halfón, (auto)biography and invention are by no means antithetical terms; the author has declared his intention to narrate from the very threshold of history and fiction. In her analysis of Halfón's "The Polish Boxer," in which the narrator's grandfather grudgingly recounts his time in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Marilyn Miller points to indexical components such as numbers and names that serve the reader as mneumonic devices for "remembering" Holocaust histories that have been silenced or denied. Like his Polish grandfather, who claimed the number tattooed on his forearm was his phone number, Halfón provides us with "true" tales in which memory is ever permeable to manipulation and fantasy, and thus capable of defamiliarizing and revitalizing individual, family, and national histories.

While Marianne Hirsch has referred to the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors as a "generation of postmemory,” the Latin American authors Charlotte Gartenberg studies actively engage with repressed or suppressed memory by layering these traumatic pasts on current circumstances. In Manuela Fingueret’s La hija del silencio (1999) and Mauricio Rosencof’s Las cartas que no llegaron (2002), protagonists recount their parents’ experiences in and around the Holocaust in tandem with their own stories of being jailed and tortured during the Argentine and Uruguayan dictatorships. Rather than combating the collapse of boundaries between past and present, self and other, these characters actively court haunting as a mode of coping with the present.

Finally, Hazel Gold explores responses to Jewish genocide during World War II as seen in contemporary Spanish/Catalan cinema. Even as greater attention has been focused on the fate of Spanish Republicans imprisoned in Mauthausen, the connection between Spain and Jewish Holocaust victims is complicated and attenuated by the contentious link to the historical memory of Sepharad, the relative absence of Jews residing in Spain since their discovery-era expulsion in 1492, and the lingering stereotypes and prejudices surrounding Judaism in the country. In the documentary Perseguits i salvats (dir. Daniel and Jaume Serra, 2014), and in the fictionalized recreations of historical events and personages in Lobos sucios (dir. Simón Casal, 2015) and La llum d’Elna (dir. Sílvia Quer, 2017), Jewish victims remain relegated to the periphery.

Working to identify the specificities and commonalities of the Holocaust in distinct corners of the Spanish-speaking world, all four 15-minute papers engage with the successes and failures of memory work across time and space, both in reference to the events of World War II, and in relation to earlier and later events that have also shaped lived realities in Spain and Latin America. The panel invites the audience to expand and reconsider this subject from a bevy of new angles, latitudes and attitudes.