אנט ויביורקה, עידן העד

III
·

Toward the end of the 1970s, the systematic collection of audiovisual testimonies began. Th. global context had changed. The genocide of the Jews was now a strong presence in political life in France, Israel, and the United States. But Western societies had also changed, and these changes could not but affect the very nature.


. . -. :.:;,.-.
·.
.of tes.iP:l:<>PY· Testimony projects and archives prolif­
erated. In an article in Le Monde, Frederic Gaussen observed:
To tell one's life story is a satisfaction refused only with difficulty. It is the proof that one-has in truth ex­isted, and that an interlocutor is there, ready to take an interest in you. Persons of importance-and in­deed, those of less importance-have always
longed to address others by writing their memoirs. Others, or­dinary people, satisfied themselves with the more lim­ited public of family and friends.
But such relative differences among individual des­

97
tinies can no longer be taken for granted. The idea has taken hold that all lives equally deserve to be told.1

man, the retired schoolteacher, and so on. In a way, at issue was a democratization of historical actors, an at­tempt to give voice to the excluded, the unimportant, the voict;less. In the context of the post-1968 years, it was also a political act. The mass demonstrations in France in
May 1968 were characterized by a massive ef­fort to seize control of public discourse. In their wake, this phenomenon spread not only to the humanities and


the street. The 1970s were also a time when feelings and psy­chological problems began to be exhibited publicly, first
-·­
through radio, then television. In the early 1990s, a new kind of television show appeared
in France, modeled on •
U.S. shows and based on the language of ordinary peo­ple. This eruption of profane experience and of private
ma9'.
man rights triumphed. Every society, every historical period came to be measured by the degree of respect it gave to human rights. The individual was thus placed at



At the end of the 1970s, after the emotional reactions and controversies that followed the broadcast of the television miniseries Holocaust in the United States as well as in France and Germany, the idea emerged for the first time that it was necessary to record video testi­monies of those the Americans call "survivors," those who lived under Nazi domination in the Third Reich or in the countries occupied by the Nazis and who escaped the Final Solution. This is clearly a broad definition be­cause it includes not only the direct victims-those who were interned in the various camps or in the ghettos­but also persons whose lives were certainly threatened but who did not necessarily suffer directly in the flesh.
The televised miniseries Holocaust was a prodigious success first in the United .States; drawing 120 million viewers. In Germany, where it aired next, it produced a profound reaction. A critic noted: "Germany has been enriched by a new American word 'Holocaust,' which simultaneously covers the Jewish genocide, the TV movie and its personalized tragedy, and the emotional and political reactions it promoted. "2 French television at first resisted purchasing the miniseries for broadcast. It was too expensive. Moreover. France had already pro­duced something superior. Alain Resnais's Night and Fog. Finally, Claude Lanzmann was working on a film and it seemed fitting to wait until it was finished. But the French television station Antenne 2 decided to buy the rights in November 1978. The miniseries was shown in February 1979 and a debate on the topic "Life and death in the Nazi death camps" immediately followed.




As in the United States and Germany, the film provoked heated debates that lasted for months.
The producer, Marvin Chomsy, whose miniseries Roots had already been wildly successful and who was
also responsible for such shows as Columbo and Man­nix, constructed the screenplay
for the miniseries as
four two-hour segments based on a novel by Gerald Green. The miniseries followed two German families, one won over to Nazism and the other Jewish-the Weiss family,
thor wanted the Weisses to be a typical middle-class family: the father a neighborhood doctor, the mother a housewife, two · children. The miniseries depicts the crumbling of the family's entire value system, until the parents find no other solution than to take their own lives. Only the son, Rudi, survives, by fighting with the resistance, then leaving for Palestine.
Criticisms of the miniseries were identical in the United States, France, and Germany. It was accused of being "romanticized," "a Hollywood product." The sit­


uations drafuatized by the miniseries were classic Hol­
lywood film scenes: the forced separation of the lovers, ·
the death of a best friend or family member, social cor­ruption. What
characterized the history of the persecu­tion of the Jews_.:.intolerable
anguish, sufering, hunger, mass death-was not shown.
But above ·all, while a large number of survivors would recognize

their history in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which they would support against all criticism b
y intellectuals, it was certain survivors them­


selves who expressed the most virulent criticisms of Holocaust. The .first of these critics was Elie Wiesel in the New York Times. He was severe. "Untrue, offensive, cheap: as a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived. In spite of its name, this 'docu-drama' is not about what some of us remember as the Holocaust .... It transforms an onto­logical event into soap-opera .... The witness feels here duty-bound to declare: what you have seen on the screen is not what happened there. "3 Charlotte Delbo, who, like Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, was part of the only convoy of women resistance fighters sent to Ausch­witz, had a similar impression: "When I sat down in front of the TV set, I had a lump in my throat. Based on the articles I had read I was afraid that I would feel un­controllable emotion at the sight of truly unbearable things. Almost immediately the lump disappeared.
I was not moved-and I don't think that I am inured to such things because I'm an Auschwitz survivor. "4 As for Si­mone Veil, she rejected the miniseries vision of the rela­tionship among prisoners, portrayed as attentive to one other and acting in solidarity. Prisoners might have stolen the blanket of someone who died, as the series shows, but, she points out, they could also take the blan­ket from another living prisoner, which is not shown.5
In the United States, the reaction of "ordinary" sur­vivors-those who had not written their memoirs, who did not enjoy any celebrity, who did not speak out in newspapers or on television-was the same. "So many lost their lives, will their life story too be taken away? was the complaint. Any survivor could tell a history





THE ERA OF THE WITNESS JOI

more true and terrible in its detail, more authentic in its depiction. "6 This multifaceted complaint deserves ex­amination. It reveals, first, an as;ute anxiety that is not

exclusive to survivors of the genocide: that of being dis­possessed of one's history by someone outside the expe­rience who claims to be telling it. The Weiss family could not pretend to represent all the Jewish families of Eu­rope. In any case, the diversity of social, political, and cultural situations among European Jews in the 1930s was such that it would be fruitless to try to represent
them with any single "type. " Yet the type chosen, the as­similated Jew from the Western European petite bour­geoisie, was not a matter of chance. It was certainly
easier for the U.S. viewer to identify with this type of person than with a Polish Jew wearing a caftan and side­locks, the father of a large, Yiddish-speaking family. Nonetheless, many, very many, such Polish Jews per­ished in the genocide and indeed constituted the major­ity of its victims. The survivors were not the only ones dispossessed of their stories by the miniseries. Their

complaint also concerned those who did not survive and
whose history was stolen by Holocaust when they were
not there to tell it themselves. Indeed, one of the recur­ring themes in both oral and written survivor testimony is of a promise made to a friend or relative who is about
to die, a promise to tell the world what happened to
them and thus to save them from oblivion-to make

death a little less futile. Survival itself is often explained and justified by this
will to honor the legacy of those who perished. The last argument advanced by the sur­
vivors who rejected the miniseries was that their history










