Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Chapter 2 Re-Dressing Women's History in the Special Operations Executive: The Camouflage Project

Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino

Honours the work of the women who served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. SOE agents worked behind enemy lines and for the first time in British history women were recruited as secret agents. Chapter 2 offers a view into the process of creating a memorial to these women, specifically a performance and exhibition entitled The Camouflage Project: A Devised Performance | Exhibition conceived by Ferris and Tarantino.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771120371

Book preview

Working Memory

LIFE WRITING SERIES

In the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press publishes life writing and new life-writing criticism and theory in order to promote autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters, memoirs and testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose political, literary, or philosophical purposes are central to their lives. The Series features accounts written in English, or translated into English from French or the languages of the First Nations, or any of the languages of immigration to Canada.

The audience for the series includes scholars, youth, and avid general readers both in Canada and abroad. The Series hopes to continue its work as a leading publisher of life writing of all kinds, as an imprint that aims for scholarly excellence and representing lived experience as tools for both historical and autobiographical research.

We publish original life writing which represent the widest range of experiences of lives lived with integrity. Life Writing also publishes original theoretical investigations about life writing, as long as they are not limited to one author or text.

Series Editor

Marlene Kadar

Humanities, York University

Manuscripts to be sent to

Lisa Quinn, Acquisitions Editor

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

75 University Avenue West

Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada

Working Memory

Women and Work in WWII

Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault editors

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Working memory : women and work in World War II / Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault, editors.

(Life writing series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-035-7 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-77112-037-1 (epub).—

ISBN 978-1-77112-036-4 (pdf)

1. World War, 1939–1945—War work—Women. I. Kadar, Marlene, [date], author, editor II. Perreault, Jeanne, 1945–, editor III. Series: Life writing series

D810.W7W67 2015     940.53082     C2015-902046-8

C2015-902047-6

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Front-cover image: Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWAC) members operating the telephone switchboard at Canadian Military Headquarters, London, 1945. Photograph courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives (#19891053017). Cover design by Blakeley Words+ Pictures. Text design by Angela Booth Malleau.

© 2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

We dedicate this volume to every woman who has struggled

to live with integrity through a war. And to the scholars and artists

who make it possible for us to imagine those lives.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Lives and the Archives

Jeanne Perreault and Marlene Kadar

Prologue: Things gone astray: The Work of the Archive

Marlene Kadar

People Dealt This Fate to People: The War and the Holocaust in Zofia Nałkowska’s Life Writing

Eva C. Karpinski

Re-dressing Women’s History in the Special Operations Executive: The Camouflage Project

Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino

Two Sisters: Contrary Lives

Charmian Brinson and Julia Winckler

From Planter’s Daughter to Imperial Soldier and Servant in Britain’s War

Patrick Taylor

Resisting Holocaust Memory: Recuperating a Compromised Life

Marlene Kadar

Snow White in Auschwitz: The Tale of Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt

Natalie Robinson

Perpetual Pioneers: The Library of Congress Meets Women Photojournalists of World War II

Beverly W. Brannan

Girl Takes Drastic Step: Molly Lamb Bobak’s W110278—The Diary of a CWAC

Tanya Schaap

These Dutch Girls Are Wizard!: The Dutch Resistance as Matriarchy in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing

James D. Stone

Facing Death: The Paintings of Australian War Artist Stella Bowen

Catherine Speck

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

THE LIVES AND THE ARCHIVES

Jeanne Perreault and Marlene Kadar

We have been moved by the reactions of our researchers and their subjects to World War II almost seventy years after the fact. Popular media, scholarship, and personal histories continue to be steeped in World War II imagery, history, memory, and materiality. Many of us grew up in families in which the stories of that war formed a persistent foreground or background giving shape to the multiple decisions of everyday life. Our mothers or grandmothers or great-grandmothers saved string or paper bags. Our uncles or grandfathers or great-grandfathers talked incessantly or refused to talk at all about their experiences at war—or worse, at home. The intense focus on the material of everyday life—the sugar or coffee, the stockings—helped divert attention from the emotional deprivation (or relief) of the absent brothers or fathers for women at home.

