Survivor:Towards A Conceptual History

Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 61, 57^82 doi:10.
1093/leobaeck/ybw013
Advance Access publication 5 July 2016
Survivor:Towards a Conceptual History1
BY ALINA BOTHE AND MARKUS NESSELRODT

Freie Universita«t Berlin ZentrumJuedische Studien Berlin- Brandenburg
Downloaded from http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Liverpool on December 19, 2016

They came as displaced persons, became ‘New Americans’, and only in the last
few decades of the international Holocaust memory boom did they morph, for
the general and the Jewish community, into ‘survivors’çto be honored,
interviewed, and memorialized.
Historian Atina Grossmann on the term ‘Holocaust survivors in the United
States’.2
The survivor3 has become a key ¢gure in understanding and commemorating the
Holocaust. At the same time, ‘survivor’ is a dynamic term, as Atina Grossmann
(quoted above) indicates. While the number of monographs, edited volumes, and
encyclopaedias on the Holocaust is constantly growing, there have been relatively
few studies of the conceptual histories of some of its most crucial terms, such as
‘victim’,‘witness’, and ‘survivor’.4 The victim has been the subject of a broad range
of historical, sociological, and literary studies.5 Also the witness has received much
critical attention and has an extensive literature on her, or his, epistemological,
1
This Year Book Section is the result of an international workshop ‘SurvivorsçPolitics and Semantics
of a Concept’ that took place in Berlin in November 2014. It was organized by the Center for Jewish
Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, and the Berlin Institute of Technology Center for Research on
Antisemitism in cooperation with the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck
Instituts and was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. We are
especially grateful to Atina Grossmann and Stefanie Schu«ler-Springorum for their ongoing support
in organizing the workshop and for discussing the topics at hand intensively. A workshop report by
Anke Kalkbrenner is available at: http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-6051
(accessed 9 May 2016). We express our gratitude to Christina Bru«ning, Micha Brumlik, and Greg
M. Sax for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.
2
Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, PrincetonÔxford
2007, p. 252.
3
In this article we understand survivors both in the singular and the plural, as survivor contains both
the notions of the collective and the individual as well as the cultural ¢gure and the real person.
4
Dan Michman observed a similar development with regard to the de¢nition and scope of the
Holocaust. See Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations,
Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues, London^Portland 2003.
5
Raul Hilberg,The Destruction of the EuropeanJews, New Haven 1961; Saul Friedla«nder, Nazi Germany and
the Jews: Years of Persecution, 1933^39, vol. 1, New York 1997, and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany
and the Jews, 1939^1945, vol. 2, New York 2007; Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police
Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York 1992; Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The
Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, Oxford 1996; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust,
New Haven 2001.
ß The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Leo Baeck Institute.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
58 A. Bothe and M. Nesselrodt
literary, and psychoanalytical dimensions.6 This body of literature does refer to
survivors, but it remains focused on the witness as the one who carries the burden
of speaking about her or his experiences during the Holocaust.7 Though the
theoretical literature on the term ‘witness’ is impressive, it is remarkable that the
concept of the survivor has still not been given the same scrutiny. But if we are to
understand the theoretical and political implications of its usage we must consider
the meaning of the term‘survivor’and its conceptual history. Who is a survivor and
what does the term express about her, or him?8
Though ‘survivor’ is used di¡erently in various contexts,9 we focus here only on

Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.10 As synonymous terms occur in di¡erent
languages and national contexts, we take survivor to be a transnational concept.11
Therefore, we look closely at the genealogy of the relevant terms in other languages.
As we will argue, the term‘survivor’originated in a complex and often contradictory
process and has been subject to ongoing transformation since 1945. The collective to
which it referred had ¢rst to be denoted and was then characterized over and over
again. Developments on several levels of the global culture of Holocaust
memorialization shaped these changes in the meaning of the term and these
allowed for the emergence and the social formation of the survivor.12 We will
identify crucial turning points in the political and semantic evolution of ‘survivor’.
Because of the limitations of the article format, we will only introduce
some of the general ideas that might inform a future conceptual history of the
6
Geo¡rey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven 2001; Shoshana Felman
and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York^
London 1992; Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History,
Westport, CT 1998; Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven 1993;
Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Ithaca^London 2006.
7
In this article, we focus on the witnesses who survived, but of course are aware of the testimonial
legacy of those who were murdered, the chronicles from the ghettos, the diaries, the underground
archive of Oneg Shabbat, etc. Di¡erent to later testimonies, those were given by individuals in
imminent danger. See Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness; Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our
History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, Bloomington, IN 2007; Zoe« Waxman,
Writing the Holocaust: Identity,Testimony, Representation, Oxford 2006.
8
In expanding on the research we propose in this article, it is necessary to discuss the connection
between gender, politics, and conceptual history. Even though the term is not gender-neutral
semantically, but indeed grammatically, the gendered dynamics of language cannot be considered
here.
9
For example, cancer or childhood abuse survivors. See Anne Rothe, PopularTrauma Culture: Selling the
Pain of Others in the Mass Media, New Brunswick^London 2011, pp. 39^41. A completely di¡erent and
popular understanding of the term, at least in the United States, derives from the television show
‘Survivor’ on CBS. For the popular encounter between a Holocaust survivor and a participant in
the TV show, see the HBO TV series ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’.
10
We use the term Holocaust, and not Shoah, because the former is the most signi¢cant term of the
discourse. For a critical reading of the term, see Giorgio Agamben, Was von Auschwitz bleibt. Das
Archiv und der Zeuge, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 25.
11
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider understand the history of the Holocaust as a global one. Thus, such
identity and memory changes need to be discussed from a transnational perspective, as a story of
global migration and adaptation. See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in
the Global Age, Philadelphia 2005.
12
Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness.
Survivor:Towards a Conceptual History 59
survivor.13 Conceptual history therefore asks for the history of the meaning and the
nuances of a term. Thus we are discussing the history of a discourse, utilizing the
necessary sources.
In the ¢rst part of this article, we trace how the English term‘survivor’evolved from
di¡erent terms in use in di¡erent languages during 1944^1945. In Hannah Arendt’s
re£ections about the Eichmann trial, the term was established by 1961, and we can
safely assume that Arendt relied on a wider discourse. Therefore we begin with the
years 1944^1960 and consider expressions from English, Yiddish, Hebrew and
German.14 We provide a sample of terms from early postwar Germany;

‘Yiddishland’;15 Israel; and the United States, which will begin our consideration of the
semantics from which the hegemonic term ‘survivor’ derives.16 The analysis of these
terms raises di¡erent questions: Who named the collective, and when and where?
Does a term originate from outside or from inside the collective, i.e., is itJewish or non-
Jewish? The early variety of terms reminds us of the various discourses and memorial
cultures in di¡erent languages at a time when the world had not yet come to terms
with what had happened and the hegemonic discourse had not yet been established.
We believe that a conceptual history of the survivor cannot be strictly
chronological, for the concept was shaped in di¡erent contexts: bureaucratic,
juridical, political, testimonial and literary. Consequently, the second part of this
article introduces four spheres of discourse about the concept of the survivorç
academic, politico-institutional, restitution and memoryçin order to uncover the
content of the concept in detail. Our examples here come from both the early post-
war years and the period after 1990, as these have been decisive for the ubiquity of
the term. However, there is a gap in the research for the 1960s and early 1970s. In
the context of this article, the academic sphere includes historical research on the
khurbn,17 the Holocaust, and the Shoah, and focuses on the role of survivors and
13
In a new version of the Geschichtliche Grundbegri¡e, survivor would be a term to be included, since for
today’s historical understanding it is of key relevance. In this article we are stimulated by a
conceptual idea, as Reinhart Koselleck has outlined in many of his writings. Conceptual history
allows us to analyse synchronically as well as diachronically the usage of one speci¢c term, the
shifts and turns in meaning. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Stichwort: Begri¡sgeschichte’, in Begri¡sgeschichten.
Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache, Frankfurt am Main 2006, pp. 99^
104; Koselleck,‘Die Geschichte der Begri¡e und die Begri¡e der Geschichte’, in ibid., pp 56^57.
14
A more elaborated conceptual history of the term ‘survivor’ would also need to cover examples from
French, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Dutch and other languages.
15
Yiddishland may be understood as a transnational framework of a secular Yiddish culture and of a
diasporic Jewish nationhood after 1882. Protagonists of Yiddishland were political parties,
publishing houses, literature, art, and Jewish schools, all of which formed a ‘state in itself ’. See
Benjamin Harshav, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture, Stanford 2007; David G. Roskies, Against the
Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, Cambridge, MA 1984; Jan Schwarz,
Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, Detroit 2015; Cecile E. Kuznitz, YIVO and the
Making of ModernJewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation, New York^Cambridge 2014.
16
We are aware that our perspective here is strongly Western-centric. A closer discussion of eastern
European terms and their evolution after 1989^90 would be desirable.
17
According to Uriel Weinreich’s seminal dictionary the word should be spelled correctly as khurbm
with an ‘m’ at the end. Yet, most English-language works in Yiddish studies spell it as khurbn. See
Modern english-yidish yidish-english verterbukh / Modern English-Yiddish^Yiddish-English Dictionary, New
York 1977, p. 321.
their testimonies. The memory sphere includes events, mainly in the United States,
that helped raise public awareness of survivors as witnesses. The restitution and
politico-institutional spheres shift the focus to the complex relationship between
survivors, national governments, and transnational Jewish agencies such as the
Claims Conference, and shed light on issues pertaining to the recognition of
survivors as individuals and as members of the small community of those who
survived. The division of the in£uences on the meaning of the term into four
spheres allows us to describe its conceptual history as multifaceted.
Three preliminary observations are of particular signi¢cance for this conceptual

history. First, the constant negotiation over the term’s meaning is tied to important
questions about the recognition of survivors as survivors and victims of the
Holocaust and, therefore, to public understanding of the events of the Holocaust
and the experiences of those who endured it. Second, we observe a long-term
tension between survivors, as individuals and as a collective, and the concept of
survivor. Finally, over the course of the seven decades since the Holocaust, the
concept ‘survivor’ has been Americanized by the discourse on the Holocaust in the
United States and the international dominance of the English language.
ABOUT THIS YEAR BOOK SECTION
This Year Book Section includes three examples of research relevant to a genuine
conceptual history of ‘survivor’. All of the contributions originated in the
international workshop ‘SurvivorsçThe Politics and Semantics of a Concept’,
which was held in Berlin in November 2014. Andree Michaelis looks at Primo
Levi’s understanding of the term and argues that we should be careful with it, if we
use it at all. Julia Menzel shows how the historian and writer H. G. Adler
negotiated the topic of survival in his academic and literary writings. Adam Stern
discusses Giorgio Agamben’s and Franz Rosenzweig’s approaches to survival and
locates Rosenzweig’s ‘Star of Redemption’ in Christian more than in Jewish
thought. All three contributions carefully analyse how the writers, philosophers,
historians, and novelists who for seven decades have shaped the politics and
semantics of ‘survivor’ have approached the concept.
I. FROM MANY TO ONE: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE EVOLUTION