demanded a greater authenticity, which would come about, notably, when such films showed more of the horrors. This argument echoes the reasons given by those who sought to testify at the Eichmann trial.
One ofthe consequences of the television broadcast, therefore, was to elicit an ardent and quite often newly felt desire among survivors in the United States to tell their stories, as the Eichmann trial had done for sur­vivors in Israel. Geoffrey Hartman remarks that the survivors expressed this desire to testify at a specific mo­ment in their lives. And the end of the 1970s, these men and women were well established in the United States. They had had families, and their own children were be­coming parents in turn. The chain of generations, dou­bly broken by the genocide and by emigration, was thus on its way to being reconstituted. The survivors no longer felt reticent about making their pasts known and about "the establishment of a legacy. "7 On the contrary, a change had taken place, one that began with the Eichmann trial. Survivors, whose stories were avoided during the postwar years, became respectable and re­spected persons in their very identities as survivors. Al­vin Rosenfeld is probably correct . in crediting Wiesel with this transformation. Wiesel was certainly the first to put into words the idea that there is no shame, either collective or individual, in being a victim of the Holocaust. During a debate that took place in New York in 1967, Wiesel declared:
Why then do we admittedly think of the Holocaust with shame? Why don't we claim it as a glorious chap­




ter in our eternal history? After all, it did change man and his world-well, it did not change man, but it did change the world. It is still the _greatest event in our times. Why then are we ashamed of it? In its power it even influenced language. Negro quarters are called ghettos; Hiroshima is explained by Auschwitz; Viet­nam is described in terms which were used one gen­eration ago. Everything today revolves around our Holocaust experience. Why then do we face it with such ambiguity? Perhaps this should be the task of Jewish educators and philosophers: to reopen the event as a source of pride, to take it back into our history.

Later in the same discussion he add,ed:
I already mentioned pride: I believe in the necessity to restore Jewish pride even in relation to the Holocaust. I do not like to think of the Jew as sufring. I prefer thinking of him as someone who can defeat suf­fering-his own and others' . For his is a Messianic dimension: he can save the world from a new Ausch­witz. As Camus would say: one must create happiness to protest against a universe of unhappiness. But­ene must create it; And we are creating it. We were cre­ating it. Jews got married, celebrated weddings, had children within ihe ghetto walls. Their absurd faith in their non-existent future was, nevertheless, af al pi chen, an affirmation of the spirit. Thus, theirs is the pride, it is not ours. Not yet. 8

Two decades after Wiesel's declarations, the change
had come about. "These men and women," wrote Leon
Uris, the author of the successful novels Exodus and


Mila 18, speaking of the survivors, "are to be looked upon with wonderment."9 And so they were.

The U.S. political context had also changed. In 1973, for the first time, the major Jewish-American organiza­tions included in their agendas the need to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. Publications and academic programs in
universities proliferated. Whereas in 1962 only one course on the Holocaust existed, at Brandeis University, such courses became widespread. By 1995 there were more than one hundred institutions devoted to the study of the Holocaust. This was first of all a re­action, in the United States as well as in France and Israel, to the Six-Day War. During the period that pre­ceded the Israeli victory, anxiety seized the population of Israel. This anxiety was lived in " genocidal" mode and with an almost identical intensity by U.S. and French Jews. It was feared that the state of Israel would be destroyed, and this fear brought to mind another de­struction..On June 4, the eve of the outbreak of war, Raymond Aron, who was usually little inclined to inti­mate revelations, wrote: "An irresistible sense of soli­darity is seizing hold of us; what matter where it comes from. If the superpowers, following the cold calculation of their interests, allow the destruction of the small state of Israel, this crime, modest on a global scale, will leave me without the wil to live, even though it is not my country. Millions of men, I believe, will be ashamed of humanity. " A few months later, he added: "I know also, more clearly than yesterday, that the possibility of the destruction of the state of Israel [which would be ac­companied by the massacre of part of its population]



wounds me to the bottom of my soul."10 Aron called this possible destruction "state-cide."
Raymond Aron was not alone in his anxiety about a possible new destruction, just as he was far from the only one to become aware of a sense of belonging. French Jews, whatever their affiliation with community organizations, shared this experience. Thus Richard Marienstras explained during a roundtable organized by the journal Esprit:
The solidarity that is manifested [with respect to the state oflsrael]-and that sometimes becomes an object of conscious reflection-is not based on the defense of a form of government or of any particular politics. It is manifested so vividly because everyone felt that, beneath the political body and government,
what was threatened was an original community that had formed a state to survive and to perpetuate or deepen its culture. We all felt that the threat weighing on Israel was not a political threat but an ontological one, aimed at the physical and cultural being of israel, aimed at the destruction of its inhabitants, of the state, of the col­lectivity. In short, what we feared was a cultural geno­cide, as well as a genocide plain and simple.11
Similarly, Wladimir Rabi spoke of "the impossibility of imagining a second Auschwitz during the same gen­
eration. "12
The Six-Day War, then the 1973 war, also had an­other, paradoxical effect for U.S. Jews. Zionism, which during the years of the war and afterward had acted as a powerful bond, orienting the identities of nonreligious Jews, became more problematic, more conflictual. Israel




was no longer a utopia but had become a real country occupying territories conquered in the Six-Day War. With Israel's intervention in Libya and with the intifada, the unanimity of the Jewish world with respect to Israel was ruptured. The heart of Jewish identity shifted imper­ceptibly from absolute support of and identification with Israel to the revitalization of the memory of the genocide. On the political front, Jimmy Carter's actions were decisive. When the U.S. president declared the need to work toward establishing a Palestinian state and demanded that Israel reinstate the borders in place be­fore the Six-Day War, he precipitated a crisis in his re­lations with the U.S. Jewish community, which, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had strongly supported the Democratic Party. How could he reconcile with them during his reelection campaign?
In 1977 the United States established an organization charged with tracking down Nazi war criminals who had legally entered the country during the years follow­ing the German surrender, some of whom even later worked for the U.S.
government. Additionally, a month after the broadcast of Holocaust, President Carter, ac­knowledging the emotion it had aroused, announced the creation of a presidential Holocaust commission to be chaired by Elie Wiesel, who embodied the survivor in the United States. This announcement coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel. It was a decisive gesture, aimed at appeasing the Jews with a view toward, the next presidential elec­tion. On October 7, 1980, a law created the American Memorial Council of the Holocaust, charged with ere­









ating a national memorial. The idea came from advisers to the president. Carter was not responding to pressure from Jewish groups. It was the :first significant political intervention in what until then had belonged to the pri­vate domain. From that moment on, the memory of the genocide, already a key issue for Jewish organizations, became a political theme as well.


