‘We tried to become normal’: Social class and memory in oral histories with Montreal Holocaust survivors

Abstract

This article argues for social class and socioeconomic inequality as neglected forms of analysis when studying the memories and narratives of Holocaust survivors. Based primarily in oral histories conducted with Holocaust survivors in Montreal, this argument is elaborated in two ways. First, the author demonstrates stories that have been left out of Holocaust narratives, such as multicultural socializing that took place in the early post-war years as class solidarity provided more kinship than ethnic solidarity. Second, the author examines the various barriers to survivors publicly recounting their experiences, and how the ability to speak seemed to accompany socioeconomic assimilation into broader Jewish and Canadian culture. This compels us to also ask who was never able to publicly recount or remember, as they did not manage to achieve this kind of stability.

We have collected thousands of hours of Holocaust testimony. This has led to social and cultural assumptions that all stories have been told, and that all survivors have had a voice in the historicization of their experience. Memory Studies, as a field, has been fundamentally influenced by work on Holocaust memory, testimony and oral history and consequent questions about what it means to recall, represent and make meaning of traumatic pasts. Myriad scholars of Holocaust testimony have pointed out, however, that despite the volume and scholarly attention of this field, there nevertheless continue to be gaps and silences that remain when trying to make sense of the dynamics of the Holocaust, and of the experience of having survived (Shenker, 2015; Stone, 2023; Waxman, 2008). These silences provide insights in and of themselves, especially given that, as Henry Greenspan (2014: 229) has said, ‘Silence, in the sense of experience never discussed, is the rule. Talk is the exception’. Those thousands of hours may give an impression of a completeness that is not real, both in terms of how many survivors have given testimony, and in terms of gaps and omissions in these testimonies. Noah Shenker (2015) calls for the necessity of ‘testimonial literacy’ in Holocaust scholarship, which understands the recordings and texts we do have within their institutional, social, cultural and political contexts. This is similar to the literature in oral history which understands what is produced in an interview as ‘situated and relational’ (Baik, 2022), and the product of a time, place and intersubjective exchange (Frisch, 1990; Sheftel, 2018; Shopes, 2014). Holocaust testimonies exist in a given context, and to ignore that context is to lose a lot of the richness and diversity of these voices, to pretend that they exist in some other world that is detached from material and political concerns. As Zoe Waxman writes in the introduction to her book,

it is necessary to resist the tendency of recent Holocaust scholarship to universalize or collectivize Holocaust testimony, and instead to revive the particular by uncovering the multiple layers within testimony. It is only by exploring the social and historical context of Holocaust testimony that we can appreciate the sheer diversity of witnesses’ experiences. (2008: 1)

Holocaust survivors who have organized, given testimony or participated in oral history projects have been the first to point out the gaps in testimony and the many survivors who have not, or were never able to, give testimony, and the reasons for this (Lindeman, 1992). In my own work, comprising over 15 years of conducting oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors in Montreal, they have often contextualized their ability to recount their stories, explaining that they needed to be in the right social and psychological positions to make public remembering possible (Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2010, 2014). Most survivors whom I have interviewed have mentioned spouses, family members or friends who could not speak; to be able to do so was exceptional, and the product of both internal and external forces.

This article continues the above call for a contextual understanding of the conditions of testimony, by focus on a much-neglected aspect of that context; that of social class and socioeconomic status. Demographic research has consistently shown that across Israel, the United States and Canada, up to one quarter of Holocaust survivors have consistently lived under the poverty line (Harris, 2014; Shahar, 2011), and in Israel this has been the source of considerable political organizing, with some attention to the issue in the United States as well (Brodsky and DellaPergola, 2005; Harris, 2014; Schwartz, 2017). However, the material plight of survivors has rarely been connected to questions of testimony and memory. In her study based largely on written testimony, Zoe Waxman (2008) acknowledges ‘middle-class bias’ in some of the collections we do have. This connects to Anna Lund’s (2018) broader claim of middle-class bias and ‘bourgeois gaze’ in sociological study, and in scholars’ conception of what is worth remembering. I argue that this is a thread we need to pull on in order to continue deepening our broader understanding of Holocaust survivors and their experiences; the question of class, and of the material conditions in which survivors lived out the rest of their lives, has permeated the development of the field, whether or not this has always been visible. In this article, I use the idea of social class as many social scientists have defined it, as a mix of ‘resources and rank’ (Rucker and Galinsky, 2017), a position which combines both tangible and intangible factors.

