Collaborative Interpretation of Survivors’ Accounts: A Radical Challenge to Conventional Practice

Interpretation of Holocaust survivors’ accounts based on one-time ‘testimonies’, without knowing the multiple versions of a survivor’s account, its permutations in time and interpersonal space, and in the absence of engaging a survivor’s own reflections on those permutations, can lead us seriously astray. Based on his nearly 40 years of interviewing survivors, and his background as a clinical psychologist, the author argues that interviews with survivors grounded in sustained and collaborative relationships often yield different, and more reliable, interpretations than those that emerge from conventional approaches. A close analysis of one particular survivor’s retelling – part of whose ‘testimony’ has often been interpreted by others – is used to document these assertions.