For the women trapped in zones of war or voluntarily at the front, emotional suppression was another story altogether. Those women could not afford to express much of the panic or grief they were feeling and often spoke in metaphors in the languages that helped them migrate. They reconfigured their realities according to what was available to them and what they had within them to bring to the fore. These are the stories of the women who calculated the main chance and took up with the Nazi soldier, or who eagerly dropped the apron at the door and picked up a paintbrush, or who brazenly bargained for their lives with the most feared of tyrants. Many of our women’s stories are about finding ways around or through the tightening grasp of Nazism and planning escapes or migrations. For most, the war was fought in Europe rather than the Pacific, and the essays here reflect that reality. Sometimes stories chronicle compromise or collapse, and now and then, great courage. This is not the courage of bravado and hype and big guns, but rather the courage of the kinds of sacrifices that make sense of the life given, even when that life seems to offer only madness. We are still hungry to hear those stories, and this collection demonstrates our contributors’ ability to see the absences as opportunities.

Our title speaks to the work women did in the war: the labour of survival, resistance, or collaboration, or the labour of recording, representing, and/or memorializing these experiences. The relation of our contributors to their subjects is also labour: the researchers trace the sweep of events determining specific occurrences in the subjects’ lives, or retrace those and recreate the movement. The essays attempt to deepen our understanding of the experiences and their meanings from the imprints left behind. These efforts are a part of the making of history, and when the process is as personal, and even intimate, as many of our contributors’ research has been, it is also the working of memory. The implication here is that memory is indeed intimate, and that the layering of narrative fragments that recovery requires or involves brings us within touching distance of ourselves.

The essays in this collection discuss little-examined aspects of women’s work during the war. One of our contributors, Patrick Taylor, observed in his response to our Call for Papers, When I think of women’s war I think of women starving in concentration camps, producing ammunition in brutal conditions in factories all over Europe, vainly working fields devastated by marauding armies, performing sexually for unknown men, and so forth. And yet your volume seems to call for something different, little known. Taylor’s words pinpoint the specific wish we have to bring scholarly attention to that part of the historical narrative about the role of women in World War II that may have been overwritten in masculinist code, or simply ignored in favour of other, brasher tales.

The scholars represented here examine a variety of media to get at the forgotten or dismissed parts of the well-known story, and to probe political, intellectual, creative, or personal limit cases.¹ Memory and disguise, evasion and exposure, and courage and corruption appear in the lives of the women examined. The process of discovering, researching, imagining, and recreating aspects of those women’s lives has been the work of our contributors. All investigators into the past are painfully aware of the fragmentary nature of our discoveries, as Marlene Kadar’s evocative musings in ‘Things gone astray’—the Work of the Archive suggest. But that incompleteness of knowledge is only partially painful to us. The gaps in knowledge and information allow us two intense, though familiar, pleasures: the searching and the recreating—the making of a narrative about and with those fragments. This collection, like others before it, seeks to recognize this. And overarching the whole project is that powerful feminist impulse: the will to ensure that women’s lives in their particularities are not submerged in the blur of the past. Richard Terdiman observes, "Inevitably the effort to make sense [of the past] aims at changing things" (1993, 345). Like others before us, we wish to change things in the present by working memory.

Our primary aim, then, is to continue the project of recognizing, remembering, and then remembering again the multiple, contested, and contradictory roles women played in World War II. Many of the essays look at life writing—memoir, diary, and other auto/biographical texts and materials—while others focus on representation in art, film, or propaganda. The collection examines a cross-section of women subjects who were compromised, or at least challenged, by necessity and desire in the period of World War II both here and abroad. The project focuses on the specificities or specific surprises a story offers rather than on how fully it represents some national or geopolitical agenda.