While there has been some minor attention to how questions of class affected survival during the war (Gerlind, 2005), this article focuses specifically on life after the war. The post-war part of the survivor story is has only emerged in recent years as an important site of study, but it provides important context for how testimony and remembering emerged. My case study city of Montreal was, in the decades after the war, home to the third largest population of Holocaust survivors in the world, after Israel and New York (Torczyner and Brotman, 1995). It is particularly relevant to apply this lens to the post-war part of the story as these were the conditions in which most testimony and oral histories emerged, although most scholarship on testimony continues to deal with the experience of the Holocaust itself. Even if survivors belonged to middle or upper social classes before the war, most arrived in North America destitute, and their class belonging was ambiguous. While some may have still identified with their pre-war class position, local society certainly did not see them that way. Survivors reported being treated like burdens by upwardly mobile Jewish Canadians, and most of their early jobs were in manufacturing and other forms of manual labour (Abramson and Lynch, 2019; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2010). Given that the oral histories cited in this article were conducted in the last 15 or so years, all who participated were child survivors, meaning that they also arrived to Montreal with interrupted educations. In these stories, therefore, age intersects with class, and the limited experience many child survivors would have had of a pre-war privileged life meant that they were really starting from the beginning when they immigrated. Many would eventually find their way back to the middle class, but at least one quarter would not.

In her introduction to the volume Critical Memory Studies, Brett Ashley Kaplan (2023: 6) cites Tota and Hagen in defining ‘memory work’ as ‘providing the conditions of possibility for unheard voices to emerge’. This echoes the purpose of arguing for a socioeconomic lens in understanding Holocaust memory. As I will demonstrate in the following pages, certain stories can only emerge with a focus on class, and class also determines which voices we privilege. These have been informal truths that are uncontroversial in most conversations I have had with survivors throughout my career, and yet they have rarely made their way into the literature. In her writing on Albert Camus’ The Plague and the violence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Debarati Sanyal (2023: 260) critiques the way in which we turn suffering into metaphor, contending that Camus’ work creates, ‘an economy of visualization that makes certain bodies, histories, and conditions perceptible while screening others out’. We treat memory as abstract, as metaphor, as cultural output to be understood, but when we neglect to understand the material and systemic factors that govern whose memories count, we obscure the most marginalized voices. While Memory Studies as a field is based in the foundational idea that memory does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is socially and politically situated, we have nevertheless struggled to connect memory to the everyday conditions of living, such as poverty and socioeconomic violence. In his work on the memories and identities of working-class British men, Vik Loveday (2014) has articulated ‘a refusal to recognize social class as a structuring principle of subjectivity’ (724). In his argument for a ‘political economy of memory studies’, Matthew J Allen (2016) argues that, ‘Too often, the status of memory is deemed to be too personal, or collectively too sacred, to attend to the dirt of capital under the fingernails of its gravediggers and memorial masons’ (372). He goes on to emphasize the primacy of economic, among other material analyses, for our field:

the sustainability of our project lies in how well the field can borrow and invent concepts to elaborate empirically informed dialogue that turns a critical lens onto the conditions that cast memory as a matter of concern in the first place. (2016: 372)

This article is one modest attempt at examining what more we can understand about memory when we pay attention to its material conditions. It draws primarily from oral history interviews that I conducted myself, through roughly 17 years of diverse projects with local survivors, as well as archival interviews from those same projects which I did not conduct. Most discussions of class, poverty and socioeconomic status were, unsurprisingly, ones that happened ‘off the record’ and were unrecorded, but the themes emerge in interviews too in interesting ways. I examine how survivors’ negotiations of social class and socioeconomic instability impacted both their stories themselves, as well as their ability to recount them. This article is broken down into three sections: first, I examine the socializing that survivors engaged in upon their arrival in Montreal, as they tried to build community with limited resources and facing considerable prejudice. I argue that they socialized more along class lines than ethnic lines during that period, leading to a multicultural social world that was lost once many of them assimilated socioeconomically. Second, I examine the circumstances of their retelling, and the tensions between survivors and the broader community. I argue that socioeconomic assimilation was key to survivors being seen as people with stories that were important to share and to respect. I also try to make sense of the survivors who never spoke, or who broke their silence reluctantly, interrogating how class and socioeconomic circumstances continue to impact the survivor community, all while acknowledging the challenges of understanding an absence (Freund, 2013; Greenspan, 2014; Sue and Robertson, 2019; Zerubavel, 2019).

