‘A Quilt of Memory’: The Shoah as a Prism in the Testimonies of Survivors of the Dictatorship in Argentina

Abstract

This paper analyses testimonies of survivors of the detention camps operated by the last military dictatorship in Argentina, with special attention to the functions served by the referencing of testimonies of the Shoah (above all in Ese infierno, a collective testimony by five women in dialogue form). The intertextuality herein assumes different functions in the shaping of discourses and representations, whether in the form of a quotation, an epigraph, a metaphor, an endeavour to legitimise what is being said, a comparison, or an effort to incorporate one’s own experience into a narrative of the catastrophe already so well known in human history.