Author: Carli Snyder, American Social History Project, City Universty of New York

Contents:

	Introduction (p. 73)
	Scholarly and Political Contexts of the 1990s (p. 76)
	“Empathetic Guidance” (p. 77)
	Memories of Rape in California-Based Interview (p. 80)
	Rape as a Topic in Trainings and Interviews (p. 83)
	Conclusion (p. 88)
	Notes (p. 89)
	Bibliography (p. 94)

Extract: »This chapter focuses primarily on the first Shoah Foundation interviewer training held in Los Angeles, California, in July 1994 and the interviews conducted by interviewers who were present at this training. Initially, trainers did not mention rape as a possible topic interviewers might encounter. This meant that when survivors shared memories about rape perpetrated by Red Army soldiers, interviewers were not necessarily prepared for these stories and needed to respond spontaneously. Then, the chapter turns to subsequent English-language interviewer trainings that took place in North American cities in which sexual violence was named as a pos sible topic. However, interviewers were still not trained to address it in a specific way. The chapter then highlights patterns in interviewer-interviewee interactions in English-language interview segments indexed in the VHA with the tag “liberator sexual assaults” in which survivors spoke about their own experiences of rape, or their fear of it, at the hands of the Red Army and how interviewers responded. This organizational structure serves to highlight the distinctions between how the Shoah Foundation communicated their methodology to interviewers-in-training and how interviewers later implemented and adapted the methodology during interviews in various ways.
I argue that descriptions of rape during liberation conflicted with the training interviewers received for two main reasons: First, interviewers were not trained to ask questions about sexual violence in general. Second, they were trained to frame survivors’ memories of liberation in an idealized way, so that it would contribute to a sense of resolution to their narrative. To understand divergent interviewer responses to these memories, it is useful to pay attention to the contextual elements behind each interview, including the training the interviewer received, their personal background and experience levels, as well as the contemporaneous state of discussions of sexual(ized) violence more broadly. Dawn Skorczewski’s work on the “intersubjective field” between a survivor and interviewer is instructive in this regard.« (Source: Article, p. 74-75)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Russia / History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953) | Genocide: The Holocaust / USC Shoah Foundation | Sex and the law: Rape / Sexual violence during the Holocaust