Insights - USC Shoah Foundation - University of Southern California

Voices from the Archive
The Elusive Recollections
By Denise Kandel
Denise Kandel, professor of Sociomedical Sciences
in Psychiatry at the College of Physicians As I write these words, I am preparing to go to
New York City, January 20, 2011
and Surgeons at Columbia University, is a Holocaust
survivor. For a full biography, see page 2. research center in Orléans,
France for an event at CERCIL, a small study and
France, dedicated to the history
of the three internment
camps of the Loiret. It was to two of these camps—Beaunela-Rolande
and Pithiviers—that the first group of Polish Jews
was sent after being rounded up in France on May 14, 1941;
my father was one of the 3,430 men arrested that day in Paris
and shipped by train to Orléans.
My flying over for this occasion is symbolic of my obsession
with my experiences during the war years, from 1942
to 1944 and of why also I agreed to be interviewed by the
Shoah Foundation. The interviewer spelled out ahead of
time the three questions around which the interview would
be organized. Thus, a structure was set up in which to provide
a coherent account of one’s life during the war. In the
days prior to the interview—and in many days since—I reviewed
over and over the facts as I knew them. My testimony
was incomplete but was probably partially correct and helped
me to impose some order on my images. I testified on November
24, 1996, and looked at the video once on July 29,
2008, as soon as the testimonies could be viewable at Columbia
University. I am consistently amazed by the importance
that I attach to the two years when I was hidden to
avoid being captured by the Germans, although these years
8 pastforward Spring 2011
The author in New York, 2011
represent such a short period of my life.
I do not know whether I testified for others
or primarily for myself. Preparing for the interview
forced me to impose a linear narrative on
events even though doing so was difficult. The
fundamental issue is that there are many lacunae
in what I know and many ambiguities in
what I try to recall; I find the ambiguities extremely
hard to accept, and I repeatedly attempt
to resolve them as best as I can. I know
that my father escaped from Beaune-la-
Rolande in January l942. How he did it, how
he spent the next several months before he
joined my mother in the southwest part of
France, how he knew how to find her, these are
questions to which I do not have answers and
to which I now presume there will never be answers.
To check out my memories, I had numerous
discussions with my brother, who was
PHOTO BY DAVID BEYDA STUDIO