Holocaust thus dramatically exposed the transfor­mations taking place in the landscape of memorializa­tion and the new elements entering that landscape: the changing image of the survivor, altered notions of Jew­ish identity, new political uses of the genocide. At least in France, survivors were also enlisted to authenticate the television miniseries. Before 1976, as Jacques Wal­ter notes, there had been only six television programs on the genocide. Appearances by witnesses and survivors were "few and far between." The televised news seg­ments devoted to Holocaust were no exception to this rule, since they dealt with the reception ofthe miniseries in Germany and with its pedagogical dimension. Sur­vivors appeared only during adebate following the broad­cast. The role they were assigned was pedagogical; they were asked to enter into dialogue with "the youth. " This goal was emphasized by the seating arrangement of the debate, in which former inmates were placed across the room from the young people.13
C n (J







In New
Haven, · Connecticut, home of Yale University, some realized that they knew practically nothing about
the survivors ofthe Holocaust,
even though some were their neighbors. One of these survivors was Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had been a child in Romania during the war. They therefore decided to establish a "Cinematic Project on Holocaust Sur­vivors," assisted by the Farband, a group of survivors from the New Haven area. By the time Yale University offered its help and the Yale Video Archive for Holo­caust Testimonies opened its doors in 1982, the project already included some two hundred testimonies. By 1995, the Fortunoff14 Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies had collected approximately 3,600 testi­monies-close
to 10,000 hours of interviews gathered throughout the United States, as well as in Greece, Bo­livia, Slovakia, Belgium, Germany, Israel, Argentina, Serbia, Belarus, and Ukraine. 15
What were the motivations behind the Yale Video
-Archive, which demanded an immense amount of time, energy, and, because it was decided that the filming should be of professional quality, money? Geoffrey Hartman explains that from the outset concern for the survivors was behind the
project, "a duty to listen and to restore a dialogue with people so marked by their experience that total integration into everyday life is a semblance-though a crucial and comforting sem­blance."16 Testimony was thus immediately assigned a new function in relation to those I have already ana­lyzed: to allow the survivor to speak. That function is difficult to define. Is it social therapy, because it consists of restoring a connection that had been broken? Dori Laub, one of the project's founders, who helped develop



and was essentially responsible for the training program for interviewers, affirms: "Lying is toxic and silence suf­focates. There is, in every survivar, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one's story, unimpeded by the 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. It is a mistake to be­lieve that silence favors peace. The •not telling' of the story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny. The events become more and more distorted in their silent reten­tion and pervasively invade and contaminate the sur­vivor's daily life." He goes on to insist that one cannot and should not speak unless one is listened to: "The unlistened-to story is a trauma as serious as the initial event. "17
The method of recording testimonies, developed in stags> at Yale, is intimately tied to this primary objec­tive: to give birth to a voice and to allow it to be heard. The interview takes place in a studio, that is, in a place closed off from the normal environment of the person being interviewed,
so that nothing will distract him or her from delving deeply into memory and the past. The interviewers, whose training is most often supervised by a psychoanalyst and who are taught the rudiments of the history of the genocide, do not use a preestablished questionnaire. Their role is to help the wimesses keep track of the story or to assist them in recalling painful episodes when they are sufering. The interviewer is not supposed to comment on or correct the narrative. The expression of emotion is encouraged, if not incited. At least at the outset, the Yale project was a community ef­










fort, a local effort one could say, centered on the sur­vivors themselves, toward whom those working at the Yale Archive always demonstrated the utmost respect, and on their social ties to their environment.
What Geoffrey Hartman calls a "testimonial pact" is thus created between the interviewer and the witness. Small communities are also formed comprising survivors, interviewers, and researchers interested in the material collected.

Today, the Yale Video Archive is far from unique. Various musewns, memorials, and memorial associa­tions have established their own interviewing projects. More than any other single factor, 1fi_e creation of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation es­tablished by Steven Spielberg in 1.994 changed the scale of testimony collection. Jacques Waite drawing on the writings of the project's founders, summarizes its devel­opment as follows. In 1994, while making Schindler's List in Poland, Spielberg was overwhelmed by the sto­ries of the survivorsworking as advisers to the film, who agreed to tell their stories on camera. In an interview in the French newspaper Liberation, Spielberg explained that he wanted "to conserve history as it is transmitted to us by those who lived through it and who managed to survive. It is essential that we see their faces, hear their voices, and understand that they are ordinary peo­ple like us who went through the atrocities of the Holo­caust." 18 The project of creating an archive of survivor testimony was born, then, from the making of a film. The analogy with the Yale Archive, the creation of which was also related to a film, is troubling. Two fictional





THE ERA OF THE WITN ESS Ill
films dealing with the genocide that were seen by tens of millions, even hundreds of millions throughout the world were also at the origin of the twq most important testi­mony archives. But whereas the survivors testified in re­action to Holocaust, in order to make their voices heard, one could say that they testified in symbiosis with Schindler's List, as a complement and not in opposition to the film. The differences do not end there. The em­phasis in Spielberg's project is different from that of the Yale Archive. The person of the survivor is no longer at the center of the enterprise. The survivor has been re­placed by a concept, that of transmission. Whereas the founders of the Yale Archive insisted on the survivors' sense of having lived on "another planet," as Ka-tzetnik put it at the Eichmann trial, on their sense of being for­ever isolated from the world and from their relatives by .an e:Xtreme experience, the Spielberg project is based, conversely, on the desire to show "ordinary people," people who have returned to "normal," who have sur­vived the shipwreck of war.
Briefly put, in contrast to the artisanal character of the Yale Archive, the Spielberg project manifests an "in­dustrial"19 dimension. Because the survivors were ap­proaching death, it was necessary to interview all who could be as quickly as possible-some 300,000 in all, with a goal of 50,000 by the end of 1997 and 150,000 before 2000-and to conduct these interviews wherever the survivors were located.20 Each team working in the various countries where survivors lived was supposed to work five days a week, conducting four interviews a day. By 1995 the Spielberg Foundation had already collected




close to 20,000 testimonies in the United States, South Africa, Israel, and Europe, including 1,300 in France. The project considered yield an important measure of success. The foundation's Web site published a daily tally of the testimonies collected (42,274 on April 18, 1998) and reported the number of interviews conducted each week (198 for the week of April 11, 1998).21 On January 12, 1998, Michael Berenbaum, president of the Spielberg Foundation, reported on the state of the archives: "If someone wanted to watch all the material we have collected, it would take nine-and-a-half years watching the tapes twenty-four hours a day. We have al­most 39,000 interviews in thirty different languages. Be­cause 20% of each story is about daily life before the Holocaust, and 15% about life after the war, we have built, for the first time, an exhaustive picture of the life ofJewish communities in the twentieth century. It is also the first time that an event is being told by those who lived through it. Normally, history relies on docuents and on stories of leaders."22

Berenbaum's assertion cannot fail to trouble even a historian who is positively disposed toward the collec­tion of testimonies. This is because Spielberg's ambition is to tell the history of the Holocaust, as is indicated by the name . of his Visual History Foundation. In the United States, the foundation already provides peda­gogical materials to secondary school teachers. But 20 percent of some 39,000 life stories collected by the Spiel­berg Foundation do not by any means comprise an "ex­haustive picture of the life of Jewish communities in the twentieth century." As things stand, they are simply