Our authors complicate the conventional descriptors of home front and battlefront, using an interdisciplinary methodology whenever possible, and are attentive to the unexpected story folded over within a war story. In the last decade, at least twenty books on some particular moment in women’s war experiences have appeared, focusing, for instance, on women in the American Civil War, World War I Berlin, Mennonite refugees of World War II, and US nurses imprisoned in the South Pacific. For us, this plethora of material indicates the ongoing interest in the subject. In contrast to the great number of narratives gathered by veterans’ affairs offices (for example), we have no interest in narratives that prop up national reminiscences. Rather, we have sought each author’s unique perspective to stir something else—we have looked for some kind of instrument to crack open the familiar cadence of war stories. In every instance, contributors have seen subjects not just as workers or victims caught in the great machinery of war, but as agents of creative responses to necessity, however limited their alternatives. The researchers and writers are also workers. Here, we find them following trails, making memories come to the surface, which is the work of making history.

We have structured the collection to reflect the range of perspectives the chapters explore. We gather essays in rough groupings: essays that examine those who represented war, and essays that examine those who lived the war. Many of the subjects inhabited necessary or expedient compromises, evasions, or deceptions to make their way through war years and family complexities. The war disrupted the normal course of life and our subjects made creative bargains to ensure their survival. We realize that those categories overlap and blur—the writer of a memoir of war has both lived and represented war, for example, and a photojournalist has lived the war while recording it. Some papers are the result of rigorous archival investigation. Others bring close attention to the life writings or graphic representations of the subjects. Several essays focus on the Holocaust, others focus on familial or domestic connections, and still others concentrate on the politics of making memory. Some papers touch all these links. They share a recognition of what has been hidden, folded, layered, and even camouflaged.

Eva Karpinski reads Zofia Nałkowska’s wartime and postwar diaries and writes a complex theoretical analysis of the self-conscious observer attempting to forge a place from which to see. Nałkowska, a Polish Gentile, responds to the horrors of the Holocaust, the Warsaw ghetto, and postwar accounts of her life in this analysis of the ethical and moral imperative to witness a nightmare against which one is helpless. In her scrupulously detailed discussion of this too-little-known writer, Karpinski considers the distinctions between textually mediated witnessing and embodied witnessing as crucial aspects of the constant claims of the past on the present.

Lesley Ferris and Mary Tarantino allow us to see their own processes at work as they create a memorial to the lives of women working as British spies in Nazi-held territory. This essay foregrounds the politics of memorializing while it details the complexities of camouflage, disguise, and secrecy. Ferris and Tarantino guide readers through the details of their intellectual and artistic labours as they show the multi-layered training and practice of tradecraft and the appalling outcomes of the women’s capture by the enemy. The power of feeling experienced by the researchers (and audiences) as they recreate this history brings another kind of doubleness—the layering of past and present—to our attention.

In a different kind of doubling or pairing, Charmian Brinson and Julia Winckler take us through the lives of two German sisters on opposite sides of the conflict in Europe during World War II. Mounting an exhibition of photographs and documents, Brinson and Winckler seek to discover the process of recreation and reconciliation the sisters undertook in the postwar period. They consider the inconsistencies of memory as it is manifested in documents and personal connections in their narrative reconstruction of these lives. The authors’ intimate connection to their subjects and painstaking efforts to tell a partially available story wholly offer insights into the work of recomposing the past.

Patrick Taylor also brings us his family’s history—despite his elder relative’s cautionary words: It might not be a good thing to dig too deeply into the past. Taylor parallels his own story with that of white Barbadian women breaking out of their given roles and, in this case, taking an active part in the war effort by nursing British wounded. The post-colonial history of the island and its fraught relationship to Britain, and the place of World War II in that dynamic history, forms the backstory of this essay. Taylor requires us to acknowledge that our poking around in history may serve us in ways our seniors may not prefer.

