|
Do interpreters have the right to interpret the stories of others?
Peter Symons provides a thought-provoking article below about his experience working at the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne. We look forward to other interpreters contributing their ideas and experiences on this highly relevant topic.
Interpreting the Holocaust — telling a stranger’s story
Last year I spent some time volunteering for the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne. I was more than halfway through my Master’s in Public History and wanted to get some experience working in a museum. I had developed an interest in refugees’ stories, partly through the debate on asylum seekers but also through the experiences of my mother, who was evacuated from New Guinea during the Second World War.
I was given a project that was to research the number and location of Jewish deaths under Nazi occupation, which would become part of the refurbished museum. It was to appear on a “pod” in the new museum. The pod would utilise the best of interactive technology, with a touchscreen where the visitor could touch a country on the screen and discover how the Holocaust was carried out in it.
The work itself was not overly taxing, although it was confronting. I was compiling lists of the dead — so many thousand here, another hundred thousand there. I was a non-Jew, helping to tell the story of the worst periods in Jewish history. While the work was important and I was warmly welcomed by the staff at the Holocaust Museum, I still felt like an intruder. I had to ask myself whether I was telling stories that were not mine to tell. After some weeks of working at the Holocaust Museum I came to a different conclusion. We are all strangers to the history we are telling. It is the historian’s job. When we interpret the past to the world, we are telling a story we have learnt, not one we have experienced.
So this was my own challenge and difficulty. Did I have the right to play this role? Ultimately I think there is no doubt that I did. I needed to do my work as accurately and as well as I would for any other project, but I could still be there, despite my uncertainty and lack of connection with the Jewish community. I was still a distant stranger to this particular past but I could do my part to help explain it as best I could. We can all take part in interpreting the past, no matter who we are. And, although we are strangers to the world we explaining, we can help connect everyone to that history, even one as grim as the holocaust.
Peter A Symons
|
