The following quote comes from the Holocaust Oral History Project. The narrator, Lucille E., is a Holocaust survivor who is recounting her story to three interviewers. She is speaking of the Kapo who supervised her barracks at Birkenau.

She was Jewish, yes, but she had a supervisory position. And at night she had a little cubicle at the end of the barracks. And there was a rumor that one of the SS came at night and spent the night with her, every night. But it was a rumor, because the barracks were dark at night, we did not know. In 1946 the rumor turned out to be true, she was in New York with that man. I met her at Altman’s.

The chronology of Lucille’s story at this point jumps from the year 1945 to 1946, from Auschwitz to New York, with no mention of the events occurring in the interim. The story departs from a narration of daily events and follows instead the fate of a single character, the Jewish supervisor. Art Spiegelman also struggled with the tendancy of the narrator (his father) to depart from the main subject of the story to persue the fate of a single character .

Vladek: Ilzecki and his wife didn’t come out from the war . . . but his son remained alive; ours did not . . . and anyway we had to give Richieu to hide a year later. When we were in the Ghetto, in 1943, Tosha took all the children to-

Art: Wait! Please, Dad, if you don’t keep your story chronological, I’ll Never get it straight . . tell me more about 1941 and 1942. (Maus I, p. 81-2)

This quote further illustrates the problematic nature of memory as evinced in oral history. The narrator tends to follow certain strains of the story (in these examples the lives of certain individuals) and in doing so takes chronological license with the narrative. Art Spiegelman describes his role in this narrative process as one of "Shaping." He must shape his Father’s story into a chronologically linear form for the purpose of clarity, while simultaneously attempting to maintian the authenticity of the story. Spielgelmann speaks to this effect when interviewed by Josh Brown.

Shaping means [that] things that came out [in an interview] as shotgun facts about events that happened in 1939, facts about things that happened in 1945, they all have to be organized. As a result, this tends to make my father seem more organized than he was.

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