OF THE CONCEPT OF SURVIVOR
The meaning of the term ‘survivor’ is linked to the evolution of a transnational

Americanized culture of Holocaust memory. This linkage mirrors our claim that
many separate terms have evolved into this one. The term’s conceptual history
cannot be understood without taking into account some of this culture’s signi¢cant
moments. Making no claim to completeness, we will describe some of those
important events.
The term became transnational18 with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1961^1963). Other important events were the broadcast of the television series
‘Holocaust’ (1978^1979), Claude Lanzmann’s documentary ¢lm ‘Shoah’ (1985),
Steven Spielberg’s feature ¢lm ‘Schindler’s List’ (1993), and the opening of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, which completed the
Americanization19 of global Holocaust memory.20 These dates are milestones in
the process through which refugees, prisoners, camp inmates, displaced persons
and new immigrants came to be regarded as survivors. Though survivors were
certainly not silent between 1945 and the Eichmann trial, they were far from being

considered secular saints (David Roskies), as they later were.21 As Henry Greenspan
(who does not distinguish between survivors and witnesses) states,‘nobody [in the
early postwar years] was talking about celebrating the witness or making a legacy
for the future generation or teaching tolerance’.22
Most scholars of international Holocaust memory consider the Eichmann trial to
have initiated the transition from an exclusively Jewish communal discourse to
today’s growing non-Jewish engagement with survivors. The historian Annette
Wieviorka identi¢ed the Eichmann trial as the turning point in the understanding
of Holocaust witnesses, though she did not discuss the survivor as witness in detail.
When observing the trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt could already employ the
concept of the survivor in describing witnesses. In her seminal work Eichmann in
Jerusalem (1963), Arendt touches on the subtle distinction between witness and
survivor in her description of listening to witnesses give testimony. Speaking of the
hundreds that had appeared in court, Arendt notes en passant that only ‘Ninety of
them were survivors in the strict sense of the word, they had survived the war in
one form or another of Nazi captivity’.23 And she even has a precise idea of what a
survivor in the strict sense of the word was. Simultaneously, she excludes witnesses who
had left Europe before the war from the collective of survivors by calling them
‘survivors’ (with quotation marks).24 Interestingly, Arendt includes herself among
18
Je¡rey Shandler, While America Watches:Televising the Holocaust, New York 1999, pp. 83^132.
19
The Americanization of the Holocaust refers to the U.S.-American adoption of the Holocaust. This
adoption became hegemonic in the global discourse due to the impact of U.S. memorial institutions.
For the further debate on this, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston^New York
2000, pp. 1^18.
20
It would be worthwhile to analyse if our claim of Americanization is matched by the internal use of
the term ‘survivor’ among American Holocaust survivor groups and networks.
21
David Roskies uses the term in the context of changing perceptions of survivors within the Jewish
community: ‘So one day the survivors awoke to hear themselves acclaimed secular saints, the
purveyors of a new gospel. As people who had ‘‘actually lived through Hell’’, they were endowed
with almost mystical powers. [. . .] People who had never experienced starvation or mass graves or
crematoria now looked upon the survivors as a higher order of human being, as God’s messengers
from the planet of destruction’. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in
Modern Jewish Culture, Syracuse^New York 1984, p. 7. On the question of alleged silence, see Hasia R.
Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust,
1945^1962, New York^London 2009; David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds.), After the Holocaust:
Challenging the Myth of Silence, New York 2012.
22
Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, p. 13.
23
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann inJerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York 2006 [1963], p. 223.
24
Ibid., p. 224.
the ‘survivors’ in the courtroom, those ‘middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants
from Europe, like myself, who had escaped from Nazi occupation’.25
Since Arendt derived her distinction between survivors and the more nuanced
‘survivors’ from a discourse existing in the early 1960s, the formative years of the
term must date to the period before 1961. The period from 1944^1945 to 1961
included a variety of words for referring to the group that would eventually be
considered the collective of survivors. In 1945, one of the ¢rst terms whose use was
widespread among Jews and non-Jews alike was ‘liberated Jew’.26 Despite its distinct
reference to having outlived National Socialist terror, the notion of liberation did

not immediately stimulate re£ection on the shape of a distinct survivor identity.
Greenspan claims that ‘Holocaust survivors’ as a construct had not been
established in the early postwar period. Instead, he concludes, there was awareness
of overwhelming destruction and death. And there were the few who somehow
remained.27 A conceptual history of early postwar Hebrew terms for survivors has
not yet been written, but the Israeli literature on survivors o¡ers a few terms from
the early days. These include ‘remnants’,‘sabonim’ (soap),‘scum’,‘comrade refugee’,
and also ‘immigrant’, as Tom Segev has observed.28 Hanna Yablonkas’s research
points in the same direction: ‘In Israel’s early years, [. . .] expressions such as
‘‘refugees’’,‘‘rejects’’,‘‘banished’’,‘‘deportees’’, and ‘‘human dust’’ were used freely by
Israelis to describe the Holocaust survivors’.29 Each of these suggests that survivors
were the Other, not Sabra, being e¡eminate, uncivilized and unable to defend
themselves. Of course, the terms used in the Yishuv and Israel have to be
understood in the context of the Israeli relation to the Holocaust and the con£ict
between those already residing in theYishuv and newcomers.30
The two currently most widespread Hebrew terms for Holocaust survivors^
‘Sordey HaShoah’ (survivors from the Shoah), and ‘Nitsoley Shoah’ (those
who were saved from the Shoah)^connote nuances of self-de¢nition and
25
Ibid., p. 8.
26
The ¢rst self-organized Jewish political body in postwar Germany was the Central Committee of
Liberated Jews (in Yiddish: Tsentral komitet fun di bafrayte yidn in daytshland). Founded in Felda¢ng,
Bavaria, on 1 July 1945, and recognized by the American Occupation Administration in September
1946, the Central Committee was the legal and democratic representation of Jewish survivors in the
American zone. See Yehuda Bauer, ‘The Organization of Holocaust Survivors’, in Yad Vashem Studies,
8 (1970), pp. 127^157.
27
Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, p. 13.
28
All terms taken from Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York 1994, see
pp. 121, 178, 181, 183, 185.
29
More general on the traumatized Israeli discourse about the survivors and DPs, see HannaYablonka,
Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War, London 1999, p. 9.
30
But their di¡erence lies within a bandwidth of solidarity to contempt and can only be discussed by
taking into account the speci¢c Israeli situation. The Israeli discourse about Holocaust survivors in
the early years can by analysed from a migration studies’ perspective, considering the shifts and
ruptures in Israeli society due to the arrival of the new immigrants and the consequences for those
already there or even established. See e.g., Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust; Idith Zertal, From
Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, Berkeley^London 1998. Anita
Shapira analyses the importance of political changes within Israeli politics, such as the election of
Menachem Begin for prime minister and the rule of the Likud in 1978, in her, Israel: A History,
Lebanon, NH 2012, pp. 357^391.
recognition.31 As the psychologist Natan Kellerman claims, Holocaust survivors in
Israel distinguish active and passive survival. Some prefer ‘Sordey HaShoah’ to
‘Nitsoley Shoah’, which is the general term for Shoah survivors. The former
emphasizes active ¢ghting for existence while the latter can be translated as ‘one
saved from the Holocaust’. In order to ‘¢t into the Zionist narrative of Jews who
took their destiny into their own hands, they prefer to use a word that conveys a
¢ghting mentality, rather than a position of victimhood’.32
Di¡erent German terms for survivors evolved in two di¡erent political systems
neither of which paid much attention to Jewish su¡ering in the 1940s and 1950s. So

