Dignity and Defiance: The Resilience to Repair and Rebuild in Response to Despair

In this paper, I discuss the life histories remembered and reconstructed by Holocaust survivors to understand their personal struggle with the legacy of historical trauma and the issues that arose from it: issues around identity, victimizastion, meaning, and grief. In particular, I am interested in how testimonies of survivors reveal the working through of the burden of such legacies, as well as the negotiation of how to represent their dignity and defiance in the shadow of despair and desolation. Through the research-informed case studies reported in this paper, marshaling and mobilizing testimony is shown to be a useful theoretical and therapeutic strategy. Based on this research, we learn that the exploration of personal testimony and its intergenerational transmission can provide a direction for understanding and growth by demarcating emergent values and actions as adaptive outcomes of traumatic experiences. In addition, the mutative engagement by the author with the papers and personel at various historical sites and libraries in Europe, Israel, and the United States points to the powerful personal and professional potential of conducting research at the source, in order to assess the reliability of memory and the reimagining of history to illustrate the communicative lessons of trauma and resilience. Moreover, these theoretical and methodological innovations have implications for other communities, as well.