I shall speak about the development of oral history from ‘factfinding’ to questions about representation and memory. I’ll use a videoclip made by myself where the interviewee speaks about trauma and sadness. It comes from my Sobibor interviews with survivors of the uprising in 1943. There are no new facts but we can learn from what is being told.

Selma Leydesdorff is an oral historian from Amsterdam. She is editor of the bookseries Memory and Narratives (Routledge). She recently published a book on Sasha Pechersky, the leader of the uprising in Sobibor.