Critical Discourse Analysis of Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies

The extreme nature of the Holocaust forced those who survived to cope with the long-lasting effects of their experience – even after the liberation. For the Holocaust survivors, the extreme reality they endured separated them from a normal reality. After the liberation, the survivors were forced to live among those who had not experienced the camps and whose efforts to understand the survivors’ experiences were unsuccessful. Because of this divide, the “other” identity the victims were assigned to in the Holocaust perpetuated itself into the present. Further, this thesis study examines six audio-visual testimonies of Jewish Holocaust survivors to identify patterns in trauma discourse and reveal how the “other” identity is reflected in such discourse. A Faircloughian approach to critical discourse analysis will be the chosen methodology for this study. Through this appraisal framework, my study will explore the commonalities found in trauma discourse; it will identify the linguistic devices that are used in trauma discourse and recognize what functions they serve. The analyses of the testimonies uncovered that fragmentation in discourse can be associated with the degree of trauma the victim experienced. That is, depending on the how chronologically sound or disjointed a speaker’s discourse is, it can be telling in how traumatic the event was to the individual. This study also revealed that some events that would ordinarily be traumatic to the “normal” individual, seemingly undisturbed the Holocaust survivors’ discourse; this too evidenced the divide between the Holocaust survivor to the “normal” world, thus perpetuating their “other” identity. In a similar vein, by examining the use of comparative devices – although serving multiple functions in discourse – they produce the same identity representation of being the “other”