Both Holocaust survivors and scholars have tried to argue that there is a danger in understanding these atrocities as something that happened ‘over there’, as detached from everyday existence in places like Montreal (Hansen-Glucklich, 2014; Schweber, 2006; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2014; Strickler and Moisan, 2018). Shenker (2015) points out the particularities of the ‘Americanized’ version of the story in American projects, which is far different from testimonies that were collected in Europea itself. An emphasis on class and the materiality of survival is yet one more way of understanding the impact of the Holocaust and the lives of survivors as being situated in where they arrived and rebuilt their lives. Scholars increasingly examine the post-war period and survivors’ lives outside of Europe as we understand that the experience of the Holocaust did not end in 1945 (Bialystok, 2000; Cohen, 2006), but as this article demonstrates, such an approach necessitates considering the very concrete and material conditions that survivors encountered after migration.

Socializing and class solidarity

Holocaust survivors arrived in Montreal having survived Nazism, but encountering the softer fascism of the burgeoning era of Maurice Duplessis, the Premier of Quebec from 1944 to 1959, a period dubbed ‘la grande noirçeur’ for its extreme Catholic conservativism and anti-labour violence (Anctil, 2017). Duplessis trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories and authoritarian governance. The established Jewish community in Quebec, having started arriving in large numbers around the turn of the century, was therefore caught in between progress and threat (Anctil, 2017). Many had achieved considerable upwards mobility towards the middle of the 20th century, slowly leaving the Jewish shtetl-like neighbourhoods in the centre of the city for new suburbs, but at the same time they understood the precarity of their positions given the new regime. This created tension between Canadian Jews and newcomer Holocaust survivors, who could potentially threaten their already precarious social mobility (Bialystok, 2000; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2010). Other factors added to that tension, such as the reluctance to face the extent of what survivors had been through. According to many survivors who arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the community provided well for them in terms of finding housing, jobs and other necessities they needed to begin their lives in Montreal (Abramson and Lynch, 2019; Draper, 1997; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2010). However, as Slovak survivor Mayer Schondorf put it bluntly, ‘socially they wanted to have very, very little to do with us, so we created our own social’ (2009, oral history interview). As Hungarian survivor Ted Bolgar explained, ‘The Montrealers didn’t know who we are . . . They were leary, because the general consensus was that we would never be normal’ (2009, oral history interview). When asked what he meant by normal, he referred to socioeconomic assimilation: to be able to get a good job, get married and provide for one’s family. The perception was that what survivors had experienced would be a barrier to class mobility, therefore threatening the social status of the broader Jewish community.

Called ‘greeners’ among other slurs, many survivors formed communities among themselves, a phenomenon that has been documented in Montreal as well as elsewhere. This community-building was social, in terms of helping people find friends, potential spouses, and learn to navigate their new homes (Goldberg, 2015; Sheftel and Zembrzycki, 2010). But it could also be political, as some groups of survivors also engaging in doing anti-fascist organizing quite soon after their arrival in Montreal, an effort which was ignored by the mainstream community for years (Bialystok, 2000). My oral history interviews that specifically focused on the question of post-war socializing, however, revealed that survivors did not only keep to themselves, but rather, at a time when the mainstream Jewish community was moving to the suburbs into more homogeneous neighbourhoods, these newcomers were also socializing within their social class, at the factories, bars and dance halls that they frequented. Class solidarity seemed to be more a source of welcome that ethnic solidarity.

This class solidarity seemed to allow survivors to make connections that at times transcended antisemitism. George Reinitz, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, remembered that he and his friends frequented a Hungarian restaurant and pool room, where:

. . . we could have dinner for 99 cents. Hungarian, mostly Hungarian, and there was a pool room, and that was a very big plus also, because in the same restaurant there were Hungarian old timers who came before the war, non-Jewish, and they were very interested in the Communist system. They believed that it’s a good thing, and they asked us all their questions, regarding what’s happening because we just came . . . they were extremely nice to us. They were not educated people, they were doing manual work, and I really can say it was a good influence on us, and they knew we were Jewish, and there was no problem whatsoever. (2018, oral history interview)

Reinitz shared that he and his fellow Hungarian survivors knew not to go to another Hungarian restaurant, which they knew was much more antisemitic; however, the welcome that he got from non-Jewish Hungarians at this particular establishment stood out as one that impacted him positively as he tried to find his footing in the city. He shared, ‘I found them honest, they talked to us, it was welcome to [speak to] somebody, you know, somebody who’s been here. [We] asked them about the customs, the laws . . .’. (2018, oral history interview). Almost all survivors with whom I have spoken about their immigrant experience have cited having one or two champions who helped them understand how Montreal worked; for some, that champion came from within the community, such as Joe Schreter, a Hungarian Jew from a previous wave of migration who owned a successful family clothing business and who clothed the newcomers, took them out for ice cream, and gave them advice. However, this wisdom also came from lesser-known connections, such as those shared by Reinitz in his memories. The Hungarians he encountered wanted to hear about communism, and these newcomers wanted to hear about how to make it in the city. Thus was born a friendly and mutually beneficial relationship.

