Article Text
Abstract
This paper considers the scope of poetic representation for exploring notions of health and wellbeing in the testimony of Holocaust survivors. The paper is based on the representation, through poetic form, of testimony derived from multiple in-depth interviews with a Holocaust survivor, Anka, in south-east Wales. This paper concentrates on two of those interviews, the first a life story and the second an interview focusing on health, illness and wellbeing. Two poetic representations, one derived from each interview, provide examples of the principal investigator’s response to the oral testimony, and the authors explore how these forms can present authentic and rigorous data distillates without detracting from the emotive, contextualised and powerful messages of the original text. The poetic representations offer an analysis of the survivor’s life experiences, especially in Auschwitz concentration camp, and her personal perspective on her health and wellbeing. The authors discuss the value of poetic representation as a methodological approach, consider the poetic form for working with survivor stories and suggest how others might judge these pieces, to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these alternative forms of data representation. They also consider the role of the researcher and Anka in creating the final product and the effect of Anka’s voice on the researchers’ work.
- Poetic representation
- ethnographic poetry
- Holocaust
- oral testimony
- survivor stories
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No, no, I can’t tell you everything. Either I tell you about the country, or else I tell you what happened. But, in your place, I’d pick what happened, because it’s a good story. Then, if you really want to write it down, you can work on it, grind it, hone it, deburr it, hammer it into shape, and you’ll have a story.1
According to Coffey and Atkinson, “How we choose to represent our data is no longer (if it has ever been) obvious and unproblematic. We need to be aware of the variety of strategies available” (p137).2 Richardson describes these strategies as including the production of confessional tales, authoethnographies, poetic representations, ethnodramas and fictional representations.3 Against this backdrop, Morse states:
Qualitative research is entering an exciting time. Dissemination is being given priority, with the emphasis on appropriate presentation for audience comprehension, and alternative and new modes of representation and re-presentation fast becoming not only acceptable but commonplace. Recasting qualitative research results as poetry, drama, visual art, and popular (non) fiction is an important and significant advancement for qualitative inquiry.4
As part of this strategy shift, in recent years a growing number of qualitative health researchers have begun to use what have been termed “poetic representations”,3 “ethnographic poems” or “poetic transcriptions”,5 to convey the findings of their studies into, for example, the lived experiences of vigilance,6 a patient’s perspective on being treated in an emergency room,7 patients’ accounts of the journey to a diagnosis of lung cancer,8 and experiences of HIV.9 In these studies, researchers, like poets in a more traditional sense, were concerned with the three elements of sound (alliteration, assonance, rhythms, pauses, rhymes, and off-rhymes), sight (images and imagery, similes, metaphors) and ideation (the feeling and thought behind, beneath, before and after the poem). Accordingly, various poetic techniques were then used to transform their data into poem-like compositions in order to communicate an aspect of sociological or psychological analysis to an audience parsimoniously. More traditional poets do not have to follow social research protocol, but social scientists do. Therefore, these researchers felt obliged to use the actual words of the participants in their studies, even though they decided on the ordering of the material and the poetic form used to create a meaningful representation of the participants’ lived experience. The process involved word reduction while at the same time an illumination of the wholeness and interconnectedness of thoughts. Thus, poetry is used in these instances both as a form of data analysis and as a vehicle to represent the data and the findings of a study to an audience.
Against this backdrop, we focus in this article on our reasons for choosing poetic representation and its construction, as a way of illuminating the life of one woman named Anka who survived the Holocaust, and the impact that this extraordinary event had on her sense of self and her perceptions of her health and wellbeing. Anka’s story was told to the primary investigator (FR) in a series of confidential interviews over a 1-year period, lasting a total of 7 hours, which generated 250 pages of transcript. The study followed a rigorous peer-review process supported by ethical approval in accordance with the ethical principles of the primary investigator’s institution. Ethical approval was followed by Anka’s consent to take part in the study and Anka was aware and in agreement with the study proceedings, from the research design stage to the analysis of data sets and their representation in poetic form.
It is important to give an overview of Anka’s story before we proceed to consider its transformation into poetic representation.
