Although oral histories about the Holocaust
are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as
well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities
for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely
personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns
relationships with significant and familiar “others.”
By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the
use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships
(with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life
story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position
“others” within both their own lives and more broadly
construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent
identities (victim, survivor, bystander).