Jewish survivors in the East were subsumed under the term ‘Verfolgte des
Naziregimes’ (persecutees of the National Socialists). But when compensation
policies were enacted in the West in the 1950s, survivors gained a new legal status;
they became Gescha«digte, i.e., wronged parties.
Three concepts from the postwar period deserve more detailed discussion: She’erit
Hapletah, displaced person, and iberlebene/sheyres hapleyte.
She’erit Hapletah
Hebrew and, especially, Yiddish were the most in£uential languages in the early
Jewish postwar discourse on the recent catastrophe.33 One of the earliest collective
terms for survivors of the Holocaust can be traced back to recently liberated
Europe.34 Liberated Jews in Germany considered themselves the Surviving
RemnantçShe’erit Hapletah in Hebrew, or sheyres hapleyte35 in Yiddish. We focus on
31
We would like to thank Doron Oberhand, Berlin, for sharing his knowledge of the Hebrew language
and its nuances with us.
32
Natan Kellerman,‘What’s in a Name? Eight Variations on a Theme’, in Kavod, 2 (2012), http://kavod.
claimscon.org/2012/02/whats-in-a-name/ (accessed 3 April 2015).
33
Laura Jockusch argues that terms like khurbn or fun letstn khurbn (from the latest destruction) indicate
how surviving Jews placed their fate in a long history of Jewish su¡ering and renewal. Laura
Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe, Oxford 2012,
p. 223, note 2.
34
The liberation of National Socialist occupied Europe happened in various places and at di¡erent
times, spanning from summer 1944 in France and Poland to spring 1945 in central Europe. Six
million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. An estimated three million Jews had survived the
Final Solution in the camps, in disguise, as partisans, members of Allied armed forces, or in exile.
On early postwar survivors’ experiences, see Dalia Ofer, Francoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor
Baumel-Schwartz (eds.), Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities, New YorkÔxford 2012.
More than two million Jews remained in the Soviet Union (including the former Baltic States), and
sizeable communities were re-established in Romania (430,000), Hungary (260,000), and Poland
(210,000, decreasing to 90,000 following the mass exodus of 1946). David Engel, ‘Holocaust: An
Overview’, in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.
aspx/Holocaust/An_Overview (accessed 20 November 2015).
35
She’erit Hapletah is a Hebrew term of biblical origin. According to Ze’ev Mankowitz, ‘She’erit
Hapletah can be seen as an early example of a collective that included every living Jewish person in
Europe, regardless of how a person escaped National Socialist persecution. This rather broad
de¢nition included Jewish partisans, former Soviet exiles, those who managed to hide underground,
concentration camp and ghetto survivors [we mean the camp and ghetto survivors as one group
here, not that someone was hiding in the camps] as well as those who survived under false
identities. Despite their di¡erent ways of survival, the members of the She’erit Hapletah ‘were
united in the feeling that they were, together, survivors of the Holocaust’. See Ze’ev Mankowitz, Life
between Memory and Hope:The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, Cambridge 2002, p. 20.
the She’erit Hapletah in Germany, but the term transcends the collective of Jewish
DPs, as Dan Michman has noted.36
The American rabbi Abraham Klausner referred to Jewish DPs as ‘She’erit
Hapletah’ in a series of volumes he began publishing in Dachau from late May 1945
that listed the names of surviving Jews living in Bavaria.37 Interestingly, the
denoted collective of survivors grew quickly, in a period of ¢ve years, from 50,000
to 300,000 as others applied ‘She’erit Hapletah’ to every Jew in occupied Germany,
Austria, and Italy regardless of their wartime experience.38 As the historian Zeev
Mankowitz noted, in Hebrew the term ‘She’erit Hapletah’, generally understood as

the surviving remnant, also referred to the saved remnant and the saving remnant.
The former carries a passive connotation of having been liberated and now being
taken care of, at that time by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or
Joint), and emissaries from Palestine or the U.S. Army, all of which Mankowitz
describes as ‘the heart of DP dependence: someone else almost always spoke for
you’.39 The latter interpretation evokes the biblical meaning of ‘She’erit Hapletah’
and places survivors at the beginning of the new generation after the destruction.40
In this sense,‘She’erit Hapletah’ connotes a temporal intermediateness, uniting the
painful past with the hope for a better future.41
Displaced Person
The self-re£ective agency that gave rise to ‘She’erit Hapletah’ is the most signi¢cant
di¡erence between it and ‘Displaced Person’ or ‘DP’. That is, ‘surviving remnant’
36
Historian Dan Michman identi¢es four layers of meaning with She’erit Hapletah. The term may
refer to: (1) The entire Jewish world, because it had survived the National Socialist assault to its
national existence; (2) Direct survivors of National Socialist atrocities, plus refugees who £ed when
the German armies approached their original domiciles and returned to European soil
immediately after their the Liberation; (3) Holocaust survivors in DP camps only; and (4)
Holocaust survivors who were still in Europe but decided to settle outside the continent, mainly in
Eretz Israel. Dan Michman, ‘On the De¢nition of ‘‘She’erit Hapletah’’’, in Dan Michman, Holocaust
Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues,
London^Portland 2003, pp. 329^332, here p. 330.
37
Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope, p. 2.
38
The surviving remnant in Germany consisted mainly of Polish Jews who had spent the wartime in
the interior of the Soviet Union. They had £ed Poland after their return from the Soviet Union in
1945^1946. With the help of the clandestine Zionist movement Bricha, an estimated 250,000 Jewish
survivors £ed their homes in eastern Europe and found a transitory home in camps for Displaced
Persons in occupied Germany, Austria and Italy. There, they joined a collective of 50^60,000
survivors of death marches, forced labour, and the concentration camp system. Mankowitz, Life
between Memory and Hope, p. 20.
39
Ze’ev Mankowitz, She’erit Hapletah: An Overview, in Ofer, Holocaust Survivors, pp. 10^15, here p. 14.
40
Mankowitz, She’erit Hapletah, p. 15.
41
It is noteworthy that the Yiddish expression ‘sheyres hapleyte’ is less often used in scholarly and
popular works on the DP period although Yiddish was the foremost lingua franca among the Jewish
DPs, whereas Hebrew was the language of religion and Zionism.
was a self-description, but ‘DP’ was an external label and as such was resented by
some of those so labelled. As Benjamin Harshav remembers:
DP. We hated that word. DP was for ration cards for bread. We were never anybody’s
displaced persons, we were glued with our feet to a world, holding on to its past as a
future, and carried it with us: places in words. DP was a label, a category for
bureaucrats.42
When it was introduced in November 1944 by the Supreme Headquarters Allied

Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF),‘DP’ referred to the tens of thousands of liberated

Jews and millions of non-Jews uprooted by the Second World War, a large
proportion of whom found temporary shelter in Displaced Persons camps set up by
the Allied forces in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Though the majority of non-
Jewish DPs were quickly repatriated to their countries of origin, the number of
Jewish DPs increased with the in£ux of refugees from eastern Europe, who had not
been liberated on German soil. Their presence called for the legal creation of a
special collective whose members would be supported by a range of relief agencies.
This is why in 1947 the International Relief Organization (IRO) expanded the
de¢nition of ‘Displaced Person’ to‘person who [. . .] has been deported from, or has
been obliged to leave his country of nationality or of former habitual residence,
such as persons who were compelled to undertake forced labour or who were
deported for racial, religious or political reasons’.43
In these ways, the increasing number of Jews in Germany, most of whom were
recognized as DPs, led to a broadened understanding of both ‘She’erit Hapletah’
and ‘DP’ in the period from 1944 to 1947. Despite their di¡erences in origin, scope
and period of use, both ‘She’erit Hapletah’ and (Jewish) ‘DP’ are collective terms
that referred to the same group of Jewish survivors temporarily residing in
liberated Europe.
Iberlebene and Sheyres Hapleyte

As noted above, the distinct eastern European background of many Jewish DPs
signi¢cantly shaped the collective of Jewish survivors in Germany.44 Unlike
‘She’erit Hapletah’and ‘DP’, most contemporary Yiddish terms for survivors are no
longer used in public or academic discourse. Nevertheless, Yiddish terms are
important because they re£ect the centuries-long history of the vernacular
language of the majority of eastern European Jewry. This is why Yiddish was the
42
Benjamin Harshav, ‘Memory Bubbles’ (unpublished English original text). Published in German
translation in Tamar Lewinsky and Charles Lewinsky (eds.), Unterbrochenes Gedicht. Jiddische Literatur
in Deutschland 1944^1950, Mu«nchen 2011, pp. viiîx, here p. viii.
43
Joseph Berger, ‘Displaced Persons’, in Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Encyclopaedia
Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. V, Detroit 2007, pp. 684^686; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, ‘Polnische Juden in der
amerikanischen Besatzungszone Deutschland 1946/47’, in Vierteljahrshefte fu«r Zeitgeschichte, 1 (1977), pp.
120^121.
44
Notably, both the SH and DPs excluded the surviving 15,000 German Jews who mostly did not
identify with the She’erit Hapletah and its distinct eastern European background. Michael Brenner,
After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, Princeton 1997, pp. 41^51.
most signi¢cant language of discourse on the Holocaust and survival until the early
1960s.
After the destruction of Yiddishland,Yiddish-speakingJews attempted to explain
the Holocaust in terms of their existing vocabulary. In his Yiddish-English
dictionary, Uriel Weinreich lists two terms for survivors.‘Iberlebender’ refers to a
survivor as such, and ‘sheyres hapleyte’çthere is no singularçrefers more
speci¢cally to survivors of a catastrophe. In their contemporary understanding,
these termsç‘lebn geblibene’ is another exampleçemphasized endurance and a
desire for hemshekh (continuity). The Yiddish names of DP newspapers and

