TOURING EXHIBIT

INTRODUCTION, an excerpt, by Malka Drucker

Firsthand accounts would help us to understand an incomprehensible time, to give us a sense of what it felt like to live under a brutal regime or occupation. Lawrence Langer, in Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, describes levels of memory reflected in testimonies from survivors. "Common memory" is chronological, ordered, and detached from feeling, but "deep memory" makes possible the intense reliving of past events that only a participant or witness can experience; it is the direct engagement with the terrible past to which "the sympathetic power of the imagination" responds, and which gives us an important understanding not only of that inexplicable time but of its impact on the personalities of the rescuers.