ANKA’S STORY
Born in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Anka was brought up in a Jewish community within a wealthy middle-class family. Although Jewish, her family believed that one’s religious leanings were unimportant. She was schooled in Czechoslovakia and was halfway through a law degree when Hitler closed the Czech universities and her life changed irrevocably. After marriage on 15 May 1940 to a German-Jewish refugee, Anka underwent voluntary relocation to follow her husband’s transport to Terezin concentration camp. At the beginning, it was imagined to be a sort of work camp for the able-bodied and the young, but in time the full horrors of the camp became clear. When her parents, siblings and other family members joined her, they were less able to cope with the rigours of daily life. Three and a half years later, and having lost her first child at 2 months of age to pneumonia, Anka was moved again—this time east to Auschwitz–Birkenau. Terezin was being evacuated and only the bare minimum of occupants were to be left behind. Anka later realised that if her baby had not died, she would not have survived Terezin. As it was, she never saw her husband and family again.
In the early stages of a second pregnancy, Anka arrived in Auschwitz–Birkenau under the rule of Josef Mengele. She lived in huge barracks with hundreds of other Jews, naked, head shaven, and starving. There was a dreadful sense to the place, the chimneys, the smell, and nobody knowing what was happening or what was to be expected. Ten days after her arrival, having undergone innumerable roll calls, clothed in rags and with wooden clogs for shoes, she was once again moved on, this time westwards to barracks in Freiberg, 10 miles from Dresden, to make the flying bombs known as doodlebugs. In early April 1945, when her pregnancy was clearly visible, Anka was taken on a 3-week train journey by open carriage to Mauthausen concentration camp. Upon arrival, she was placed on a cart to ascend the hill to the camp. On the way back down, surrounded by people who had either died or were dying of typhoid fever and with millions of lice crawling around her, her second child was born. She named her Eva. It was 29 April 1945, 3 days before the end of World War II.
Eva weighed 3 pounds; Anka weighed 5 stone (70 pounds). With no baby clothes to hand, the child was wrapped in newspaper. Three days later, when the Americans arrived, declaring an end to the war and armed with bars of chocolate, she and the baby went to Prague to live with her cousin. During the 3 years she spent with her daughter in Prague, Anka met her second husband, and the family eventually emigrated to the UK, where they have lived ever since.
Clearly this is a harrowing story that can be represented in different ways. For example, after Anka’s interview transcript had been subjected to to various forms of analysis, a standard realist telling could be used to represent the findings. As Van Manen noted, this kind of tale would be characterised by experiential authority, the participant’s point of view in the form of closely edited quotations, and interpretative omnipotence on the part of the author.10 This kind of representation is not without its merits and, as Sparkes has commented,11 when well crafted can provide useful, compelling, detailed and complex depictions of social worlds. There will be times when we opt for a realist telling of our findings. On this occasion, however, we opted for a different form of representation.
ON CHOOSING A POETIC REPRESENTATION
Given that qualitative health researchers now have an array of choices of how to write up or represent their research, it is important that principled, informed and strategic decisions are made about which form of representation to use, given specific purposes and sets of circumstance. There is also a need to reflect on the methodological issues related to the construction of each particular kind of representation.
Our own choice of poetic representation to portray moments from Anka’s life is informed by the work of scholars from a range of disciplines, who have advocated and harnessed the potential of this genre as a means of analysing social worlds and generating different ways of knowing about these worlds and their place in it. As Richardson reminds us, “Setting words together in new configurations lets us see, and feel the world in new dimensions. Poetry is thus a practical and powerful method for analysing social worlds” (p933).3 In this regard, scholars have claimed a number of benefits for the use of poetic representations, and we were drawn to three in particular.
The first benefit, claimed by Kendall and Murray,8 Poindexter9 and Richardson,12 relates to the power of poetic representation to create evocative and open-ended connections to the data for the researcher, the reader and the listener. Given its ability to reach out to both the cognitive and the sensory in the reader and the listener, poetic representation can touch us where we live, in our bodies. This gives it more of a chance than standard realist forms of representation to communicate core narratives and evoke the emotional dimensions of experience with an economy of words that researchers frequently strive towards. In this regard, reading and listening are not passive experiences. Kendall and Murray pointed out that when interviews are transformed into poetic representations, people respond differently to them because they are conditioned to respond differently to poetry than to prose. They stated:
When presented as a poem, people may approach them more slowly, expecting to hear them in their heads and being more alert to their patterns of sound, image, and ideas and more willing to engage emotionally with what is being said (p746).8
Therefore, when the dynamics of the reading or listening process are changed, the potential arises to elicit different responses.
