Witnessing the Recovery: Storytelling and Family Building, from Belsen to Ireland

Abstract

This article will explore three individuals (nurse Muriel Knox Doherty, pediatrician William Robert Fitzgerald Collis, and administrator Olga Eppel) who took on the role of caretakers but who were also, as James Young would call them, “eyewitness scribes”: those who aspire both “to represent the sense of discontinuity and disorientation in catastrophic events and to preserve [their] personal link to events — all in a medium that necessarily ‘orients’ the reader, creates continuity in events, and supplants his authority as witness.” While many scholars have explored the ethics, complexities, and textures of the stories of child survivors who were eyewitness scribes, comparatively little has been written about caretakers who had not been the targets of genocide but who developed an intimate connection with the youngest survivors, who felt compelled to write about these connections, and who were testifying and processing the trauma of the survivors under their care, all the while attempting to make sense of their own relationship with the Holocaust. As such, they serve a triple function of being active participants in healing, front-row spectators to survivors rebuilding their lives, and eyewitness scribes intent on telling stories of their caretaking as well as retelling the stories of the children who received their care for a broader audience.