Survivor-historian Saul Friedländer makes a compelling case for integrating history and memory. Yet, he refers to a continuum of public-collective memory and "'dispassionate' historical inquiries." From these two polar locations, history and memory move toward each other-seeking out the other-to what Friedländer terms a middle ground where "the two areas-distinct in their extreme forms-become intertwined and interrelated."
However, an examination of postwar Yizkor books, memorial books produced by town-based societies in memory of the community and its people who perished in the Holocaust, demonstrates that historical and narrative truths are not polar opposites. While these truths move toward each other, it is not to seek a middle ground. Rather, they are elemental forces that resemble tectonic plates. Their collision "storyquake" produces a new converged, generative space where historical and narrative truths coexist and support each other as memory.
Yizkor books have increasingly become accessible in English translation and scholars are beginning to apply them to their microhistories. Still, looking across these memorial books reveals the possibilities for additional storyscapes. Drawing on several memorial books, this paper follows the migration path of refugees from Ostrow-Mazowiecka, a town on the border of Nazi-occupied Poland in the fall of 1939, through the Soviet side of occupied Poland and Belarus. Other new storyscapes include those of intra- and inter-community cultural knowledge and folkways. The production of Yizkor books reconnected communities in diaspora and their existence has brought descendants togethers to create their own new generative space of memory.
