Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ not require a direct transfer of experience is useful in getting past the debilitating trope of incomprehensibility. Understandably, survivors express anguish about being heard and understood, but that neither silences their expression nor bars their audience from listening and drawing conclusions about the event. The absence of a direct transfer of experience is not a failure to communicate. While written survivor accounts may arouse the empathy of their readers and speak to a yearning to experience secondhand that which the survivor has endured (hence the term “fantasies of witnessing”), Weissman also rightly comments that “no degree of power or monumentality can transform one person’s lived memories into another’s.”93 Indeed, it is the awareness that the survivors are passing that produces a hunger to claim as personal memory that which must become something else when the survivors are gone.94 That something else is collective memory, which, in a strict sense, is not memory at all, but remembrance. The hunger for experiencing from a safe distance what victims and survivors endured makes such experience impossible a priori, but Weissman does not conclude that testimony therefore loses its purpose. The “fantasy of witnessing”—the mistaken belief that there is a way to comprehend the survivor’s experience in its fullness—still enables the compassionate reception of another’s testimony within a historical framework.

      Weissman’s admonition not to confuse the reception of witness testimony with experiencing trauma also helps explain the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, which may be motivated by similar “fantasies of witnessing.” In fact, he opens his volume with an account of a son who accompanies his father, a survivor, to the Mauthausen camp memorial in Austria, where the latter was interned. Hoping to know somehow more directly what his father experienced by visiting the site, he is instead disappointed by the normality of the place. He does not encounter abject horror; “instead, he felt distanced from the actuality of what had occurred decades ago in the places where he stood. In response to this feeling, Michael’s desire to experience what Mauthausen had been for his father in 1944 gave way to a more basic effort to feel, to experience something, whatever would enable him to overcome his sense of estrangement from the Holocaust past.”95 (Perhaps Michael’s estrangement is not so different from the experience of some prisoners, as Weissman suggests. Primo Levi’s description of his arrival at Auschwitz recounts a sense of surprise that he is not immediately confronted by the “apocalyptic,” instead encountering a semblance, however brief, of the familiar.) Tourists like Michael hope through proximity to find a sense of immediacy that they cannot find by reading survivor testimony, even if they are the children of survivors.96 But the inability to experience the horror begets something equally important to the transmission of testimony, and that is an act of imagination—in Michael’s case, about what it must have been like for those who suffered. “Finally it was hearing stories of how prisoners suffered and died in the quarry, told at the very scene of the crime, that enabled him to come closest to something of the missing horror, however fleetingly.”97 (We will explore in the following chapters the ways in which Holocaust tourism invites its participants to engage in a more difficult act of imagination—identification with the perpetrators.)

      Weissman’s distinction between historical knowledge and experiential knowledge reminds us that we should not discount knowledge that is “merely factual”; instead, we should acknowledge the role such knowledge plays in the act of testifying to experience. Surely the job of Holocaust museums and memorials is to ensure that historical knowledge, too, is transmitted on behalf of the victims. In court cases, where testimony has its primary locus, the jury’s task is not to take on the identity of the victim, to endure the victim’s experiences, but to find truth. Courtrooms are frequent sites where traumatic experience is articulated, but that does not negate the assumption that one can get at a sense of truth through testimony in combination with other forms of evidence. Let us remember that the origins of the camp memorials stem also from this same sense of bearing witness for evidentiary purposes.

      If a tour to Auschwitz enables witnessing, understood as the tourist’s reception today of testimony from those who were there in the past, it must, at the very minimum, involve a communicative act between an absent speaker and a present listener. The most obvious way in which Holocaust museums and memorials present testimony comes in the form of displayed quotations or videotaped interviews from survivors, which are often running on continual loops as tourists move from one display to the next. Survivor accounts are also well represented in most Holocaust museum bookstores. Sometimes, though very rarely now, survivors themselves give guided tours through memorials.98 But the primary voice that tourists hear at Auschwitz is that of their tour guide, who is usually a credentialed, university-trained educator from Poland, who recounts the experiences of the deportees to the visitors, often trying to humanize the victims by giving narrative accounts of specific individuals or groups. For example, the guide may stop at the photo of a prisoner and tell what we know about his or her fate. When the tour reaches Birkenau, the guide may describe the calamity that befell the Hungarian Jews, who were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in the summer of 1944, and for whose arrival the rail spur through the middle of the extermination camp was built. This last example is often the focus of guided tours at Auschwitz because the only known case of a transport photographed from arrival to selection to the march to the crematoria depicts an arrival of Hungarian Jews. The photos, taken by the SS and recovered by a prisoner after the camp was evacuated, allow the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum to illustrate the process of mass murder by placing photos at the spot where they were taken. (These images will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter.)

      Of course, that SS photographer did not accompany the doomed into the gas chamber, so it is fair to ask if the examples of testimony presented overrepresent the survivors and perpetrators at the expense of the more than 1.1 million people who were murdered at Auschwitz. Perhaps the closest the memorial site comes to representing the voices of the murdered is to incorporate testimony recovered by members of the Sonderkommando, who were forced to carry out the killings. Sonderkommandos were routinely exterminated after a few months and replaced, since there were to be no eyewitnesses to the gas chambers. Several prisoners wrote detailed descriptions of what they witnessed and buried them in containers on the camp’s grounds, some of which have been recovered. A resistance group at Auschwitz smuggled a camera to a Sonderkommando unit, and a few photographs have been recovered. Some of the few Sonderkommando survivors have recounted the last words they heard from the doomed, as documented in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. But the fact remains that the vast majority of victims were murdered in anonymity, unable to leave testimony in written words. Herein lies the importance of such artifacts as the piles of suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, and even human hair that are on display in Auschwitz I, all of which function as visual testimony of the deportees’ fate.

      It is this concern for bearing witness for the dead who could not testify that informs the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s insistence on the “sayability” of Auschwitz, even for those who have been silenced.99 Agamben cites Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel on the problem of the survivor who inherits the burden of speaking for the millions who were murdered.100 Although survivors did not share the terminus of the gas chambers, they can—must—relate facts about the killing.101 Agamben’s aim is not to deny the chasm between the dead and the survivors; like Weissman, he recognizes a distinction between that which a subject experiences in its affective entirety and that which a subject can put into words, which must always be a partial account. He elaborates: “The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge; a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.”102 That space between experience and testimony is not a void; rather, it is a place for productive potential that calls forth witnessing. Rejecting Laub’s notion of an “event with no witnesses,” Agamben insists that ethics post-Auschwitz require witnessing, the inadequacies of language notwithstanding. While Agamben’s gesture toward a “new ethics” has invited criticism from some, his notion of witnessing as a way to bridge silence and speech recalls what has always been a fundamental attribute of witnessing.103 Testimony, the expression of the personal memory of the camps, is predicated upon that very distinction between experience and its translation into reported facts, a point made very clearly by Weissman.

      Tourists may come to Auschwitz with the explicit expectation of a more experiential СКАЧАТЬ