periodicals connote living in a transitory period; they also express agency,
collective identity and the assurance that the future will be bright for Jewish
survivors.45 As Jan Schwarz notes, ‘Yiddish culture was arguably the most
signi¢cant site of critical and artistic engagement with the Holocaust’.46 In places
like Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Paris, Moscow, and Warsaw, the dispersed members of
Europe’s Yiddish culture created a ‘virtual Ashkenaz’ or ‘virtual Yiddishland’ by
using the Yiddish language in producing works of art.47 In what Zachary M. Baker
called the ‘silver age’of Yiddish, from 1945 to 1961, survivors played a crucial role in
researching and commemorating the khurbn, which is the Yiddish transliteration of
the Hebrew hurban, the historical archetype of Jewish catastrophe.48 As Magdalena
Ruta, and Tamar Lewinsky and Laura Jockusch have shown, the majority of
Yiddish literature on the khurbn emphasized mourning, commemoration and
reconstruction.49 As a result, most surviving Yiddish writers did not re£ect
speci¢cally on the signi¢cance of being a Holocaust survivor.
The end of the silver age of Yiddish culture in the early 1960s coincided with a
general shift of the discourse to non-Jewish languages (with the exception of
Hebrew in Israel). English began to replace Yiddish as the foremost language of
khurbn forshung and eventually became the lingua franca of Holocaust research and
the discourse on survivors.50
So far, we have discussed some of the di¡erent terms in use before Hannah Arendt
wrote about survivors in 1963, when she employed the existing terminology to
di¡erentiate ‘real’ survivors from refugees. But to understand the further evolution
45
Some of these titles were Ibergang (Transition), Bafrayung (Liberation), Hemshekh (Continuity),
Undzer Veg (Our way), all published in Munich, or Undzer Lebn (Our life), published in Berlin.
For an in-depth study of DP newspapers, see Ayelet Kuper Margalioth, Yiddish Periodicals Published by
Displaced Persons, 1946^1949, Ph.D. dissertation, Magdalen College, Oxford 1997.
46
Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles, p. 5.
47
The new centres of virtual Ashkenaz included publishing houses in Buenos Aires (Dos poylishe
yidntum), Warsaw (Yidish bukh), Moscow (Sovetish Heymland), and Tel Aviv (Di goldene keyt).
Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles, p. 10.
48
Roskies, Against the Catastrophe; Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, New
York 1984.
49
Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, ‘Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in
the Soviet Union’, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 3 (2010), pp. 373^399.
50
Notably, the silver age of the Yiddish word was an exclusively Jewish matter. This is why most Yiddish
studies on the history and memory of the khurbn were (and are) largely ignored by scholars of the
Holocaust. David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide,
Waltham, MA 2012, pp. 75^124.
of the concept, especially from the late 1970s onwards, one must take a close look at
the relation between the witness and the survivor. Central to today’s understanding
and commemoration of the Holocaust is a theoretical triangle with the witness, the
victim, and the survivor. The concepts of the survivor and the witness overlap, but
there is one signi¢cant di¡erence: the witness bears the burden of recounting her
or his experiences. A rich output of scholarly and ¢ctional literature on the
Holocaust initiated the rise of the Holocaust witness. David Roskies and Naomi
Diamant called the 1970s and early 1980s a ‘period of advocacy’ in which several
critics and cultural historians, like Terrence Des Pres, Laurence Langer, and James

E. Young, turned to the Holocaust for its ‘moral, existential, and otherwise
subversive meaning’.51 The result was the so-called ‘Era of the Witness’, which
established the framework that was decisive for the emergence of the survivor as an
individual. This framework incorporated a variety of di¡erent phenomena at
di¡erent times such as the creation of several oral history projects since the late
1970s52 and the widespread use of excerpts from videotaped testimony in museums,
television programmes and Holocaust education after 1990. These projects focused
on survivors, their survival experiences and their lives afterwards.
We end this short and necessarily incomplete overview with two observations.
The ¢rst one concerns pragmatic considerations. Over the course of the past seven
decades since 1945, the English term ‘survivor’ has emerged as the predominant
term, which is used to refer to diverse groups. As a result, most of the terms from
other European languages have all but ceased to exist. The second observation
regards the evolution of the reference of the term from the collective to the
individual. The early postwar terms for those who endured the Holocaust that we
have surveyed, ‘the surviving remnant’, ‘displaced persons’, etc., were only used
collectively. Individuals belonged to these collective, but, in general, the individual
was not referred to or understood, even by her- or himself, as someone with a
unique story. The Jewish people, and not the individual Jew, was the referent. Since
the late 1970s, this has changed radically as the individual survivor, with a name
and a story, has emerged from the collective, especially in the Oral History
Archives, now containing more the 100,000 individual survivor’s testimonies.
Though the process of individualization has many origins and implications, which
we cannot elaborate on here, what is signi¢cant for a conceptual history is the
striking shift from conceiving of survivors as passive subjects of immigration and
welfare to seeing them as secular saints to be honoured in museums and at public
events. Several di¡erent agents of change, including survivors’ own decade-long
struggle for recognition as survivors, are responsible for this shift, as we will discuss
in the following part of this article.
51
Ibid., p. 12.
52
The most comprehensive project in the ¢eld was the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive,
initiated by Steven Spielberg in the mid-1990s. Videographed testimonies discussed in the literature
mostly stem either from the Fortuno¡ Archive in Yale or the VHA. Therefore we take a close look
on both archives in the fourth sphere, i.e., the Memory Sphere.
II. FOUR SPHERES OF DISCOURSE ON SURVIVORS
Examples of the meaning of ‘survivor’ can be detected in at least four discursive

spheres: academia, political institutions, restitution and memory. We chose each
example because it is either paradigmatic or unique in terms of conceptual history.
Obviously, there are many others that we could have used. We place our groups in
spheres to mirror the complex, contradictory, multilingual and transnational
process of recognition and individualization. In a similar manner, Aleida
Assmann has o¡ered a profound analysis of the meaning of the term ‘witness’. She

argues that the term has four di¡erent realms of application: juridical, historical,
religious, and moral.53 In her view, survivors are today considered to be moral
witnesses, though they also embody aspects of the other three realms. We do not
share Assmann’s interest in current meanings; rather, in light of our concern with
conceptual history, we want to show how the meaning of ‘survivor’ has evolved in
di¡erent arenas of discourse.
The Academic Sphere

First we analyse the genealogy of the survivor in the academic sphere. Due to the
volume of relevant literature, we limit the scope of our analysis to a few of the
scholars and centres of Holocaust research that have helped shape the term into its
current form. The academic sphere is strongly in£uenced by the historiography of
the Holocaust but also by other disciplines, such as literary studies, psychology
(especially psychoanalysis), sociology and political science. Our examples
illustrate how the discourse on survivors has evolved from an almost exclusively
Jewish to an increasingly non-Jewish discourse that is closely intertwined with
issues of language, translation and the development of audiences.
Beginning in late 1944, Jewish survivors in 14 countries founded historical
commissions, documentation centres and other research projects for the purpose of
‘collecting and recording’ evidence of National Socialist atrocities during the
Second World War. In Poland, the DP camps in occupied Germany and elsewhere
in Europe, surviving Jewish activists saw it as their mission to collect as many
survivors’ testimonies and perpetrators’ documents as possible.54 And many
survivors saw it as their duty to recount the stories of the murdered. Addressing the
surviving Jews of Europe, Moshe Feigenbaum asserted that ‘We, the She’erit
53
Aleida Assmann,‘Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft’, in Michael Elm and Gottfried Ko«ler (eds.),
Zeugenschaft des Holocaust, Frankfurt^New York 2007, pp. 33^51.
54
Until the end of the 1950s these Jewish documentation initiatives gathered some 18,000 testimonies
and 8,000 questionnaires completed by survivors. See Laura Jockusch, ‘Historiography in Transit:
Survivor Historians and the Writing of Holocaust History in the late 1940s’, in LBI Year Book, vol. 58
(2013), pp. 75^94, here pp. 75^76. For more general studies on the Historical Commissions, see
Jockusch, Collect and Record! David Boder was the ¢rst psychologist to audiotape interviews. It is
noteworthy that the title of his book is a clear indication that the term survivors of the Shoah or
the Holocaust was not yet common. David P. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, Chicago 1949.
Inmates, prisoners, people, women, children, sisters were the terms used by BBC journalist Patrick
Gordon Walker in his diary regarding the liberation of Belsen. Patrick Gordon Walker, Belsen Report,
20.4.1945, online http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust/5136.shtml?page=txt (accessed 9 May 2016).
Hapletah, the surviving witnesses, must create the basis [. . .] for the historian,
through which he will be able to get a clear picture of what happened to us and
amongst us. [. . .] The Jews themselves must document this bloody epoch [and] for
that, historical commissions are necessary’.55 In combining ‘surviving’ and
‘witness’, Feigenbaum determined those individuals’ future role, viz., because they
survived they must assume the moral stance of bearing witness. Feigenbaum also
expressed the then widespread view that surviving Jews were a ‘living treasury’ for
the future historiography of the khurbn. His use of the Yiddish ‘khurbn’ is important
for understanding his view of the role of survivors in documenting and