39,000 juxtaposed versions of what the survivors re­member about native communities that, for the most part, have been erased from the.map. A historian who agreed to watch these stories day and night for two years would at most be able to draw a picture of how the survivors remembered their communities fifty years after their destruction. But the historian would in no case be able to reconstruct the history of these commu­nities. Ihave already verified this in my study, conducted with I. Niborski,
of the image of lost communities recorded in memorial books. We found that "the books that appeared before the war, monographs devoted to the towns of Pinsk or Vilna, expressed, though the se­lection of texts, the desire to offer a synthetic account of Jewish life by situating themselves in relation to the problem of the evolution of Yiddishkeit in Poland or in the el:nigration. The memorial books do not have any analytical or synthetic perspective. Members of Jewish society who were at odds -or ignored each other entirely, the assimilated or the orthodox, Bundist or communist, boss or worker, are hre simply mixed together as they were mixed together in death."23
The Spielberg
Foundation benefited from, and claimed to be inspired by, the Yale project, from which it doubtless sought a-"scientific" legitimacy. But it nonetheless substantially modified the Yale interview technique-and, consequently, the very meaning of the project. Potential interviewers, all volunteers, com­pleted a questionnaire designed to test their knowledge of the Holocaust .and their general competency. Once accepted, they underwent three days of training, at­







tending presentations on history and psychology and critiques of testimonies. After this training program, they were declared ready to interview. The foundation, which loves numbers, reported that there were 8,500 candidates for the interviewer positions, of whom 4,500 took part in the training sessions, and that 2,400 in the end conducted interviews.
Designers of the Spielberg project believe that testi­mony should be regulated. In principle; each testimony was to be of a fixed length, tWo hours; 60 percent of each session should be devoted to the war and 20 per­cent each to the periods before and after the war. But above all, and this is the principal innovation with re­spect to the interviews conducted at Yale, at the end of the interview, as in certain radio broadcasts, the
sur­vivor was supposed to deliver a message expressing "what he or she would hope to leave as a legacy for fu­ture generations. " The survivor's family (spouse, chil­dren, and grandchildren are specified), though excluded from the place where the interview occurs, usually the suivivor's home, was to be invited co reunite with the survivor at the end of the interview, unless the witness opposed it. The end of the interview is thus in some sense the equivalent of the epilogue to Schindler's List. Accompanied by the actors who played their roles in the film, the real life survivors on the list walk by Oskar Schindler's grave in the cemetery of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, as the number of their ·descendants is announced. The film, heretofore in black and white, changes to color. Schindler's List thus has a happy end­ing. A single individual, one of the Righteous among the










THE ERA OF THE WITNESS 115
Nations, sufficed to annul the Destruction. In the same way, the interviewed survivors show their happy lives after so many trials. The message is qptimistic: the fam­ily, reconstituted thanks to their descendants, is the liv­ing proof of the Nazis' failure to exterminate a people . This message reveals the true nature of these interviews. The project is not ultimately concerned with construct-­ing an oral history of the Holocaust but rather with cre­ating an archive of survival.

The modifications introduced by the Spielberg proj­ect are magnified by the onerous logistical demands in­volved in video testimony. Whereas the interviewers and the staff of the Yale Archive are volunteers, with the ex­ception of a handful of paid staff members who work on video conservation, cataloging, and the general op­eration of the archive, the Spielberg project has a staff of inore than 240 full-time employees, and its inter­viewers receive a stipend.24 Contrary to common belief, the project is not financed by profits from Schindler's List, that is, by Spielberg's money. Rather, Steven Spiel­berg created a foundation whose budget-some 60 mil­lion dollars in the three years from 1995 to 1998­comes from Steven Spielberg, MCA-Universal, NBC, the Wasserman
Foundation, and Time Warner. Thus, the funds the Spielberg Foundation receives might have


gone to other projects related to the memory of the genocide, notably the Fortunoff Archive. Whereas the Yale interviews were largely nondirective and open­ended, those conducted by the Spielberg teams were di­rected and limited to two hours, following a common protocol in all the countries where interviews took








place. The videos were then sent to Los Angeles to be digitized and indexed. On the technological cutting edge, these digitized testimonies are supposed to be­come available on a server; so that the young people whom the Spielberg project hopes to educate can con­sult extracts from these testimonies on their computer
screens with the help of an index. They will also be able to consult all sorts of related information: the witness's family archives, photos related to the events the witness describes, a map indicating the site of the camp or ghetto in question, and so on.
It is clear that we have come a long way from the clandestine writings of the ghettos, composed in an eradicated language, often buried underground, which came down to us by such hazardous and difficult routes. What will the testimonial landscape look like if and when new technologies of dissemination become ubiq­uitous ? What vision of the Holocaust will those born three generations from now have ? No one can tell. Only one thing seems certain. Lamenting the limits of the aca­demic history of the Shoah-too cerebral, too cold­Geoffrey Hartman hoped that the stories of the sur­vivors would be heard, stories whose eminently literary qualities he highlighted. This hardly seems scandalous to me, since historical interpretation has never pre­tended to any hegemony. Michael Berenbaum and Steven Spielberg, however, seek something entirely dif­ferent: the substitution of testimonies, supposedly real history, for the history· of historians. It is quite simply a historiographical revolution to which we are invited, a revolution made possible by modern technology. His­


THE ERA OF THE WITN ESS 117
tory would thus be returned to its true authors, those to whom it belongs: the actors and witnesses who tell it di­rectly, for present and future listeners.
In April 1998, the database of the Spielberg Founda­tion included only 1,600 testimonies. But the catalog is a work in progress. Michael Berenbaum explains: "We are preparing materials for teachers who stil use books [my emphasis], but who in five years will all be connected to computer networks, at least in the United States. We
have created a new digital catalog using key words and wil also be producing CD-ROMs, documentaries, and books. "25 A cultural revolution is combined with the his­toriographical one: the written word in teaching is aban­doned in favor of "modem" technologies.
It would be a mistake to see only the technical aspects of the problem. The Spielberg collection is part of a
r
larger movement that Michael Berenbaum calls "the Americanization of the Holocaust. " The expression is valorizing in its intention. It designates the transplanta­tion of an event from the place where it occurred, Eu­rope, to the United States, as well as the modifications this entails. He explains:
The Holocaust is now part of Western culture and, in America, it represents the absolute experience. People don't know what good and evil are, but they are cer­tain about one thing: the Holocaust is absolute evil. On television, Schindler's List was seen in sixty five million homes. It was the largest audience in the his­
tory of American television for a non-sports program threeoand-a-half hours long...•And of the ten mil­lion people who have already visited the Holocaust










Memorial, the new museum in Washington, only 20 percent have been Jewish. Titls is why I have coined
the term, the AmericanizatiQn of the Holocaust. We
have taken a European event and integrated it into American culture, popular culture. Today, the event is
understood differently in Washington, Warsaw, Paris, and Jerusalem. Young African Americans leaving the museum in
Washington often: say, "We didn't know the Jews were black." It rok me a long time to understand that for them the face of sufering was black even if the victims were white. In the United States, the Holocaust is used to teach traditional American values: to remind us first that all people are created equal, with inalienable rights that the state canot take away. It is seen as the extreme expression of something that is ultimately, in fact, ordi nary. This is contrary. to Elie Wiesel's definition of the

not belonging to o'ur world. In the United States, it serves now as an exam ple to justify efforts to limit government intervention.25
This is an extraordinary declaration, and it is not iso­lated. A French reader imbued with the culture emerg­ing from the ColdWar, when American civilization was readily demonized, may see the concept of the "Ameri­canization of the Holocaust" in negative terms. But Michael Berenbaum in rio way means it pejoratively. What he describes is a variegated reality that can be summarized by the fact that the United States is cur­rently at the center of the Holocaust. Holocaust histori­ography, having once been German and Israeli, is now principally American. The Holocaust Memorial .1u­seum in Washington, D.C., has undertaken the gigantic





