From Yearned Harbor to Nazified Territory: Experiences and Accounts of Holocaust Survivors in Argentina.

EMMANUEL NICOLÁS KAHAN

St. Louis

Congreso; Lessons & Legacies XV Conference; 2018

George Washington University and Holocaust Educational Foundation /Northwestern University)

The arrival of refugees from naziGermany and Holocaust survivors to Argentina presented a number of particular features. First, the extensive time period as well as the conditions under which they entered the country characterized their experience in different ways: from those who could do it with legal visas, with the support of international aid organizations, to those who had to face immigration restrictions or take resource to clandestine means. Second, these experiences converged with the ways in which the refugees and survivors wentthrough their incorporation process to the host society. While some narratives perceive the tensions with local political processes, others place the focus on the distinctive social and cultural features of a landscape that was novel and unknown to the protagonists.These narratives and accounts by Holocaust survivors who arrived to Argentina illustrate how, through a considerable period of time, they got to configure a memory not only on what happened during the nazi years in Europe but also about theirexperiences of integration in the host countries. This paper presents two accounts by a one survivor, Sara Rus, on two occasions separated by twenty years and situated in specific contexts: the terrorist attack to the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA as per its Spanish acronym) in 1994, and the State policies on Memory established by the Kirchners? administrations by 2014.