Women’s Testimonies

Chairperson - Rebecca Rose

Rational:

The project of the Women's Testimonies Group foregrounds the role of women's testimony - (understood broadly as written, oral, and visual) - to expose students to the historically "inconspicuous" feminine experience of the Holocaust and to link women's testimony to "performative acts of translation and survival." We will show that as "acts of translation," women's testimonies were instrumental to the potential transformation of individual experiences of imprisonment and persecution into a plurality of proactive acts of freedom. In addition, we will present women's testimonies as instrumental to the intergenerational survival of cultural practices, symbolic action, and intergenerational memories.

Goals:

Emotional learning through Testimonies to enable empathetic engagement.
To articulate a parallel between Women’s Holocaust testimony and current gender studies/genocide studies. Everyday experiences of trauma.
Focus on women’s stories, which resonate with current women’s daily life dilemmas.

Target Population:

High School and College Students.

Expected materials:

Videos testimonies; diaries; artwork by women prisoners; songs written either in captivity or by survivors; possible film excerpts

Geographical focus:

Holocaust in the Balkans and Transnistria