THE ERA OF THE WITNESS 119
task of microfilming all the archives related to the geno­cide of the Jews across the globe: not only those of the former Soviet states, which haye been inaccessible until now, but also Western European archives already fa­miliar to historians. Thus the French archives, those conserved in private centers such as the Center for the Documentation of Contemporary Jewry (CDJC) and those in public archives, will be accessible in Washing­ton. It will thus become more convenient to travel to the Unite&States, where the totality of the archives will be available, than to take archival research trips across France and Europe. In 1953 the CDJC had just placed the first stone for the first memoriaF-which was sup­posed to be a world memorial-to those who died in the





the memory and history of the genocide. Yad Vashem sought to be the sole central repository for the names of the dead; it authorized the construction of memorials; it centralized the archives. But it seems that the provisions
of that law are now obsolete. Yad Vashem's resources are derisory compared with those of the United States.
..... -•
But the "Americanization of the Holocaust"27 can­not be reduced to a mere change in the location of the institutions that produce history and memory. It also generates its own vision of the Holocaust, a vision that has been exported widely, mainly in films. Alvin Rosen­feld points out a paradox: recent surveys aimed at as­sessing knowledge of the genocide of the Jews show that Americans, compared to the French, English, and Ger­


mans, are by far the m
ost ignorant, while at the same time it is in the United States, to all appearances at least, that the Holocaust is most palpably present. A single ex­ample: only 21 percent of Americans realize that the Warsaw ghetto has a connection to the Holocaust.

Rosenfeld also observes that in the United States
most people see Nazi war crimes less through the lens
of historical accounts than through images and stories
produced by popular writers, artists,
and film produc­
ers. To recall the role of Holocaust and Schindler's List:
"It is part of the American ethos to stress goodness, in­
nocence, optimism, liberty, diversity, and equality. It is
part of the same ethos to downplay or deny the dark and
brutal sides of life and instead to place a prepo
nderant
emphasis on the saving power of individual moral con­
duct and collective deeds of redemption. Americans pre­
fer to think affirmatively and progressively. The
tragic
vision, therefore, is antithetical to the American way of
seeing the world, according to whi
ch people are meant
to overcome adversity and
not cling endlessly to · their
sorrows. "28The U.S. view Rosenfeld describes clashes
with that formed by a historian studying the genocide
of the Jews.
The gen
ocide was absent from political life in the

..United States and elsewhere until the beginning of the
1960s. It
was also absent from cultural life. Of the five
hundred or so films produced by Hollywood, "We find
striking avoidance of any explicit presentation of the
Jewish catastrophe during the course of the war."29
\ Hollywood only broke this silence in 1959 with the filming of The Diary of Anne Frank.
121


Much can be said about the importance of Anne Frank's diary in forming the memory of the genocide. But I am far from sure that the adolescents, girls espe­cially, who read the book emerge informed about the genocide, since The Diary of Anne Frank is above all the story of a family behind closed doors. Although its au­thor's tragic destiny contributes to the intensity of the story, it is primarily the story of family relations-no­tably Anne's relationship with her mother-and of Anne's awakening to love that fascinates young readers. In his work on personal diaries,· Philippe Lejeune ob­serves that the Diary of Anne Frank is what first inspires many people to write their own diaries.30 And Bruno Bettelheim is quite harsh toward the Frank family. "The extraordinary world-wide success of the book, play, and movie The Diary of Anne Frank sll.ggests the power of the desire to counteract the realization of the personal­ity-destroying and murderous nature of the camps by concentrating all attention on what is experienced as a demonstration that private and intimate life can con­tinue to flourish even under the direct persecution by the most ruthless totalitarian system. And this although Anne Frank's fate demonstrates how efforts at disre­garding in private life what goes on around one in soci­ety ca,n hasten one's own destruction." The worldwide success of Ane Frank's story, Bettelheim argues, "can­not be explained unless we recognize in it our wish to forget the gas chambers, and our effort to do so by glo­rifying the ability to retreat into an extremely priate,gentle, sensitive world, and there to cling as much as possible to what have been one's usual daily attitudes











and activities.,.
31 Bettelheim moves from a discussion of the success of the book to a consideration of the success of the film and the theatrical adaptation. He focuses on the ending of the film and theatrical
versions, where one hears Anne's voice off camera or offstage: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at
heart." Bettelheim comments: "This improbable senti­ment is supposedly from a girl who had been starved to death, had watched her sister meet the same fate before she did, knew that her mother had been murdered, and had watched untold thousands of adults and children
being killed. This statement is not justified by anythin Ane actually told her diary." 32 What, then, is the func­tion of this entirely fabricated final act of faith in the goodness of the human race? It is there to reassure­mistakenly, according to Bettelheim. It

falsely reassures since it impresses on us that in the combat between Nazi terror and continuance of in­timate family living the latter wins out, since Anne has the last word. This is simply contrary to fact, be­cause it was she who got killed. Her seeming survival through her moving statement about the goodness of men releases us effectively of the need to cope with the problems Auschwitz presents. That is
why we are so
relieved by her statement. It explains why millions loved the play and movie, because while
it confronts us with the fact that Auschwitz existed, it encourages us at
the same time to ignore any of its
· implications. If all men are good at heart, there never really was an Auschwitz; nor is there any possibility that it may recur.33



Alvin Rosenfeld, studying the reception of The DiaryofAnne Frank in the United States, observes that in the mid-1950s, Americans were not i;eady to confront the Holocaust. Are they more so today? There is reason for doubt. In the 1990s, Harry James Cargas, a U.S. aca­demic and theologian, expressed his admiration for Anne Frank in terms that echoed the critics of the 1950s: "The compassionate child, never forgetting to go be­yond herself, to see the miserable condition of others rather than to wallow in her own situation as many of us might have done, despite all, evinced hope. Each time I read the Diary I cannot help but feel that this time she'll make it, she'll survive."34
Thus optimism triumphs, as it triumphed in Holo­caust and in Schindler's List. The history of the geno­cide, it seems, should not be erid in despair. The story should be told in a way that saves the idea of man. It is this optimistic imperative that underwrites the tour of history offered at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington:

Visitors will learn that while this is overwhelm­ingly a story about the extermination of the Jewish people, it is also about the Nazis' plans for the anni­hilation of the Gypsies and the handicapped, and about the persecution of priests and patriots, Polish in­tellectuals and Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and even innocent children.
Then, finally, when breaking hearts can bear it no longer, visitors will emerge into light-into a celebra­tion of resistance, rebirth, and renewal for the sur­vivors.whether they remained in Europe, or as so







many did, went to Israel or America to rebuild their
lives. And having witnessed the nightmare of evil, the
great American monuments to democracy that sur­
round each departing visitor will take on a new mean
ing, as will the ideals for which they stand. 35
The museum in Washington has already drawn crowds of visitors. It is a major instrument in the education of present and future generations. For Michael Berenbaum, it also aids in the "Americanization of the Holocaust, " which manifestsitself in the very goal the museum set for itself: it is addressed to Americans and should play a role in the political future of the United States. To do this, th museum should not address itself only to Jews. Instead, "The story had to be told in such a way that it would res­onate not only with the survivor in New York and his children in San Francisco, but with a black leader from Atlanta, a Midwestern farmer, or a northeastern industri­alist." 36 Berenbaum thus assigns a clear goal to the telling of the Holocaust story: to make reality comprehensible, to respond to the social needs of today's Americans.
Noemi Paiss, director of communications for the mu­seum, explains the idea behind the memorial's mission
in different terms. The goal of the museum, she told the New York Times, is an "en-masse understanding that we are not only abo.ut what the Germans did to Jews but what people did to people. "37
The museum's link to the Steven Spielberg Founda­tion lies . first in the fact that the same man, Michael Berenbaum, the promoter of the "Americanization of the Holocaust, " assumed in succession
the directorship of these two projects, equally monumental, equally







