Post-Holocaust Subjective Memories of the Eastern Carpathians Ethnic Diversity

Abstract

The article examines subjective memories of two writers, Stanisław Vincenz and Aharon Appelfeld, who both omit central historical aspects while describing their Holocaust experiences. The works of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz and an excerpt from a work by the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld are interpreted while considering the role of historiographic metafiction in modern literature. Though the experiences of both authors are fairly different, their silence may be treated as an act of conscious forgetting, or as a mindful choice of Holocaust recollection. It is suggested that this silence actually offers a valuable perspective for both literary and historical research. While Appelfeld’s experience of the Holocaust was different from that of Vincenz, the silence of the authors carries profound meanings. Reading Vincenz and Appelfeld as historiographic metafiction is to read their silence.