Finding the archival traces of “misery trains”: Early accounts of train transport before the Holocaust

Abstract

This article analyses a collection of eyewitness accounts by survivors of Nazi persecution gathered in the mid-1950s by the Wiener Library in London, narratives that were elicited about lived experiences of railway transport and trauma, as well as the implication of railway personnel and structures in resistance activities. The accounts provide an opportunity to interrogate early postwar narratives that reveal emerging constructions of refugee identity, agency, and survival through key memories deemed particularly “valuable” to the Library, an institution created by Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution. Through a case study approach framed by Ketelaar's distinction between archivalisation and archivisation, this paper argues that narratives of trauma, displacement and resistance associated with deportation by train were of special interest to Library staff already in the 1950s. This is striking due to a lack of scholarly focus on these themes until decades later. The recent publication of the collection as a digital resource has the potential to further expand and recontextualise “tacit narratives” of transport embedded in the collection.