Survival and Memory: Arnold Daghani’s Verbal and Visual Diaries

Abstract

The representation of memory was the foundation for the practice of Arnold Daghani (1909–1985), who combined, juxtaposed, and interwove media in varied and complex ways, with the verbal and visual forms of his diary acting as contrasting representations of the events to which they related. Daghani was witness, victim, and survivor, and his diaries can be seen as significant testimonies to the Holocaust in Ukraine, about which the historical evidence is sparse. They function as elements in the pursuit of justice and, in fact, led to legal investigations into war crimes. When the courts failed to execute justice due to lack of evidence, Daghani felt ever more strongly his duty to keep the memory of his fellow inmates alive and to make the world more aware of this forgotten corner of the Holocaust. His habit of revising and amplifying his diaries may complicate the issue of historical authenticity, but his aim was to enrich our understanding both of events in the camp and ghetto and of the subsequent traumas. These multiple reworkings of core experiences in visual and verbal form produced the unique body of work that will be analyzed in this article.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments

—(Michaels 1998, 138)

An earlier version of this article was published in Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, co-authored with Edward Timms (London: Routledge, 2009), 64–91. I am very grateful to Edward Timms for his comments and contributions.