LNP Alumni Feature: Sarah Federman (’16)
We continue our alumni feature series with Sarah Federman, who spoke to us from her COVID-getaway spot in British Columbia about the process of writing her soon-to-be-released book, “Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability.”
Sarah Federman, Spring 2016
Assistant Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Baltimore
Writer, Baltimore
Website | @sarahfederman
Sarah Federman is Assistant Professor of Negotiation and Conflict Management at the University of Baltimore. Dr. Federman also consults nationally and internationally with corporations, individuals and organizations. Her website, Language of Conflict, discusses the role of language in framing conflicts and, as a result, the approaches taken for their resolution.
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What about this particular subject – the culpability of the French railroad’s actions during World War II – grabbed your attention?
Well, actually, the book truly derailed my life! I had been living in Paris for three years, working with a French advertising company. And before I moved there my friend, and former history professor, said, “When you get to Paris, find out if those train drivers kept their jobs after the war!” And then I forgot all about it. But one day I saw my name on the Holocaust Memorial Wall. I’d been rollerblading in the neighborhood and I just popped into the memorial and saw my name. And it was really scary, honestly, to touch my name. Who was this girl that had my name? I didn’t know anything about her. And then I was like, all right, I’m going to find out what happened with those train drivers after the war. So that was the calling.
It seems like you approach things from a practical point of view. You see an issue and you think, how do I tackle this? And you just run with it.
Totally! What qualifications did I have to go mucking about in French history? I went to grad school in Paris because I was already there, and started studying the history of the trains. It was great. I went to a train conference, met with train executives, met with the French-Jewish community. I went to all the memorial sites. I went to the archives. Then I got to the end of the program in Paris, and I realized I didn’t yet know enough to take my research to the next level. But I found the one grad program that focuses on exactly where I was stuck. I hadn’t applied because I didn’t really plan ahead – I just showed up in D.C. at the Ph.D. welcome night – and continued my research.
What did you hope to accomplish in the Logan Nonfiction Program ?
At that point I didn’t see myself as a writer. So being selected as a Logan Nonfiction Fellow – having you take a chance on me – then being surrounded by people who actually were writers was really helpful at that time. I had 90 stories and I had put them all in my dissertation, but for the book I could only use a few. One of the fellows said, “Think about the four that most stuck with you.” I would sit in my room, really thinking about the four, but it was only after I started to write about them that I realized they were all on the last train. That’s where the book title came from. It was just a coincidence. They were all on the train together.
In the article you wrote for Folklife magazine, “The Keeper of the Violin,” you say that telling the story of these survivors became your way of honoring your own grandfather and the family he left behind.
It felt like I was fulfilling a soul contract. Even some of the pain I had in my heart since I was a kid started to leave. It was like, maybe there is something to this idea of transgenerational trauma and that it actually does help to process it. It released something in me. What’s really poignant is the survivors that I interviewed are now dying. I think about what it means when the survivors will be gone and we’re the ones now carrying their stories. A lot of the survivors ask, “what’s happening now? How can we help people who are suffering today?” And they turned my attention to people who are suffering, like the refugees, and saying, “all right, now take care of those who are going through what I went through when I was a kid.” So many of them were orienting me in that direction.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a few articles related to the book. One is about the idea of applying lessons learned to corporate accountability as it relates to companies with the legacy of slavery. Another project is not Holocaust related, but I’ll just mention it. I got the advance book contract recently! At the University of Baltimore I teach a negotiation class to ethnically diverse adult students in Baltimore, and I saw that what you learn about negotiation at Harvard and Wharton doesn’t work as well when you’re negotiating from a position of historical oppression or disenfranchisement. So the book is about how you negotiate from the margins. How do these students get into the middle class? If your family never talked about money, if you’re the first person to go to college in your family, it’s very, very different. So my students are ultimately helping me write this book.
One last word: The book had its own trajectory. Like when I was getting my thesis printed in France… I took it to an Office Depot below my apartment, I gave them the USB key, I ran back upstairs, and when I came back down my thesis was sitting on the counter and there were piles of Jewish prayers, documents someone had printed, all around the thesis, and nobody was in the store. Weird coincidences like that. I was journaling about them at some point, but they got kind of haunting and I just thought, OK, this is creepy. Like one thing would lead to the next or my eyes would be pulled to something and then I would go to that box and there it was. It’s almost like the dead are saying, ”It’s over here. It’s over here.”