Dwelling With the Letters: Methodological and Epistemological Dilemmas in a Qualitative Analysis of the Correspondence of Jewish Internees From the Drancy Camp

Abstract

Analyzing documents produced under extreme historical violence poses methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges that remain insufficiently theorized in qualitative inquiry. This article examines these challenges through an IPSE-inspired qualitative document analysis of 300 letters written by Jewish internees in the Drancy camp (France, 1941–1944), conducted as part of the LettresCamps project. Originally designed for long, co-constructed interviews, the IPSE approach was combined with Ethnographic Document Analysis to dwell with short, censored, pre-existing texts shaped by surveillance, coercion and the looming threat of deportation. The study produced three intertwined sets of results. First, an IPSE-inspired structure of experience was constructed, organized around three axes: telling the daily story of internment, expressing horror and suffering, reassuring and staying connected. Second, the analytic process itself became a result, as we encountered a series of methodological impossibilities: the unbearable nature of literal description, the tension between phenomenological and historical truth, the need to move toward a hybrid model combining descriptive, testimonial and dialogical/reception-oriented readings. Third, an unintended collective autoethnography emerged, documenting the fragmentation of the analytic we, the ethical asymmetry between the dead and the living and the mirrored fractures of subjectivity between the internees’ I and the researchers’ I. The study offers a phenomenology of what censored Shoah letters do to qualitative methods. We argue that working with archival correspondence produced under genocidal terror requires a situated, abductive, ethically grounded epistemology that acknowledges the limits of subjectivity, the impossibility of bracketing history and the necessity of reading such letters as dialogical gestures under terror. We conclude by proposing methodological principles arising from this specific corpus and by conceptualizing these tensions as a form of productive impossibility. This article does not propose a general theory of qualitative trauma research but offers a situated methodological reflection grounded in a singular corpus.

Introduction

The Drancy camp, in a northeastern suburb of Paris, was the main transit hub for Jews deported from France to killing camps, particularly Auschwitz. From the outset, living conditions were extremely harsh: overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and hunger were constant realities. Communication with the outside world relied on clandestine letters, smuggled out with the help of gendarmes, the camp’s bus driver, or hidden in bread sacks, and on censored official postcards (Poznanski et al., 2015; Sabbagh, 2005; Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015). The Vichy regime’s Jewish statutes, inspired by Nazi racial ideology, defined Jews by ancestry, embedding a fundamentally racial form of antisemitism into French law. Persecution targeted not only practicing Jews, but all individuals stigmatized as belonging to an allegedly “inferior” race (Singer, 2025).

Letters held in Drancy between 1941 and 1944 constitute a unique historical corpus. They bear witness to an experience that is simultaneously quotidian, constrained, and often cryptic, produced in a liminal space between daily survival and imminent deportation. In May 2022, an interdisciplinary team (comprising historians, psychoanalysts, education scholars, and us as qualitative methodologists) was formed around the LettresCamps project. This broader project, directed by Dimitra Laimou at the Centre d'histoire des sociétés, des sciences et des conflits (the Centre for the History of Societies, Sciences, and Conflicts), examines the functions of correspondence in contexts of wartime isolation, using those letters as a paradigmatic case. Its interdisciplinary dimensions are developed in detail elsewhere (Laimou et al., 2025, 2026a, 2026b; Dureuil et al., 2026).

Within this team, we work as qualitative researchers drawing on the Inductive Process to Analyze the Structure of Lived Experience (IPSE), an inductive and phenomenologically informed approach recently developed in health research (Sibeoni et al., 2020), designed to access lived experience as closely as possible through co-constructed interviews. This method fits into the constructivist paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Pernecky, 2016) and is informed by a descriptive phenomenological approach (Giorgi, 2012). Data analysis is based on a rigorous, detailed, systematic, and shareable process (Sibeoni et al., 2020). Recently, Behal (2023) advocated the application of the IPSE approach outside the field of medicine, in the practice of social science research.

Our initial mandate was to conduct a qualitative document analysis (QDA) (Handy & Ross, 2005): a descriptive, inductively derived analysis of the letters that could provide a shared language and common starting point for interdisciplinary dialogue. The aim was to perform an analysis inspired by IPSE, drawing on two of its central dimensions: (1) collective, intersubjective analysis through group reflexivity; (2) a descriptive phenomenological orientation aimed at staying as close as possible to what the material gives without interpretive extrapolation. This methodological choice reflected an ethical imperative shared by the wider team: to avoid speculative interpretation and protect the historical integrity of an extremely sensitive corpus.

Very quickly, however, the project encountered unexpected instructive obstacles within our analytic group. While we did produce a descriptive synthesis, we found ourselves pushed beyond description alone. Engaging with the material collectively required us to reflect on, and ultimately interrogate, the very nature of our analytic stance: What does it mean to describe a document produced under such conditions? What does such material do to the researchers who analyze it? This article therefore traces the process, dilemmas, tensions, and methodological renunciations that accompanied this attempt.

Methods

Conceptual Framework

QDA is a systematic procedure for analyzing documents as a source of qualitative data (Bowen, 2009). It is often used alongside other qualitative methods as a form of triangulation, but it can also function as a stand-alone methodological approach (Furlong et al., 2024; Moilanen et al., 2022; Wild et al., 2010). Documents may be examined descriptively or interpretively and can be approached through a wide range of analytic orientations: hermeneutic, discursive, narrative, anthropological, historical or ethnographic (Flick & Coffey, 2014; Prior, 2003). In historical research, close analysis of written documents is common.

