‘My family wouldn’t have survived, and I would not be here’: Juxtaposing counterfactual and actual pasts and presents in narratives of rescue by Aristides de Sousa Mendes

Abstract

This paper examines the alignment of multiple chronotopes in narrative discourse about Holocaust rescue. Participants talked about actual alongside hypothetical or counterfactual events surrounding their families’ rescue from Nazi-occupied Europe in the summer of 1940, thanks to then-illegal visas from ‘righteous gentile’ Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Specifically, participants recounted how their families were actually rescued, and what would have happened without Sousa Mendes’s actions (i.e. their family’s likely deportation and murder). They calibrated actual and hypothetical narrated chronotopes to multiple ‘present’ chronotopes: (a) that of the speech event; (b) that of speakers’ ongoing survival and their family members’ existence; and (c) that of timeless, nomic truths which narrators take the narrative to illustrate. Such alignments and disjunctures of multiple pasts and presents constitute a complex type of interdiscursivity, or more specifically, heterochronicity.