Oral History and the War

This book is rooted in the author’s experience as an interviewer and researcher in the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project – the biggest European oral history project devoted to a single Nazi concentration camp system, realized in the years 2002/2003 at the University of Vienna. Over 850 Mauthausen survivors have been recorded worldwide, more than 160 of them in Poland, and over 30 by the author. The work offers an in-depth analysis of Polish survivors’ accounts, sensitive to both, form and content of these stories, as well as their social and cultural framing. The analysis is accompanied by an interpretation of (Polish) camp experiences in a broader biographical and historical perspective. The book is an interpretive journey from camp experiences, through the survivors’ memories, to narratives recalling them ? and backwards.

Piotr Filipkowski is a sociologist and oral historian, who works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is co-founder of the biggest Polish Oral History Archive at the History Meeting House in Warsaw. He currently publishes mainly on oral history theory and practice, as well as on qualitative methods in social sciences.