A particularly rich body of historiographical scholarship has developed around letters written in wartime contexts (Dauphin, 2002; Debruyne & Van Ypersele, 2011; Doetzer, 2002; Gilbert, 2022; Halberstam, 1995; Hurtubise, 1994; Klacsmann, 2017; Lamprecht, 2001; Lorenz, 1998; Sabbagh, 2005; Saltiel, 2017; Vidal-Naquet, 2014), playing a key role in establishing correspondence as a historical source in its own right. More than a simple individual narrative, a letter bears the imprint of the context in which it is written and emerges as a space in which multiple dimensions of existence intersect, at the crossroads of the social and the intimate (Dauphin, 2002; Hurtubise, 1994; Vidal-Naquet, 2014). These personal narratives are historical materials, they do more than record events, they illuminate the ways in which individuals construct meaning around their existence; In the context of the Shoah, they acquire particular significance, insofar as they provide spaces in which subjective identity and institutional frameworks shaping individual trajectories become intertwined (Balint, 2023; Knight et al., 2025).

The methodological literature on documentary research remains relatively limited (Tight, 2019) and only a few QDA studies have used a phenomenological orientation and always through a combination of descriptive and hermeneutic dimensions “aimed at construing the meaning of the document: both its surface and underlying meanings that the document avails” (Armstrong, 2021). Hermeneutic approaches that seek to interpret how participants make sense of their lived experience were not well suited to this corpus and its historically sensitive context. Analysis of documents produced in settings of extreme violence or oppression exposes researchers to intense dilemmas explored in scholarship on “difficult topics” (Silverio et al., 2022) and ethical qualitative research in sensitive contexts (Laimou et al., 2026b; Stevens, 2013).

These letters appeared amenable to our IPSE inspired collective descriptive phenomenological approach that might allow us to account for their content without betraying the subjectivity of their authors. IPSE was designed for long, co-constructed interviews and not for brief, fragmentary documents. We complemented it with Ethnographic Document Analysis (EDA) (Trundle & Phillips, 2025), whose emphasis on “dwelling with documents” (reading them slowly, repeatedly, attending to their silences, absences, tonalities and materialities) and attending to the material and contextual constraints of texts allowed us to adapt the IPSE analytic posture to short, censored letters written under extreme conditions. EDA invites researchers to consider documents as social and affective sites rather than inert texts. It was impossible not to read the letters through a constant double movement: emic (what the letter explicitly gives to read, the letter as subjective material) and etic (what history compels us to know, the letter as testimony to atrocity).

A Qualitative Study Inspired by the IPSE Approach

This study was conducted from November 2022 to April 2024 and was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Université de Picardie Jules Verne (number: 2022-12-1/2023-21). The report of this study complies with the JARS-Qual guidelines (Levitt et al., 2018). Our approach draws on EDA and the collective group analysis and a descriptive phenomenological orientation IPSE method (Sibeoni et al., 2020).

Our research group consisted of four expert qualitative researchers (ARL, EM, JM, JS), a psychologist-psychoanalyst and principal investigator of the LettresCamps project (DL) and a historian (AV). Data analysis was conducted by individuals of different genders (one man, three women), ages and personal backgrounds, each holding a specific and situated relationship to this period of history. To support the reflexive dimension of the analysis, the qualitative researchers invited another researcher from their laboratory (LV), who had no access to the data, to participate in selected meetings.

The historians of LettresCamps team compiled all available historical information regarding the context in which the correspondence was produced. To preserve an inductive stance and to dwell with the letters as subjective material, the qualitative researchers deliberately chose not to access the detailed historical context of the Drancy camp until after the analytic process was completed. This decision reflects a methodological commitment grounded in phenomenological inquiry and in the IPSE ethos: to begin with what the material gives, to bracket pre-existing assumptions, and to allow categories and meanings to emerge from the documents themselves rather than from prior historical knowledge. This intentional postponement of contextual information protected the analysis from being prematurely shaped by established historical narratives and enabled the researchers to attend carefully to the letters’ linguistic, emotional, and relational textures.

Data Collection

Access to the letters written by Jews interned in the Drancy camp was made possible through a partnership with the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, whose mission includes the preservation and transmission of archival materials (Mémorial de la Shoah, 2025). The letters form part of the CMLXXXVI collection, which brings together correspondence entrusted to the Mémorial over several decades by the families and relatives of internees and deportees. The team of historians of the project classified the letters according to an initial typology (clandestine, official or uncertain), dated them as precisely as possible, digitized them, and transcribed them into a documentary database (Heurist) developed for the project (Laimou et al., 2025, 2026a, 2026b). The entire collection is estimated to comprise several thousand items. For the purposes of the research, the digitized and transcribed letters were compiled into an Excel file organized chronologically and made accessible to the qualitative research team (Laimou et al., 2025, 2026a, 2026b). A preliminary corpus of 300 letters was then selected according to a principle of temporal and situational variability to capture different communicative conditions.

None of the letters were written under conditions of free expression. Each text is shaped by constraint, censure, fear, and strategies of protection toward loved ones. As a result, the subjectivity expressed in these documents is not a native or spontaneous subjectivity but one profoundly transformed and often wounded, by the conditions under which it was produced.

Our qualitative research group received the 300 letters in stages. In November 2022, we first obtained the letters from 1941 (all written by men) and provided an intermediate analysis of this subcorpus at the request of the wider team. The letters from 1942, 1943 and 1944 were shared with us in January 2023.

