Comparing Family Narratives during the Holocaust and the Early Apartheid Era: The Hekster Family Papers

Comparative histories often draw from published sources to make analogies between events and phenomena in varying temporal and geographic spaces.  The practice has become controversial, as historians debate whether two seemingly different phenomena can indeed be analyzed together by members of a discipline that values specificity and depth, rather than broad generalizations. The Hekster Family Papers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provide an interesting case study in the debate over comparative history.  Written mostly in 1940, the letters that comprise the collection served as the main means of communication between Hekster Family members in Nazi-occupied Holland and those who had fled to South Africa, where a largely anti-Semitic radical right was laying the foundations for what would later become known as apartheid.  Rather than providing an objective analysis of similarities and differences between the Holocaust and apartheid, as some historians have done, the Hekster family papers represent the unrepresentable.  These letters tell the story of a family that experienced discrimination and displacement in two very different places at the same time and demonstrate the ways that distinct histories have been portrayed by the people living them.This close reading of the Hekster Family Papers will reveal the degree to which one group of kin, facilitated by the Red Cross, represented their lived experience through letters. These letters are sometimes descriptive of the political situation in both countries, but they also provide a compelling personal narratives and portray the unrepresentable as an experience that can be not only represented through writing, but can also signify the similarities in repressive state systems.