One Things Leads to Another: Archive, Fragment, Trace

Abstract

For decades it was argued that Canada had no connection to the Holocaust. However, by the end of the war hundreds of Canadians had assisted at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and hundreds more encountered it through informal visits and authorized tours. For many Canadians it became their defining moment of the war. And yet, their stories had been ignored or relegated to a mere footnote in history books. I will make connections between Marlene Kadar's scholarship on the archive, fragment and trace and my own recently published Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (2015). Borrowing ideas from a presentation Marlene and I worked on years ago, I will give credence to three methodological concepts: one thing leads to another; keep the nose to the grindstone; and what goes around comes around.