The letter extracts reproduced in this article are presented in their original French in the appendices and were transcribed by the team of historians of the project. To maintain authenticity, they have been reproduced exactly as written with no attempt to improve readability. The English translations adhere closely to the vocabulary, grammar, syntax and punctuation of the originals, although spelling mistakes have not been replicated. These translations were produced specifically for this article and are not intended as official translations of the corpus (Laimou et al., 2025, 2026a, 2026b).

Data Analysis

The analytic process unfolded in two major phases: an individual descriptive phase and a collective group-based phase, both deeply shaped by the sensitive nature of the letters.

Individual Phase

Three qualitative researchers (JM, EM, JS) independently conducted an initial descriptive analysis of each letter. This phase was adapted from the first IPSE analytic stages: reading, identifying meaning units, creating first-level categories and combined with principles from EDA (Trundle & Phillips, 2025), especially the invitation to “dwell with documents”. Each researcher followed the same procedure for every letter.

Slow, Repeated Reading

Each letter was read three times, slowly and attentively, with attention to what is said explicitly, what is repeated or emphasized, silences and omissions, tone, style and affective inflections, euphemizing, modesty formulas and implicit or coded expressions. This step signaled the first major methodological adaptation. Dwelling with the letters required attentiveness to both presence and absence, surface and rupture, reflecting the phenomenological difficulty of approaching subjectivity that is constrained, wounded or encrypted.

Segmentation Into Descriptive Units

After readings, each letter was divided into descriptive units, corresponding to minimal segments capturing one idea, action, request, emotion or relational gesture.

Emergence of Descriptive Codes and Categories

Researchers reorganized descriptive units into first-level descriptive categories, created inductively and without interpretive intent. Examples include Food, Health updates, Requests for linen or parcels, Expressions of optimism, Concern for family members, Reassurance messages, Absence of self-concern, Material conditions, Everyday tasks, Departure rumors. Coding and categorization were supported by NVivo 12. The goal was not to interpret the meaning behind these expressions, but to describe what the letters gave to read, however limited, fragmented, or constrained that surface might be.

Group Phase

The three qualitative researchers then met repeatedly with the fourth group member (ARL), who had read all letters as many times as needed to become familiar with the material. These meetings (2 h each, held over several months) reproduced the central IPSE step of intersubjective group analysis, in which meaning is negotiated collectively.

Structuring and Grouping, From Categories to Axes

During these meetings, researchers compared and discussed their categories to group them into higher-level themes, reorganize them into provisional axes, explore the relations among categories and identify emerging structures in the corpus. In classical IPSE, this phase aims to articulate axes of lived experience. Here the axes were not experiential, but, at least initially, textual-phenomenological, describing how subjectivity appears, disappears, is constrained, or is performed in the letters.

Reflexive Work and Confrontation With Preconceptions

At the end of each analytic meeting, we conducted a formal reflexive session, supported by an external fifth qualitative researcher (LV). Reflexive discussions focused on historical knowledge and the impossibility of bracketing it fully, emotional reactions, identity-based positionalities, the ethical stakes of misinterpretation and the fear of producing descriptions that could be misread or misused by revisionist or denialist discourses.

Effects of Chronological Organization on the Analysis

The letters were provided to us in four chronological Excel files (1941–1944). Within these files, letters were organized by date rather than by correspondent. We initially found that this chronological fragmentation created a protective analytic distance, reducing the emotional intensity of immersion and allowing us to approach the material descriptively. Only after completing the descriptive analysis, we regrouped letters by author, distinguish men’s, women’s, and adolescent’s letters and reconstruct correspondences. This reorganization intensified the emotional experience of the material and restored individuality to the internees.

Reflexivity

Working with Shoah-related documents, and particularly with letters written from a space of internment, required a deliberate and sustained reflexive practice at both individual and collective levels. Reflexivity was not simply an ethical expectation but became a methodological requirement to “secure credibility, trustworthiness, and non-exploitative research through self-scrutinization of the lens through which the researcher views the phenomenon studied” (Berger, 2013). It was also essential to ensure the psychological safety of the researchers and to prevent the emotional strain inherent in research on highly sensitive topics.

Individual Reflexivity

At the outset of the study, the qualitative researchers produced written positionality statements. These statements were not formalities but became structuring elements in the analytic process, shaping reactions to the material and revealing unavoidable preconceptions. Examples include:

“I analyzed these letters as a Frenchwoman; this is the history of my country, and it shaped my reading. I also read them as a non-Jew.”

“I analyzed these letters as a Jew and felt a great responsibility in reading them. They confronted me with how I had internalized since adolescence the question of the representable and non-representable in the Shoah.”

“I analyzed these letters as the daughter and granddaughter of deportees, and as the holder of a letter written from Drancy.”

“I analyzed these letters as a young mother starting a family; motherhood resonated painfully as I read each letter.”

These positionalities influenced not only the researchers’ affective responses but also their analytic hesitations, discomforts, and attentional blind spots. Acknowledging them explicitly allowed the team to contextualize interpretive tendencies and to avoid unintentional projection onto the material.

