Five Lives of a Holocaust Survivor: On Shifting Identities,the Search for Belonging,and Building Meaning

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Biographies of Belonging in the Holocaust”, guest-edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová.

This article examines the life story of Felicia Carmelly, a Holocaust survivor from southern Bukovina, and follows her geographic and demographic journey from Dorna to the deadly camps of Transnistria, to postwar Romania and Israel, and finally to contemporary Canada. By close reading of her two oral interviews and her later memoirs, it reconstructs a particular biography shaped by the violent uprooting of Felicia and her family from the places she called home and discusses multiple shifts in her identity and a changing sense of belonging. Her life offers us a window into the broader questions about Jewish survivors and migrants after World War II, the inherent contradictions surrounding the evolution of modern Jewish identities, and the (non)negotiable boundaries of individuals in various circumstances.