Two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, USC Shoah Foundation is extremely concerned for its partners, survivors and friends in both countries and strongly condemns the senseless loss of life. USC Shoah Foundation has strong roots in Ukraine, having conducted 3,432 interviews in the country that form the basis for a collection of testimony-based educational programs that have reached tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and students.

In recounting the past, Holocaust survivors deliberately or unconsciously craft the stories they recount about the Shoah. Whether through literature, memoirs, or testimony, survivors shape stories about the past while signaling what remains unsaid. Deferred memories – stories told many decades after the events occurred – often address issues that survivors did not dare or could not bear to recount earlier. Looking at these deferred stories through the lens of gender, we will explore how survivors craft accounts that insist on reclaiming, owning, and interpreting what the writer Ida Fink called “the ruins of memory,” often against the grain and in tension with academic interpretation.