crowned with success and which, each in its own do­
main, relegate their predecessors to insignificance. The first Memorial to the Martyrs of the.Shoah on rue Geof­froy-I'Asnier and Yad Vashem appear provincial next to
the memorial in Washington. The 130 interviews-per­
haps 300 hours-collected by the French satellite of the Fortunoff Archive seems paltry compared to the 1,700 hours taped in France by Steven Spielberg's teams, which, moreover, reinterviewed certain survivors who had already given their testimony for the Fortunoff Archive. We can always console ourselves by affirming, in this case, that the Fortunoff interviews are certainly better, that they were conducted by persons with better training, that their protocols
better respect the person­ality of the witnesses, that their location at the National Archives is prestigious, and that this inscribes these tes­timonies in national memory. But the fact is, we find

ourselves in the situation of a small grocer threatened
with disappearance by the superstores, or like a small tailor competing with a large clothing manufacturer. Above all, we must not hide from reality: with a few ex­ceptions, the survivors of
the deportation prefer the in­terviewing procedures used by Steven Spielberg's teams to those of Yale. They like to show off their homes, which they prepare specially for the interview. They are happy to have their grandchildren join them at the end of the interview. But above all, Steven Spielberg's fame spills over onto them and gives them the impression that
they are basking in the
light of his celebrity.
ODO

Testimony given spontaneously, and testimony solicited by
the needs of justice, have given way to the social im­perative of memory. The survivor was supposed to honor a "duty to remember," which, morally, he could not evade. Survivors had hoped for the chance to deliver their testimony ever since they left the camps. The act of bearing witness in front of the camera, of being able af­terward to show the tape to their grandchilr;lren, holds an essential importance for, the survivors. "For many of us," Primo Levi observed, "being interviewed was a unique and memorable occasion, an event we ha9 been waiting for since the day of the liberation and tht even gave our liberation a meaning."38 What difference does it make if this act could not take place until half a cen­
tury later? For those who frequently feared they would not be believed, saying what life was like during the Holocaust validates an experience that, as many s\lr­vivors have said and written, 9uickly began to seem un­real to them, often from the very moment of liberation.
The psychoanalyst Ane-Lise Stern, who was de­ported to Birkenau; observes that documents (notably those from which history is written) are made of paper. "Paper is also made from rags, from scraps, 'paper, rags,
scrap iron for sale.' What
are we? What am I? the sur­
vivor asks. All those·who were deported in truth bear witness to that, to the scraps they have become. Knowl­
edge of the deportation is that-knowledge of waste, of scraps. But when they speak of it, testify to it, they are no longer scraps. "39 Henri Borlant, deported at age





fourteen in 1942, expresses the same thought .in more

ordinary terms: "Asleep within every former inmate is

a humiliated being. "40 When former inmates know that they are at least being truly listened to, if not underc stood, testimony returns their dignity to them, in the very part of their identity that had been humiliated: that of former concentration camp inmates or ghetto survivors. In 'this
sense, the recording of testimonies,
when carried out with respect, responds to the desire that Robert Antelme expressed bluntly in a rarely read text that appeared in 1948. "The veritable hemorrhag­ing of expression-experienced by everyone, whether or not he was a writer-expresses one truth that en­compasses all the others: namely, that each of us wants to put his entire effort into recognizing himself in that time now past and that each wants to make it under­stood that the man speaking now and the man who was over there are one and the saine. "41 In this sense, it might seem that gathering testimonies is also a way of repairing the irreparable.
It is no coincidence that many involved in interview­ing survivors have familial ties to this history. They are in search of a family story that history has denied them. Nathan Beyrak, director _of the Israeli satellite of the Yale Archive, who also led the Ukrainian and Belarusian projects, writes: "I hav.e no details of the murders of my relatives, my grandmother and her mother, sons, and daughter-my mother's two brothers and sister­which probably took place in the death pits near Slonim. I always felt compelled to know, to learn the most inti­mate details of what they experienced, moment by mo­ment. I tink the nearest I got to satisfying my curiosity was when leaped the testimony of a man who was taken











to the very same death pits, possibly together with my family, and described the experience in great detail. Un­like my relatives, he fell into the pits without being hit by a bullet, and later managed to climb out. "42 Thus testimony reestablishes not only the identity of the sur­vivors but also the identities of the descendants of those who died without graves, by allowing them to im<'!gine the circumstances of their relatives' deaths and thus to begin the work of mourning.
The injunction to former inmates to testify, to tell their story to the young, to "package" their history so that their testimony can serve posthumously to educate future generations, also includes, however, an impera­tive that irritates certain of them. "Be Deported and Tes­tify": that is the provocative title Anne-Lise Stern gave to her contribution to a recent colloquium. There is in this tide a rejection of a double constraint: to be en­closed within a single identity, that of the inmate; and to be, as an inmate, nothing but one who testifies. Anne­Lise Stern is uncomfortable with being thus trapped in a set of demands greater than she, that causes her in some sense to lose her freedom, and whose en.ds are not unproblematic:
The pedagogy of memory, its necessity, can also have perverse effects. Survivors wish more and more to un­burden themselves of their history, to unburden and soothe their close family, to universalize that history. Interviewers who may or may not be trained to listen, historians, sociologists, filmmakers, philosophers, or
other intellectuals-they take up this task, or seize hold of it, by necessity and often with noble inten­



tions. But then some start accusing the others of claim­ing a 'copyright' on Auschwitz. It could be that all sides, psychoanalysts among th.m, in fact dispossess the survivors and the dead. Will we become, all of us, nothing more or less than "ragpickers of History"?43
In place of the complaint of not being able to speak upon returning because no one listened, we now see an­other complaint, one that was already voiced after the
broadcast of Holocaust: that of being all of a sudden dispossessed-but also exploited and reified in a com­petition among various specialists, a competition that undeniably is under way. Anne-Lise Stern approvingly cites the reflectii:ms
of another former inmate, Henry Bulawko, who testified on his return from the camp and who has been the main orgaruzer of associations of for­
er Jewish inmates in France. "At a conference," he said, "I heard historians declare that former camp in­mates were documents to them. . . . I expressed my surprise. They replied with a friendly smile: 'Living doc­uments. ' I suddenly saw myself transformed into
a strange animal caged in a zoo with other rare species.
Historians came to examine me, told me to lie down, turned me over and over as you turn the pages of a doc­ument, and asked me questions, taking notes here and there .. .. The term used at the conference seemed to me infinitely shocking. One can go from being a 'former in­mate' to a 'witness,' then from 'witness' to 'document.' So then, what are we? What am 1?"44
Although it would be posible simply to question the competence of the historian who dared speak to the wit­








