Retranscrire la violence et le traumatisme: Mises en récit administratives de la persécution dans l’immédiate après-Shoah

The Canadian Jewish Archives in Montreal have preserved more than one thousand visa applications filed by Holocaust orphans who immigrated to Canada during the late 1940s. From the casefiles, one can retrace the individual trajectories of these young survivors and, more importantly, understand how their trajectories were transcribed by the administration. This article examines this early administrative narrativization of the Holocaust, where violence and trauma form the implicit backdrop. It investigates the use of casefiles in the social sciences and addresses recent developments in the historiography of childhood in the wake of the Holocaust.