Anna Sheftel, Saint Paul University and Stacey Zembrzycki, Concordia University
“Questions are More Important than Answers”: Creating Collaborative Workshop Spaces with Holocaust Survivor-Educators in Montreal
For the past three years, we have been working with survivors who frequently recount their lived experiences of the Holocaust publicly in various educational settings. Initially, our goal was to understand how such profoundly personal and difficult memories are transformed into pedagogically useful lessons. However, through multiple life story interviews with a core group of survivors, we realized there was a lot more going on. Survivors’ public recounting implicates them in a tightly-knit community of people who do such memory work. In Montreal, this community meets under the umbrella of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC), where survivors grapple together with big questions related to our understandings of the Holocaust—for example, forgiveness, communicability, its relevance to Israel—trying to make sense of their personal feelings on these issues, as well as how they can communicate them effectively in educational and community settings.
Because this community is engaged in a constant back and forth about the roles that survivors play in Holocaust and human rights education, and the ethics of this role, we as researchers realized that one-on-one interviewing was not enough. In an attempt to access the conversations that were already happening, as well as responding to a desire we heard from survivors to push these conversations forward, we partnered with the MHMC and two survivors to co-organize a series of collaborative workshops that explored issues related to public recounting and education. A type of “professional development,” this idea originated in a conversation we had with one of our interviewees, Batia Bettman, wherein she articulated a long-held desire to create spaces where survivors could discuss their educational experiences and improve their practice. In these encounters, we encouraged survivors to think deeply and collectively about the practical considerations of speaking – what they tell; what they withhold; what tools/cues they use; and how much time they need – as well as their educational motives –their message; how they deal with difficult questions; and whether they are comfortable speaking about other genocides and/or controversial political situations.
This paper reflects on the collaborative process that was integral to these workshops as well as the possibilities they held for capturing the dialogical nature of how life stories are remembered, reconstructed, and negotiated within communities. We explore how collaborative workshop spaces can facilitate conversations started in oral history interviews, as well as how responding to community needs such as these can help build trust and narrow the gap between interlocutors in life story research. The greatest success of these workshops, as this paper will argue, was how they served the interests of both interviewers and interviewees, allowing all parties to explore the issues that were most important to them.