ness in this way, Henry Bulawko is raising the problem of the tension between the witness and the historian, a tension, even a rivalry-and, why not say it outright, a power struggle-that is at the heart of current debates over the history of the contemporary era, but which is also found in other areas where individual expression comes into conflict with intellectual discourse. Philippe Lejeune, addressing defenders of canonical literature who denigrate autobiography, writes: "You act like a professional threatened by amateurs, or like .certain pro­fessors I've met who have claimed their territory and don't appreciate it when someone challenges the legiti­macy of their claim. "45 Lejeune adds: "There are those who know and those who heal. Bosses and nurses. Those who hold conferences and those who set to work in the workshop. Those who milk others' lives, those who churn them into theses, those who place them in archives .... Power cannot be avoided, but one can try to share it. "46
When faced with the testimony of the inmates, his­torians find themselves i:O: an impossible situation. It is the professional imperative of the historian, as Pierre Laborie reminds us, to be
a memory critic [un trouble-mbnoire], careful not to
forget that lines of division exist, that not all gaps can
be closed: gaps between c?nvictions born of lived ex­
perience and critical inquiries into the unfolding of the
past coming from more distant sources; gaps between
the virtues of commemoration and the rigor of the his
torical method; gaps between moments of amnesia or
. the reconstructed arrangement of time and the hard








realities of minutely reconstituted chronology; gaps between the tricks played by retrospection and the refusal to swim with the curre.pt so as to be able to continue to observe men and events critically; gaps be­tween memories that constitute identity, create soli­darity, and form a "fraternity of a superior essence," and memories subjected to strict autopsies, examined and crosschecked according to the demands of truth; gaps between the seductive-coherence of a discourse that makes everything explicit, and the effort to track down the unsaid, the forgotten, the silences; gaps be­tween the legitimation that takes place when the past is too perfectly reconstituted, and a legitimate effort to preserve
one's commitments, heritage, and values
from banaliZation.47
Although Pierre Laborie is speaking here of the Resis­tance, his analysis could apply equally to Holocaust tes­timonies. But can the historian, when face to face with a living person, act morally as a "l!.l:I_l,c:o/
cri(i."? The suffering conveyed by the story of a survivor-'by one who may be the last repository of a procession of the dead whose memory he carries with him-paralyzes the historian. The historian knows that all life stories are constructions, but also that these (re)constructions are the very armature, the vertebral column, oflife in the present. Historians find themselves faced with a prob­lem that is ahQost impossible to resolve because two moral imperatives come into conflict. Each person has the right to fashion her own history, to put together what she remembers or forgets in her own way. Sum­marizing his life in his only book, written in the twilight











of his life, Marcel Levy observes: "Because our ideas to­day are not those of our adolescence, because our ru­ined body offers only a vague resemblance to the one we inhabited forty years ago, memory alone remains to af­firm the continuity of our being. Our life, or what is left of it, is suspended from those few beads of the rosary strung on the subtle cord of memory, which we always fear will break. And still, what guarantees do we have that those remnants of memory are really fusthand? "48 Each person has an absolute right to her memory, which is nothing other than her identity, her very being. But this right can come into conflict with an imperative of the historian's profession, the imperative of an obstinate quest for the truth.
Some, like Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg, pre­fer to distance themselves from testimonies, never sub­jecting them to critique, ignoring them altogether, or abandoning them to oblivion or to other disciplines such as literary criticism or psychology that do not maintain the same relationship to truth. Alternatively, historians can read, listen to, and watch testimonies without look­
of precise events, places, dates, and numbers, which are wrong with the regularity of a metronome-but know­ing also that testimony contains extraordinary riches: an encounter with the voice of someone who has lived through a piece of history; and, in oblique fashion, not factual truth, but the more subtle and just as im.li:spens­able truth of an epoch and of an experience.
0 0 Cl




133
The conflicts we sometimes see between witnesses and
historians probably stem to a large extent from the re­

cent blurring of boundaries between the areas for which
bet-ween the roles each is as­signed. Witnesses and historians are summoned to the
same places: the witness stand, radio and television stu­

dios, classrooms. They often find themselves cast as ri­
vals. The "duty to remember" calls for much more from
--·
witnesses and their testimony than an account of a lived experience. For instance, the explicit goal of the Sur­vivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation is ambi" tious: "The archive will be used as a tool for global education about the Holocaust and to teach racial,

ethnic and cultural tolerance. By preserving the eye­witness testimonies of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors, the Foundation will enable future genera­tioiis to learn the lessons of this devastating period in human history from those who survived. "49 The goal, then, is quite simply to replace teacher}Vith witnesses,
!
··.-·--·-----· .. ''---: ­
who are supposed to be bearers of a knowledge that, sadly enough, they possess no more than anyone else. Primo Levi, who reflected deeply on this question and who delivered his testimony not only in his writings but also in a large number of classrooms, expressed his exhaustion and skepticism toward the end of this life:
One of the questions that gets repeated and repeated is the question of why it happened, why there are war.. why the camps were built, why the Jews were
.k ..
exterminated, and it is a question to which I have no

answer. No one does. Why there are wars, why there was the First World War and the Second World War and now we talk all the time of a Third World War, is a question
that torments me because I have no answer. My standard
reply
is that it-is part of our animal make-up, that a sense, an awareness of territory is something we share with dogs, nightingales, all ani­mals; but even as I say it, I don't believe it....Well, I have only
vague, generic answers, that man is evil, man is not good. And there is another question I am constantly asked: is man good? How can anyone an­swer such a
question? There are good people and less good people, each of us is a mixture of good and not so good.50
Primo Levi stopp.ed going to classrooms to give his tes­
timony because his experience as a concentration camp
inmate did not provide him with answers to any of the
questions asked of him. But not all the witnesses are as
rigorous and demanding as Primo Levi; the fact that
.they are survivors does not make then any less men and

women, complete with human vanity. How can anyone
resist giving a history lesson, especially to the young?

· How can they find the courage to say that the concen­
tration camp experience does not confer any prophetic talent, that, sadly, it does not permit any better under­standing of how to fight future barbarism ? Most often, the witnesses depart from their role, explain to the stu­dents the rise of Nazism and its multiple crimes, and at­tempt to mobilize them for the battles of the moment. The witnesses perform this task, moreover, largely with
· the consent of teachers, who thus evade the dry task of teaching the history of the Holocaust. Some teachers pre­