A second benefit, according to Glesne,5 Poindexter,9 Richardson3 12 and Sparkes and colleagues,13 is that by engaging the emotions, and touching us in and through our bodies, poetic representations can provide the researcher, reader and listener with a different and compelling lens though which to view the same scenery and thereby understand the data, and themselves, in alternative and more complex ways. The use of this genre also allows readers greater interpretative freedom to make their own sense of the events and the people focused upon, so that they are better able to transfer this understanding to their own lives. In a similar fashion, Sparkes and colleagues argued that the poetic representations they presented are designed to stimulate and encourage multiple interpretations by evoking a range of responses in readers who may be differently positioned towards the text.13 Readers are invited to make their own conclusions and are not filtered towards a researcher-dominated interpretation as they are in the realist tale.
Given the volume of data generated by interviews such as those that took place with our participant, a third benefit of poetic representations is their ability to communicate the findings of a study in an economical and condensed form that encapsulates the essence of events and experience. As Glesne noted, instead of piecing together aspects of a person’s story into a chronological, representational puzzle of the life, with pieces missing, poetic transcription encourages the writer to search for the “essence conveyed, the hues, the textures, and then drawing from all the portions of the interviews to juxtapose details into a somewhat abstract re-presentation. Somewhat like a photographer, who lets us know a person in a different way” (p206).5 The reader, therefore, comes to know the life of another with the minimum of words.
Woods, for example, interviewed a teacher about her experiences of a government inspection of her school, and then created a poetic representation called Ofsted blues.14 It is 25 lines long and uses the teacher’s own words in an attempt to present the essence of her response in a way that creates a vivid, immediate, emotional experience for the reader so as to integrate the sociological and the poetic at the professional, political and personal levels. He acknowledged that this poem would not make the 20th-century book of verse. However, he stated that he found it a useful way of getting across key points about this teacher’s experiences on an overhead projector during presentations, while emphasising the prominent features of that experience. In this example, Woods recognised that it would have been difficult to present the teacher’s original, unedited utterance, which ran to several pages, in any other way: “The constraint here is not just one of the publisher’s restrictions on word count, though that is a serious consideration; but also one of judging how best to get the teacher’s feelings over to readers or audience” (p59).14
CONSTRUCTING THE PIECE: THE THINKING WITHIN THE MATERIAL
Along with issues of choosing genre come methodological decisions that relate to the construction of each particular kind of representation—methodological decisions that are integrally linked to the ways we decide to represent our data. In an attempt to explain the power of poetic representation, Piirto15 points to Eisner’s views that the thinking is actually within the material. Eisner follows this line of thought in his 1997 paper,i pointing to the ability, as the researcher becomes stimulated “by the possibilities that new forms of representation suggest”, to “think within the medium we choose to use” (p8).16 This notion is vital to our understanding of the formulation and purpose of the research poem. We recognised with this piece of work the need to display our thinking within the material, to provide the conceptual beginnings and analytic purposes that support our choice as they are steeped within the poetic paradigm. In this sense, we are required to defend our crafting of Anka’s life, and clarify how the raw material of the interview data was realised in poetic form as well as illuminating how the cognitive processes in play rendered the data poetically. As Eisner reminds us, researchers should be expected to support their research outputs with credible explanations, as failure to do so throws into doubt the verisimilitude and value of the artistic form.
Therefore, in what follows, we have attempted to provide the reader with insights into our thinking within the material and how this relates to the construction of two of the poetic representations we present later in this article that relate to Anka’s story, called Ten days in Auschwitz—100 days in hell and Like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. These two derive from two interviews that, for the sake of this paper, we will call “life story” and “health story” interviews. They form part of an intensive collection of life history collected over a 1-year period and developed and moulded as the relationship between researcher and participant developed, with growing trust. Consequently, although these could be considered discrete events in their own right, each leading to a single poetic representation depicting different aspects of Anka’s life, they are also evidence of first-person narrative and coauthored narrative.
The complex process of data collection, personal influence and coauthorship changes as the fluid relationship between researcher and participant changes, and this cannot be easily defined. Nevertheless, it is clear that the researcher becomes more involved and more confident in the coauthored stories as they evolve and that as a result of fluidity of discussion, positioning and debate, stories never stay quite the same. Over time, as they are shared by teller and listener, these stories undergo a process of increasing refinement and reinterpretation as the researcher contests, questions, affirms and re-affirms what she is hearing. The narrative is thus drawn into their relationship, and the relationship, in turn, changes shape and expands to become a new testimonial. At the end of the year, the interviews are both a complex life history containing Anka’s incredible story and a reflection of the strength of a relationship that now binds Anka to the researcher and forms a new kind of research history. Thus the end product is a product of shared understanding, discussion and coauthored retelling.
