Our volunteer writing partners are people of different ages, life stages and religious, cultural and education backgrounds. They share the desire to learn more about the Holocaust and support survivors in telling their stories in the manner that was meaningful to them.
The experience of writing with Sustaining Memories was a wild array of adjectives and emotions. Meeting, interviewing and getting to know my survivor partner was deeply moving and educational, but also disturbing and overwhelming. Where to start? How to do her story justice? How to react as she tells me about these dreadful experiences? How much and when do I probe? These problems were compounded by a slight language barrier (English was her fifth or sixth language) and the usual difficulties that come with age (hearing loss, sickness, memory lapses).
Writing the manuscript was another monumental task – I knew that transcription was a long and monotonous process from my time in journalism as an undergrad, but I had never had to deal with such huge quantities of tape. I had over 11 hours of material from interviews and video documents, some of it repetitive, some of it contradictory, all of it important. There was also a huge amount of existing literature and data both online and in libraries in which to read, sort through and find relevant information.
The process was stressful, time-consuming and exhausting, but I also feel that the resulting memoir is one thing that is important and good that I helped bring into the world. I’ve never in my life felt like I was doing something more worthwhile. In some ways, it feels weird to write so much about my experience helping with the memoir, almost like I’m trying to appropriate her experiences. I hope it goes without saying, but I am under no illusions about how lucky I am, how minor these “difficulties” were in the larger scheme of things and how much of a privilege it was to be involved.
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