Hermine Braunsteiner is one person who would very much have preferred obscurity and erasure. Marlene Kadar investigates the most unsavoury of our subjects, a National Socialist overseer who made her way from the Nazi prison camps to the safety of postwar Canada and the United States, even after having been convicted of war crimes in Europe. Kadar’s careful tracking of this fractured history is a model of scholarly research and a fierce grappling with the values, beliefs, and ideologies that inhabit, and perhaps inhibit, our memories, particularly those we and they might like most to forget. The essay becomes a meditation on our reaching after elusive truths.

In contrast to the brutal narrative of Hermine Braunsteiner, Natalie Robinson’s subject shows exemplary imagination and courage, even in the face of a frustrating postwar aftermath as she is refused the right to reclaim her paintings. Robinson provides a multi-tiered examination of Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt’s use of her art to save herself and her mother under Josef Mengele’s authority in Auschwitz. Robinson examines conflicting rights of ownership as the proprietors of historical memory battle for possession of the artwork. Crucial questions of property rights that inflect all participants in history making and telling resurface here.

As principal curator of documentary photography in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Beverly Brannan is acutely aware of the responsibilities of those who hold public memory in trust. Brannan’s focus on American women photographers and photojournalists makes a great contribution to the preservation of women’s work in World War II. Women journalists, artists, and photographers on the Allied side were said to have an alibi to go everywhere and do everything. Her essay presents the artists and shows us her own ongoing labour to recover and preserve, and even recreate, the work of women artists of the past. This essay offers a tantalizing invitation to scholars—the not-perfectly-raw material of the archive is ready for the next generation of workers.

Tanya Schaap, an active member of that generation, reads official Canadian war artist Molly Bobak’s art and her wartime diary—a parodic account of the absurdities of military life for women—as a challenge to the public image of women in the military. Bobak’s work as an artist focused on Canadian servicewomen actively engaging in their jobs. Linking the diary and the paintings, Schaap analyzes the contradictions servicewomen faced during the war years and gives us insight into the everydayness of women’s lives. Her analysis of how gender was understood and articulated by servicewomen is an introduction to an unusual Canadian artist. Molly Bobak died at the age of ninety-one, just as this collection was being prepared for publication.

James Stone also brings attention to gender representation in images, examining the film portrayal of Dutchwomen as resistance fighters. Stone marks the powerful role women played in the Resistance and notes that the propaganda functions of such films seem less significant than their challenge to conventional views of women. Like other contributors here, Stone introduces us to little-known aspects of women’s experiences in the war, layers the history with an understanding of how it is shaped by representation, and demonstrates that the most obvious story (in this case, making propaganda) may not be the most important one.

We conclude the volume with Catherine Speck’s essay on Australian war artist Stella Bowen. Speck examines Bowen’s haunting paintings, contextualizing the artist’s work in historical and aesthetic terms and focusing on the difficulties women war artists face. Speck invites us to see the psychological power of these paintings, and addresses the effects on both artist and viewer. Seeing these quiet paintings of young men and women, some of them dead before the work was complete, through the eyes of a commonwealth artist helps us frame our understanding of memory’s work. By placing her subject’s work in context with such precision, Speck suggests we might see in Bowen a statement about how war itself is irrational.

It is with pride and humility that we present the work of these scholars. Many of them create crossover generic projects (exhibitions, theatre performances, archival websites); several reposition life-writing materials; others use diverse, often individually articulated analytic strategies like seeing camouflage as miasma or opportunity; and all, reaching into the unworked places of art, history, and memory, might be seen as pioneers at the crossroads of the present, going in at least two directions—the past and the future. It has been said that history happens to people while they are living their lives. Our contributors are bringing those lives into a context the subjects did not have. In doing this work, they invite us to imagine ourselves differently into the future.