PHASE I ANALYSIS: DEVELOPING THE RESEARCH SCENARIOS
Following interview transcription, analysis began in earnest. The primary investigator (FR) read and reread the interview transcripts to ascertain their content, dynamics and relationship. The process of reading and assimilating these three aspects of the transcripts was lengthy and time-consuming, a cognitive endeavour that involved moving back and forth between full texts and parts of texts, between these two interviews and the full complement of study transcripts.
The primary investigator had originally intended to conduct a standard thematic content analysis to reveal themes and their concomitant categories. However, as analysis progressed, it became clear that drawing themes and categories from codified transcripts would be a reductive and clumsy exercise, detracting from the testimonies, with their complex formulations, verbal idiosyncrasies and emotive content. While recognising that the material would inevitably undergo researcher manipulation to produce a new distillate, what was required was an approach that paid closer attention to the words and the voice of the survivor—the voice that so powerfully held the story. The voice was confident and autonomous, changing in timbre as the story changed but within any given moment supporting and directing the researcher towards new ways of thinking and understanding. This, one could argue, is where realist tales and carefully crafted prose have their limitations, for they frequently muffle the voice of the teller, or remove it entirely from the presentation of data findings.
Having moved direction from thematic analysis, the researcher turned to van Manen’s “sententious” analytic framework to search for the “fundamental or overall meaning of a text” (p94).17 The framework encourages the researcher to reveal the important, essential elements of an individual’s presentation. Van Manen describes this approach as a “thoughtful, reflective grasping of what it is that renders this or that particular experience its special significance … what constitutes the nature of this lived experience” (p32).17 He describes the “essentiality” of data—the indispensable aspects of a text that are paramount to understanding and without which the whole would have no meaning. The primary investigator began to search for these indispensable aspects and arrived at certain events, conversations, self-realisations and encounters that appeared to be the linchpins of the story’s coherence. These were recorded and came to be known as the “research scenarios”. Research scenarios ranged from single phrases to extended paragraphs of text, sometimes intriguing and complex notions, at other times ordinary descriptions of everyday life.
There were occasions when the research scenarios resonated with the researcher’s own life experiences or world views, but more often than not they opened onto completely new frames of reference, provoking an overwhelming sense of responsibility in the researcher to do justice to the story. While the horror and tragedy of the details of the research scenarios weighed heavily on the primary investigator’s mind, working within these frames of reference also encouraged the researcher to step outside the minutiae of everyday life experience to share in the overall sense of loss and, by approaching the work in this way, to retain an intimate conversation with the data, far exceeding the limitations of the interview timeframe.
Box 1 Final scenarios from the survivor’s first interview transcript
My father was a free thinker and didn’t believe in any religion really.
I asked the eternal question, “Where was he?”
It was deprivation but one could take it you know, they kept on saying if it doesn’t get any worse.
I became pregnant and there were about five couples in the same situation and when it became known for some reason or other, I can’t remember why, we were called in front of the German authorities … And we were told which I didn’t understand then, but, soon enough, that the children will be born but will be taken away from us and they will use euthanasia.
Anyway, we had to sign a paper that we agree to that. And we of course signed, one signs it, there is an SS man with a revolver behind you, of course you sign. But nothing happened, nobody ever explained to us why nothing happened, what was the point of this whole exercise, which sounds totally. The children were born and nothing happened.
So these women who had these small children a few months old, five, six months at most, and they all went straight in the gas of course. With a baby in your arms you couldn’t go anywhere else.
And you thought you came to hell without knowing anything.
We were disembarking and we still didn’t know where we were and the prisoners were like us in those stripy jackets. We asked where we were, Auschwitz, where do you think you are or something like that and the dogs, left, right, you can’t imagine that these perfectly dressed officers, smart and their boots shining and we still not quite decrepit by then, but frightened out of our wits. Without knowing of what.
You were given some rags and clogs and no underwear, nothing and it was October in Poland, but we still didn’t know.
In all innocence she asked the people who were already in the barracks: “Where are my parents?” Like I see them or something to that effect. And they started hooting with laughter, “You idiot, you stupid idiot, they are in the chimney by now.” And then we thought that they were all mad … Why should her parents be in the chimney? Well we soon enough found out.
Always running naked in front of those things, but one loses every sense of shame.
I spent 10 days in Auschwitz, which I could compare only with 100 days in hell.
