Late Bystander Testimonies in East Galicia: Between Memory, Identity, and Loyalties

Abstract

This article examines the advantages and limits of late non-Jewish witness testimonies in Holocaust research. Grounding my conclusions in more than 150 biographical interviews conducted in small communities of contemporary Western Ukraine (historically Eastern Galicia) in 2017–2019, I dwell on the specificity of such sources and offer guidelines on how to work with them. As I show, late witness testimonies typically consist of multiple layers that can only be understood when analyzed within the wider life story of the interviewee, and when read against a deep knowledge of local history. When following these introduced guidelines, late non-Jewish witness interviews can be an extremely valuable source, especially for rural communities where no Jewish testimonies are available. This source allows us to further examine the complexity of identity and belonging, estrangement and intimacy, in ethnically mixed communities during World War II and immediately after, but also memories of the nonexisting world today.