Behind the Issue – Interview w/ Miranda Brethour

Miranda Brethour’s latest article, Jewish–Gentile Relations in Hiding during the Holocaust in Sokołów County, Poland (1942–1944) is a relevant and poignant piece that explores “the experience of Jews in hiding with gentile Poles during the Holocaust through the geographical lens of one county in eastern Poland, Sokołów, which was situated a few kilometers south of the Treblinka death camp.” We asked Miranda a few questions about this micro-historical research, the importance of studying Jewish-Gentile relations, and the impact she hopes the work will have on the field.

Specifically, Miranda’s work draws “on the written and oral testimonies of Jews from the region, the following pages illustrate the attempts of Sokołów Jews to survive after the liquidation of the ghettos in 1942 by finding shelter with Gentile neighbors, looking into their divergent experiences of hiding. This article shows that there were very few cases in which Jews received shelter from Polish Gentiles without providing something in return: For many Jews in hiding, financial exchanges were the lifeline connecting them with their aid-provider, and, at times, offers of shelter were rescinded gradually or immediately once financial resources ran dry. It further exposes that the roles of ‘rescuer’ and ‘perpetrator’ could be performed simultaneously, complicating the notion of the Gentile rescuer as a one-dimensional actor of moral good, which has dominated public spaces of memory in contemporary Poland and appears in pieces of academic writing. Finally, this article pays homage to the community of Sokołów Jews destroyed in the Holocaust by exploring the memory of Sokołów’s Jewish past in the region today.”

Miranda Brethour is a doctoral student in the Department of History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Behind the Issue – Interview w/ Charlotte F. Werbe

Retroactive Continuity, Holocaust Testimony, and X-Men’s Magneto is Charlotte F. Werbe’s latest article published in the most recent issue of JHR. Dr. Werbe was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about her article which, “examines retroactive continuity (or retcon), a fundamental feature of serialized comics, in which a character’s backstory can be effectively rewritten, in order to shed light on the complex question of testimonial production and reception.” 

Specifically, Dr. Werbe analyzes, “how the Jewish identity of X- Men villain Magneto has been overwritten. While Magneto first appeared in Uncanny X-Men 1 (1963), his origins as a survivor of Auschwitz were only written into the story much later, in Uncanny X-Men 150 (1981). More recently, Greg Pak’s X-Men: Magneto Testament (2008), a five-issue origin story, confirmed Magneto’s Jewish background. Retconning reveals how comics are constantly reinvented to meet new market demands, but it is also a feature that challenges the internal logic of a text while being an extension of it. Magneto is repeatedly retconned (i.e. the number on his arm tattoo, his given name), as is Holocaust discourse at large. How, then, are we to read (into) his pasts? In the case of Magneto, retroactive continuity calls attention to the relations between the character, the story world, and cultural and political contexts by generating multiple, parallel stories. Rather than undermining or deforming the ‘truth,’ to read retroactive continuity back into testimony is to allow for the relations that necessarily condition the ‘truth’ in the first place to come to the fore.”

Dr. Charlotte F. Werbe is an Assistant Professor of French at Gettysburg College. Her academic interests are on Visual Studies, Cinema, Comics, Testimony, Holocaust Literature, Yiddish, 20th + 21st century French Literature, & Translation.