NOTE

1 Leigh Gilmore’s important study brought our attention to the concept of limit cases in life writing. See Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

WORK CITED

Terdiman, Richard. 1993. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

PROLOGUE

THINGS GONE ASTRAY

The Work of the Archive

Marlene Kadar

When we think of archives, we usually think about large buildings with regulations and professional staff that sort, protect, and distribute collections of unpublished documents and accounts for researchers to read, think about, and interpret. Certainly, anyone who has read Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression assumes that the archive is global and illuminating on many levels, but that in its essence it speaks to us about life writing in its most poignant position: as death writing, as my colleague Ian Balfour used to jest ten years ago. (Death writing appears more commonplace as an autobiographical genre now.) Derrida uses Freudian concepts to argue that the archive is the seat of writings that yearn towards that moment of death and dying that we all approach and think about, whether with resolve or panic, or some other emotion or faith altogether.

Part of the archive writ large is the family’s private archive, a collection that is no less subject to these drives and may in fact be more revealing of the subject, and of those aspects of humanity that we do not always want to reveal when we are alive, or when our beloved friends and relatives are alive (such as how afraid we are to approach the end of life, to know who we really are, and to die alone or forgotten, and how afraid we are that we do not know from whence we come). Richard Teleky, a Canadian-Hungarian poet and scholar, spoke to me about a collection of letters his mother and grandmother had saved for a few generations—letters exchanged between his grandfather (back in Hungary) and the grandfather’s daughters (now in Cleveland) who had left for Amerika in search of another sister, newly married and reportedly dejected as a consequence of being away from home and family. The young women were emissaries of the father; they were to bring the lost soul back to the homeland, which in this case was Hungary.

Ironically, the daughters never returned to the homeland themselves, and it seems almost in exchange for the bad deal dealt their father that they saved the correspondence that was the evidence of their non-return, the evidence of the death of their parents and the death of their homeland such as it was. With a melancholic beauty, Teleky discussed a kind of muted address to these letters, which would include showing them to the world by publishing them. With his own pen, however, Teleky would give the letters peace, a resting place, or, as he called it, a context. As Teleky writes in the plaintiff poem Plainsong, death approaches as each day of life passes. The last three stanzas of his six-stanza poem go like this:

Make a space in your heart for the hour

of departure, cling to breath, stay the minute

as you must—night will pass. Break of day;

morning’s over. See how longing can last.

Old men fall on the sidewalk, women shit in their beds,

the dog still snores contented, how much time is ahead?

No refrain can console me, rather bitter, bitter blight,

we are lost in the morning, afraid of the light.

Find a space in your heart for the thought

that life’s over, learn to carry the night

like a gift overdue. Reap and sow, the sun

warns us, at end’s end your death’s you.

(Teleky 2011, 79)

If we follow the poetic justice of these verses, we might more easily anticipate that private archives, uncatalogued archival collections passed from one generation to another, family letters, and the like can provide a therapeutic crutch on which to balance (romantic) family lore and its inevitable difficult memories—both of which are sources of the stories we need in order to interpret our lives. We have to admit that the relationships between documents are often mysterious, enigmatic, unexplained, or unexplainable, and yet assumed to be of the blood (although this assumption, too, can be overturned with probing archival research that unveils family secrets, clandestine sexual adventures, or religious and political secrets that question a received truth). Why descendants feel the need, often the deep longing, to read and interpret the lack that Freud speaks so often about is a question without an answer, and yet a question always worth asking. Terry Eagleton closes one of his pensive invectives against the death drive by saying, It is only because we carry death in our bones that we are able to keep on living (2007, 160).

I wish to take these bones into a metaphor of context, a place of belonging, where life’s longings interpenetrate with death’s desire. Can we see the letters kept in Teleky’s care, for example, as the skeleton for the story that exists out there but can never in its totality be told? There is always something missing, always a lack in remembering family stories. Yet there is more of a desperation to know when blood is at stake, or when the continuity of life is threatened and we desire to know its roots. For Teleky, the subject’s (self-imposed?) exile is a rich source of knowledge about these themes, which he explores narratively in his profoundly compassionate 1998 novel The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin.

