“Eu vivi visceralmente esse sentimento de perda” : pós-memória e narrativas dos filhos de sobreviventes do Holocausto em Belo Horizonte (1945-2019)

Abstract

This dissertation proposes to analyze the narratives of 22 children of Holocaust survivors who, after the war, settled in the city of Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais state, Brazil. These children, here called “Second Generation”, were interviewed using the methods of oral history in the context of the project “Herdeiros da Memória”, carried out by the Instituto Histórico Israelita Mineiro (IHIM), between 2017 and 2019. As oral narratives, interviews are the result of the imbrication of several times and layers of memory. In a first layer, the subjects we are looking at experienced, since childhood, a contact with their parents' past in a particular way, marked by the language of the family and everyday life: living with survival itself, the symptoms, nightmares, manias and traumatic remnants that do not need words to be expressed and felt. The second layer that makes up the imaginary about the Holocaust shared by the group resides in their experience as Jews who lived and still live in Belo Horizonte, experiencing to a greater or lesser degree the spaces, institutions and sociability landmarks of this “Jewish community”. Added to these two is a third layer, composed of the collective memory that is expressed through different spheres of public space, highlighting the legal sphere, through judgments and processes; the institutional sphere, through commemorations, rituals, memorials, museums and places of memory; and the cultural sphere, through films, literature and representations. Collectively operated memory work has placed this past in a universal and paradigmatic position, which feeds on familiar memories at the same time as it informs them. Each of these layers, moreover, is permeated by temporality and the changes imprinted by the more than seventy years that have passed since the end of the genocide. What is observed, then, is that such narratives are the result of the intertwining of these layers and temporalities, articulated in the subjective elaboration of the past and in each subject's self-narrative, composing what we understand as second generation memory, or postmemory, as formulated by Marianne Hirsch in The Generation of Postmemory.