Eyewitness testimonies cut through the abstraction of news cycles by grounding conflicts in human experience, and thereby mobilizing global awareness and shaping policy responses. The harrowing video accounts from Bucha, showing murdered Ukrainian civilians left in the streets by Russian troops; the testimonial activism of Majke Srebrenice; and Ruwaida Amer’s diary of life under relentless bombardment in Gaza, all testify to the power of witnessing in shaping public opinion and boosting anti-war engagement. Yet, the same networked communication and media technologies, including increasing use of AI, while amplifying these voices also expose them to manipulation, from deepfakes and disinformation campaigns to the weaponization of testimony itself. Despite this vulnerability, testimonies remain vital for attuning us to complex constellations of human agency, symbolic logics, political orchestrations, and cultural triggers that both underlie the outbreak and persistence of conflict—and may also shape its resolution.
Our panel seeks to conceptually revisit wartime testimonies as complex forms of knowledge that can be transformed into collective memory and form the foundations of resilient cultural heritages, both local and translocal, national and transnational ones. Through a conceptual lens that foregrounds the archival, the canonic, and the potential, we approach testimonies not merely as snapshots of wartime reality or as identity-shaping narratives, but as resources for resilient, democratic and peaceful futures. We approach testimonies as tools of the possible, forged at the intersection of historical trauma, resilience and aspirational transformation.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa. Lund University. "Opposing Death and Suffering through Art: Jadwiga Simon Pietkiewicz’s testimony from Ravensbrück". This paper examines the testimonial art produced by Polish painter Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz during her imprisonment in the Nazi women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. In the final months of the Second World War, Simon-Pietkiewicz was evacuated to Sweden as part of the White Buses operation, a humanitarian mission organized by the Swedish Red Cross. Shortly after her arrival, her artworks were publicly exhibited in Sweden, becoming some of the earliest artistic representations of Nazi atrocities encountered by the Swedish public in the immediate postwar period. The reception of these works in Sweden suggests that they facilitated a moral and emotional engagement with the suffering they portrayed. By analyzing this rare instance of early visual testimony by a survivor and direct eyewitness, this paper explores the role of artistic expression in the construction of memory regarding crimes against humanity. It argues that Simon-Pietkiewicz’s work exemplifies the potential of art to bridge temporal and experiential gaps between historical trauma and contemporary audiences. Specifically, her works contribute to the formation of prosthetic memory and postmemory—modes of remembrance through which individuals who did not experience the events firsthand can nonetheless establish a meaningful and ethical relationship to the past. In foregrounding the intersection of art, trauma, and memory, this paper underscores the significance of visual artisitc testimony as a form of historical witnessing that not only documents but also shapes collective understanding and commemoration of atrocity.
Eleonora Narvselius (Lund University) and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen (University of Alberta, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies) "Testimonies from the Russo-Ukrainian war as memories and emerging heritage." Wartime testimonies have been emerging as essential forms of cultural heritage whose significance extends far beyond the immediate context of conflict. Whether written, spoken, or visual, war testimonies constitute complex repositories of knowledge that can be transformed into collective memory and commemorated in public spaces. As such, eyewitness accounts form the foundations of both local, national and transnational cultural heritages, meaning resources inherited from the past and shaped by people’s evolving values, beliefs, knowledge, and traditions. A distinctive feature of heritage lies in its emergence from the dynamic interaction between people, objects, narratives, and places over time. Heritage is not limited to texts, artifacts, or locations; it also involves the formation of heritage communities, groups of people who assign value to specific aspects of cultural heritage and seek to sustain and transmit them to future generations. To fully acknowledge the multifaceted nature of testimonial heritage, it is essential to consider testimonies from the Russo-Ukrainian war not only as informative, credible, and mobilizing appeals to broader audiences, but also as cultural genres that reflect deep-seated imagery of humanity, conviviality and hope. This session argues that such wartime testimonies should not be dismissed as fragmented or unsystematic accounts emerging from diverse contexts, periods, and voices. Rather, they should be recognized as powerful repositories of humanistic knowledge offering insights into conflict, survival, and the possibilities of peace.
Violeta Davoliūtė, Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science The Gendered Aftermath of Liberation in the Memoirs of Hannah Rigler and Primo Levi This paper examines how the canonicity of Holocaust survivor testimony has shaped and constrained the memory of sexual violence committed by liberating armies in the European interregnum of 1944-1947. It does so by reading two memoirs side by side: Primo Levi's internationally celebrated The Reawakening (1963), and the little-known 10 British Prisoners-of-War Saved My Life (2006) by Hannah Rigler, a Lithuanian Jewish survivor of the Šiauliai ghetto and the Stutthof concentration camp who was liberated in Pomerania, while Levi was liberated in Silesia – two regions where sexual violence against the local population by the Red Army was epidemic. The paper argues that Levi's geopolitical perspective -- that of a man identifying with a civilized West against a barbaric but benevolent East --exemplifies a postwar narrative regime that dissimulated the prevalence of Soviet military sexual violence. Reading Rigler's printed memoir alongside her audiovisual testimony at the Fortunoff Video Archive (1992) and the Holocaust Survivors Oral History Project (2010) recovers a peripheral voice whose unsilencing revises a canonical narrative. The documentation of conflict-related sexual violence in any war confronts the dynamics of canonicity, genre, and gendered exclusion that shaped postwar Holocaust memory. The interpretation of these works is meant to suggest how the recovery of marginalized voices can resource a more democratically resilient memory culture.