Collective Reflexivity

The diversity within the research group created fertile ground for intersubjective reflexivity but also epistemological, and ethical tensions. The group repeatedly encountered feelings of discomfort, responsibility, paralysis, identification with internees or their families, and fear of betraying the authors of the letters. These emotions were not peripheral but became methodological challenges, shaping the pace of analysis and the ability to engage with especially painful documents. The presence of the fifth colleague to support the reflexive process helped name implicit assumptions, highlight positionality dynamics, surface tensions that researchers hesitated to voice, and modulate the emotional climate of discussions. Her external perspective proved decisive in maintaining reflexive rigor and preventing interpretive polarization.

Originally conceived merely as internal documentation, the research diary became an essential component of the analytic and reflexive process. Its value emerged in three ways: (1) the diary captured immediate affective responses; (2) It documented methodological dilemmas in real time; (3) It became an ethnographic account of the research team itself.

Results

As the analysis progressed, it became increasingly clear that we were not only conducting a study. Something else was taking shape, less planned than revealed, through our struggles with the material. What emerged was threefold:

(1) The findings we were able to produce at the end of the analytic process.

(2) Our methodological trajectory to get to such findings, revealing the limits of our methodological approach

(3) A collective autoethnography, quite unintended at the outset, documenting how the material acted upon us

These three components constitute the results of this study. They do not form separate layers but rather the three dimensions of a single analytic movement, shaped by the methodological impossibilities we encountered.

The Findings

We present here a reduced synthesis of the structure of experience produced through our IPSE-inspired analysis. The full version of the results, including all categories and the complete set of quotations, is available in the Supplemental Material 1.

Being Jewish

Across the corpus, internees occasionally anchored their experiences in their Jewish identity, sometimes explicitly linking “being Jewish” to danger or persecution. One man wrote of needing “the blue pants with the Jewish badge sewn on” (Q1); another warned his mother not to leave the house because of “a lot of roundups… children younger than Edouard” arriving daily (Q6). Several letters connected deportation directly to Jewishness: “we Jews are leaving very early… for an unknown destination” (Q14).

Axis 1: Telling the Daily Story of Internment

Entering the Camp: Being Arrested, Being Interned

Many internees described the moment of arrest or transfer: “I was transferred to the Drancy camp on January 29” (Q15). Some expressed incomprehension or guilt: “What crime have we committed?” (Q17).

Daily Life Inside the Camp

Letters offered detailed accounts of the built environment (“a new barracks… no partitions… reinforced cement” (Q21), overcrowding (4000 internees, including “a blind man with a white cane” Q22), and daily occupations (hairdresser, Q24). Violence and repression were omnipresent: “Not a day goes by that the Germans don’t come to the camp looking for hostages to shoot” (Q26). Yet life was also described through relationships: “Me, Léon and Bernard are the 3 best buddies here” (Q29), evoking solidarity amid precarity.

Parcels and Letters

Parcels shaped daily rhythms, sometimes causing enthusiasm (“Papa just got a parcel today, so it’s a party!” Q39), sometimes disappointing (“it was rather thin” Q40). Clandestine letters reveal ingenuity and risk (“wrap the note in cellophane” Q35).

Leaving the Camp: Being Deported

Letters preceding deportation were marked by anxiety, care for others, and attempts to give instructions. Adolescent wrote: “I’ve just been called to the search room” (Q42). Some wrote from inside the train itself: “I’m in a sealed cattle car… 50 Jewish men, women and children” (Q52).

Axis 2: Expressing Horror and Suffering

Expressing the Horror of the Situation

Internees described their situation as “awful” (Q54) and “tragic” (Q57). The living conditions were portrayed in visceral terms: “disgusting promiscuity… repulsive filth” (Q58); “we sleep on a disgusting floor… filthy straw mattresses” (Q59). Hunger appears in stark formulations: “I am in a skeletal state and starving” (Q68). Parents expressed the agony of separation: “It's really cruel to separate a mother from her child” (Q70).

Talking About Suffering

Many wrote openly about despair and mental collapse: “I’d like to die” (Q56); “I spent most of my time in despair” (Q80). Some anticipated execution or death during deportation: “Tomorrow they may come looking for me to be shot” (Q87); “we are going to our deaths” (Q86)

Saying Goodbye, Writing Last Words

Farewell letters crystallized the moment when internees confronted the imminence of deportation, using their last words to prepare loved ones, express love, and acknowledge a destiny they could no longer escape: “I’m leaving tonight for an unknown destination, but we can guess… what a terrible fate!” (Q88).

Axis 3: Reassurance and Staying Connected

Reassuring About Their Physical and Mental Health

Despite the conditions, internees repeatedly sought to protect their families from worry: “I am healthy and courageous” (Q96); “morale is very good, everything is fine” (Q97). Euphemisms were recurrent strategies (“As for the food, it's not great. Everyone's hungry.” Q99).

Paying Attention to Others and Bonding

Internees attempted to continue their social and familial responsibilities: “I particularly recommend Pierre… not to neglect his Yiddish lessons” (Q104). Women wrote extensively about relationships, emotions, and caregiving (“What grief she must have for us! I feel it intensely” Q108). Adolescents echoed adult strategies of reassurance: “I’m very spoiled and very obedient… every night I say my prayers” (Q109).

Writing Hope

Letters often closed with affection and tenderness: “My thoughts are with you” (Q112); “I kiss you very tightly” (Q114). Even in farewell messages, some expressed hope: “one day a radiant sun will light up the world and we’ll all meet again” (Q128).

The Trajectory

The IPSE-inspired qualitative analysis did not yield stable, robust, and consensual categories in the way it typically does when applied to interview data. Instead, it produced a trajectory marked by tensions, dead ends, and successive readjustments.