Leslie Vertes was also a Hungarian survivor, who had spent some of the war in hiding in Budapest, as well as the end of the war in a labour camp in Russia. He arrived in Montreal after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and he described a more surprising occasion of working class socializing. He got a job at a shoe factory, where:

beside me was a Ukrainian SS officer, in the cutting room . . . well that wasn’t easy, in the beginning, wasn’t easy . . . Because in Russia, I learned Ukrainian . . . so I was talking to him, and I was only the second person he was able to talk to, so somehow we got along, but the knife was still there. He told me he was with a unit, he was fighting the Russians beside the Germans, the unit killed lots of Jews, not me. (2010, oral history interview)

Leslie described this as a tense sort of friendship, a bond that was able to happen because they were both immigrants who knew few people, as well as sharing a common language, but one that of course was always limited by their histories. Many survivors recall encounters with SS officers, capos, and other people who victimized them upon arrival to Canada, but these encounters are usually in passing; a confrontation or moment of panic on the street. Vertes’ story was unique for how the context of labour put these two people in an actual relationship with each other, however fraught it might have been. This is part of the post-war survivor narrative that is not always visible, that of continuing to encounter the Holocaust in Canada, in spaces that we do not necessarily expect.

Because the survivors whom I have interviewed were young upon arrival in Montreal, dating was important to them, and emerged as a key site of cross-cultural socializing. Male survivors consistently explained that Canadian Jewish girls were discouraged from going out with them. As Bolgar said, ‘I went out a few times with Montreal girls, and I could see . . . their parents were nervous’ (2009, oral history interview). According to Sidney Zoltak, a Polish survivor:

There was a time that a Canadian born girl was a bit embarrassed to go out with a survivor . . . We were considered having a lower standard. You couldn’t show off with somebody who was a survivor. You could show off with someone who drives a nicer car, or someone that went to Byron Bing High School [the neighbourhood high school]. I went at nights to Sir George [a continuing education college], so . . . I wasn’t someone to show off with (2009, oral history interview).

Per Zoltak, therefore, the barrier was a class one; concerned with their precarious social status, Canadian Jewish girls and their families shied away from the survivors. Reinitz explained the barrier from a different perspective: ‘Jewish girls, they were afraid of us . . . they shied away from us, because we were not ready to get married but we were ready to have fun’ (2018, oral history interview). According to him, then, it was not just that they were poor, but also a question of social norms; many survivors arrived in Montreal as orphans with no family or community, and so they did not immediately conform to the social expectations of the local population. Most eventually would, but stories of socializing and dating in the early years were surprisingly transgressive, particularly when it came to dating non-Jewish girls, a major taboo in the Jewish community.

Reinitz’s first job was as a cutter in a clothing factory. He remembered having much more success with French-Canadian girls, who were more open to newcomers like him:

We were starting to mix with the French girls. I met them at the factory, where I worked at the factory, and it was the thing to have French girlfriends. I had no regrets with them because they were nice . . . Many of them wanted to associate with us because we already spoke English, and they said, we’d like to learn English, so we’d like to associate with you . . . a girl used to tell us at lunchtime, we used to eat together, she said, I want to get a job at Eaton’s, which was a department store at the time, but I can’t because I don’t speak English. So they made friends with us . . . and of course we tried to learn French also, so it worked both ways (2018, oral history interview).

Like at the Hungarian restaurant, this was a mutually beneficial form of companionship, and one that perhaps worked because the French-Canadian girls would have been less likely to know the stigma that came with being a survivor and a newcomer; these young men were blank slates to them. Furthermore, they were all in the same boat as working-class youth who were trying to build a future beyond the walls of the factory, and whose working-class positions meant that they had to be resourceful. There was no concern here about ‘showing off’ or being able to prove one’s worth, but rather friendship and companionship forged out of being able to support each other through common goals.

