I began at ̽̽ as an undergraduate studying history with a minor in Holocaust studies, with coursework that concentrated on twentieth-century European history and German language classes. I then entered the Accelerated Master’s Program in history, which allows students to apply six credits toward both the bachelor’s and master’s degrees. As a graduate student, I expanded my studies both geographically and temporally, completing projects that related to Jewish history, including tolerance of Jews in the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth century and the French Trial of the Talmud in 1240. I branched out in other classes to research issues relating to collective memory and memorialization, including the process of redress for Korean “Comfort Women” following World War II and the portrayal in texts for elementary school audiences of the first Thanksgiving. In spring 2023, I finished my second year in the Accelerated Master’s Program.
In the summer of 2022, between my first and second year in the Accelerated Master’s Program, I worked, with the support of the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, as an intern at Holocaust Museum LA in Los Angeles, California. The Museum was founded in 1961 by Holocaust survivors who met while learning English.
My first day was spent touring the Museum, listening to the various audio tours, and speaking with Renée Firestone, a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz and a participant in the “Dimensions in Testimony” exhibit from the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation. The Shoah Foundation, also known as the Institute for Visual History and Education, maintains a major collection of interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides. The technology of “Dimensions in Testimony” allows visitors to speak one-on-one with Firestone, asking her questions and receiving real-time responses. Other days at the museum I spent with interns and staff and also interacted with Holocaust survivors invited to speak to visiting student groups. These student visits typically included a survivor sharing the story of their Holocaust experiences, a question-and-answer session between the students and the survivor, and a reflection activity for the students.
Most of my time, however, was spent transcribing interviews from the Holocaust Museum LA’s collection of video and oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors and American Jewish liberators. A memorable part of this experience was meeting Mary Bauer, a Hungarian survivor, after I had transcribed her video testimony. In the course of this work, I learned about some of the complications of providing a witness account, about unusual methods for surviving, and about the experiences of Holocaust survivors after immigration to the United States. Additionally, I learned about the organization of the museum’s archive, worked in the physical archive space, and maintained a log of digitized interviews. My work was supervised by Jordanna Gessler, Vice-President for Education and Exhibits at the Holocaust Museum LA and a 2011 ̽̽ graduate with a minor in Holocaust Studies.
Following my time in LA, I returned to Burlington and continued my work for the museum remotely. One of the most notable testimonial interviews I transcribed was with Shmuel Askler, who survived as a child with his family as refugees in the Soviet Union and Soviet East Asia. In his interview, he discussed not only his experiences as a refugee, but also his estrangement from the Holocaust survivor community; he never viewed himself as a “true” survivor. Building on my experiences of the summer, in the fall 2022 semester I wrote a research paper exploring questions that Askler’s interview sparked. I subsequently expanded on that research in a broader project exploring questions of identity among Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust by fleeing to the Soviet Union.