The Unbearable Nature of Description

The earliest letters (1941) intensified the rupture. They contain no explicit trace of the violence, deprivation, or internment conditions that we, as analysts, know would later unfold, realities that, in 1941, the authors themselves could not yet fully anticipate. Instead, they speak of food, clothing, parcels, health, and minor concerns, an unbearable normality within a death-bound environment. As a researcher wrote: “I read a request for socks and I heard something else. I cannot stay inside the text without invoking History.” (Research diary). This was our first methodological limit: a literal, descriptive phenomenological reading risks unintentionally banalizing extreme historical violence.

IPSE is anchored in a constructivist epistemology, assuming that reality is co-constructed between material and researcher; that data emerges from dialogical, situated exchanges; that meaning is grounded in first-person explicit accounts (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Sibeoni et al., 2020). But in this corpus, the problem of what is not written becomes epistemologically central. This directly resonates with Morgan’s (2022) discussion of QDA as an approach constrained by the partial and incomplete nature of documentary data, which requires researchers to adapt their analytic questions to what documents can provide. The letters’ inexplicable omissions (lack of explicit references to violence and fear, and only few about hunger, or Jewish identity) are not simply absences: they are structural silences, imposed by the camp regime and the conditions of terror.

As the coding began, this epistemic divide hardened. The descriptive categories we generated felt both too literal and too blind to the historical context. We faced a contradiction: if we coded literally, we risked naïve description and the ethical danger of banalizing extreme suffering; if we contextualized first, we left the descriptive phenomenological method and entered hermeneutics or history.

To justify our descriptive results, we drifted into counting occurrences, an approach explicitly incompatible with IPSE. We counted: mentions of “God”, uses of the word “Jew”, occurrences of “Yiddish” references to food and parcels. This drift was defensive. It emerged during the interdisciplinary discussions that the first letters we analyzed contained no explicit mention of violence, of the harsh conditions of arrest and internment documented elsewhere, nor of Jewish identity. This prompted us to clarify at the beginning of our results how “being Jewish” appeared in the corpus. These exchanges highlighted the gap between the historical reality of persecution and what the letters themselves were able -or willing- to express under conditions of censorship, fear, and surveillance.

The arrival of the 1942–1943 letters (women, children, deportations) intensified the discomfort. These letters contained clearer signs of hunger, fear, and separation, and even then if explicit references to the horror were present, they remained limited, indirect, or markedly restrained. The phenomenon to describe is not in the letters alone, but in the abyss between the letters and History. Only describing the letters is unbearable because the letters themselves make description impossible. They resist interpretation yet demand context.

Phenomenological Truth Vs Historical Truth

Unlike the 1941 corpus, some later letters contained rare and abrupt references to violence and the deportation process. These lines ruptured the general tone of minimization or silence and acted as emotional shocks for the research team. They seemed suddenly to say what the rest of the corpus consistently refused to express. These rare explicit descriptions stood out as exceptions within thousands of lines of restrained and censored writing.

Among the most emotionally overwhelming documents were the farewell letters; last messages written just before deportation, often censured, and limited to a few lines. Analyzing these letters triggered powerful emotional reactions, making it impossible to remain within a strictly descriptive phenomenological stance. They illuminated the epistemic and ethical limits of attempting descriptive analysis in the presence of texts written on the threshold of extermination.

As the corpus expanded to include letters from women, adolescents, and deportees, the emotional burden intensified. The team implemented several strategies to protect members: requests for collective reading sessions, shielding certain researchers from reading adolescent’s or mothers’ letters, reorganizing the material to make it more bearable. Yet these strategies had unintended consequences: they fragmented the group and undermined a central pillar of IPSE: the collective, dialogical construction of meaning. Rather than supporting intersubjectivity, the group became isolated, each researcher alone with their memories, identifications and emotional reactions.

Confronted with dissatisfaction, we faced a central question: Can a purely constructivist, descriptive method account for the historical truth of the Shoah? To respond, the team adopted an abductive analytic strategy (Earl Rinehart, 2020) combining induction (analysis grounded in the letters) and deduction (historical knowledge) to articulate the historical conditions underlying the letters even when they appeared only in fragments or euphemisms. But it also generated disagreements about what counted as horror: for some, horror was explicit (cattle cars, starvation), for others, horror was precisely in what was not said (the forced normality, the euphemisms, or the letters written by adolescents). A diary entry captures this: “The rarity of references to famine describes the horror. Not understanding is itself a way the horror appears.”

This forced us to consider the letters as testimonies, that is situated, first-person narratives interpreted as evidence of lived experience and power relations (Clandinin et al., 2016; Riessman, 2015). But testimony in the context of genocide also invokes impartiality, reliability, and validity, as criteria of truth (Stromquist, 2000). This stands in tension with constructivist qualitative paradigms, where truth is multiple, negotiated, and relational. The Shoah imposes a very different framework: historical truth is non-negotiable. Gill et al. (2018) work on trustworthy historical narrative emphasizes that qualitative researchers working with historical documents must attend to the truth-value of testimony even when testimony is silenced, fragmented or constrained. These letters are doubly situated. They are private and intimate, addressed to loved ones. But they are also historical documents, recording persecution under Nazism. This dual status echoes Arendt’s reflections on letters as texts that blur the line between private discourse and political reality (Morariu, 2011). Through their very constraints, censorship marks and silences, the letters function as negative testimonies: testimonies through absence, a theme explored in trauma studies (Felman & Laub, 1992; LaCapra, 2014; Trouillot, 2015), testimonial literature (Correia & Caetano, 2023; Hirschauer, 2006; Poland & Pederson, 1998), and Shoah historiography (Láníček, 2017). In ordinary qualitative inquiry, the constructivist paradigm rejects the idea of a stable, objective truth. But the Shoah, as a historical event, resists that stance. The team could not disregard the reality of deportation and the documented conditions of Drancy. This tension is well-documented in qualitative research examining historical trauma, where researchers must hold both subjective realities and historical facts (Cutcliffe & McKenna, 2002; Randall & Phoenix, 2009; Todres, 1999). In this sense, the team’s shift aligns with critical realism, which accepts that subjective accounts exist within a world of objective structures and constraints (Gill et al., 2018).