remembering ‘the latest destruction’. As Benjamin Harshav notes, the word
‘khurbn’ carried the whole history of Jewish su¡ering. Among contemporary
Yiddish speakers, it also connoted the destruction of the Yiddish world in eastern
Europe.56 Laura Jockusch adds that ‘survivors’ use of terms such as ‘latest
destruction’ (der letster khurbn) and ‘destruction of the third temple’ (hurban beit
shlishi) is evidence that previous catastrophes provided a foil for understanding the
Holocaust’.57 In other words, many survivors of the Holocaust did not consider
themselves as members of a distinct collective of survivors but, rather, saw
themselves as part of the long tradition of Jewish su¡ering and renewal. Thus, they
apparently had no need for a new label.
Interestingly, the historical commissions’ claim to reach out to every living Jew
stood in contrast to their own understanding of Holocaust survival. The ¢rst
questionnaire for survivors, issued by the Central Historical Commission in Lodz,
was aimed at those who had ‘spent the German occupation in ghettos, camps, on
the Aryan side, hidden in the woods, [or] ¢ghting in partisan units’.58 This
understanding excluded other groups of Jewish survivors, such as returnees from
the Soviet Union, who were not mentioned in contemporary publications on the
history of the Holocaust, such as Fun letstn khurbn, the journal of the Central
55
Cited from Jockusch, Collect and Record!, p. 136.
56
‘That is why the Holocaust was called in Yiddish by the Hebrew word Churban (something like ‘‘total
ruin, destruction’’), which was the term for the Destruction of the First Temple and the ¢rst Jewish
state in Palestine and the exile to Babylon, and for the Destruction of the Second Temple, which led
to two thousand years of Diaspora around the world. [. . .] It is not by accident that the Zionist
establishment in Israel did not want to dignify the death of European Jewry with the term that
denoted the end of a Jewish independent nation in the past. ‘‘Yad Vashem’’, the government
institution established to commemorate the catastrophe, was called Yad Vashem la-Gevurah ve-la-
Shoah, ‘‘Memorial to Heroism and Holocaust’’. ‘‘Heroism’’, of course, had the priority, but
‘‘Churban’’ was not mentioned. ‘‘Shoah’’ (like the English ‘‘Holocaust’’) is a natural disaster, an
eternal catastrophe rather than a pivotal historical event in the life of a nation. (With time, of
course, ‘‘Holocaust’’ assumed that other meaning as well.)’. Benjamin Harshav, ‘Introduction’, in
Herman Kruk, The Last Days of theJerusalem of Lithuania, pp. XX^LII, here p. XXIII.
57
Jockusch, Historiography in Transit, p. 91. On the ambivalence of the word letster, see Roskies, Holocaust
Literature, p. 77: ‘Like the Exodus, like the Akedah, the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, Letst
was richly ambiguous, for it could mean ‘‘latest’’ or ‘‘the last,’’ the ultimate. If it meant ‘‘the latest,’’
then the destruction of European Jewry was a link in a terrible chain. If it meant ‘‘the last,’’ then the
Holocaust was its own archetype, an end that was also a beginning’.
58
Cited from Jockusch, Historiography inTransit, p. 75.
Historical Commission in Germany.59 As a general rule, returnees were considered
as refugees with no signi¢cant experience of the Holocaust. And, yet, Jewish
returnees from the Soviet Union, who did not witness the destruction of the Jews in
German-occupied territories, provoked, just by their presence, a need to identify
who was to be considered a survivor, a question that the She’erit Hapletah had not
previously taken to be important.60
It is noteworthy that, despite their di¡erent wartime experiences, most Jewish
DPs identi¢ed as part of the surviving remnant. This is even more notable since the
history of those Polish-Jewish DPs who survived the war in the Soviet Union was

usually not addressed in public discourse. One rare exception was Marek
Liebhaber’s call for integrating the Soviet experience into the history of Jewish
su¡ering during the Second World War. Published in June 1947 under a pseudonym
in the Yiddish newspaper Ibergang, he warned that this chapter of history was in
danger of being lost. The lost chapter of history is: ‘The su¡ering of the European
Jews in Russia in the years 1939^1946. It is a great, rich and grand and important
chapter that must not be lost’.61 Generally speaking, historians of the Jewish DP
camps, who often did not include returnees from the Soviet Union in the collective
of survivors, shared the contemporary understanding that there were two distinct
groups of Jewish DPs, survivors and refugees, separated by their wartime
experiences.62 Jewish historical research on the khurbn conducted in the DP camps
is an early stage in the debate over who was a survivor and which experiences of
survivors should be considered part of the latest destruction.
Terrence Des Pres’s 1976 studyThe Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps is a
landmark in the evolution of the concept of the survivor in American discourse.
Des Pres, who based his analysis on eyewitness accounts published by survivors,
studied the structure of survival for mostly Jewish prisoners in National Socialist
camps and the Soviet gulag system.‘It turns out that survival is an experience with
a de¢nite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral’.63 According to Des
Pres, the survivor is a completely new ¢gure in historiography, who helplessly
endures the fate that others have in£icted upon him or her. At a time when the
historical and literary value of the accounts of witnesses was in doubt Des Pres
59
According to Laura Jockusch, Kaplan’s understanding of survival included having experienced
concentration camps and ghettos, ¢ghting in partisan units, living in hiding places, or under false
identities in occupied Europe, Jockusch, Collect and Record!, p. 140.
60
The Central Historical Commission distributed two posters among the DP camps in the American
Zone asking the surviving witnesses to testify as to what they had seen. Interestingly, the posters
were directed at unde¢ned Jewish collectives, apparently assuming no need for clari¢cation: ‘Help
to write the history of the latest destruction’, and ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’. See Jockusch,
Collect and Record!, pp. 143^144. It remains a crucial and still unexamined question whether it was
the in£ux of the ‘repatriates’ that really provoked a need among the She’erit Hapleta to de¢ne who
was a ‘survivor’.
61
M. D. Elihav [Marek Liebhaber],‘A kapitl fun geshikhte geyt farlorn’, in Ibergang, 29 June 1947, p. 3.
62
Atina Grossmann has recently called for the integration of the refugee experiences and their
memories of displacement into our understanding of the Shoah. Atina Grossmann, ‘Remapping
Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World
War II’, in New German Critique, 117 (2012), pp. 61^79.
63
Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, New York 1976.
linked survival and bearing witness by highlighting the importance of survivors’
testimony.64 ‘Modern history has created the survivor as a moral type. His or her
special task, moreover, has become indispensable. When terrorism and mass
murder prevail, there will be no sources of concrete information unless men and
women survive’.65 Des Pres wrote his book before the ‘Era of the Witness’,66 when
the survivor was not yet seen as a moral hero but was, rather, somebody who had
been at a time and place where the inexplicable had happened. ‘Merely because
they are survivors, the men and women who passed through the camps are suspect
in our eyes. But when we consider the speci¢c nature of their identityçnot only as

survivors, but survivors of those placesçsuspicion deepens to shock and
rejection’.67 Des Pres was the ¢rst to put the survivor at centre stage semantically
and theoretically, describing him or her speci¢cally as a Jewish camp survivor and
in the process marking him or her asJewish.
When Des Pres was writing in the1970s, survivors’accounts had left the domain of
Jewish historiography and entered literature. Many historians considered them to
be unreliable sources and preferred the documents of perpetrators to victims’
accounts. So, for example, in his ¢rst major work, The Destruction of EuropeanJewry
from 1961,68 Raul Hilberg, a historian and political scientist, not a literary scholar
like Des Pres, wrote, ‘Lest one be misled by the word ‘‘Jews’’ in the title, let it be
pointed out that this is not a book about theJews. Not much will be read here about
the victims. The focus is placed on the perpetrators’.69 Hilberg systematically
analysed the ¢gure of the survivor and the di¡erent connotations of the term but
he did not mention survivors as such, because he saw those Jews who had escaped
the Holocaust as a passively constituted collective, not as a distinct group of
individuals with their own agency.
The shift towards a more integrated Holocaust historiography in the English
academic discourse (e.g., Saul Friedla«nder) changed the attitude to survivors’
accounts dramatically.70 Thus, it was only thirty years later, in his 1992 Perpetrators,
Victims and Bystanders, that Hilberg turned to studying Jewish survivors. However,
he stated that there was no ‘ironclad de¢nition of the term Jewish survivor’ in the
postwar period. Nevertheless, he observed ‘an unmistakable rank order among the
64
Notably, Des Pres discussed testimonies of the victims of National Socialist camps as well of the
Soviet Gulag system.
65
Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 49.
66
Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness.
67
Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 170.
68
We are following Dan Michman’s argument that while Hilberg’s book was only published in 1961,
most of his research had taken place during the 1950s. Dan Michman,‘‘‘The Holocaust’’ in the Eyes
of the Historians: The Problem of Conceptualization, Periodization, and Explanation’, in David
Bankier and Dan Michman (eds.) Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and
Achievements, Jerusalem 2008, pp. 9^40, here p. 11.
69
Hilberg, The Destruction of the EuropeanJews, p. v.
70
Norbert Frei and Wulf Kansteiner (eds.), Den Holocaust erza«hlen. Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher
Empirie und narrativer Kreativita«t, Go«ttingen 2013; Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei (eds.), Die Geburt
des Zeitzeugen nach 1945, Go«ttingen 2012; Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation:
Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, Cambridge^London 1992.
Jews who lived through the wartime Nazi years’.71 In this later and quite particular
view, three di¡erent groups of survivors existed in 1945. First were those, like the
Jews of Budapest, who lived openly under National Socialist occupation but were
not murdered because of a lack of transportation or manpower. The second group
consisted of those who survived in hiding or in resistance groups and, therefore, by
their active agency. The third group were those liberated from camps. According
to Hilberg, these three groups formed a hierarchy on the basis of ‘exposure to risk
and depth of su¡ering. Members of communities that were left intact and people
who continued to live in their own homes are hardly considered survivors at all. At

the other end of the scale, individuals who emerged from the woods or the camps
are the survivors par excellence’.72 Hilberg here o¡ers his answer to the question
‘Who is a survivor?’At the core of his classi¢cation lies the individual’s experience.
According to Hilberg, survivors were characteristically young and healthy and in
possession of resources, but, more importantly, they were realistic, decisive and
had a tenacious hold on life, three qualities that distinguished them from those
who perished.73 Because of these di¡erences Hilberg believes that survivors cannot
speak for the murdered. ‘Survivors who describe themselves as the few are not a
sample of the many who died.’ Furthermore, he argues that every survivor decided
to survive, and he dismisses the frequent mention of luck and chance.‘Yet survival
was not altogether random. [. . .] They were lucky after they had tried to save
themselves’.74 It is because Hilberg realized that survivors are rare exceptions, in
experience as well as in personality, that he did not integrate Jewish accounts of
survival into his research for many years.
During Hilberg’s lifetime, Holocaust research shifted from a focus on
perpetrators to a historiographical approach that prominently featured the voices
of Jewish victims. Like Des Pres, Hilberg considers the di¡erences between the
survivor and others. He distances survivors from the murdered and thereby
distinguishes them both from the collective referred to in the Yiddish discourse and
surviving witness.75 We have chosen Des Pres and Hilberg as examples because the
publication of their works constitute decisive moments in Holocaust historiography.
By 1990, leading historians of the Holocaust acknowledged the value of survivors’
accounts and, contra Hilberg, understood survivors as ‘representatives of the
71
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators,Victims, Bystanders:TheJewish Catastrophe 1933^1945, New York 1992, p. 187.‘For
decades after the publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, academic
Holocaust historiography in Europe and North America focused its analysis on the structures and
policies of the National-Socialist regime while largely barring the memories and experiences of
victims from the historiographical record’. (Jockusch, Historiography inTransit, p. 90).
72
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators,Victims, Bystander, p. 187.
73
Ibid., p. 188. While this perception may also be identi¢ed in survivors’ own narratives, there is also a
contrary argument that the best perished. These two discoursive ¢gurations in survivors’ narratives
of survival need closer consideration.
74
Ibid., pp. 188, 190.
75
Jockusch, Historiography inTransit, p. 91.
victims who did not survive’.76 The academic turn to survivors as eyewitnesses was
echoed by a growing public interest in the stories of survivors. The late 1980s and
early 1990s saw the beginning of a new attitude toward survivors as narrators of
their life stories and honoured individuals, as the opening quotation by Atina
Grossmann pointed out.
The Politico-Institutional Sphere

