1. The first level, that of
being a witness to oneself…as a…survivor…I have distinct memories…the
subsequent life my family and I led there.
I remember both these events and the feelings and thoughts they provoke
in minute detail. They are not facts
that were gleaned from somebody else’s telling me about them…
But these memories are those of an adult…the recall in a young child…It
is as though this process of witnessing is of an event that happened on another
level, and was not part of the mainstream of the conscious life…[of a child]. Rather, these memories are like discrete
islands of precocious thinking and feel almost like the remembrances of another…removed,
yet connected to me in a complex way…The remembrances of yet another child survivor,…subtly
related to my own in the quality…will serve as a connecting, reemerging thread…
2. …the process of witnessing is
my participation, not in the events, but in the account given them, in my role
as the interviewer of survivors…My function in this setting is that of a
companion on the eerie journey of the testimony. As an interviewer, I am present as someone
who actually participates in the reliving and reexperiencing of the event. I
also become part of the struggle to go beyond the event and not be submerged
and lost in it.
3. …the process of witnessing is itself being witnessed. I observe how the narrator, and myself as
listener, alternate between moving closer and then retreating from the
experience---with the sense that there is a truth that we are both trying to
reach, and this sense serves as a beacon we both try to follow. The traumatic experience has normally long
been submerged and has become distorted in its submersion. The horror of the historical experience is
maintained in the testimony only as an elusive memory that feels as if it no
longer resembles any reality. The horror
is, indeed, compelling not only in its reality, but even more so, in its
flagrant distortion and subversion of reality.
Realizing its dimensions becomes a process that demands retreat. The narrator and I need to halt and reflect
on these memories as they are spoken, so as to reassert the veracity of the
past and to build anew its linkage to, and assimilation into, present-day life.
“This essay will be based on this enigma of one child’s memory of
trauma.”
There is an implicit imperative to ‘the testimony.’…an imperative need
to ‘tell’ and thus to come to ‘know’ one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the
past against which one has to protect oneself.
One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s
life. [p.78]
[In the unholy triangle…abuser, victim, witness]
….to maintain an integrity….that could keep itself uncompromised,
unharmed, by…her very witnessing. The
perpetrators, in their attempt to rationalize the unprecedented scope of the
destructiveness, brutally imposed upon their victims a delusional ideology
whose grandiose coercive pressure totally excluded and eliminated the possibility
of an unviolated, unencumbered, and thus sane, point of reference in the
witness.
What I feel is therefore
crucial to emphasize is the following:
it was not only the reality of the situation and the lack of responsiveness
of bystanders or the world that accounts for the fact that history was taking
place with no witness: it was also the
very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the
very notion that a witness could exist, that is, someone who could step outside
of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the
event was taking place, and provide an independent frame of reference through
which the event could be observed…
What do I mean by the notion
of a witness from inside? To understand
it one has to conceive of the world of the Holocaust as a world in which the
very imagination of the Other was no longer possible.
There was no longer an other
to which one could say ‘Thou’ 4 in the
hope of being heard, of being recognized as a subject, of being answered. The historical reality of the Holocaust
became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility
of address, the possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another. But when one cannot turn to a ‘you’ one
cannot say ‘thou’ even to oneself. The
Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear to witness
to oneself. The Nazi system turned
out therefore to be foolproof, not only in the sense that there were in theory
no outside witnesses but also in the sense that it convinced its victims, the
potential witnesses from the inside, that what was affirmed about their ‘otherness’
and their inhumanity was correct and that their experiences were no longer
communicable even to themselves, and therefore perhaps never took place. This loss of the capacity to be a witness to
oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of
annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to
exist as well.
Survivors often claim that
they experience the feeling of belonging to a ‘secret order’ that is sworn to
silence. Because of their ‘participation’…they
have become the ‘bearers of a secret’ (Geheimnisstraeger) never to be
divulged. The implications of this
imaginary complicity and of this conviction of their having been chosen for a
secret mission are that they believe, out of loyalty, that their persecution
and execution by the Nazis was actually warranted. This burdensome secret belief in the…propagated
‘truth’ of Jewish subhumanity compels them to maintain silence. As ‘subhumans,’ a position they have accepted
and assumed as their identity by virtue of their contamination by the ‘secret
order,’ they have no right to speak up or protest. Moreover, by never divulging their stories,
they feel that the rest of the world will never come to know the real truth,
the one that involved the destruction of their own humanity. The difficulty that prevents these victims
from speaking out about their victimization emphasizes even more the delusional
quality of the Holocaust. This delusion,
fostered by the Holocaust, is actually lived as an unconscious alternate truth,
by executioners, victims and bystanders alike.
How can such deadlock be broken?
The Emperor’s New Clothes
…secret sharing of a collective delusion….the…delusion was ubiquitously
effective in Jewish communities as well.
This is why those who were lucid enough…about the…destruction either
through information or thorough foresight, were dismissed as ‘prophets of doom’
and labeled traitors or madmen. They
were discredited because they were not conforming by staying within the
confines of the delusion. It is in this
way that the capabilities of a witness alone to stand out from the crowd and
not be flooded and engulfed by the event itself, was precluded.
The silence….after…[has] been
a continuation of the power and the victory of that delusion.
Across the Gap
….any instance of its survival inevitably implied the presence of some
sort of informal discourse, of some degree of unconscious witnessing that could
not find its voice or its expression during the event….the historical
imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence. The degree to which bearing witness was
required, entailed such an outstanding measure of awareness and of
comprehension of the event---of its dimensions, consequences, and above all, of
its radical otherness to all known frames of reference---that it was beyond the
limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to
imagine. There was therefore no
concurrent “knowing” or assimilation of the history of the occurrence. The event could thus unimpededly proeceed as
though there were no witnessing whatsoever, no witnessing that could decisively
impact on it.5
….The perspective I propose tries to highlight, however, what was
ultimately missing, not in the courage of the witnesses nor in the depth of
their emotional responses, but in the human cognitive capacity to perceive and
to assimilate the totality of what was really happening at the time.
Witnessing and Restoration.
Yet it is essential for this
narrative that could not be articulated, to be told, to be transmitted, to be
heard. Hence the importance of
historical endeavors…
To a certain extent, the
interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that
previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry
out. It is the encounter and the coming
together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible something
like a repossession of the act of witnessing.
This joint responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth.
…The testimony constitutes in this way a conceptual breakthrough, as
well as a historical event in its own right, a historical recovery which I tend
to think of as a ‘historical retroaction.’
What ultimately matters in all
processes of witnessing, spasmodic and continuous, conscious and unconscious,
is not simply the information, the establishment of facts, but the experience
itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony.
The testimony is, therefore,
the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as
witness: reconstitutes the internal ‘thou,’ and thus the possibility of a
witness or a listener inside himself.
In my experience, repossessing
one’s life story through giving testimony is itself a form of action, of
change, which has to actually pass through, in order to continue and complete
the process of survival after liberation.
The event must be reclaimed…
~Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub. Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, pp.78-84
No comments:
Post a Comment