At this point, the qualitative researchers began to diverge in their analytic stance. Two researchers insisted on remaining relatively faithful to the descriptive phenomenological ethos of IPSE, that is staying close to the explicit content of the letters, refusing to fill silences with interpretation, resisting the pull of historical knowledge, defending the subjectivity of the internees as it appears on the page. The other two were overwhelmed by the proximity of the Shoah, the traces, clues, euphemisms and silences that haunt even the most ordinary sentences. For these researchers, remaining strictly descriptive felt not ethical but dangerous: a form of erasure or even an unintentional contribution to revisionist discourse.

The team split around a central ethical question: Should we remain faithful to the subjective truth of the letters, or to the historical truth of the Shoah? These disagreements were not simply methodological: they were rooted in positionality. The letters activated different dimensions of identity for each researcher. And these differences shaped our readings. The resolution of this conflict was not achieved through intersubjective consensus (a core principle of IPSE). Instead, we reached a negotiated compromise: Axis 1 reflects the inductive, descriptive, phenomenological stance; Axis 2 reflects the abductive, testimonial, historically anchored stance.

This juxtaposition became a result in itself: an acknowledgment that the method encountered its epistemological limit. When the letters fall silent about horror, the analysts must confront whether they have the right or the duty to speak. This challenge revealed that phenomenology alone cannot contain the Shoah. History intrudes. Memory intrudes. Ethics intrude. And the method itself must bend, fracture, or transform in response.

Toward a Dialogical and Reception-Oriented Reading

If the letters were marked by constraint, fear, and the looming threat of deportation, they were equally traversed by another recurrent gesture: an unwavering desire to protect the addressee, to reassure, to maintain a fragile thread of intimacy across separation. This led us to a decisive epistemological shift: from phenomenological description and abductive testimony work to a dialogical, reception-based approach, positioning ourselves (consciously and reflexively) as Model Readers.

In contrast with interviews, the letters were never addressed to researchers. Their meaning is inseparable from the presence-in-absence of those to whom they were written. This insight aligns with Jauss’ aesthetics of reception (1982), which posits that the meaning of a text emerges through the anticipated horizon of its reader. It also echoes Iser’s “implicit reader” (1993), Genette’s narratological work (1980), Derrida’s Post Card (1980/1987) and Bakhtin’s dialogism (1975/1982), where every utterance is fundamentally relational, anticipating response and shaped by the presence of another consciousness. Under this lens, the letters cease to be mere descriptions or testimonies. They become dialogical gestures, forms of reaching out, of holding on, of sustaining relational life within a system designed to annihilate it.

Umberto Eco’s Lector in Fabula (1985) offered a decisive turning point. Eco argues that every text constructs a Model Reader whose encyclopedia (the sum of their cultural knowledge, memories, prior texts) is mobilized to complete the text’s gaps. The letters, laden with censorship and survival constraints, are quintessential open texts full of silences, ellipses, and implicit meanings. Our reflexive work therefore led us to adopt the position of Model Readers, not to pretend that we were the intended recipients, but to recognize that these letters were meant for someone, to acknowledge that their meaning is inseparable from that fact, to accept that our own encyclopedia is inevitably activated in reading them, and to reintroduce a form of co-construction central to IPSE but disrupted by the archival nature of the material.

Positioning ourselves as Model Readers also activated an ethic of reading. Levinas’ philosophy of the encounter (Dougan, 2016) with the other suggests that any face-to-face (even a deferred or textual one) imposes an ethical responsibility: to recognize the otherness of the other without absorbing it into one’s own categories. Reading the letters dialogically meant resisting the temptation to appropriate or overinterpret but also acknowledging their address as a gesture of care. In this sense, the dialogical axis is not only methodological but ethical: an attempt to honor the relational intention of the letter-writers.

This shift required a practical change: transforming the material from chronological Excel tables into correspondence-based groupings. Grouping letters by sender and recipient reintroduced narrative continuity, personal identity, relational history, and a sense of voice. This reorganization also helped counteract the disembodied feel of the initial dataset and supported the reconstruction of the addressee’s presence, essential for dialogical analysis.

The dialogical stance offered an unexpected emotional buffer. The researchers found a place where compassion and analysis could coexist and yet this proximity also intensified emotional reactions. This oscillation between protection and vulnerability is consistent with literature on analyzing sensitive or traumatic archives (Silverio et al., 2022).