It almost sounds mystical or irregular, but in fact it is normal, vernacular, that words are used in one present, discovered in another, and interpreted in yet another, so that the private lives of ordinary persons are intelligible to their descendants. Indeed, so desperate is the desire that hundreds of websites have opened declaring that one family archive is here, another there. Other websites offer tools for the preservation of family archives, the conservation of the paper on which words are written and thus saved in an archive, either public or private. But try as we might, we can never archive everything. Paul Ricoeur reminds us of this in Memory, History, Forgetting, translating what he calls Pierre Nora’s exclamation—Archive as much as you like: something will always be left out (2004, 169).

Contemporary life-writing theorists and memoirists desire to address this lack, this missing part of the greater story, and in doing so, try to also pay homage to neglected peoples and their communities. Like Teleky, life-writing theorists long to find all the lost things and names, whatever they may be: things gone astray, mislaid, squandered, wasted (Steedman 2005, 16). For better or worse, the part that is left out changes, but it never goes away.

WORKS CITED

Derrida, Jacques. [1995] 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eagleton, Terry. 2007. The Meaning of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Steedman, Carolyn. 2005. Archival Methods. In Research Methods for English Studies, edited by Gabriele Griffin, 16–29. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Teleky, Richard. 1998. The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press.

———. 2011. The Hermit in Acadia: Poems. Holstein, ON: Exile.

PEOPLE DEALT THIS FATE TO PEOPLE

The War and the Holocaust in Zofia Nałkowska’s Life Writing

Eva C. Karpinski

In early 1945, Zofia Nałkowska, a celebrated Polish modernist writer, author of socially and politically conscious fiction and essays, and doyenne of pre-war literary and cultural salons, was invited by the newly formed Communist government to participate in the unprecedented task of assisting the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. What resulted from her exposure to eyewitness accounts, survivors’ testimonies, and visits to multiple sites of extermination was a slim volume of documentary narratives called Medallions. She distilled some of her experiences into this incredibly economical, restrained, and powerful text that deserves to be placed next to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz or Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. In addition to publishing Medallions, Nałkowska was a prolific diarist whose wartime notebooks contain a record of everyday life in German-occupied Warsaw and a rare contemporaneous response by a Polish Gentile writer to the Holocaust, in particular to the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.¹ Because Medallions became available in English only in 2000, with Diana Kuprel’s translation,² and Nałkowska’s diaries have not yet been translated, her work has not been fully recognized in the Anglo-American canon of world Holocaust literature. Unfortunately, the only article in English that I have been able to locate that discusses Nałkowska’s work, Magdalena Opalski’s critique of wartime diaries, significantly distorts facts and uses Nałkowska’s writing to reinforce the widespread stereotype of Poles’ anti-Semitism and indifference to the plight of their Jewish neighbours under the Nazi occupation.³

I want to complicate this picture by reading the vast body of Nałkowska’s war-related life writing and tracing a trajectory that corresponds to the movement from incomplete witnessing to becoming what Arthur W. Frank calls a communicative body (1995, 143)—a receiver and transmitter of difficult knowledge. This trajectory runs from sparse, cryptic remarks in her wartime diaries to the adoption of a conscious testimonial stance in Medallions and in the commission’s activities. The challenge of my approach lies in viewing Nałkowska’s practice of witnessing as spread across three different sites, each constructing a different knowledge about the Holocaust: her wartime diaries (1939–1945) and her post-liberation diaries (1945–1954); the short narratives collected in Medallions (1946); and her participation in the work of the commission (1945–1947). These specific forms of life writing and documenting must be read as intertexts that resonate with one another as they span different modalities of the testimonial act, from an