The politics of the concept of the survivor are shaped in the political arena by

parliaments, governments and organizations of all kinds. For example, survivors
formed their own political organizations each of which contributed to the content
of the concept. The She’erit Hapletah in the postwar DP camps is the ¢rst self-
identi¢ed collective of Holocaust survivors. The centres of this ‘remarkable society
in transition’77 were Munich, Frankfurt and West Berlin. According to the
historian Dan Diner, the Jewish DP period contributed to the ‘subjecti¢cation of
the Jews’, i.e., Jewish DPs’ understanding of themselves as a national collective and
not only a group of citizens of di¡erent states.78 Many of the She’erit Hapletah
believed that this newly de¢ned collective should establish its national home in
Palestine. Despite its diverse composition and overtly transitional character,
Jewish DP society functioned as a‘collective memory space’ (Erinnerungsraum) with
a central committee as its political authority, and newspapers, literature and
theatre as means of communication among its members.79 With the change of
location and language from Europe to other continents,‘She’erit Hapletah’ lost its
importance as a term for the collective of survivors. However, it took decades for
organizations of Holocaust survivors to establish themselves.80
The eventual emergence of Holocaust survivor movements was a reaction to the
widespread ignorance of Jewish su¡ering during the Second World War. Until the
late 1970s, it was mainly communist and anti-communist associations of former
resistance ¢ghters who dominated the memorialization of National Socialist
persecutees.81 These organizations, which called themselves ‘Committees’, focused
on the common experience of life in concentration camps, not on the persecution of
76
Omer Bartov (ed.), Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath: Rewriting Histories, London^New York
2000, p. 10.
77
Atina Grossmann and Tamar Lewinsky, ‘Erster Teil: 1945^1949çZwischenstation’, in Michael
Brenner (ed.), Geschichte derJuden in Deutschland von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft,
Mu«nchen 2012, p. 67.
78
Dan Diner, ‘Elemente der Subjektwerdung. Ju«dische DPs in historischem Kontext’, in Fritz Bauer
Institut (ed.), U«berlebt und unterwegs. Ju«dische Displaced Persons im Nachkriegsdeutschland, New York^
Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 230.
79
Tamar Lewinsky, Displaced Poets: Jiddische Schriftsteller im Nachkriegsdeutschland 1945^1951, Go«ttingen
2008, p. 110.
80
Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, pp. 203^4.
81
In June 1945, the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime was founded in Stuttgart. The
International Auschwitz-Committee resumed its activities in 1952 with a West-German branch
following in the mid-1980s. Henning Borggra«fe, Zwangsarbeiterentscha«digung. Vom Streit um ‘vergessene
Opfer’zur Selbstausso« hnung der Deutschen, Go«ttingen 2014.
speci¢c religions or ethnicities. Although Jews were active in some of these
committees, they did not stress theJewish experience.
This changed in the early 1980s as more Jewish survivors actively sought to
organize themselves as survivors of the Holocaust.82 These years coincided with
the ‘Era of the Witness’ and the new widespread use of ‘Holocaust’. Age and life
cycle were also a decisive factor in the evolution of survivor organizations. A
generation of Holocaust survivors, all born after World War I, had reached the age
of retirement by the 1980s. Unlike older generations of survivors, they had begun
their careers after the war and therefore their material claims against West

Germany were denied.83 We will discuss the topic of restitution in the next arena.
Their ¢ght for restitution seems to have motivated many Jewish survivors to join or
even co-found organizations of Holocaust survivors. More generally, the ¢ght in
the 1980s for material restitution from the German government stimulated
Holocaust survivors’desire for collective recognition, as we describe below.84
Another turning point in the history of organized survivor movements was the
First World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Israel, which took place in
June 1981 and brought together more than 10,000 survivors and their families.85
Joseph Berger, a journalist for the New YorkTimes who joined the World Gathering
with his parents, commented in his memoir that after ‘decades of indi¡erence, [the
survivors] are ready, ¢nally, to celebrate their own triumph, bitter as it is’.86 With
the creation of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1983, and
many similar organizations in Israel and other countries, survivors ¢nally entered
the stage of international, collective political action.87 Or, as survivor-activist
Roman Kent88 put it at the closing ceremony of the founding event of the
American Gathering inWashington, D.C.,‘We came here individually, but we must
leave together as determined as never before. [. . .] Together we are a moral,
82
This may be the reason why the organizers of the ¢rst World Gathering of Survivors in Jerusalem felt
the need to invite Jewish Holocaust survivors, a seemingly tautological expression.
83
Borggra«fe, Zwangsarbeiterentscha«digung, p. 94.
84
Together with the Centre of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel (established in 1987) the
American Gathering became members of the Claims Conference in 1989. The German government
has expended more than $60 billion in satisfaction of claims under the law negotiated by the
Claims Conference. http://www.claimscon.org/about/history/ (accessed 5 May 2015). Three
survivors’ organizations are today members of the JCC: American Gathering/Federation of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors (USA); American Council for Equal Compensation of Nazi Victims from
Austria (ACOA) (USA); and the Association of Israelis of Central European Origin (Israel).
85
We do not discuss the gendered notions of the concept survivor as noted beforehand. But it seems
important to note that rise of feminist Holocaust historiography came close to these gatherings and
there were womençsurvivors and second generationsçwho argued relentlessly for the inclusion of
gender into Holocaust Studies. See for example the classical text by Joan Ringelheim, ‘Women and
the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research’, in Signs, vol. 10, no. 4 (1985), pp. 741^761; for the
more recent discourse Stefanie Schu«ler-Springorum, Geschlecht und Di¡erenz, Paderborn 2014, pp.
110^127. It would be an interesting study to analyse the use of the term ‘survivor’ in the still
expanding ¢eld of feminist/gender^sensitive Holocaust Historiography.
86
Joseph Berger, Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust, Washington 2001, p. 322.
87
On the history of the AGJHS, see: http://amgathering.org/about-us/ (accessed 5 May 2015).
88
For his biography see Jeanette Friedman, ‘Roman R. Kent’, in Berenbaum, Encyclopaedia Judaica, pp.
77^78.
spiritual, and political force to be reckoned with both in American andJewish life’.89
After the She’erit Hapletah and decades of individualization, survivors had once
again formed a collective.90
The Hidden Children Foundation was founded in 1991 after a gathering of about
1,600 former hidden children had taken place in New York City.‘Hidden children’
describes the mostly Jewish children who were kept in secret, given to orphanages
and put into foster care. It was obvious to these survivors that their experiences
had never been acknowledged. Thus, for example, a survivor who as a persecuted
child was separated from his family and hidden with another family often felt

abandoned or trapped between two families and two religions. As the Hidden
Child Foundation puts it, ‘But we were thought to have been ‘‘too young’’ to be
a¡ected by our experiences, the ‘‘lucky ones’’çbecause we survived. This lack of
recognition compounded our trauma’.91 The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR),
founded in 1941, provides social services to Jewish victims of National Socialist
oppression living in the United Kingdom. It represents two groups, survivors and
refugees, and includes provisions for two distinct groups of former children of each
sort. According to membership criteria for child survivors,‘Membership is open to
those of Jewish heritage who lived under Nazi occupation during the period 1939^
1945 and who were sixteen years and under at the end of WWII. Our membership
includes children who survived in ghettos, in hiding, on the run and in camps’.92
Together these two organizations illustrate the lack of consensus among survivors
over who is to count as one. While the AJR explicitly draws a distinction between
refugees and survivors, the Hidden Children Foundation fought for the
recognition of all of their members as survivors.
In a new development, survivor status has come to be understood as part of a
family’s heritage, which can be handed down. As a result of the consequently
increasing number of ‘survivors’, the AJR and the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors have expanded their missions to include the descendants of
survivors. According to their most prominent spokesman, Menachem Z.
Rosensaft, descendants of survivors call themselves Second and Third
Generation,93 or 2G and 3G.94 In his writings and in interviews, Rosensaft claims
that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors feel an intense bond
with the history of the Holocaust. The most recent illustration of this is a volume
edited by Rosensaft that includes the re£ections of children and grandchildren. He
89
Borggra«fe, Zwangsarbeiterentscha«digung, p. 96.
90
The early 1980s was a period when the survivors became very visible in the American discourse,
especially as advocates of their own history. The most outspoken activist, Elie Wiesel, became the
Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980. In the 1990s the
genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia led to further visibility of survivors, especially as moral ¢gures.
91
http://archive.adl.org/hidden/ (accessed 5 April 2015).
92
http://www.ajr.org.uk/childsurvivors (accessed 5 April 2015).
93
The AJR is very precise when referring to descendants of refugees and survivors.
94
Rosensaft was born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in 1948 and serves as Chairman
of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. See his comment on the
terms 2G and 3G in a interview on: http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/
post/interview-with-menachem-z-rosensaft/ (accessed 5 May 2015).
explicitly links the experiences of Holocaust survivors and their descendants with
the experiences of other genocide victims and theirs.95 Like the United States
Holocaust and Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Visual History Archive
(discussed below), Rosensaft looks for lessons from the Holocaust that can help
victims of other mass atrocities and their families.96 His inclusion of children and
grandchildren into the collective of Holocaust survivors is an example of how the
present use of the term ‘survivor’ refers to a newly broad range of Jewish
experience, which includes the wartime su¡ering of concentration camp inmates
and refugees and the later experiences of their o¡spring.97

