Proyecto de Investigación: Experiencias y trayectorias individuales de sobrevivientes del Holocausto en América Latina: Un estudio comparativo de Chile, Colombia y México.

Much has been written on the Holocaust and Latin America, especially about the immigration policies of different national governments. Less, however, is known about the lives of the victims-survivors who left their places of origin and the sites of murder to resettle in new places. This research project has a comparative Latin American focus. It studies the individual experiences and trajectories of survival, mobility and integration by Holocaust survivors who settled in three Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia and Mexico. It seeks to examine how and why Holocaust survivors dealt with their survival in similar but also different Latin American settings? To what extent their trajectories of mobility and the particular national context provided opportunities, or constraints, for integration and healing? How did survivors understand their survival as framed by their age, gender, Holocaust experience and local frameworks -including language, cultural norms, and the politics of memory. This research project analyzes 75 testimonies of survivors found in the USC-Shoah Foundation`s digital collection: 25 for each one of the three countries. It combines oral history analysis, as well as tools of the Social Sciences -such as circular migration plots and text mining- to analyze the survivors` post war experiences as recalled by them. In this way, this project places the survivor and his/her testimony as the main unit of analysis and source of knowledge of post-Holocaust Jewish life.