By shifting focus from “what happened” to “what meaning was addressed,” we honor both subjectivity and historical truth. In line with Levitt et al. (2018), documenting reflexive tensions, positionality, and epistemic shifts becomes itself a methodological contribution. Dialogism offers a way to analyze traumatic archives without collapsing into reductionism or denial. Two limitations remain: first we lack the letters sent to the internees, making the dialogical reconstruction partial and second, the Model Reader stance risks reintroducing researcher affect and memory. Triangulation with historians and systematic reflexive journaling were needed to limit this.

Collective Autoethnography

We began this project believing we would analyze letters. We did not know that the letters would begin to analyze us. What emerged was not only a set of themes or axes but a group of researchers slowly stripped back, by fragments, by resistances, by successive collapses of what we thought we knew. The qualitative analysis did not merely produce categories; it produced a “we”: sometimes gathered, sometimes scattered, always affected. We had imagined a collective study. What we encountered, instead, was collective solitude.

These letters cracked the identity we carried into the research. We were startled by the emotional states that surfaced: shock, shame, moral fatigue, methodological guilt, and at times, a sense of unworthiness or imposture. At other moments, we felt a quiet, persistent shame: shame at not holding up, shame at not knowing how to analyze, shame at not finding the words. And deeper still, a doubt crept in, a doubt about our right even to do this work. Were we allowed to analyze what precedes death? Were we allowed to name what the internees themselves could not write? Were we allowed to describe what perhaps must not be described? As we moved forward, the analysis shifted into something else entirely: a form of cohabitation with the horizon of disappearance.

IPSE is a collective method. It assumes that knowledge is co- constructed , that the group carries the analysis. The letters undid this assumption. Some of us could no longer attend meetings. Others could read but no longer analyze. Others still could analyze but only alone. We ceased to be a “group”. We became an archipelago of wounded subjectivities, each trying, in solitary ways, to absorb the material. And, paradoxically, this fragmentation revealed something essential: In extreme contexts, the collective is not necessarily the condition of qualitative work. It may be the obstacle. IPSE’s intersubjective core (its strength in ordinary circumstances) was here impossible and perhaps undesirable.

As the work progressed, we realized that our responsibility was not merely scientific; it was moral. We knew our words could circulate beyond context. We knew denialism exists. We knew literal description could be hijacked. This awareness altered our posture. We were no longer merely researchers. We were, unwillingly but inevitably, guardians of meaning. We also knew that our analyses would return, not only to academic circles, but to the families who had entrusted us with these letters, families for whom these fragments were the last material trace of loved ones. This double audience, scholarly and familial, transformed our task. It demanded not only methodological rigor but a form of ethical tact, a way of writing that could bear the weight of memory without appropriating it.

This role was never part of the initial plan. It imposed itself. It is the outcome of the research itself. We sign this work collectively not because we felt the same, but because we choose to make visible how our subjectivities were engaged, threatened, transformed. This “we” is neither homogeneous nor stable. It is a moving product of material that resisted our methods and forced us to invent another way of reading, thinking, analyzing.

This study did not produce a descriptive analysis of the Drancy letters. It produced an analysis of what it means to attempt to analyze them. Here, it was not the letters that were analyzed. It was the method, tested, strained, transformed. We do not claim to have found the “right” way to analyze these letters. But we have tried to remain faithful to what they demand: humility, rigor, historical consciousness and an attentiveness willing to be wounded.

Discussion

Analyzing these letters confronted us with a set of methodological and epistemological tensions that could not be resolved within the familiar frameworks of qualitative inquiry. To clarify how our methodological assemblage operated in practice, we provide an exhaustive mapping of the five approaches mobilized across the study in a Table 1 in supplemental material detailing the levels, function in the research process and limits of each approach.

Our IPSE-inspired attempt to describe the letters gradually dissolved into something else: a confrontation with the limits of qualitative methods, interdisciplinarity, and subjectivity itself.

We discuss here three intertwined contributions that emerged from our work: (1) the destabilization of the collective, the impossible we of trauma-laden analysis; (2) the ethical asymmetry between them and us, between the dead and the living; (3) the mirrored fractures of subjectivity between the I of the internees and the I of the researchers.

The Impossible We

IPSE rests on the assumption that the analytic group forms a stable we capable of jointly interpreting, reducing, and structuring experience. But under the weight of the Drancy letters, that we fractured. The group dissolved not because of dysfunction but because the material itself made co-analysis impossible. The letters did not simply demand reading; they demanded bearing. And bearing, we discovered, is unevenly distributed.

Some researchers withdrew for a while. Others read but could not analyze. Others analyzed but only in solitude. The analytic collective progressively lost its coherence, giving way to a plurality of destabilized subject positions. This dissolution resonates with findings in qualitative work with traumatic or violent data, where emotional overload fragments analytic communities (Silverio et al., 2022). It also echoes Ellis and Bochner’s (2000) work on emotional autoethnography, which shows that the researcher’s emotional life becomes part of the phenomenon. Yet our experience reveals something more radical: in extreme contexts, the collective is not always the optimal epistemic unit. It can become the obstacle.

IPSE’s intersubjective strength, that is its requirement for shared reading, affect and construction, became untenable. The project unfolded instead as a collective solitude, a paradoxical configuration where each researcher worked alone under the same storm. The impossibility of the we is not a limitation but a methodological result.

Them and Us: The Ethical Asymmetry

A second dilemma emerged from the ontological distance between them -the authors of the letters, persecuted and largely exterminated- and us, researchers reading their last words decades later. This asymmetry shaped every interpretive decision.