Survivor organizations and institutions vary in their political goals and thus are
far from homogenous. In mission statements and self-de¢nitions, the survivors
themselves give meaning to the word. The resulting constant re-de¢nition of the
term‘survivor’ indicates that there is still no common understanding of its content.
The Restitution Sphere

One’s eligibility for restitution depends on one’s legal status as a survivor. As legal
recognition may entitle a person to make ¢nancial claims, governments,
organizations like the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC), and judges, actively
attempt to specify who is to count as a survivor. The ¢rst act of restitution for
victims of National Socialist persecution was the Reparations Agreement between
Israel and West Germany in 1952. Representing 23 Jewish organizations, the JCC,
which had been founded one year earlier, was a third party to the negotiations. In
the decades that followed, the JCC was in£uential in shaping Germany’s policies of
95
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Re£ections of Children and Grandchildren of
Holocaust Survivors, Woodstock, VT 2014. See also Arlene Stein, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their
Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, Oxford^New York 2014; and Esther Jilovsky, Jordana
Silverstein, and David Slucki (eds.), In the Shadows of Memory: The Third Generation and the Holocaust,
London^Portland, OR 2015.
96
‘It is my fervent hope that [the book] will comfort and inspire the victims and descendants of victims
of other genocides and atrocities. After all, if the survivors could emerge from the horrors of the
Shoah 70 years ago and [. . .] chose to rebuild their lives in new, not always welcoming
surroundings and to start new families, and that we, their children and grandchildren, consider
their legacy to be not a burden but a hallowed birthright, then there is no reason why the victims and
the descendants of victims of genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia or Darfur, or of atrocities in Syria or
elsewhere, cannot do so as well’. Rosensaft,‘Interview with Jewish Book Council’ (see interview note
94). Note also the very wide range of descendants included; this is an extremely broad de¢nition.
97
A converse example of the increasing diversi¢cation of the collective of Holocaust survivors is the
parents of the above-mentioned journalist Joseph Berger, who tells their story in his contribution to
Rosensaft’s volume. Although they had both escaped from Germany to the Soviet Union, they were
imprisoned in forced-labour camps. As Berger notes in his own memoir, his parents never
considered themselves Holocaust survivors, and, yet, the Holocaust, though not a personal
experience of theirs, still marks the turning point in his family’s story. Looking back at his parents’
life, Berger describes them as having gone beyond the survivor label. ‘They are survivors and
refugees, sure, but they have long moved beyond those shorthand labels, with their intimations of
marooned castaways or vagabonds, to something more accomplished’. Berger, Displaced Persons,
p. 343.
Wiedergutmachung (reparations) and de¢ning speci¢c groups of Jewish persecutees as
eligible for restitution.98
A landmark in the history of German restitution was the Federal Republic of
Germany’s Restitution Law (BEG) of 1953.99 The BEG does not de¢ne ‘survivor’; it
employs the word ‘persecutee’ instead. And as the law not only addresses survivors
but also allows the relatives of the murdered to make claims on their behalf, it
commonly employs the general term ‘victim’. ‘A victim of National Socialist
persecution is one who was persecuted because of political opposition against
National Socialism or because of race, belief or ideology by national socialist acts

of violence and thereby su¡ered loss of life, damage to body, health, liberty,
property, wealth, to his professional or economical advancement (persecutee)’.100
Political debates over newly de¢ned groups of eligible victims constantly rewrite
the history of restitution. The Jewish Claims Conference has contributed to the
shaping of these debates for over six decades. Today, criteria for survivor status,
which determine eligibility to receive funds distributed by the Claims Conference,
are di¡erent for each of its programmes. For example, the Central and Eastern
European Fund speci¢es that one is eligible only if one ‘were imprisoned for at least
3 months in a ghetto as de¢ned by the German Ministry of Finance’ or ‘were in
hiding for at least 6 months, under inhumane conditions, without access to the
outside world in German Nazi occupied territory’. The di¡erent lengths of time
that survivors had to endure di¡erent modes of persecution constitute a hierarchy
of survivors and types of survival. Interestingly disconnected from this hierarchy,
those who ‘were a fetus during the time that their mother su¡ered persecution as
described above’ are eligible for most Claims Conference programmes. The
inclusion of unborn persecutees into the extension of ‘survivor’ is the most recent
broadening of the term.101
Two global players, the German government and the Claims Conference, have
dominated the restitution sphere. Both participated in negotiating a system of
98
Jose¤ Brunner, Constantin Goschler, and Norbert Frei (eds.), Die Globalisierung der Wiedergutmachung.
Politik, Moral, Moralpolitik, Go«ttingen 2013.
99
The BEG was not the ¢rst restitution law in postwar Germany. Prior to the federal BEG, several
regional initiatives had been implemented. The ¢rst restitution law was enforced in 1953. Two
amendments in cooperation with the JCC followed in 1956 and 1965.
100
The German text reads as follows: ‘Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung ist, wer aus
Gru«nden politischer Gegnerschaft gegen den Nationalsozialismus oder aus Gru«nden der Rasse, des
Glaubens oder der Weltanschauung durch nationalsozialistische Gewaltmanahmen verfolgt
worden ist und hierdurch Schaden an Leben, Ko«rper, Gesundheit, Freiheit, Eigentum, Vermo«gen,
in seinem beru£ichen oder in seinem wirtschaftlichen Fortkommen erlitten hat (Verfolgter)’.
101
The most recent examples of restitution claims are aimed at the compensation of former ghetto
inmates under German occupation (Ghetto pension) and the former Displaced Persons who had
worked in occupied postwar Germany (DP pension). For the German discussion on the ghetto
pensions, see Kristin Platt, Bezweifelte Erinnerung, verweigerte Glaubhaftigkeit. U«berlebende des Holocaust
in den Ghettorenten-Verfahren, Mu«nchen 2012; for DP pensions, see Ju«rgen Zarusky, ‘Der Streit
um die DP-Renten. Holocaust-U«berlebende im Labyrinth von Aktenvernichtung und
Geschichtskonstruktion’, in Sybille Steinbacher (ed.), Transit US-Zone. U«berlebende des Holocaust im
Bayern der Nachkriegszeit, Go«ttingen 2013, pp. 184^206.
¢nancial recognition for survivors that has made explicit de¢nitions of the term
necessary.
The Memory Sphere

Palestine/Israel and the United States became home to most Holocaust survivors
after 1945. As Boaz Cohen, Hasia R. Diner, and others, have shown, there has
never been complete silence about the Holocaust in either. However, the memory
boom arose with the Era of the Witness. And as survivors were ¢nally

