As I mentioned before, I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary. It was a pleasure because I always enjoy discussing the dilemmas of civilians during the Second World War. The director asked some intriguing questions, one of which I’ll share with you today.

She asked me about the difference between archival and oral sources for writing history. Put simply, archival sources are written documents that are either in an archive or could be in one. That includes every sort of bureaucratic report and paper, diaries written during the course of events, court proceedings and newspapers, flyers etc published at the time. Oral history means interviews of participants or observers made after the fact. In theory you could collect such oral history a month after something happened, but in the case of the Second World War such interviews were not collected until decades after the events in question. So the key difference between archival and oral sources for the history of WWII has to do with the date in which they were created.

Every source has its shortcomings because no one knows everything and no one is completely unbiased. Even the main actor in an event does not know absolutely everything that happened to everyone involved. This is especially true for dangerous and chaotic times such as WWII and for the Resistance. Furthermore, archival sources are all shaped by the person or agency that created the document. The American officers in MIS-X who asked civilians how they helped Allied aviators evade capture, for example, only asked resisters about how they helped aviators. They did not ask if the same helpers also rescued Jews or other civilians and, for the most part, the helpers did not volunteer that information to those officers. So to decide that European civilians did not rescue Jews based on reading the MIS-X files would be completely inaccurate and shoddy history to boot. Of course oral history interviewers also have to set parameters to their interviews or they’d end up with incoherent ramblings.

The beauty of oral history is that it can fill in the gaps left by the more formal documents in archives. An oral history interviewer can ask a resister if he or she helped Jews as well as aviators, or aviators as well as Jews. The interviewer can also ask for the sorts of private, daily details that no one thought worth recording at the time, such as how the family got enough food and how a resister knew the other people in his or her group. The difficulty with oral history, though, is that most people do not have perfect memories. They forget things. They suppress memories that are too painful. Or they read things in the intervening years that shape their understanding of what they witnessed decades earlier. I’ve seen this a lot, especially among women who risked their lives by sheltering or feeding fugitives. For decades after the war “Resistance” meant the military resistance of partisans fighting in the hills and “the war” meant the military battles. Ordinary people tend to discount their own experiences if they don’t coincide with what they’re told matters. So these women tell me all about the fighting in the area without once volunteering anything about the very real dangers they faced in their villages and towns.

In the case of the Second World War, an historian can use both archival and oral history sources as long as he or she acknowledges the limitations of all of them.