Oral history and the war : the Nazi concentration camp experience in a biographical-narrative perspective / Piotr Filipkowski ; translated by Tristan Korecki.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-439).

Introduction -- Part I: The contexts -- 1 Oral history and the war -- 2 Concentration camp experiences in Polish sociological analyses: State-of-the-art in research, methodological issues, and research perspective adopted in this study -- Part II: The accounts of former camp inmates: recognising the meanings -- 3 The camp inmate experience seen through autobiographical narratives: a tentative ‘typology’ -- 4 Excursus: Mauthausen in female narratives -- Part III: Case studies -- I. Leon Ceglarz -- II. Zygmunt Podhala ń ski -- III. Roman Str ó j -- Concluding remarks

This book is rooted in the author's experience as an interviewer and researcher in the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project - the biggest European oral history project devoted to a single Nazi concentration camp system, realized in the years 2002/2003 at the University of Vienna. Over 850 Mauthausen survivors have been recorded worldwide, more than 160 of them in Poland, and over 30 by the author. The work offers an in-depth analysis of Polish survivors' accounts, sensitive to both, form and content of these stories, as well as their social and cultural framing. The analysis is accompanied by an interpretation of (Polish) camp experiences in a broader biographical and historical perspective. The book is an interpretive journey from camp experiences, through the survivors' memories, to narratives recalling them - and backwards.