Studies in Contemporary History 7 7 Studies in Contemporary History 7 Piotr Filipkowski Piotr Filipkowski Oral History and the War Piotr Filipkowski This book is rooted in the author’s experience as an interviewer and researcher in the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project – the biggest European oral history project devoted to a single Nazi concentration camp system, realized in Oral History and the War the years 2002/2003 at the University of Vienna. Over 850 Mauthausen survivors have been recorded worldwide, more than 160 of them in Poland, and over 30 by The Nazi Concentration Camp Experience the author. The work offers an in-depth analysis of Polish survivors’ accounts, sensitive in a Biographical-Narrative Perspective to both, form and content of these stories, as well as their social and cultural framing. The analysis is accompanied by an interpretation of (Polish) camp experiences in a broader biographical and historical perspective. The book is an interpretive journey from camp experiences, through the survivors’ memories, to narratives recalling them − and backwards. The Author Piotr Filipkowski is a sociologist and oral historian, who works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is co-founder of the biggest Polish Oral History Archive at the History Meeting House in Warsaw. He currently publishes mainly on oral history theory and practice, as well as on qualitative methods in social sciences. Oral History and the The Nazi War. Concentration Camp Experience ISBN 978-3-631-74866-4 COHIS_06 274866_Filipkowski_SB_A5HC 151x214 globalL.indd 1 14.03.19 15:45 Studies in Contemporary History 7 7 Studies in Contemporary History 7 Piotr Filipkowski Piotr Filipkowski Oral History and the War Piotr Filipkowski This book is rooted in the author’s experience as an interviewer and researcher in the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project – the biggest European oral history project devoted to a single Nazi concentration camp system, realized in Oral History and the War the years 2002/2003 at the University of Vienna. Over 850 Mauthausen survivors have been recorded worldwide, more than 160 of them in Poland, and over 30 by The Nazi Concentration Camp Experience the author. The work offers an in-depth analysis of Polish survivors’ accounts, sensitive in a Biographical-Narrative Perspective to both, form and content of these stories, as well as their social and cultural framing. The analysis is accompanied by an interpretation of (Polish) camp experiences in a broader biographical and historical perspective. The book is an interpretive journey from camp experiences, through the survivors’ memories, to narratives recalling them − and backwards. The Author Piotr Filipkowski is a sociologist and oral historian, who works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is co-founder of the biggest Polish Oral History Archive at the History Meeting House in Warsaw. He currently publishes mainly on oral history theory and practice, as well as on qualitative methods in social sciences. Oral History and the The Nazi War. Concentration Camp Experience COHIS_06 274866_Filipkowski_SB_A5HC 151x214 globalL.indd 1 14.03.19 15:45 Oral History and the War STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY Edited by Dariusz Stola / Machteld Venken VOLUME 7 Piotr Filipkowski Oral History and the War The Nazi Concentration Camp Experience in a Biographical-Narrative Perspective Translated by Tristan Korecki Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the in- ternet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. This translation has been co-funded by the Foundation for Polish Science. Proof-read by Despina Christodoulou ISSN 2364-2874 ISBN 978-3-631-74866-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3- 631-76905-8 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978 -3-631-76905-5 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978 -3-631-76905-2 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b14717 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ © Piotr Filipkowski, 2019 Peter Lang – Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com Contents Introduction ................................................................................................. 7 Part I: The contexts 1 Oral history and the war .................................................................. 17 2 Concentration camp experiences in Polish sociological analyses: State-of-the-art in research, methodological issues, and research perspective adopted in this study ............................................................................... 37 Part II: The accounts of former camp inmates: recognising the meanings 3 The camp inmate experience seen through autobiographical narratives: a tentative ‘typology’ ........... 59 3.1 ‘Low-numbers’ ............................................................................................. 80 3.2 Concentration camp as punishment and wartime ‘adventure’ ......... 106 3.3 Varsovians ..................................................................................................... 132 4 Excursus: Mauthausen in female narratives ........................... 149 Part III: Case studies I. Leon Ceglarz ................................................................................................ 183 II. Zygmunt Podhalański .......................................................................... 249 6 Contents III. Roman Strój .................................................................................. 321 Concluding remarks .......................................................................... 415 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 423 Introduction World War II is part of the past. It forms an increasingly distant sequence of events on the axis of measurable physical time. The memory of this war – the memory of its experience – belongs, in turn, to the present. Incessantly remembered and (re) interpreted, it continues to be profoundly vivid in the present. It remains an impor- tant, sometimes crucial, point of reference for a number of identities: the European identity that is under construction; the more soundly-constructed national iden- tities; and, moreover, for a number of individual identities. There is a number of such memories of the experience of the war; similarly, there are many communi- ties of memory comprised of different people who remember different things, or remember things in diverse ways. These memories tend to be mutually contra- dictory, conflicting, or competitive. This is nothing new, in terms of how memory works in general – and, it is not specific to World War II. Nonetheless, there is something specific about the era in which we live as regards the memory of wartime experiences. The last eyewitnesses – those who had first-hand experience of World War II and who are able to tell us themselves about this experience – are passing away. They had often recounted pieces of this experience, when they had the opportunity to be listened to. But, they were not listened to everywhere and in all periods; indeed, some were not listened to at all. Today, however, there is much more of a willingness to hear them and the last of the living witnesses continue to tell their stories. For them, the war, with its extreme ordeals – the Holocaust, the concentration camps – forms part of their biographical experience: usually, the most special, central part of it, which is con- stitutive for their self-image, their self-definition. This element, even if concealed and denied, is also the key ‘episode’ in their autobiographical narratives. Soon, these people will no longer be counted among the living, although their memoirs, accounts, stories and recorded interviews will remain. The archives of their memory and identity will survive. Many of these collections, such as the narrations that are known as oral history, have been created in recent years, inspired by the conviction that they are being produced at the very last moment, when it is almost too late. The archives containing the successful collection of recordings of thousands of individual voices and images are also a token of the cul- ture of memory – or rather, the culture of remembering and commemorating – in which we live. These archives are often referred to as unique monuments, of a par- ticular kind. This label is both meaningful and revealing. The same is true for the claim that we are witnessing the experiences of the war as they slip from commu- nicable into cultural memory, the latter being produced without a direct reliance on the autobiographical memory of the ‘witnesses’. Although the records of this autobiographical memory, which have been deposited in the archives, seem somehow to suspend or delay this moment, they cannot reverse it. The authors of these testimonies will never speak for themselves 8 Introduction again. They will need to be exposed, read, reheard, watched – and, subsequently, interpreted, dressed with a sense, and given meanings that are relevant. This will from henceforth take place in the