acknowledged to be individuals with unique experiences, which should be
narrated, recorded, and exhibited, survivors in Israel faced the challenge of
making their voices heard in the country’s early discourse on the Holocaust.
Israel’s central site for Holocaust research, Yad Vashem, became an important
locus for debates on subjects related to survivors, such as the need for research,
remembrance and appreciation. As Boaz Cohen has shown, a group of survivor-
historians and other survivor-activists formed a ‘cadre [. . .] that was prepared to
re-open the wounds of the past, research them, and learn their lessons’.102 Though
a diverse group, survivor-activists shared a number of demands. For example, they
successfully lobbied for the introduction of a National Holocaust Remembrance
Day in Israel (1951) and over the course of the 1950s gained in£uence on Yad
Vashem’s activities.103 Survivor-historians published their ¢rst outline for a future
Holocaust research agenda in Yad Vashem’s journal Yedi’otYad Vashem, in which they
strongly advocated a Judeo-centric104 perspective on the Holocaust. Moreover, by
describing Holocaust research as a ‘sacred obligation’, survivor-historians at Yad
Vashem expressed the need to make it a site not only of research but also of
remembrance.105 As Cohen concludes, public pressure from survivors eventually
led to the resignation of Yad Yashem’s director Ben Zion Dinur, whose focus on
academic research of the Holocaust had caused widespread frustration among
them. In 1959, he was replaced by Aryeh Kubovy, who ‘committed Yad Vashem to a
policy of commemoration and remembrance which assuaged the concerns of
survivors. The survivor-historians were vindicated. Yad Vashem was moving in
their direction’.106
102
Boaz Cohen, ‘Holocaust Survivors and Early Israeli Holocaust Research and Commemoration: A
Reappraisal’, in Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds.), How the Holocaust
Looks Now: International Perspectives, London 2006, pp. 139^149, here p. 147.
103
Cohen,‘Holocaust Survivors’, pp. 139, 144.
104
In 1959, survivor-historian Philip Friedman distinguished between a Holocaust research using
Jewish sources (Judeo-centric) as opposed to writing the history of the Holocaust exclusively with
the help of perpetrator sources (Nazi-centric). See Philip Friedman, ‘Problems of Research on the
European Jewish Catastrophe’, in Yad Vashem Studies, 3 (1959), p. 33. See also Boaz Cohen, ‘Setting
the Agenda of Holocaust Research: Discord at Yad Vashem in the 1950s’, in Bankier, Holocaust
Historiography in Context, pp. 255^292, here p. 264.
105
Cohen,‘Setting the Agenda’, pp. 258^264.
106
Cohen,‘Holocaust Survivors’, p. 147.
A few years before the Eichmann trial inJerusalem, survivor-activists had raised
their voices and created a survivor public that by the end of the 1950s could not be
ignored in Israel. Today,Yad Vashem de¢nes ‘survivor’quite broadly.107
Now is the era of the Americanization of the Holocaust (Michael Berenbaum),
that is, the process of making the history of the Holocaust more ‘accessible and
relevant for a broad American audience by using it as a means to teach
fundamental American values’.108 Two major players in the memory sphere have
shaped this process in the United States and had a signi¢cant in£uence on the
concept of the survivor: the Holocaust oral history archives and the United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum. Those institutions were results of a transition in the
1980s between provisional and authorized memory (Roskies/Diamant) of the
Holocaust by the end of which survivors had become honoured and respected
authorities of history, and the American public had become more interested in
listening to witnesses’accounts.
Two important collection projects of the time were the Fortuno¡ Archive at Yale
University and the Visual History Archive (VHA) of the Shoah Foundation of the
University of Southern California (USC). The latter is one of the most striking
examples of a collective e¡ort to record testimony. It applies a very broad
understanding of the term ‘survivor’. Every Jew interviewed is referred to as a
survivor, unless he or she was a member of one of the liberating armies or
participated in the war crime trials. That is, a survivor is anyone who was in
Europe sometime between 1933 and 1945 and the object of some kind of National
Socialist persecution.
A survivor is anyone who su¡ered and survived persecution for racial, religious,
sexual, physical, or political reasons while under Nazi or Axis control between 1933
and 8 May, 1945; or who was forced to live clandestinely; or to £ee Nazi or Axis
onslaught during the war in order to avoid imminent persecution. A person is a
survivor if he/she was alive at the point of liberation on May 8, 1945. A person is a
survivor if they died before May 8,1945, but successfully £ed from German or Axis
countries.109
This inclusive de¢nition illustrates a general tendency to extend the label
‘survivor’ to members of groups not previously considered as such.
In contrast,Yale’s Fortuno¡ Archive regards interviewees not just as survivors but
as people whose lives continued. Many of their interviewees who had luckily
escaped the National Socialist threat, however, subvert the Shoah Foundation’s
107
‘At Yad Vashem, we de¢ne Shoah survivors as Jews who lived for any amount of time under Nazi
domination, direct or indirect, and survived. This includes French, Bulgarian and Romanian Jews
who spent the entire war under anti-Jewish terror regimes but were not all deported, as well as
Jews who left Germany in the late 1930s. From a larger perspective, other destitute Jewish refugees
who escaped their countries £eeing the invading German army, including those who spent years
and in many cases died deep in the Soviet Union, may also be considered Holocaust survivors. No
historical de¢nition can be completely satisfactory’. (http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/resources/
names/faq.asp#) (accessed 5 May 2016).
108
Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar E¡orts to Experience the Holocaust, Ithaca^London, p. 11.
109
USC Shoah Foundation (ed.), Cataloguing Guidelines, Los Angeles, 2006, p 13.
identity criteria. For, even though they demand recognition of their experiences as
exiles, refugees, or participants in the Kindertransport, they acknowledge that they
were not in camps, ghettos or in hiding and, so, exclude themselves from the
hierarchy of survivors. Eliyana R. Adler rightly observed that the opportunity
given to each survivor at the end of the interview to send a message to the future is
a moment for identi¢cation with the complex collective of survivors.110 In many
cases, interviewees who are not among Hilberg’s ‘survivors par excellence’ are
confused by the question and unsure about how to identify themselves.
As for the USHMM in Washington, D.C., it is the most visible product of the

Americanization of the Holocaust.111 The opening of the museum in 1993, after 15
years of preparation, marks the advent of the survivor as an honoured individual
authorized to speak about the Holocaust and convey his or her experiences to
future generations. Situated on the National Mall among other sites of national
remembrance, the USHMM takes survivors and witnesses as intermediaries
between the dead and the living, more speci¢cally, between European victims and
American visitors to the museum. In its work with survivors and witnesses, the
museum applies an open and not exclusively Jewish de¢nition of ‘survivor’. ‘The
Museum honors as Survivors and Victims any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who
were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious,
ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between
1933 and 1945’.112 Like the Visual History Archive, the museum intentionally
de¢nes ‘survivor’ as broadly as possible, in sharp contrast to the de¢nitions of
previous decades. The museum’s agenda of linking the past with the future, which
echoes Berenbaum’s Americanization of the Holocaust, can be seen in its First
Person Podcast Series, in which it makes excerpts from interviews with survivors
accessible on its website. ‘More than 70 years after the Holocaust, hatred,
antisemitism, and genocide still threaten our world. The life stories of Holocaust
survivors transcend the decades and remind us of the constant need to be vigilant
citizens and to stop injustice, prejudice, and hatred wherever and whenever they
occur’.113 The museum’s attitude towards Holocaust survivors as moral authorities
may not be applicable in all discursive arenas, but it represents one important path
that Jewish survivors have taken from being members of the She’erit Hapletah
collective to being respected and honoured individual survivors.
In considering the memory sphere, we have shown how the broadening of the
term ‘survivor’ was in a dialectical relationship with the practices of di¡erent
memorial institutions. A survivor is no longer only a camp survivor but every Jew
who lived on mainland Europe between 1933 and 1945. In a way, this discourse
110
Eliyana R. Adler, ‘Crossing Over: Exploring the Borders of Holocaust Testimony’, in Yad Vashem
Studies, 43 (2015). In press.
111
Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, p. 11.
112
http://www.ushmm.org/remember/the-holocaust-survivors-and-victims-resource-center/survivors-
and-victims (accessed 23 April 2015).
113
http://www.ushmm.org/information/museum-programs-and-calendar/¢rst-person-program/¢rst-
person-podcast (accessed 23 April 2015).
echoes the early postwar discussion on the She’erith Hapletah: Does the collective
include every surviving Jew or only those who had had a certain sort of experience?
CONCLUSION
In this article, we have traced some of the genealogy of the concept of the survivor.
As we have shown, the meaning of the term evolved within a transnational
framework of welfare and compensation schemes as well as public and scholarly

discourse. During this process, a number of di¡erent terms coalesced into the
Americanized term ‘survivor’, which mirrors the shift in languages for Holocaust
historiography as a whole. This change resembles the development of associated
terms, such as ‘khurbn’, ‘Holocaust’, and ‘Shoah’.
As for the politics of the conceptual history of the survivor, we have identi¢ed
three central results. First, the concept has been shaped by the constant dynamics
between the individual and the collective. Second, the number of survivors has
long been increasing due to the inclusion of more groups into the collective. Finally,
the recognition by others of being a survivor has been and continues to be a matter
of negotiation.
With regard to the ¢rst, we have discussed two intertwined processes. By 1945,
survivors had lived through years of National Socialist persecution that aimed at
destroying their individuality, and in the process of recuperation survivors formed
a new collective that integrated the individual into a community and a tradition.
In the decades following the Second World War, and especially in the 1980s, the
collective lost its centrality and the individual stood at centre stage. This result of
the Americanization of the Holocaust and the establishment of Holocaust
education is most obvious in oral history video archive projects. But there is a
dialectic here to be noted. Even though it is the individual survivor who speaks, she
or he is linked to the collective of witnesses and the collective of victims who
perished. In the postwar process of living on (Ruth Klu«ger’s ‘weiterleben’),
individuals overcame the status of passive victims and were transformed into
active survivors, which is the second of the intertwined processes. We need to
address the aporia of our approach. In focussing on the ‘Americanization’, we
narrowed our argumentation towards it.
Second, and surprisingly, as the Holocaust receded further into the past, as more
groups sought inclusion into the extension of the concept survivor, which turned
attention to their su¡ering and their experiences of the Holocaust. The status of
survivor, and the scope of the term, has repeatedly been extended by the claims of
Jewish organizations, national governments and other agents.
The third result pertains to the recognition of Holocaust survivors as people with
historical authority. The process through which a growing number of Holocaust
survivors are recognized as moral witnesses is indicated by David G. Roskies and
Naomi Diamant. ‘There was a time when the heroes of the Holocaust were the
¢ghters and resisters, each remembered by name and political a⁄liation. Today
they are more likely to be‘‘Everysurvivor’’, whose very survival is heroism enough’.114
Today, survivors have become recognized exactly for their survival and their value
as keepers of memory. By reconstructing important aspects of the conceptual
history of the survivor, we can see how a key concept of Holocaust or Shoah Studies
was formed and thereby better understand its usage in di¡erent discursive arenas.
Furthermore, we have shown that the concept has always been and continues to be
not univocal but contradictory and full of ambivalence and nuance.
Being a survivor is not only a concept and a discursive ¢gure but also a legal status
entitling its holder to compensation as well as a lauded social and moral position.

Over the course of seven decades, this status has developed in di¡erent national
contexts and with the participation of numerous agents. Its future meaning in the
di¡erent arenas of discourse is still to be negotiated.
114
Roskies, Holocaust Literature, p. 2.

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Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 61, 57^82 doi:10.

Survivor:Towards a Conceptual History1

BY ALINA BOTHE AND MARKUS NESSELRODT

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ABOUT THIS YEAR BOOK SECTION

I. FROM MANY TO ONE: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE EVOLUTION

The meaning of the term ‘survivor’ is linked to the evolution of a transnational

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When it was introduced in November 1944 by the Supreme Headquarters Allied

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Iberlebene and Sheyres Hapleyte

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Examples of the meaning of ‘survivor’ can be detected in at least four discursive

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The Academic Sphere

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The Politico-Institutional Sphere

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The Restitution Sphere

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The Memory Sphere

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