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Between Witness and Testimony: Survivor Narratives and the Shoah

2000; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1542-4286

Michael Bernard‐Donals, Richard R. Glejzer,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

The disaster is related to forgetfulnessforgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated . To write . . . is to be in relation, through words in their absence, with what one cannot remember. (Blanchot 1995,121) When you're hungry, it gets to a point where you don't mind stealing from your own sister, from your own father ... Now I-you would never picture me, and I can't even imagine myself doing that now. But it happened. (Leon W, FVA tape T-2)1 In the last several years, a number of groups and individuals have made an effort to record the memories of those who survived, in one way or another, the utter burn of history. Two of the most notable are the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, established in 1982, and the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, established with the help of Steven Spielberg in 1994. In addition to recorded oral testimonies, we have those gathered much earlier, recorded with paper and ink: Primo Levi began writing If This is a Man (which, in its later printing, became Survival in Auschwitz) in 1948, less than four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and countless others have committed to language the memories that haunted them and the realities that confronted them as they were starved, beaten, and left to watch one another be killed or die. In the case of both written and oral testimonies, in spite of the prima facie differences between them, it becomes clear that the distance between what has been witnessed and what can be committed to testimony-what was seen and what can be said-is often wide, but always palpable. And it is palpable not only in the witness's statements but in the shrugged shoulders, the winces, the tears, and the silences that punctuate the oral testimonies and that are aestheticized but not domesticated in the written language of figure. Nathan A's description of an aktion, in which Jewish villagers are asked to dig ditches and then line up at its edge to be shot, along with, later, all of their neighbors, proceeds this way: They used to throw the earth on the top, and the earth used to go up and down because they are living people: One-the son bury his mother; the mother was still alive: Moyshe, ikh lebh; bagrub mikh nisht lebedikerheyt (Moyshe, I'm alive; don't bury me while I'm alive]. . . . But Moyshe had no choice, because the Germans no give him the choice. And he bury alive. [Interviewer:] He buried his mother alive? (FVA tape T-113) At that, Nathan shrugs his shoulders without any facial expression. The shrug of the shoulders and the lack of apparent emotion in this account, as much as the incongruous connection of the pleading of a mother to her son and the statement bereft of anything but description that concludes the episode (and he bury alive), mark a point between witness and testimony that can be seen as a moment of trauma, a moment in which the historical real and the memory of it as demanded by the imperative to testify to it disintegrate and present for both the witness and the interviewer (as well as those who are present to view or listen to the testimony) a break.This moment, this break, is neither a site of historical facticity nor a kernel of truth nor the recovery, for the witness, of the moment by way of memory. It is, in Cathy Caruth's words, a moment in which the object-in this case, the moment not of the son burying his mother, but of Nathan A.'s witnessing of the acts he attempts to describe--is grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence (1991, 187) in which the object is denoted not by the words but is borne by the shrug, the connective and:' and the impassive face of Nathan A. as he confronts the interviewer. In Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, there are equally devastating moments in which the writer presents his reader with incomprehensibly painful and quite literally unbelievable moments of cruelty In one, the boy Binjamin-perhaps a pseudonym for a Jewish child who in 1944 is no more than five or six, and who finds himself separated from his brothers and transported to Majdanek-recalls what happens to two young boys who are caught soiling their already-fouled bunks: They were forbidden to come back into the barracks. …