As adjustments were made between the researcher’s understanding of key aspects of the story and the full interview transcripts, myriad research scenarios underpinned the developing analytical framework. Being true to the data meant honouring Anka’s voice, her phrasing, idiom and sentence formulations. Working with the data helped make concrete the key ideas within the text to which the primary investigator had initially responded instinctively. Scenarios were recorded in the order in which they appeared and, once written down, were left unaltered, irrespective of grammatical irregularities or nuance in speech pattern. Page after page of research scenario became the order of the day, with line breaks indicating the end of one and the beginning of the next. Some scenarios appeared closely situated in time and sequencing, while others reflected more lengthy gaps in time. As in the telling, so with the recording: some research scenarios were chronologically closely positioned, while others were out of synch with “real-time” events. However, whether closely situated or far apart, chronologically ordered or lacking in order, the final product was a new kind of journey through the survivor’s tale, examples of which can be found in box 1.
PHASE II ANALYSIS: ADDITIONAL DATA DISTILLATION
In order to continue working with the data at the latter stage of analysis, while ensuring continued rigour within the process, additional data distillation was undertaken and, in keeping with an ethnographic approach to data management, it was supported by strict self-regulation (box 2). In its greatly honed-down state, this enabled the researcher to continue to retain the survivor’s speech patterns and inference, intonation and emphasis, word groupings and word layout. Clearly, as with any research involving the honing down of large quantities of data to smaller amounts of data, personal choice comes into the equation. The researcher reads the text and, as in the case of these scenarios, chooses what must stay and what could go.
However, with poetic representation work, more so than with other qualitative, reductive processes, the researcher is vitally and constantly aware of the decisions being made and their impact on the sense-making of the final product. This was more intensely impressed in this work than in other work in which the primary researcher has been involved, perhaps as a result of the extremity of the reductive process, but also as a result of the emotive content of the raw material. The emotive, it would appear, adds weight to the researcher’s intent to get the story across as closely matched to its original state as possible. The emotive reinforces the researcher’s sense of responsibility to the participant and enforces the notion that all choices made irrevocably affect her as well as the reader. Consequently, the researcher is very much aware of the research process as it unfolds, and aware of the potential effects of the end product on participant and audience, even before the final product is fully formed. Interestingly, the activity brought to the researcher a sense of heightened responsibility to get the story across accurately and precisely, presenting it to an audience through shared (though perhaps presumed) values and sensibilities. The researcher was greatly supported by the self-regulation procedures set out in box 2, and also by Anka herself, who regularly reassured the researcher of the value of the research and the approach being taken. The researcher showed Anka the work in progress and it was frequently discussed. Anka made no suggestions about how the work might be developed, nor did she make any demands on the researcher. However, she was fully supportive of the research endeavour and committed to her part in it (providing a detailed life history and confirming or discussing details of that life history as and when necessary), and this enabled the researcher to feel confident in the production of these works. Anka read all the final pieces produced (many of which are being published elsewhere) and commented on how much they represented her views in her own words. Furthermore, Eva, Anka’s daughter, whose story is vitally linked to her mother’s, on reading the pieces said she had been filled with emotion and had wept: “You have captured her story exactly … it is as if I am listening to my mother speaking, telling her story, telling me her story.” Since these pieces were shown to Anka and Eva, they have also been read aloud to a range of audiences—from those attending the American Anthropological Association Award ceremony in November 2007 to those interested in the performative social science genre.18 19 Wherever these pieces have been taken, audiences have met them with great interest and passion.
Box 2 The self-regulation of phase II analysis
Materials would be worked in the order in which they appear in the text.
Sentences would retain their original order.
Sentences would retain their original tense.
Sentences would retain their grammatical inconsistencies.
Phase II analysis could only be applied to phase I scenarios.
The outcome of analysis would be a presentation of data that reflected the order in which testimonies were spoken and transcribed, irrespective of chronology, temporal storyline or event.
Phase II led to the production of poem-like ethnographic representations of each interview. Each transcript was represented in a compacted form that encapsulated the essence of the research scenarios. This demanded further scrutiny and ordering, and scenarios became subject to decisions about what was superfluous and what was vital to sense-making within the texts. Phase II emphasised the part of the researcher in achieving a three-to-four page poetic representation of a 50-to-60-page interview.
POETIC REPRESENTATIONS
The poetic representations that relate to Anka’s first and third interviews are presented in this section. This first piece, Ten days in Auschwitz—100 days in hell, is the result of a life-story interview. The life-story interview was an extensive testimony that examined Anka’s major life events, family history, her time spent in Terezin, Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps and the process of building her life again after the Holocaust, having emigrated with her young family to the UK.