Factory floors were not the only place where survivors were connecting with French-Canadians. As Slovak survivor Tommy Strasser recounted:

We used to go dancing every Saturday at a place on Stanley [in downtown Montreal], I think, called le Palais D’Or . . . Most of the girls at the Palais D’Or, the majority were French-Canadians, there were very few Jewish girls that came to the Palais D’Or, it was not for them. It was really more of a pick-up place . . .

We were fraternizing, sisternizing. It was very nice, actually, it was a very pleasant place, you know, and many of our friends that I met were actually going to that place (2018, oral history interview).

These are stories of being young; integration into their new homes was not only about jobs and accommodation and language, but also about finding spaces where you could enjoy yourself, and where you were not treated as a broken person. Strasser described it as ‘pleasant’, a word which implied the lightness of the experience, suggesting the ability to just be a person dancing with others, and to not be a survivor for an evening. Zoltak, as well, was a regular of the Palais D’Or, and described winning dance competitions and joyful socializing with French-Canadian dance partners (2018, oral history interview). All of this was, of course, very taboo per Canadian and Jewish social norms, and I argue that it was in class solidarity that these survivors felt comfortable and happy defying those norms, finding comfort and community among people who welcomed them, and created space for them to have fun.

The fun, of course, did not last forever. These newcomers knew that they were violating social norms, and as they settled in, they began to conform to the expectation of normality cited above: marriage (almost always to a Jewish woman, and almost always to another survivor); moving their way up to more white-collar jobs; buying a house and leaving their working class neighbourhood. As Zoltak remembered:

And I started going out and I loved dancing, so I used to go dancing all the time, and someone came to me, someone that I met in Montreal, and he said to me, he said, you’re doing it all wrong, this is not, this is not what you should be doing . . . he said, you should go to get a formal education. (2008, oral history interview)

Zoltak complied. A dancer his whole life, he nevertheless finished his education and went into the insurance business. He met his wife walking on Park Avenue, in the heart of Jewish Montreal at the time, a fellow survivor (2018, oral history interview). This period of cross-cultural socializing was incredibly short-lived, and it is one that has been intentionally forgotten likely because it contains taboo behaviour. Furthermore, as Paul Connerton (2008: 63) explains, forgetting can also occur as a means of becoming a new person, ‘on the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practicable purpose in the management of one’s current identity and ongoing purposes’. Despite some purposeful amnesia, this is also a period remembered fondly once survivors have felt comfortable speaking about it, and one that seems important in terms of their acculturation in their new homes. I would argue that another reason it was forgotten is because it was not seen as part of the ‘survivor story’ until interviewers like myself have asked. This is precisely what is so powerful about these memories; they were connecting across communities as regular human beings, without the weight of being a ‘Holocaust survivor’ in the room with them. But this is simultaneously also what pushes them out of the Holocaust narrative, a formative moment that does not fit into homogenizing conceptions of ‘testimony’.

As I have suggested above, it is important to note how gendered this experience was, particularly with regards to the stories of dating. Young survivor women did not enjoy the same liberties as the men, and did not feel free to engage in that kind of transgressive behaviour. They worked the same working-class jobs as the men, usually in manufacturing, and some do describe friendships that transcended ethnicity. However, I have yet to speak to a female survivor who felt as free as some of these men did. This is a reminder that this focus on class and cross-cultural mobility is also helpful for thinking through the gendered nature of survival and remembering; transgressive socializing and the freedom that came with it was something largely reserved for young men.

What is also significant about these stories is that they were not exceptional, and map onto a broader phenomenon of erasure of the cross-cultural history of Jewish and French-Canadian socializing and solidarity in Montreal. For a myriad of social and political factors – from the authoritarian politics of the Duplessis regime to the linguistic nationalism that emerged after it, as well as politics internal to the local Jewish community – the fact that many Jews and French-Canadians were once close allies has been socially and culturally forgotten (Anctil, 2017; Lacasse, 2022). From the relationships between the city’s long history of Yiddish theatre and the French-Canadian popular theatre tradition (Margolis, 2011), to bonds formed during union organizing and other political activity (Tulchinsky, 1984), there has been a tendency in the Jewish history of Montreal to homogenize and to erase from collective memory and identity a long period of cross-cultural cohabitation, exchange and friendship. The survivors’ early socializing in Montreal is but one small piece of this broader phenomenon of forgetting. In that sense, the contextual nature of remembering the Holocaust and what came after for Montreal survivors has extended beyond the more obvious factors; it also connects with the complexities of 20th-century Quebec history, nationalism and the always precarious position of the Jews.

