Dis/abling Affect: Building Community Out of Trauma at the International Tracing Service

The Arolsen Archives, the world’s largest archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazi regime, contains millions of stories of death and traumatic suffering. Less well known, but just as important, it also includes stories of survival. By looking at the Displaced Persons (DPs) who came to the Arolsen Archives (then the International Tracing Service) after the war to find work, we discover remarkable accounts of people helping to build and organise a unique tracing service and archive that helped thousands of people find loved ones and receive some form of restitution. Analysing the less researched DP personnel files of the Arolsen Archives as well as oral interviews with former DP employees, their co-workers and their children, I use affect theory to bring trauma studies and disability studies into conversation. Focusing on the extraordinary postwar stories of the DPs, I use a political/relational disability studies model to show how the specific historical and social conditions co-constructed trauma and disability for the DPs. This disability studies approach allows for a new social-relational dimension to the understanding of trauma on the one hand and the agency of the DPs on the other. Moving past the old stereotypes of disability-as-personal-tragedy, the concept of agency, which has informed the social justice efforts of many disability activists, is useful for appreciating the extraordinary contributions of the DPs to the Arolsen Archives.