Ten days in Auschwitz—100 days in hell
They waited for the Germans to come,
but we had Czech passports, nothing can happen to us?
They kept on saying, “If it doesn’t get any worse.”
It was gradual, the deprivations.
I didn’t want to go
but it was the only thing to do, being Jewish.
I was proud, or not proud, I carry my head high.
They can’t hurt me, it was just bravado.
I arrived on the 14th of December in Terezin.
At the beginning we took it like a holiday camp,
it was an adventure.
But they got hold of 16 young men,
young Czech Jewish men,
they wanted to smuggle a letter to their parents in Prague.
They hanged them.
The smuggling was nothing but they hanged them.
Food was dreadful,
soup like water, coffee like water.
At the beginning, still well fed from home,
the old ones, going down.
We were the first, the pioneers,
young and able bodied.
We spent three years in Terezin,
we knew our way around.
When I came to Auschwitz standing on that ramp,
flames from the chimneys
and the smoke and the smell.
East, you dreaded, you didn’t know why.
I became pregnant. Call in the authorities,
children will be taken, use euthanasia,
sign that we agree.
SS man with a revolver, of course you sign.
But nothing happened.
Nobody ever explained.
The children were born
and nothing happened.
My little boy wasn’t killed but died of pneumonia,
he was two months old.
Women who had small children all went in the gas,
with a baby in your arms you couldn’t go anywhere else.
And you thought you came to hell without knowing anything.
We were disembarking and didn’t know where.
“Auschwitz, where do you think?”
Dogs, left- right, you can’t imagine.
These perfectly dressed officers, smart boots shining
and still not quite decrepit but frightened out of our wits.
That is how the choice was made.
October in Poland.
In all innocence she asked,
“Where are my parents?”
“In the chimney by now.”
We thought they were mad.
Well we soon enough found out.
Always running naked, lost every sense of shame,
ten days in Auschwitz—100 days in hell.
The transport lasted three weeks.
Coal wagons full of soot,
no hygiene anywhere,
and I was nine months pregnant.
Thirty women dying and millions of flies,
dying of typhoid and I was sitting there.
We were going down the hill and the baby came out
didn’t move, didn’t cry, and then we arrived.
We arrived in Mauthausen.
No baby clothing and three weeks in newspaper.
Americans came, Germans disappeared,
no one will kill me I had to cope with that.
Somewhere in Prague I met a man I know.
“Don’t wait for your husband
I was there when he was shot.”
Kind of him to tell me, not to let me wait
and to tell me straight.
So many blows, another more or less.
My mother was gassed,
and my sisters were gassed,
and I know that all these years.
I wanted her to live
it helped to keep me sane.
She’s the only thing that’s mine,
we all love our daughters—can’t explain.
Don’t know if it’s good for her because I will die.
She started asking when she was very little,
she wanted to know, so I told her.
It’s been out in the open so long,
I relive it so I can let go.
This second piece, Like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, is the result of a health interview, which explored Anka’s perceptions of health and illness in relation to the extraordinary events of the Holocaust and the manner in which the Holocaust impacted on her psycho-social and emotional wellbeing.
Like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind
I seem to have been blessed
with an optimistic state of mind.
I think this “count my blessings”
really summarises my point of view.
There was not any reason why I should be pessimistic.
I had a most happy childhood,
and young girlhood,
it was heaven.
I don’t think about the physical
because it was there.
And the mental—
well so many things happened and you still carried on.
I always looked on the bright side, I always looked up and not down.
My physical saved my life.
Dr Mengele took one look at me
and put me on the side who are fit.
My pregnancy didn’t show,
that would have put me on the other side.
“Diesmal sehr gutes Materiale,”
as if we were cattle being sent to the slaughterhouse.
We are stark naked, parading in front of him.
“Is she healthy enough to work?”
I was only glad that it isn’t me,
that it was somebody else.
I am not a very selfish person
but if it’s life and death you choose life.
I don’t know if you can understand?
You don’t do anything for it or against it,
but you are relieved you have been chosen to live.
So I must have still looked capable—
“M Transport”, from Prague, where most came back.
We were young and we knew how to live in a camp,
and knew whom to ask for a favour.
Scarlet fever and whooping cough, but in a very mild way.
Every woman lost her period.
Every woman in Terezin thought she was pregnant,
well we couldn’t all be pregnant!
We were totally helpless. You took it as it came.
It could happen any day and you tried not to think.