The conditions for speaking

As I argue in the preceding section, it seems that one of the things that made socializing with French-Canadians and other non-Jews so attractive was the idea that these young survivors were seen as ordinary human beings like any others, and not defined by what they had experienced, or ostracized because of it within the broader Jewish community. This was also happening within the context of what many scholars have referred to as the ‘post-war silence’, referring to the first decades after World War II when there was little broader cultural or political interest in the Holocaust and its horrors. While scholars have debated whether or not this silence really existed, and if so, where it came from (Bialystok, 2000; Cesarani and Sundquist, 2012; Diner, 2009), it is clear from most survivors that they both did not speak about their survival in their early years in Montreal, and even more importantly, that people were not ready to listen.

This silence has many origins. For some, it took a long time to feel fully comfortable in Canada; as Zoltak put it, ‘It took me a while, after coming to Montreal, to be totally out of hiding’ (2008, oral history interview). Indeed, most literature about survivors’ ability or inability to speak about their past draws on questions of psychological readiness. As Bolgar explained, ‘When they ask me, how can you talk about it, I say I feel lucky that I can, because those who can’t, they keep it all inside’ (2008, oral history interview). He could not explain why he was able to do it, but he understood that this ability was a gift. His own wife could not speak. Mayer Schondorf was similar in his outlook:

It may sound entitled, make a saint out of myself, no, I feel genuinely, it’s my responsibility as long as I am able and capable of doing it, and there is no line up of people who want to do it, or are able to do it, I must do it. And it gives me a satisfaction to be able to do it. (2008, oral history interview)

Again, inherent in the ability to speak was the recognition that this was a state of exception, rather than the norm. With this came both a sense of responsibility and a sense of purpose.

Nevertheless, in speaking of the psychological ability to remember and recount, survivors inevitably intertwined material conditions with psychological factors. In an interview together, Polish survivor Rena Schondorf, alongside her husband Mayer Schondorf, connected who could not speak with who could not pull themselves out of their working-class beginnings:

Mayer: They were not easy years after the war, but somehow or other I would say most people eventually settled down. But again, I must tell you, I say most people. Some people came and could never really break out of their shell. They got a job as a shipper or a cutter or an operator, until the day they died, they worked in a factory, some of them never married. There was a tremendous amount of bachelors and bachelorettes after the war-

Rena: They could not create families. Mostly they were a little bit older, and what they found is they didn’t trust that you can have children. I know some of my mother’s friends for instance, they were younger than her, in their late 30s and so on, they would not have children because they don’t want to bring children into this world (2008, oral history interview).

The Schondorfs argued that their young age certainly helped them to establish themselves more easily in Canada, as well as the fact that they had not lost spouses and children. But these people they described above were simultaneously people who had more difficulty building a life in Montreal, as well as those who would never easily speak about their wartime experience. The issue was generational, but it was also material. The question is what the connection between their factory jobs and their silence was. Was it that their trauma or psychological distress prevented them both from building flourishing careers and families and from being able to speak? Or was it that the inability of them to improve their material conditions did not create space for them to heal and therefore to speak?

We, of course, will never be able to answer such questions. However, we do know that poorer survivors are underrepresented in the archives (Gerlind, 2007). And we can perhaps extrapolate from the memories of those who were able to build careers and families and eventually become public and visible Holocaust survivors who told their stories openly; for all of those survivors, assimilating socioeconomically, and becoming just like any other Montreal Jew, was a key part of the process of then being able to claim their public identity as a survivor. It was not the only part, as of course most survivors who experienced success in Canada still could not speak. But it seemed to be a sort of prerequisite. As Bolgar explained, ‘we tried to become normal, whatever normal is, and I never talked at home about it, and I think it took everybody, maybe 10 years, until we got to the point where we could talk about it openly’ (2008, oral history interview). Normality, which again, Bolgar defined as a good career, house, children, was the condition for being able to talk about it. In subsequent conversations he went even further, explaining that that this process, to him, was actually very sequential:

Surviving the Holocaust was a kind of a gift which came with two obligations. One was to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people. So I came here, I got married, two children, six grandchildren, this is done! The other part is . . . not to let the world to forget the Holocaust (2008, oral history interview).

In this formulation, the private came before the public, personal obligations before social and political ones. Mayer Schondorf felt similarly, and explained that he too only came to public testimony later in his life: ‘I never spoke about I was a survivor, to my neighbours, I was in business, like anybody else, my kids went to school like anybody else . . .’. (2008, oral history interview). Only after some time of being ‘like anybody else’ did the space open up for him to speak.

