Page - 355 - in Mauthausen und die nationalsozialistische Expansionsund Verfolgungspolitik, Volume 1

Auswahlregeln für die MSDP-Videoausstellung «Mauthausen erzählen/Narrating Mauthausen» | 355 stand survival emphasising factors like age, education, language, physical and psychi- cal force, the ability to learn, earlier persecution experience, jobs, friendship, solidarity, militancy and the willingness to survive. We also should not follow the «lies» presented after 1945. Irina Scherbakowa argued that life stories which the Russians and Ukrainians willingly told are structured by the narratives and often refer to similar situations. As «peaks» of the narratives often occur birth day, family, first day in camp, humiliations, hunger, dogs, liberation, etc. Von Plato argued that the «keys» like explaining persecution and «guilt of surviving» (Primo Levi) are especially important for Jewish and «Gypsies», and they are different from country to country ; one should not ask what is typical but what is specific for each country. Halbmayr argued that life stories often do not start with birth but with imprisonment and that there are stronger differences between persons (according to their skill and experience in story telling) than between nations (in the Ravensbrück case). Albert Lichtblau stressed the importance of the individuality and the free reflections in the narratives, often jumping forward or backwards in time. Psallidas reported about the Greek case that many of his interviewees refused to tell their life story and family, espe- cially to foreigners, and that for farmers from Crete, for example, life (and stories about their experience) was only important (and worth to be told) when War and persecution began. Thus, he favoured to present only accounts about the time of imprisonment and not the whole life story. Predrag Marković pointed at the difficulty for the single regional co-ordinators to de- cide about the specificity of the interviews, which decision should rather be done by the «centre» ; he demanded not only country criteria but also the attractiveness of tes- timonies for the public as important criteria. He also proposed for a better comparison to compose. Kasia Madoń-Mitzner raised the problem of quantitative representativeness, which she feels not being fulfilled in the Polish case, and she warned of reproducing stereotypes which could be better applied to the way of story-telling. She also gave examples how to explain the length of survival of Polish inmates in Gusen under extreme conditions and that interviewees having frequently expanded their life stories so much on the pre-history that, then, they were too tired to tell about their Mauthausen experience in length. Because of this, she raised the question if it might be possible to repeat inter- views. (This solution was ruled out as a norm by the MSDP team, and Botz answered that the exhibition does not aim at showing representative interviews but examples and different stories.) Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY 4.0