On the accounts of former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps in the context of time, space and circumstances in which they were recorded (or on the benefits of oral history)

One of the main objections against oral history interviews is their retrospective character – the distance from the time of events which are covered by the interviews. While it is not the distance itself that is the issue but its deforming potential: the susceptibility of memory to later, in relation to the discussed events, influences. Another issue is the influence of an interview situation itself, relation between the person documenting interview / the researcher and the so-called witness to history. The text starts with those theoretical and methodological questions and considers them on the example of concrete, empirical material. The material is the so-called representations of former Auschwitz prisoners gathered through decades by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as well as biographic and narrative interviews with the same people recorded in years 2002–2003 for the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project and archived in the Oral History Archive of the Karta Center and the History Meeting House. Thorough comparison of both accounts from the same person delivered orally at a different time, place and in a different context (biographic, social, historical) conducted by different institutions and on the basis of different methodologies allows one to analyze the influence of different contexts on the content of the stories told. The effect of those analyses is a new picture of dependencies between the memory of experience of there and then and the entanglement of stories of this experience with the here and now reality. This picture seems quite distant both from naive realism as well as – although today it may seem quite surprising – from extreme constructivism. Analyzed accounts prove to be quite stable and resistant to the lapse of time as well as the current context of an interview situation. In this last regard, on the basis of analyzed sources, one can formulate some methodological postulates related to its impact. One of the main objections against oral history interviews is their retrospective character – the distance from the time of events which are covered by the interviews. While it is not the distance itself that is the issue but its deforming potential: the susceptibility of memory to later, in relation to the discussed events, influences. Another issue is the influence of an interview situation itself, relation between the person documenting interview / the researcher and the so-called witness to history. The text starts with those theoretical and methodological questions and considers them on the example of concrete, empirical material. The material is the so-called representations of former Auschwitz prisoners gathered through decades by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as well as biographic and narrative interviews with the same people recorded in years 2002–2003 for the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project and archived in the Oral History Archive of the Karta Center and the History Meeting House. Thorough comparison of both accounts from the same person delivered orally at a different time, place and in a different context (biographic, social, historical) conducted by different institutions and on the basis of different methodologies allows one to analyze the influence of different contexts on the content of the stories told. The effect of those analyses is a new picture of dependencies between the memory of experience of there and then and the entanglement of stories of this experience with the here and now reality. This picture seems quite distant both from naive realism as well as – although today it may seem quite surprising – from extreme constructivism. Analyzed accounts prove to be quite stable and resistant to the lapse of time as well as the current context of an interview situation. In this last regard, on the basis of analyzed sources, one can formulate some methodological postulates related to its impact.