Holocaust Studies X 2020

A Digital Humanities Project created by two Graduate Students at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. This project focuses on how the knowledge of the Holocaust are formed through Polish Children's Literature and how memories of first, second, and third-generation survivors are archived and inherited. Finally, this project explores how and why the Holocaust matters in 2020 America, and explores whether trauma can produce meaningful change.

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Can trauma be productive?

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Hi! My name is Allie and I am extremely excited to be sharing my thoughts and understanding of the Holocaust on this page as it relates to our current cultural and political climate in the US today. This summer I was finally able to dive deeper into the complex literary, social, and political history that surrounds the Holocaust in order to better understand Poland’s current attitude towards Holocaust and the importance of studying it. I truly believe that studying the Holocaust is central to how we act and view the world today, an understanding of the past is crucial to a better future. Through my research I hope to compare and contrast Polish children’s literature before the war and after in order to understand the complex Polish Jewish relationship. I think studying children’s literature demonstrates the importance of how children understand the world around them, ultimately giving them the tools to become better global citizens. 

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Allie & Rebecca Read "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick

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Books that have informed Rebecca’s research and thinking. She quotes these in her poem, “Nursing Ghosts of Metaphors Past.”

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Nursing Ghosts of Metaphors Past

By Rebecca Gross | Written June 10, 2020

Scoliosis and cursive Rs

remind me of my child-

hood(s). Closed breasts with ducts taped shut:

“There was not enough milk... 

she felt light, not like someone

walking but like someone in a 

faint, in trance, arrested in a 

fit, someone who is already a floating angel” [1] ––

Cribbed children with mouths as pale as 

sun-bleached paper,

anemic from lack of tradition;

rich with loved voices and thick 

curls of history,

ringlets bouncing on backs of girls

running home with challas ––

hair and bread braided of

ancestral pasts.

What is the Metaphor you’re searching for?

“From Greek metaphora ‘a transfer,’ 

literally ‘a carrying over,’” from 

metapherein ‘to transfer, carry over, change, alter’...

from meta ‘over, across’ +

pherein ‘to carry, bear’” [2]

To Carry, To Bear

Witness:

“Testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness.” [3]

To Carry, To Bear

Language:

“A language that no longer signifies”

“A non-language.” [4]

To Carry, To Bear,

“Responsibility (and privilege?)”:

To find ways of 

restoring language to the

fracturing and silencing 

of human experience.” [5]

To Carry, To Bear

Children:

Those who “will embody

the DNA of the dead.” [6]

Those who will be mute for years 

until their DNA begins to boil,

coming in waves and wails of pain,

emptied from their colorless mouths,

hungry for every piece of culture their

mothers’ mammary glands know and their own memories lack ––

Who is the Metaphor you’re searching for?

Is She the howl of a child crying for her mother’s chapped, 

milkless breasts?

Is She the breath of God ––

the rustle of the leaves whispering

Yud Hey Vav Hey

I am who I am?

Is She the buzz of electric

fences ––

“real sounds in the wire: 

Grainy sad voices...

lamenting voices” [7]

that speak on the tongue of

sorrow?

Who is the Metaphor you’re looking for,

and will She be on your side when she lets herself be found?

Will she bear

witness,

language,

responsibility,

privilege for the 

“silence in the stories” [8] she never told

us, Lacunas [9] festering in our 

guts, throats, veins?

Child, Cry out in undignified 

screech ––

Who needs dignity when people are 

dying? when the “memories of others’ 

experiences” become your

past, present, and future?

When you can’t escape the

psychic pain radiating from stoneless

graves of your ancestors because it’s

not only in your genes but it’s also

your everyday experience?

---

[1] Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl.” 3-4.

[2] Etymonline.com/word/metaphor

[3] Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz. 39.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Rosner, Elizabeth. Survivor Café. 206.

[6] Rosner, 33.

[7] Ozick, 9.

[8] Sicherman, Claire. Imprint. 90.

[9] A reference to Agamben’s work.

[10] Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. 31.

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Hi there! My name is Rebecca Gross, and I’m a graduate student at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I’m originally from Los Angeles, and more specifically, the San Fernando Valley. I grew up going to Jewish summer camp in Brandeis, CA –– Camp Alonim –– where I first explored my Jewish identity and culture. I pursued my BA in English Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I researched and wrote about the African Diaspora in literature. I returned to Los Angeles in the Summer of 2018, and upon beginning my Masters Studies at LMU in the Fall of 2019, decided I wanted to put the research I’d already done in conversation with my Jewish identity. My research now explores how memories become archived in bodies that have endured large-scale trauma (such as the Holocaust, the Tulsa Massacre, and other genocides). In the context of this course –– which was supposed to take place in Poland, but was re-structured due to COVID-19 –– I’m considering how children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors represent the Holocaust in literature, film, and TV. Allie, my partner in this digital humanities project, and I are working to explore how our research interests fit together with one another; this page is the documentation of that process.