This panel proposes a theoretical framework through which different witnesses and forms of witnessing are summoned to emphasize the role of testimony in putting difficult pasts in dialogue. Engaging with issues of trauma and memory in the wake of mass violence and their post-effects, including the question whether healing is possible, the panelists open debates on safeguarding democracy and raising people’s empathy with victims of historical traumas in our traumatogenic cultures. Covering a large specter of events that follows a chronological temporality (from the Holocaust to communist dictatorship in Romania, Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship at the end of the seventies-beginning of the eighties, Namibia’s 1990 independence from South African rule with its unresolved moral injuries, and COVID-19 policies that strengthened the discourse of totalitarianism in China), and media (literature, visual arts and film), as well as issues on how we handle memory archives and how we reflect upon such events in scholarship or represent them through arts, the panelists become themselves direct or indirect witnesses to events that they examine openly in order to reveal unresolved wounds and fears, with a view towards the hope that what totalitarian states or other repressive regimes tried to keep invisible becomes visible. This visibility towards all panelists and their witnesses aspire to is possibly one of the best solutions to trauma healing and fighting against contemporary ideological discourses that weaponize collective memory.
Idit Gil, Open University of Israel, "Holocaust Memory and Democracy in Poland"
This paper discusses the nexus between Holocaust memory and the state of democracy in Poland, showing how debates about the past are not only reflective of democratic conditions but also constitutive of them. When institutions are open and resilient, Holocaust memory can be pluralistic and critical, fostering tolerance and democratic deliberation. When democracy weakens, memory becomes narrowed, state-controlled, and instrumentalized for political ends.
I examine the relationship between Holocaust memory and democracy in Poland since the collapse of communism, tracing how changing political regimes have shaped collective memory. While four distinct phases can be identified: liberalization, consolidation, democratic consolidation, and populist backsliding, the central focus will be on the period of Law and Justice (PiS) government (2015–2023), when Holocaust memory has been systematically exploited to consolidate power and undermine liberal democratic norms.
During this period, the populist government actively mobilized Holocaust memory to reinforce its nationalist agenda and weaken democratic institutions. The 2018 amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, known as the “Holocaust Law”, criminalized public claims of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes. Presented as a measure to defend national honor, it practically undermined key democratic pillars: freedom of expression, academic freedom, pluralism, the rule of law and trust.
The Polish case demonstrates how populist regimes weaponize collective memory not only to consolidate political power but also to redraw the democratic life’s boundaries. By framing alternative voices as “enemies of the nation” and fusing national identity with victimhood, PiS deepened polarization, eroded trust in democratic institutions, normalizing illiberal attitudes. Holocaust memory has thus become a central arena where the struggle over Poland’s democratic future is being waged, revealing how illiberal populism exploits history to undermine liberal values and transform democratic culture from within.
Arleen Ionescu, West University of Timisoara, Mirta Kupferminc, GRAFICA INSURGENTE, "Witnesses Called at the Bar: Testimonies on Totalitarianism"
Starting from different paradigms accounting for a diversity of memorial politics, this paper features a dialogue on witnessing 20th and 21st century historical traumas. Mirta, a multidisciplinary artist, has been witnessing the Holocaust indirectly as the daughter of Auschwitz survivors. She was living in Argentina during the civic military dictatorship in which 30000 people disappeared. Arleen, a trauma studies scholar spent her first fifteen years in Ceaușescu’s totalitarian so called “golden age” in Romania, wasting most of her childhood summer holidays to cheer the ‘Leader’ on stadiums in the forced manifestations in his honour. When researching a book about the Jewish refugees who had escaped from Hitler’s hell to Shanghai but were interned by the Japanese occupiers into what was informally known as a ‘ghetto’, Arleen witnessed directly how a city with 27 million inhabitants turned itself into a big ghetto to serve the totalitarian regime’s ‘zero COVID policy’ propaganda. Totalitarianism marked the authors’ whole lives. They took their missions as ‘witnesses,’ one in the field of research, the other in arts. The dialogue starts from one of Mirta’s best known exhibitions on Holocaust memory, Testimonio para el testigo, where the witness captured by the Nazis is represented in Kupferminc’s creative act as free. Using methods from memory and trauma studies, we develop on how while being locked or forbidden to speak, the witness takes on the difficult task of capturing events for posterity, bringing what totalitarian states tried to keep invisible to the visible. This dialogue, in the form of what Blanchot called an entretien infini, testifies for witnesses whose conscience remains free, because what is at stake is the need to remember and honour the disappeared, the persecuted, the traumatized.
Claudia A. Bacci, CONICET and Universidad de Buenos Aires, "Justice, memory and emotions: Reflections on three testimonial scenes"
Due to the erasure of documentary records caused by the last Argentine dictatorship, testimonies from relatives of the disappeared and survivors of clandestine detention centers and prisons assume the greatest social and affective burden in the task of reconstructing memories of repression and disappearance. The narration of these experiences by witnesses remains indispensable, as the effects of human rights violations committed under State Terrorism extend into the present. Building upon a broader investigation into the relationship between justice and memories within testimonial scenes from the Argentine processes of justice, this presentation explores emerging memories at these processes.
To this end, I analyze a corpus of testimonials compiled from public audiovisual archives of the Trial of the Juntas (1985), the Truth Trial of La Plata (1998–2006), and from non-governmental organizations dedicated to human rights (Memoria Abierta). I focus here on the tensions that arise in testimonies related to sexual violence in clandestine detention centers, as well as in the reconstruction of precarious or accidental archives materialized through narration and audiovisual recording. How should we attend to what these audiovisual archives testify? The witnessing of testimonies through audiovisual archives produce other memories and meanings of these experiences. Filmed testimonies at justice scenarios “render justice” in unexpected ways with potentially active claims in the present.
Stefanie Hofer, Virginia Tech University, "The Desert Within: Witnessing Moral Injury through Film"
This paper analyzes the Namibian film Taste of Rain (2012) to explore how the concept of moral injury can challenge dominant national memory politics. I argue that the film employs the desert landscape as an allegory for psychological distress and examines the limits of healing in the aftermath of political violence—particularly when collective responses rely on amnesia, repression, and moral impunity. Following Namibia’s 1990 independence from South African rule, national leaders embraced a policy of blanket amnesty and constructed a heroic “master narrative” that sidestepped accountability for wartime atrocities. Taste of Rain disrupts this narrative by insisting on the need to confront the enduring consequences of unresolved moral wounds. Through the deteriorating relationship between Rachel, a grieving mother, and Ray, a former guerrilla fighter, the film offers a powerful meditation on personal and collective trauma while resisting simplistic victim/perpetrator binaries. Rachel is haunted by her daughter’s death in a car accident, while Ray struggles with guilt over his role in his brother’s death during the liberation war. By framing both characters through the lens of moral injury—a condition rooted in perceived ethical transgressions—this paper contributes to recent scholarly efforts to include representations of perpetrators and to deconstruct rigid moral categories. Ultimately, I argue, that the trope of moral injury may open space for “difficult dialogues” about accountability, healing, and memory in the wake of mass violence.
Mariela Peller (CONICET-UBA) This panel comprises 4 individual papers (one with two authors, both presenting). Our moderator will be Mariela Peller.
20260730T140020260730T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires6.19. Witnessing in traumatogenic cultures across time and spaceSVE3MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