Qualitative methods often assume the possibility of encounter, even when mediated by text. But these letters refuse symmetry. They are acts of communication produced under surveillance (Morariu, 2011; Prior, 2003), emotionally protective performances (Goffman, 1959), textual fragments shaped by censorship and self-censorship (Sankofa, 2023), artefacts circulating within a system of domination (Trundle & Phillips, 2025) and testimonies written under conditions where full expression was structurally impossible (Felman & Laub, 1992). Thus, the very ontological assumption of descriptive phenomenology collapses.

The fear of producing a naïve descriptive account, one that could be misused or inadvertently feed negationist readings, was not paranoia; it aligned with warnings from Todres (1999), Gill et al. (2018) and Silverio et al. (2022) regarding the dangers of insufficient contextualization in traumatic histories. While phenomenological bracketing is a core methodological principle of descriptive phenomenological psychology (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003), our analysis suggests that, in the context of extreme historical documents, its application may become ethically problematic. Suspending historical knowledge is impossible and dangerous. Neutrality becomes a moral impossibility (LaCapra, 2014; Levinas, 1982). Thus, unlike typical qualitative inquiry, our task was not only to remain faithful to the subjectivity of the letters; it was also to remain faithful to the dead. This asymmetry is not soluble. It is a result.

The Fractured I: Mirrored Subjectivities

The letters are written in the first person, an I that appears to offer direct access to experience. Yet this I is not the sovereign, self-present phenomenological subject assumed in qualitative inquiry. It is a wounded I, censored, constrained, fragmented, speaking under terror and often speaking to protect others rather than reveal itself. This raises fundamental questions: Where and who is the I that writes? Does it have access to the horror it is living? Is it protecting itself or its loved ones? Is it a subject of its experience, or so stunned and displaced that subjectivity becomes unstable? The I is both present and self-effacing, a fractured voice whose very fragmentation is part of the phenomenon. What is given is inseparable from what must remain unsaid. We expected to analyze subjectivity. Instead, we encountered the limit of subjectivity.

At the same time, the I of the researchers was destabilized. Shame, guilt, breathlessness and what we came to call methodological unworthiness surfaced: the sense that no analysis was adequate, no interpretation legitimate.

This produced a mirroring effect: the internees’ I is incomplete, forced into silence; the researchers’ I is destabilized, forced into reflexivity. Two subjectivities confront each other: one fractured by violence, the other fractured by responsibility. In this context, Blanchot’s (1955) reflections on subjectivity offer a way of thinking about the limits we encountered: the impossibility of fully restoring the internees’ subjectivity, and the impossibility for researchers to step outside their own.

Methodological Implications

We mobilized reception theory, and more specifically Eco’s notion of the Model Reader, not as a general interpretive framework nor as a replacement for descriptive or testimonial analysis, but as a context-specific methodological necessity arising from the material conditions of the corpus. Dialogical reading becomes warranted when three conditions converge: (1) the documents are letters, texts structurally oriented toward an absent addressee; (2) they are archival and orphaned, with no possibility of dialogical co-construction with their authors; and (3) they are produced under extreme constraint, resulting in systematic ellipses, euphemisms, and protective silences. The Model Reader stance functions as a third analytic layer, complementing rather than replacing the others (descriptive and testimonial), by explicitly accounting for the addressee-oriented logic of the letters and for the fact that what is written is inseparable from what is meant to be received. Methodologically, the aim is not to reconstruct a coherent story, infer hidden meanings, or interpret symbolic depth; but to specify the conditions of address and reception under which the text operates. We therefore propose dialogical/reception-oriented reading as a situated methodological response to censored, relational, and historically saturated correspondence, not as a portable or universal analytic model.

Toward a New Epistemology for Traumatic Archives

These three contributions converge to suggest that analyzing extreme historical documents requires a multilayered epistemology, one that departs from inductive phenomenology and moves toward: critical realism, reception theory, ethical philosophy, trauma studies, and document theory, as discussed earlier in the manuscript (e.g., Felman & Laub, 1992; Gill et al., 2018; Prior, 2003).

Phenomenology relies on analyzing what the phenomenon gives. Here, what is given is structurally incomplete. These letters cannot be read as full narratives; they are strategic communications, acts of survival, testimonies through silence. Thus, a new epistemic model is required: a three-level analytic stance combining descriptive, testimonial and dialogical/reception layers, grounded in reflexivity and historical responsibility. This is not a generalizable model. It is a model for materials that wound.

Conclusion

This study does not offer a phenomenology of the letters from Drancy but a phenomenology of what the letters do to methods, to groups, to subjectivity, to ethics. It shows that neutrality is impossible, inductivism is naïve, description is dangerous, interpretation is ethically charged, and researchers become inseparable from the phenomenon. Our contribution is not a methodological answer, but the articulation of productive impossibility.

When qualitative inquiry meets the archives of genocide, methods crack open. Through these cracks emerge a new kind of knowledge (situated, ethical, wounded) one that requires acknowledging both the impossibility of full understanding and the necessity of trying.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Dwelling With the Letters: Methodological and Epistemological Dilemmas in a Qualitative Analysis of the Correspondence of Jewish Internees From the Drancy Camp

Supplemental Material for Dwelling With the Letters: Methodological and Epistemological Dilemmas in a Qualitative Analysis of the Correspondence of Jewish Internees From the Drancy Camp by Jeanne Mathé, Jordan Sibeoni, Emilie Manolios, Laurence Verneuil, Adam Veiller, Dimitra Lamou, Anne Révah-Lévy in International Journal of Qualitative Methods