Se non ora, quando?" - the hidden musical testimony of Holocaust survivors in Australia

Abstract

In Australia, personal recorded testimony has been a feature of readings of the Holocaust since the early 1980s. Yet up to now, no specific studies in Australia have focussed on a notion of music as a testimonial device. This paper presents a cross-section of musical testimonies gathered from Holocaust survivors living in Australia. Such memories are a crucial part of the psychological and musical life of survivors, post-Shoah, where a wealth of hidden experience lives on in the songs and memories preserved, and each memory is used as a reflexive pedagogical tool in discussing the nature of those experiences. Music acts as a powerful medium in the context of traumatic isolation, describing, educating, mocking, soothing and distracting.