The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, among other oral post-Holocaust initiatives, seeks to give voice to and remember the experiences of Holocaust survivors. During the interviews, many of the survivors opt to read poems that they have written, citing the artistic potential of poetry in commemorating experience. Emerging from the research I conducted during my Fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, my paper presentation examines poetry written and read by survivors during their Shoah Foundation Holocaust testimonies as an act of commemoration. In particular, I examine the role of empathy – the entry into the survivor's experiences that the survivor can invite and/or refuse – as pivotal to this act of commemoration. I argue that the poetry that survivors read during their testimonies both encourages and discourages empathy. This empathetic tension reflects the survivors' struggle with the role of empathy, of allowing someone else into their memories, after the Holocaust. Engaging with and showing a clip from one survivor's testimony, I argue for the potentials of poetry to commemorate and the perils of empathy to violate experiences of the Holocaust.