But it was in everybody’s mind,
when is the next execution?
One had to cope with whatever came.
I can only tell you what I saw.
The old people and the children
complained about the hunger.
But I don’t talk about my parents,
they wouldn’t have burdened me with that.
You notice immediately how they lost weight
the old people, and how they bent down.
They had to live on these lofts,
in summer unbearable, in winter too cold.
We were the lucky ones and we were young,
the only transport where so many came back.
That fear was overpowering.
“Will I get through?”
The ill and the sickly were past it,
there was no room for anybody ill.
I was in a young group
on our way from Auschwitz.
There were only young people,
the old had gone.
It was always “tomorrow will I survive?”
Everybody tried to keep healthy,
because as soon as you weren’t healthy
you were gone.
Mind over matter, if you got a cold you hide it
but you didn’t get a cold, that’s the point.
We didn’t have stockings,
we didn’t have underwear,
it was as cold as can be and nobody got a cold.
I spent some time in this hospital room
just one room in the factory,
With a nurse and a doctor who was a prisoner.
And a work bench with iron legs.
There was only one fear, that Eva won’t survive,
and you didn’t get illness
on that cart where she was born.
Women dying, and lice in millions.
Well I didn’t even think about it,
because if I had started I would have gone mad.
To be on that cart with those lice,
with those lice.
“I will think about it tomorrow,”
this is my philosophy.
“I will think about it tomorrow,”
like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.
I don’t know if it’s a strength,
but it’s part of my character.
Because there have been so many things
I am here to report.
******
Auschwitz was 24 hours
so you were afraid all the time.
But when we arrived in Mauthausen,
a beautiful village on the Danube.
I was sitting on those carts,
and I looked at the beautiful countryside
and I remember how much I liked it.
I honestly had other worries.
I couldn’t explain, why did I look?
And the Danube underneath,
and Melk Abbey not far away.
Admiring things, and feeling the baby
and I probably will not see anything else,
the end is very near.
Maybe you thought,
“This is the last nice thing
I will see on this earth.”
Sitting on that cart having a baby,
going up to Mauthausen—
I remember it like yesterday.
The Germans had a perverse sense
a programme of cultural things.
So people sang pop songs
to give the prisoners something to admire.
And I remember one girl—a Mischling,
half Jewish, half German—Hannah-Laura.
Hannah-Laura sang popular songs.
You felt like listening
like you felt like going to the gas chamber.
A German sense of humour,
making us more miserable
that we can’t go home
and listen to a song.
They wanted the next slice of bread
and, “Do we go to the gas chamber?”
And she sings a pop song of our time.
It was smelly and muddy
and these creatures without hair,
and in those sort of rags.
******
Yes I had a few problems lately,
but it’s so many years since the camps.
Little things I survived so far,
but they are getting much more frequent.
I will be 90 years old very shortly
So I have done quite well.
It started about one and a half years ago,
now I pick up everything.
If I can get out with my mind still working
and my body saying “not any more”.
Well all right I had a long life,
and a very healthy one.
There are so many people who deny it
and the number of people is growing.
They should know what one human can do to another.
You can mourn one person,
you can mourn a family
but not six million.
I am a non-believer and nobody—
a priest or a minister or a rabbi
can answer the question—
“Where was he?”
If I think of that little boy of my sister’s
who was only 8 years old.
I can only mourn something I know
because otherwise it’s too big.
And as we will die out within the next 10 years
who will carry the torch?
DISCUSSION AND REFLECTIONS
In this article we have attempted to provide a rationale for our use of poetic representation to generate insights into the experiences of one Holocaust survivor called Anka. We have included details of the processes involved in the production of this kind of representation before presenting examples of this genre in action, with a view to exploring how Anka’s experiences have shaped her life and her understanding of her own and others’ health and wellbeing over time. By taking the reader through both the process and the product of this endeavour, we hope to have illustrated the complexity of the interactions involved in the movement from one to the other. Finally, we hope the poetic representations constructed and as presented are able to confirm the ways in which this genre is a practical and powerful form of analysis that can evoke the emotional dimensions of experience with an economy of words and allow both researcher and reader to understand the same data in different ways.
