Research Fellow Explores Treatment of Gender, Sexuality and Sexual Violence in VHA interviews

Carli Snyder is the 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies. Since the beginning of January, she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies. A PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, she is conducting research as part of her larger dissertation project that is provisionally entitled ‘Flesh of the Facts’: Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness.

The Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies is awarded annually to an outstanding advanced-standing Ph.D. candidate from any discipline for dissertation research focused on testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and other unique USC research resources. The fellowship enables the recipient to spend one month in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research during the academic year and to deliver a public lecture about his or her research findings.

During her time at the Institute, Snyder has been exploring the evolution of how the USC Shoah Foundation trained its interviewers to handle issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence while collecting testimonies from Holocaust survivors over the past three decades. She is particularly interested in a number of VHA interviews from the 1990s with women who had also been interviewed by feminist Holocaust scholar Joan Ringelheim “a decade earlier.

Badema Pitic, Acting Head of Research Services at USC Shoah Foundation, said Snyder’s research is a significant contribution to our understanding of nuances and complexities around oral history testimonies.

“Snyder shows us how, in addition to a specific interviewing methodology, the interplay between the personal—survivors’ and interviewers’ backgrounds and circumstances— and the public—the wider context and conventions at the time—affect what does and does not find its place in these narratives, and how these change over time.”

Carli Snyder sat down for an interview about her work as the Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies and the material she’s found in the Visual History Archive.

Tell us about what you’ve been doing at USC Shoah Foundation

I am a History PhD candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. I'm working on a dissertation about feminist approaches to Holocaust research and memorialization in the United States in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I focus on a scholar named Joan Ringelheim, who scholars recognize as one of the first researchers who began to shed light on women's gendered experiences during the Holocaust. She also was the Director of the Oral History Department at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Shoah Foundation's development and implementation of a specific interviewing methodology in the 1990s as staff prepared to interview tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors is of interest to me. I am also curious about cross-institutional collaborative work between the Shoah Foundation and other major Holocaust oral history projects. While in residence, I have reviewed videos of interviewer trainings, worked with institutional archival materials, listened to testimony clips in the Visual History Archive, and spoke with people who worked as interviewers. I have been looking for whether or not issues related to gender and sexuality were included in the training materials and how these topics were asked about in testimonies.  

What have you found so far? 

One of the earliest oral history interview manuals that Shoah Foundation interviewers were provided with contains a question list that does include a couple of questions about the “division of the sexes” in the camps. Additionally, an interviewer trainee asked a question about how to ask about rape in an interview. So, these topics did come up, but the trainings happened at a moment when many still understood these sorts of questions as “off-limits.” And because the Shoah Foundation was working so quickly to interview as many survivors as possible, and because these themes weren’t fully integrated as a main component of the trainings, these types of stories were handled unevenly. What we end up seeing in the earlier interviews is that while interviewers occasionally do follow up with questions on these sensitive topics, many times they seem to not know exactly how to follow up and they change the subject instead.

When you look back to the earliest interviews with Holocaust survivors from the 1940s, long before USC Shoah Foundation came into being, were there questions about sexual abuse and violence?

There are cases in the earliest interviews in which some women and men describe instances of sexual abuse and violence quite bluntly. For example, psychologist David Boder explicitly asked about these issues in his 1946 interviews with survivors in European Displaced Persons camps. So, it was being spoken about at that time, as a fact of the experiences they had either during the war or liberation.

In the decades that followed, cases of sexual violence became less spoken about publicly, mythologized, and sometimes erased. It would take decades for questions about sexual violence or sexuality more broadly to become included in scholarly conversations about the Holocaust.

Why did questions about sexual violence become silenced over time?

For many reasons. In short, I would say, in the process of survivors’ attempts to adjust to their new lives—whether they ended up in the United States and Canada and Israel or anywhere else—-many were told to not talk about what they had experienced in general. Once historians began to write major histories of the Holocaust, sexual violence was not included as part of the research agenda. This led to sexual violence not being included as a part of an overarching narrative of the Holocaust. When feminist scholars—with Ringelheim at the forefront—began to ask about how sexual violence factored into survivors’ and victims’ experiences, many historians and even many survivors treated these questions as not legitimate, irrelevant, too personal, or completely inappropriate.

When did it become common, or practiced, to ask survivors about sexual violence?

It took decades, and even so, I still would not describe it as “common.” Ringelheim was one of the first to start recording testimonies with specific focus on issues related to sexual violence, among other gendered and sexuality-related issues. She started interviewing survivors at a grassroots level in 1979. At that time, it was still very uncommon for survivors to be asked questions about these topics.

In the Visual History Archive, I have found numerous instances of survivors speaking about sexual violence, but in a majority of the cases, the survivor decided to volunteer the information rather than being specifically asked about it. In the earliest trainings, Shoah Foundation interviewers were not trained to directly ask about these topics, but rather to ask open-ended questions. Many survivors who spoke out about their own experiences often were making a choice to have those memories on the record.

If we look to today, as scholars are writing projects about gender during the Holocaust or sexuality during the Holocaust or queer lives during the Holocaust, those are the types of questions that many historians are dealing with. They are grappling with which questions were not asked, and which topics were not followed up on, when testimonies were collected.

We’ve talked about how sexual violence was raised, or not raised, in interviews over the decades. What about broader questions of sexuality?

I find myself talking so much about rape and sexualized violence, but there is of course so much to learn more broadly about sexuality in the Visual History Archive. One example I came across is a really striking testimony of a woman survivor—one of the earliest Shoah Foundation interviews conducted in 1994. She described a moment during a transport that she witnessed a couple, in her words, making love in the wagon as they were being transported. And in the interview she very calmly said that she felt so sorry for herself, not just because she was on the transport, but because she had never had an opportunity herself to be loved or, in this case, to have had sex. She said that she knew that something terrible was about to happen, and she worried that she would never have that human experience. This is just one example of many I have found related to survivors’ attitudes toward love and sexuality during the Holocaust.

How would you characterize the main differences between the first interviews in the early 1990s and today?

I think a lot has remained consistent in some great ways. The open-ended questions have remained and even became more flexible. And I do see that the types of questions and the preparation of the interviewers has evolved over time based on the Shoah Foundation's constant involvement in the scholarship, both in Holocaust studies but also in being involved with other oral history organizations. You can also see how specific interviewers honed their interviewing strategies over the years.

In some cases, in the 2000s and 2010s interviews in the collection, it seems that many survivors were more willing to speak freely about gendered issues or memories related to sexuality, and interviewers were more willing to ask about these topics or follow up more extensively.