Suicidal journeys: attempted suicide as geographies of intended death

In geography, a conversation around suicide survivors and their suicidal journeys has yet to happen. The current prioritisation of suicide as end points marked on maps and patterns of death in space and regions has obscured the lived experience of adults who attempt suicide and do not die. In an effort to reduce this invisibility, evidence derived from in-depth interviews with adults (18 years and over reported as missing) who freely delivered narratives of their attempts is employed to understand the complex spatiality of suicide in retrospect. Situating suicide survivors as knowledgeable about their feelings, beliefs and experiences, the paper encounters testimonies of intended death via a focus on spatialised journeys: physical routes, pathways and places of attempted suicide. Discussing these particular journeys as socio-spatial process represents the potential for geographical scholars to rework geographies of dying and (attempted) death as an active practice.     

Accepting Jewish roots for a pair of shoes: identity dilemmas of Jewish children in Poland during the Second World War and in the early post-war years

Jewish children who managed to survive Nazi attempts to exterminate them are a clear, yet still under-examined, example of a group who managed to resist the path to genocide. It was only by changing their individual social identity that they were able to survive. By more or less consciously breaking their ties with Judaism and converting to Catholicism, they abandoned membership of the group destined for extermination and strove to become unidentifiable as Jews. This article focuses on the issue of the identity of the Jewish children raised or born in Poland during the Nazi persecution and who survived the Shoah under an assumed non-Jewish identity. It will examine the war's impact on these Polish ‘hidden children’ and its consequences for their ethnic and religious identity. Many children were intentionally deprived of their Jewish identity by their parents or saviours since such a renunciation was the only way to survive. Therefore the role of non-Jewish rescuers and the attitude of the Jewish authorities towards these children's fate during and after the war is also discussed. The survival of these children hinged upon questions of identity and how successfully they were able to conceal their life-threatening origins and adopt the much safer disguise.     

Searching for safe space: the absent presence of childhood sexual abuse in human geography

In 1993, Julia Cream published an article deconstructing the politics surrounding the ‘cluster’ of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) diagnoses in Cleveland, UK. In 2014, in a viewpoint article in this journal, Dowler, Cuomo, and Laliberte called for a change in higher education governance, after the widely publicised Penn State CSA scandal. Within this 20-year period, these were two of only a handful of articles to be published in geography, focusing on CSA. Upwards of one in eight people in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand are survivors of CSA. Other social science disciplines have established the impact CSA can have on mental health, relationships and life choices, all of which are lived out in space and place. CSA survivors are also over-represented amongst geographically marginalised groups. We argue that human geography's silence on CSA represents a significant oversight not only in terms of understandings people's relations to, use of and perceptions of space and place but also in terms of contributing to the silencing of survivors. We call for a recognition that this absent presence is associated with individual and social processes of dissociation and denial.     

Jabotinsky and Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora

This article examines the customary assumption that ultra-Orthodox memory of the Holocaust is a counter-memory, which confronts, consciously and unconsciously, the dominant secular, Zionist memory of the Holocaust. However, in the early postwar period, the memory of the Holocaust in ultra-Orthodox society was variegated and multifaceted. The article shows that not only did some members of ultra-Orthodox society adopt part of the Zionist narrative on issues such as the lessons of the Holocaust and the centrality of the Land of Israel but that they even took part in its creation and consolidation. During the 1960s some of the ultra-Orthodox spokesmen shifted their commemoration efforts to within their own community for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, the sectorial barriers between the secular majority and the ultra-Orthodoxy minority in Israel in the first decades were not as high or as rigid as they appear to be today.     

