On October 22, 2020 Doc Chatters explored themes of memory, trauma, and resilience through the oral history of one Holocaust survivor. 

An ongoing series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs a NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Seven, Meri-Jane Rochelson, Professor Emerita of English literature at Florida International University, spoke with NYPL’s Lyudmila Sholokhova about her father Dr. Eli G. Rochelson’s audio interview in the American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. With attendees, they explored the emotional and intellectual power of listening to a survivor’s story and analyzed how audio recordings, transcripts, and annotations can reveal different layers of memory and experience. 

Doc Chat Episode 7: Listening to and Reading Holocaust Testimony from The New York Public Library on Vimeo.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode. 

Episode Seven: Primary Sources

Eli G. Rochelson’s 1974 interview is part of NYPL’s American Jewish Committee (AJC) Oral History Collection. Publicly available transcripts and audio files can be accessed on the Library’s Digital Collections. Interviews with Holocaust survivors constitute an important component of the AJC’s Oral History Collection—it includes 250 recorded Holocaust testimonies that amount to over 10% of its content.

While Eli G. Rochelson’s audio interview has been a part of the AJC Oral History Collection since 1974, the transcript that he was editing after the interview remained a part of the family archive for over 45 years and was not reunited with the original audio until recently. Over the past several years, his daughter (and featured Doc Chat speaker) Meri-Jane Rochelson completed a careful reading and additional editing of the transcript and donated a digitized version of the transcript to NYPL. 

Below are selections of the transcript that were discussed in this Doc Chat episode.

 

Audio files for Eli Rochelson's interview are not yet available for public access on NYPL's Digital Collections, but we are happy to provide the clips featured in this episode to educators looking to use them in their classrooms. Please email Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection, to request access. 

Special thanks to Meri-Jane Rochelson for granting the Library permission to share these important documents.

Episode Seven: Readings and Resources 

Doris L. Bergen,  War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

Shalom Eilati, Crossing the River. Translated by Vern Lenz. (University of Alabama Press, 2012).

Elly Gotz, Flights of Spirit (The Azrieli Foundation, 2018). 

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (A Bulfinch Press Book, 1997). Also available for loan in electronic format from Internet Archive.

William W. Mishell, Kaddish for Kovno: Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto, 1941-1945 (Chicago Review Press, 1998).  Also available for loan in electronic format from Internet Archive.

Meri-Jane Rochelson, Eli's Story: a Twentieth-Century Jewish Life. Interviews with Eli G. Rochelson by Burton L. Rochelson. (Wayne State University Press, 2018).

Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Indiana University Press, 2015).

Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Edited by Martin Gilbert. Textual and historical notes by Dina Porat. Translated by Jerzy Michalowicz. (Harvard University Press, 1991).

For additional guidance on Holocaust related research, check out these NYPL resources: 

• Holocaust Research, Education, and Remembrance Online, NYPL Research Guide. 
• Amanda Seigel, Voices of Holocaust Survivors, NYPL Blog, January 25, 2016.
• Learn more about the Dorot Jewish Division at the Steven A. Schwarzman Building here.

Teaching With Holocaust Testimony

Meri-Jane Rochelson presented a series of questions that can guide teachers using this material in the classroom with students at a variety of levels. They include:

• How are the experiences of listening and reading different? 
• What is the role of editing in these transcripts? What differences do we find between immediate audio files and later written transcript changes or additions?
• How do we interpret unfamiliar speech patterns or handwriting?
• Why is it important to tell stories of trauma? To tell other kinds of stories?
• What are the benefits of memoirs, whether oral or written, as evidence? What are their limitations? How can we use them with both the benefits and limitations in mind?
• How do you want to be remembered?

Eli G. Rochelson: A Short Biography

Eli G. Rochelson was born in 1907 in Kaunas, a city in contemporary Lithuania which was then part of the Russian Empire. Married and with a young child, he completed his medical degree in 1940 and became a physician. During the Nazi occupation, he and his family were forced with the other Jews of the city into the Kovno ghetto. In 1944, after the ghetto was liquidated, Rochelson and his son were sent to Kaufering, a subcamp of Dachau; his son was soon taken to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Rochelson's wife was taken to a camp at Stutthof, and died of starvation during a forced march at the end of the war. After the liberation, Rochelson was one of the physicians who helped establish the hospital at the displaced persons camp at Landsberg-am-Lech. In 1946 he came to the United States, where he remarried, had two children, and re-established family life as well as his career in medicine. Eli Rochelson died in 1984. 

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