Abstrakt
Not only exceptionally, the desire for revenge had been an important element of the lives of Holocaust survivors', at least for a while. As such, it often made its way into the narrative accounts of the personal past that some of them shared in various research or educational contexts.
Here I focus on the narrative accounts of revenge in oral history interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. In this context, we may identify several categories of revenge and their logical combinations, as reflected during the instance of specific oral history interview.
First, there is potential (dreamed of, seeked for, imagined) and actual (practically carried out) revenge. It is also interesting to focus on how and why the transition from potentiality to actuality did or did not happen.
Second, there are three main categories of revenge in relation to the situatedness in the temporally plotted structure of the narrative: wartime revenge (during the years of WWII), anomic revenge (during the transitional days of liberation) and post-war revenge. Practices and devices of revenge differ profoundly on the level of potentiality and actuality, as well as in the different historical periods.
In this paper, I aim to illustrate this variety by audiovisual excerpts from the interviews, and also explore the ways by which people make sense of potential or actual revenge in the context of their life story.