Traumatic echoes of memories in child survivors' narratives of the Holocaust: the Polish experiences of Michał Głowiński and Henryk Grynberg

Drawing upon the important contribution brought by literary testimonies to humanitarian work delineated by Susan Rubin Suleiman (2002) and Leigh Gilmore (2011), this paper analyses two Polish Jewish authors' autobiographical narratives, Micha? G?owiński's The Black Seasons (1999) and Henryk Grynberg's The Jewish War (1965) and Victory (1993), as instances of literary child-witnessing the Holocaust. The two authors' narratives represent two different cases of child survivors' testimonies given their situation during the Second World War: G?owiński being encamped in the Warsaw Ghetto, Grynberg living in hiding. The author argues that their narratives present the case of child survivors whose Holocaust experiences and aftermath memories in Communist Poland spring from their primarily scattered and painful memories foregrounding the importance of vulnerable lenses. In light of this, the main question the author addresses is: to what degree do these children's war memories take specific stances as a function of the age they were during the Holocaust and their location (either being encamped or living in hiding)? The main contention of the paper is that Second World War children's literary testimonies contribute to present-day scholarship by their complex understanding of the multi-faceted character of humans whose specific bulwarks are the simultaneous exposing and acknowledgement of individual occlusions, ambivalences, limitations or randomness.     

Photography,Film and Visibly Wounded Genocide Survivors in Rwanda

Over the past two decades survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda have been represented by an increasingly varied range of photographers and filmmakers. International photographers responding to the aftermath of this violence have tended to focus on bearing witness to a genocide that the world failed to acknowledge at the time. One strategy for doing this has been to foreground a relatively small number of visibly wounded genocide survivors who recur in work by different artists. This article analyses representations of six such disabled survivors to explore the strengths and limitations of varying artistic strategies and trace their evolution across time. In doing so it draws on disability theory, contextual material and interviews with Rwandan artists. Whilst some photographers continue to instrumentalize the visible wounds of survivors as metaphor, this is often complicated when the visual image is accompanied by extended text or dialogue. More recent work, including work by Rwandan artists, further prioritizes the survivor’s perspective and ongoing lived experiences rather than solely the events of genocide in 1994.     

The Nanjing Massacre and the traumatic memory of Nanjing residents

ABSTRACT

The Nanjing Massacre of 1937 is a historical tragedy that is hard to erase from the collective memory of Nanjing residents. Since 1982, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and other monuments have been established as a Chinese response to the Japanese revision of their high school history textbooks, and these facilities have opened a mnemonic channel for the Nanjing people to link history to reality. In the Nanjing people’s traumatic memory, the historical facts of the Nanjing Massacre of the contemporary nationalistic sentiments are entangled and symbiotic. Many survivors have profound factual memory of the massacre, yet they have shown tolerance and forgiveness to the victimizers. While their memory has transcended the primitive stage of retaliation, the traumatic memory of mankind should be transformed into invaluable resource of the human endeavor to pursue peace.     

Marginalized for a lifetime: The everyday experiences of gulag survivors in post-Soviet Magadan

Over the past decade notions of social capital have become embedded in the social development lexicon, often presented as the ‘missing link’ within development theory. Much social capital‐based research takes Robert Putnam's theorization of the subject as its starting point. Putnam's work argues that social capital can be measured by a region's levels of trust and civic engagement. While its use, and conceptualization, has undergone much academic debate, often formal institutions still employ this very narrow, and arguably Western‐centric, reading of the subject. This paper argues that while at the micro‐level social capital has little to do with the civic engagement and trust theories posited by Putnam, it still has relevance to the lives of marginalized individuals and is an important factor in their continued survival. To explore this, drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted in Magadan, Moscow and St Petersburg, I critically examine the construction of everyday survival strategies among Gulag survivors living in Russia's far northeast city of Magadan. Denied a return to their ‘homeland’ upon their release, this group experienced considerable marginalization in the post‐Stalin period. This was exacerbated when the collapse of the Soviet Union saw pensions in the far northeast of Russia fall to below 50% of the state‐set subsistence minimum. The paper demonstrates the importance of social capital to this group by showing how their survival is based on far more than interactions with formal and informal organizations.