General Characteristics and Features of International Oral History Projects on the Holocaust in the USSR (the Case of the North Caucasus)
The article’s main purpose is to identify and systematise all existing international Oral History projects with Soviet Jews who survived the Holocaust. The narrators are Holocaust survivors who could overlive the mass killing of Jews during the Nazi occupation. Since most of the interviews have been conducted with the former “children of war”, the article focuses on the analysis of the peculiarities of remembering practices in the childhood and its subsequent (self) reflection by the narrators on their war time experience under the influence of Soviet propaganda and state ideology. A general analysis of various international Oral History projects about the wartime experience of the Soviet Holocaust survivors is the main task of the article. It will allow us to make a thematic and comprehensive analysis of specific interviews with Holocaust survivors later on. Geographically, the study is limited to one region of modern Russia, the North Caucasus, however, all Oral History projects that discuss experience of Jewish survival in this region will be relevant for studying the features of the Holocaust history and Jewish survival practices during the Nazi occupation on the territory of the former Soviet Union.