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Vicarious Witnessing in European Concentration Camps: Imagining the Trauma of Another

Counseling Psychology Program at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, pkeats{at}sfu.ca

When standing before the historical evidence of a massive trauma such as the Holocaust, people vicariously witness the trauma through photographs, artistic images, survivor stories, and physical artifacts. From this evidence, the mind creates a semblance of the historic event. The effect of this reconstruction involves a powerful experience, whereby people believe that they know something very deeply about the event by living imaginatively through the experiences of another. This phenomenon is the vicarious witnessing experience. This qualitative research project explores the impact of vicarious witnessing during visits to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Each participant constructed three types of narrative perspectives before, during, and after visiting the camps, including written (travel journals), spoken (interview and conversational dialogues), and visual (photography) texts. In analyzing these texts, the author utilized two types of narrative analyses, interpretive readings and narrative instances. The analysis showed how participants filtered their vicarious witnessing experience through personal, social, and cultural frameworks, created a safe vicarious witnessing experience, and made sense of their experiences through the perspective of their own lives.

Key Words: vicarious witnessing • narrative research • Holocaust • trauma • secondary traumatization

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