Stephanie Markowitz
Limitations Get Us Down to Business
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Recently in a workshop on the subject of oral history and digital story-telling, Dr. Stephen High of Concordia University, spoke of the practice of oral history. In some of his projects, Dr. High’s team interview one subject over several hours, over the span of several years. Dr. High made it clear that sometimes it takes a long time for a interviewee to open up and reveal the whole depth of their memories and experiences.
The reality with The Memory Project : Stories of the Second World War is quite different. Firstly, the interview subjects are in their mid to late eighties. In many cases, we are too late, but in some, we simply do not have that many years left to interview them. Further, the parameters of the project sometimes only give us 20 – 30 minutes to interview a veteran.
Upon reflection, this fact can be quite overwhelming . How does one satisfactorily capture the essence of one man or woman’s years in the service, years that often are loaded with horrifying memories into the span of 25 minutes. Is this even possible?
However, I have found that once the interviewee has had a chance to warm up, allowing him or her space to consider what they would most like to communicate about their time in the service generally evokes a pretty amazing story in a short period of time.
The sense of urgency about documenting the service of world war two veterans in Canada is generally shared by the world war two veteran themselves. Even though at times, their stories and memories have not been shared or discussed for over sixty years, sometimes very detailed accounts can be recalled quickly and without too much prompting.
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