USC Shoah Foundation | Stitching the Fragmented: Teaching the Shoah in the Era of the Witness and Beyond

As part of her course Paris under the Occupation and its [Non-]Places of Memory, University of Pennsylvania Senior Lecturer Mélanie Péron embarked on the project of annotating the journal of Hélène Berr (2008) to enable her students to understand, to the extent possible, the young woman's world despite the historical and cultural distance that separates them from it. Didactizing the text quickly revealed a wonderful facet rarely mentioned in commentaries on the published journal: its hospitality. Indeed, within the cover of its pages, Hélène sheltered a multitude of History's castaways, making her intimate account a refuge for the stories of others. Both students and teacher followed the pebbles sown by Hélène to give a name, sometimes a face, a biography to people who have rarely been able to tell their story afterwards. The many threads of this collective needlework have intersected many times with the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Hélène's fatal deportation didn't leave her time to write her memoirs. Nonetheless, she left behind a time capsule enabling us to discover an often-forgotten reality and, above all, people in all their humanity before they were reduced, like her, to a typed line on a convoy list. This presentation will feature four stories of Jewish children mentioned in the diary and highlight the roles, official and clandestine, played by the controversial Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) Hélène volunteered at. It will also offer a possible answer to the harrowing question: how to teach about the Shoah despite the inexorable disappearance of the last remaining witnesses?

Mélanie Péron is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the associate director of the Penn-in-Tours summer program. She was the recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation Rutman Fellowship for Research and Teaching (2016-2017). As a Price Lab for Digital Humanities fellow, she created a multimedia digital map of Occupied Paris and two websites related to the Holocaust in France: Occupied Paris and En marge du journal d’Hélène Berr.

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