Of course, all of this was not happening in a vacuum. Survivors’ slow coming out coincided with the beginning of public interest in the Holocaust. Locally, this came with the establishment of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (now the Montreal Holocaust Museum), established in 1979 after about a decade of organizing by Holocaust survivors themselves to make such a space possible (Giberovitch Myra, 1994). There was no interest in listening to survivors until the survivors themselves demanded it; it did not happen organically. In wider culture, many attribute Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah with the beginning of a broader interest in the Holocaust (Costello, 2019). In Canada, survivors often cited the rise of denialism, in particular the Zundel case in the early 1990s (Tingler, 2016), as a moment that motivated them to take up more public space. There were many smaller and more regional political, social and cultural moments that slowly thawed various silences about the Holocaust. Nevertheless, what is key is that once the public was ready to listen to survivors, they also had to be ready to speak; and some were, due in large part to having had success in establishing themselves in their new homes.

The public perception that formed of the survivor, particularly in North America, was nevertheless of someone who had overcome their experience, and who had escaped the horrors of Europe and not only survived, but rebuilt a successful life with all the class implications of such a story. This ‘success story’ model has been thoroughly critiqued by scholars (Langer, 1991; Shenker, 2015). Mayer and Rena Schondorf reflected:

Mayer: I feel terrible because I am ending the story on a happy ending.

Rena: Yeah, but we are the exception, we are not the rule. (2008, oral history interview).

To them, they were the exception principally because they survived at all. As Mayer put it, ‘Can you imagine if all these other people were alive, what kind of happy endings, what kind of world we would live in today?’ (2008, oral history interview). But they were also the exception because they had a happy ending in Canada, and because they were in a position to speak at all. Both Schondorfs became frequent public speakers about their Holocaust experiences, sharing their stories in classrooms and accompanying teenagers on trips to Poland through the March of the Living. In their interviews, they mused on the challenges of representing their happy ending, something which was true to them, but which they did not want young people to understand as the norm. This public work and recognition could only come once they were able to integrate within the Canadian Jewish community, once their stories were institutionalized through organizations like the museum, which went from a survivor-led project to a recognized community institution. These processes – of the community becoming ready for the Holocaust survivors, and of Holocaust survivors becoming ready for the community – happened simultaneously, intertwined with each other. The material and the mnemonic have always gone hand in hand, and in these stories, seem impossible to separate. It is also worth noting that the materiality of being able to be a public Holocaust survivor and recount your story continues; survivors who are invited to give testimony on the March of the Living, which many see as a great honour, are expected to pay their own way on the trip, which costs several thousand dollars.

It is difficult to make sense of the stories of survivors who never publicly identified as such, and who did not have the linear experience of integrating and assimilating into the broader Canadian Jewish community described above. We can only piece together stories from people who did eventually come to speak, or their children. Some survivors did not publicly identify as Jewish, much less as survivors, for much of their lives, preferring a total assimilation into dominant Quebec culture as a means of survival. Dominique Arama’s father was one of these people, a Tunisian Jew who escaped Nazi-occupied Tunis on a tandem bicycle with his brother, and who eventually found his way to Montreal and converted to Catholicism when he married his French-Canadian wife. Arama grew up knowing the story of her father’s daring escape, but only learning they he was Jewish later in life. He had wanted to protect her (2024, oral history interview). Similarly, French survivor Marguerite Elias Quddus, who is now a very active member of the Montreal Holocaust Museum and frequently gives public testimony, did not reveal to her son that he was Jewish, and that she was a Holocaust survivor, until they visited an exhibition about the Holocaust in Paris when he was 11 years old. She described willing herself to tell him, thinking it was now or never, a seemingly impossible thing to impose onto her child (2024, oral history interview).

Both Arama and Elias Quddus described many reasons for these silences; both lived in the relatively homogeneous south shore of Montreal, a suburb in which they already stood out. Elias Quddus married a Muslim man from Pakistan and so she was already conscious that her child was a visible minority, and Arama’s father similarly thought that she would have enough difficulty with a Tunisian father, much less a Jewish one. While these were not exclusively considerations about class and socioeconomic status, they nevertheless reveal the material calculus that goes into sharing one’s identity and one’s story. As I have stated above, the Holocaust literature has devoted considerable attention to the psychological and social conditions for being able to remember privately and publicly (Felman and Laub, 1992; Roseman, 1999). But there is little acknowledgement of survivors who could not speak because they were trying to protect themselves and their families. They put the survival and success of their children above questions of identity, again highlighting just how intertwined the material and the mnemonic are.