Importantly, we do not claim that poetic representations are the only way, or even the best way, to represent all social research experience and knowledge. There are situations when poetic representation would not be appropriate as a method, and these might include the clarification of routine data sets, the consideration of the mundane or everyday, and consideration of superfluous material in research studies. In addition, work involving large, mixed-method trials that demand data triangulation may not be suitable for poetic representation because of their complex and overlapping analytic workings, or the reporting of health or social-care interventions and their effects on professionals, stakeholders and patients. However, we should be careful not to categorise too narrowly those areas where poetic representation is less effective but to leave this to the consideration of the researcher in relation to the research questions being asked, the research context and the importance of the relationship of the chosen approach to the research outputs. Neither do we suggest that all health researchers include poetic representation in their reporting, for not all will find it within themselves to work with data in this manner. However, like Richardson, we do believe
… (a) that for some kinds of knowledge, poetic representation may be preferable to representation in prose, and (b) that poetic representation is a viable method for seeing beyond social scientific conventions and discursive practices, and therefore should be of interest to those concerned with epistemological issues and challenges (p877).12
Furthermore, we advocate that health researchers be exposed to what poets and social researchers working within poetic genres do with their materials, so that, if they so wish, they might also reap the benefits of poetic craft and practice in their work.
As part of this exposure, it needs to be recognised that the data generated in qualitative research do not self-evidently lend themselves to the construction of poetic forms. Indeed, to move from the extensive raw material of the interview, focus group, narrative or biography, for example, into the prose distillate is a demanding business. Even if data lend themselves to such a transformation, this may not be the best choice in all circumstances. As Glesne noted, “It depends on the inclination of the presenter, the nature of the data, the intended purpose for writing up one’s research, and the intended audience” (p218).5 There are many effective ways to analyse and represent data; it is just that some experiences may be best expressed in a particular form on certain occasions. In view of this, as Sparkes emphasised, just as scholars take responsibility for theoretical and methodological decisions, so they need to make informed, critical, strategic and principled decisions regarding representational issues.11 Where it is helpful to use a poetic representation, and when it is done well, then it can be an additional way of understanding a phenomenon or upholding its complexity. As Richardson stated, “Science is one lens, creative arts another. Do we not see more deeply through two lenses?” (p888).12
As part of this principled decision-making, health researchers need to consider their abilities to craft any given genre. As Sparkes and colleagues stressed, “Producing a poetic representation that is useful, effective and works is no easy task” (p175).13 In this regard, as a literary writer and a qualitative researcher, Piirto asked about the qualifications that arts-based researchers might need to have before they attempt to produce poetry.15 Is it necessary, for example, to have studied or performed an art form before using it in a high-stakes arena such as the preparation of an academic thesis or an article submitted for peer review? If so, how long should the person study and practise the art form and under what kind of guidance? Finally, should we accept inferior poems as qualitative research? In responding to her own questions, Piirto acknowledged that while poetic representations might be flawed in a literary sense, they can, in specific pedagogical contexts, be eminently useful for stimulating reflection on important issues.15 That is, a poem can work, and be effective, in relation to its intended purposes and audience.
Certainly, we hope that the poetic representations we have presented here for consideration are not “bad” poems. Regarding criteria for judging them, we were heartened to hear that the primary investigator is to receive an Honorary Mention from the Society for Anthropology and Humanism (American Anthropological Association) for ethnographic pieces from the same work series.19 Besides this recognition, however, we would also suggest that appropriate criteria for judging the poetic representation of Anka’s experiences might be its ability
to engender an empathic response from the reader, irrespective of how far removed the reader’s own lived experiences are from Anka’s;
to be believable;
to be seen as a truthful exposition of the raw material;
to take the reader on a journey through Anka’s life or experiences, including thoughts, connections, emotions and opinions, so that the reader can judge both merits and demerits of the re-presentation; and, finally,
to encapsulate the story clearly, succinctly and appropriately without an overindulgent or underindulgent response on the part of the researcher.
Beyond these criteria for judging the integrity and value of these poetic representations, we hope that they will offer insights for health professionals working in specific pedagogical and practical contexts, in particular, those teaching on the subject of human survival and human suffering, those teaching Holocaust studies and those interested in Judaica studies. We also hope that these poetic representations can be considered part of a larger archive of work that continues to bear witness to the events of the Holocaust despite repeated attempts to deny that they happened. If this is the case, then they will have served their purpose.
Acknowledgments
We would like to offer a big thank you to Anka and the other two women, Terry and Edith, who offered up their stories of Holocaust survival to the primary investigator. We acknowledge their openness, honesty and willingness to participate and the great fortitude it takes to tell of these extraordinary events.
Footnotes
Competing interests: None declared.
↵i Compare Eisner’s keynote speech at the Qualitative Interest Group Conference (QUIG), 1997.