Conclusion

Why have class discussions been so absent from the scholarship and broader cultural discourse about surviving the Holocaust? There is no easy answer, although of course this must relate to broader taboos about money and discussing class in North American society, which has dominated this literature. In the case of Holocaust survivors in Montreal, to talk about the socioeconomic aspects of their lives, and how this related to their ability to be heard, also dredges up some unpleasant intra-communal history. But beyond this, the erasure of class and socioeconomic struggle in Holocaust testimony also allows for a sort of universalization that depoliticizes testimony. I have written elsewhere about how survivors are treated as symbols more than actual humans, and most of the survivors cited in this article have expressed frustration with their tokenization and being put on a pedestal (Sheftel, 2018). Part of this phenomenon necessitates a sort of mind/body split, where their story of survival is somehow out there in the world, an atrocious tale of suffering and resilience that stands on its own, untethered to everyday, mundane considerations.

To do this is to make the survivor story more palatable to a larger audience, to not weigh it down with politics or ideology which might alienate some. This relates to a broader literature critiquing the ‘universalization’ and the ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust, both of which critique the development of a testimonial regime which de-contextualizes the specificities of the Holocaust (Cole, 1999; Demsky, 2021). Natan Sznaider (2003) points out that these critiques can assume that there is a more ‘pure’ Holocaust memory out there, when the goal should be, again, to rather understand the situated nature of Holocaust memory wherever it manifests itself. Zoe Waxman (2008) warns against hegemonic Holocaust narratives in all forms, bringing us back to the specificity of diverse experiences as necessary to avoid superficial and distorted understandings of the Holocaust. And so in the vein of these concerns and critiques, I argue that to abstract testimony from the material conditions from which it emerged is also to obscure the truth, and to depoliticize the very political story of Holocaust survival and subsequent migration. In writing about psychotherapists’ reluctance to talk about money in therapy, Richard Tracthman (1999: 279) paraphrased Marxist psychoanalysist Fenichel as arguing that, ‘by keeping the proletariat from thinking clearly about money, the capitalist masters keep them in their place’. By separating out Holocaust testimony from its material conditions, we can indeed avoid critique of those conditions, of capitalism, of xenophobia, of political positions that continue to perpetuate inequality today. The Holocaust stays ‘out there’, and not something tied to broader social, political and economic conditions.

As I demonstrate in this article, the silences around socioeconomic conditions of Holocaust survivors in their post-war lives have done two things. First, they have obscured salient parts of their stories, wherein we have lost the richness of some early post-war experiences in which survivors socialized across cultural lines and found solace in class affinities. That this does not ‘fit’ into the standard survivor testimony is a problem, because it tells us so much about where and how people looked for community, and it also reminds us that child survivors, in particular, were young adults dealing with the burdens and losses that they carried over with them, but they were also just human beings trying to connect to other human beings. Second, they have obscured that the contemporary veneration of Holocaust testimony in North American culture did not happen organically, and was not predestined. It emerged out of particular material conditions, which also means that many were excluded from this recognition. And it means that we must understand the testimony and oral histories that we have as being largely limited to those who found socioeconomic success, and therefore forcing us to acknowledge what is not there, and how those stories might differ.

Misconceptions, conspiracy theories and libel about Jews and money have accompanied so much of the historical persecution of Jewish people, including during the Holocaust. This might explain part of the hesitation in addressing questions of money and class when it comes to testimony, but it is also perhaps even more of an argument for doing so, to dispel the notion that all survivors succeeded, became rich, and have ‘happy endings’, and to underscore the socioeconomic inequality that they experienced, much like most refugees and survivors of mass violence experience. It is hard to know how to address these issues, given that there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors to interview; what we have in the archives now is more or less all we will ever have. That said, the solution to these gaps seems to be in a more contextual analysis of testimonies, as Holocaust scholars have long been arguing for, as well as in honest and transparent disclosures about where we lack information or the ability to analyse material conditions. To include a socioeconomic lens in our study of Holocaust memory is to make more space for diverse narratives, for stories of struggle, for stories of friendship and solidarity, and for an understanding of the Holocaust narrative as something that exists in the real, everyday world and not separate from it.

Author biography

Anna Sheftel is principal and professor in the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University. She has done research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Holocaust survivors in Montreal, with student activists, and she is currently working on a project about a strange but significant little Jewish cemetery. She has published extensively on oral history practice, ethics, and pedagogy, most notably Oral History Off the Record: Towards an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-edited with Stacey Zembrzycki, which won the OHA’s 2014 Book Award.