1.35
fer not to teach the subject, replacing lessons with a film or a discussion with a witness, whereas pedagogy de­mands that history lessons and the witness's testimony

both be presented, which did not happen, for instance, at the forum following the broadcast of Holocaust on French television, from which both historians and teach­ers of history were absent.
What is there to testify about, then? What knowledge do the survivors possess-because they must certainly possess some knowledge? What does the audience ex­
pect from testimony? Is a story of atrocity supposed to inoculate us against future atrocity? Anne-Lise Stern asks herself these
questions: "We are expected, we are urged to testify 'before it is too late.' Yet, what knowl­edge do they hope to gain? What deathbed confession, what family secret, do they expect to hear? Where is all this litening to survivors leading, whether by those who
·
have had little education about the Holocaust or by those who are overeducated? Toward sound bites, I fear, which future generations will play with and enjoy. It's happening already." .·
--·
And she adds: "For the teaching of horror always threatens to Qecome itself a source of pleasure. To the three impossible professions mentioned by Freud-edu­cation, government, and psychoanalysis-must one now add a fourth: bearing witness?"51 Perhaps she is right.
D 0 D
Testimony, then, has changed. Survivors are no longer motivated to tell their stories before the camera purely





by an internal necessity, though this necessity still exists. A veritable social imperative now transforms the wit­ness into an apostle and prophet. The decline of com­munism at the end of the 1980s has also made travel to the sites of the annihilation of the Jews-Auschwitz­Birkenau most importantly-easy and relatively inex­pensive. Young people from every country visit in greater and greater numbers, accompanied by former camp inmates. Knowledge will thus come from a con­frontation with the real, the "true": the reality of the site, the reality of the former inmate's "experience." The
objective of such undertakings corresponds to another stereotype that is becoming increasingly common, namely, the transformation of the young, those of the third generation after the events, into "witnesses for the witness," bearers of a knowledge of the destruction of the Jews acquired not at school, for instance, or from books, but from a lived experience. This model seems to recall the Gospels: these young people will be the apos­
tles who, once the witnesses have disappeared, will be able to carry on their .ord. But what word? What do witnesses speak of? Of what they remember, and only
this memory has the force of the real. Nathan Beyrak re­ports a strange interview with a man who had been part of a group of children who, having survived in the Kovno ghettountil its evacuation in 1944, were sent to various camps in Poland and Germany, including Birke­nau and Mauthausen. The man Beyrak discusses came for a first testimony session. He spoke for three hours, telling a story Beyrak describes as "dry." Returning home, he suddenly remembered that he had a series of









137

notes there, a sort of ghetto diary whose existence he had forgotten. He dug out the diary and discove,red that it mentioned many things he had not cov..ered in his tes­timony; He had to testify again. At the next session,

he came equipped with his diary and told new stories, read­ing extracts from the diary before the camera. But the person conducting the interview noticed that he was
skipping over certain pages in the diary and she asked why. He-replied that certain things written in the jour­nal could not possibly have taken place, because he had no memory of them whatsoever. Nevertheless, when
one reads t

hese pages, particularly the description of hunger, there can be no doubt about their authenticity. But the witness did not want to read these
pages aloud. They seemed to him simply "unreal." As Beyrak notes, he simply cold not conne
ct his memories with the ex­perience described in the diary.52
If the testimony of this witness had been · recorded · shortly after the end of the war, his story would have been different from the one Beyrakrecorded some fifty years later. Every testimony is recorded at a precise mo­ment in time, and as such may be instrumentalized in political and ideol9gical contexts that, like all such con­

texts, are bound to change. The moment when a testi­
mony is delivered tells us a great deal about the society
in which the witness lives. Today,for example,survivors of the French deportation tend to tell similar stories. They were deported by Vichy, poorly received in France
after their return, and no one helped them reintegrate into society. They did not,for instance, receive help from psychologists or specialized educators. But this version

of events overlooks the fact that psychology did not have the same status in 1945 as it has today and that even the profession of educator was still in its infancy. This is a discourse of resentment toward France, which disre­gards Nazi Germany. The "Boche" or the "Teuton," a figure that was common in stories from the immediate postwar years, has disappeared.. Witnesses no longer tell, as they once did, how they kissed the ground of France on their return or cried with emotion on hearing "La Marseillaise." Witnesses always give their stories goals beyond the scope of the particular story. These goals change over time. In the postwar years, the dominant idea was that Germany-an "intrinsically" barbaric Ger­many-had to be stopped from coming back to life.53 Today, all the witnesses, in France and elsewhere, cite as their goal the fight against Holocaust denial and the
resurgence of "fascism. " In addition, there is sometimes the fight against the "genocides" that continue to take place in various countries. This discourse, which has be­come stereotypical, is embedded ,in the surrounding po­litical discourse, which is, as it were, superimposed on the testimonies that it in turn instrumentalizes.
The discourse of the witnesses is also determined by their age. The witnesses of the 1990s, those who testi­fiedduring the explosion of testimony, were for the most part men and women of retirement age who will have no more children. For these witnesses, as for everyone in old age, the future and the possibilities it opens have shrunkvastly. The tone of their testimonies is heavily in­fluenced by the ways they think about and assess their lives. A witness may have the sense of having succeeded





in life, or of having failed, with, of course, a whole range of positions in between. The interview, however, is tak­ing place because of the person's-experience during World War II, even if he or she is asked to discuss the periods before and after the war as well. Witnesses are being interviewed as "survivors" or "former inmates." What is collected, therefore, is not a "life story" but rather-and this is clear to both interviewers and wit­nesses-the story of the witness's life (before and after, but above all during) as it is informed by the time of the war, a time that is therefore postulated to mark a fun­damental rupture. The very notion of a "before" leads to anachronisms cir teleology. "After" indicates that the interviewer is asking the witness to consider this event as a moment of origin. Elie Wiesel referred to Auschwitz as a new; Sinai, the place of a new covenant. In psycho­analytic terms, the Holocaust has become anew primal scene. We are therefore in the presence of a second myth of origins. An individual's entire history thus finds itself knotted around the yea,rs of life spent in the camp or the ghettos because ofa pure postulate: that tht experience was the decisive experience of his or her life This, how­ever, remainsto be proven, something no one has yet un­dertaken.Ruth Kliiger is, to my knowledge, the only one to have protested against this image of the former in­mate. "And yet in the eyes of many, Auschwitz is a point of origin for survivors. The name itself has an aura, al­beit a negative one, that came with the patina of time, and people who want to say something important about me announce that I have been in Auschwitz. But what­
ever you may think, I don't hail from Auschwitz, I come













from Vienna. Vienna is a part of me-that's where I acquired consciousness and acquired language-but Auschwitz was as foreign to me as the moon. Vienna is part of my mind-set, while Auschwitz was a lunatic terra incognita, the memory of which is like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it. Auschwitz was merely a gruesome accident. "54
Others have perhaps protested through their silence. In certain refusals to testify, might there not be some­thing other than the fear
of awakening memories that are too painful, namely, the fear of being trapped in an image in which one does not quite recognize oneself?



How can the explosion of testimony be explained? What drives this collection of video testimonies, which demands so much time and money? For some, at issue is the creation of an oral history archive in the tradi­tional sense. The collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is thus called an oral history archive. For others, these testimony projects are a des­perate effort to rescue the individual from the masses, to give voice to ordinary people who have neither the desire nor perhaps the ability to put their stories inwrit­ing. The same motivations are at work in this case and in the memorial books. Whereas theology and sociology
rt! speak of the "'Holocaust," explains Aharon Appelfeld, himself a survivor of the genocide, "'Literature says: 'let's take a look at this particular person. Let's give him a name. Let's give him a· place; put a c;up of coffee in his


hand'. ... The strength of literature lies in its ability to convey intimacy ... the kind of intimacy that touches your own. »SS Nathan Beyrak, who directs the Israeli satellite of the Fortunoff Archive, in a text entitled "To Rescue the Individual Out of the Mass Number: Inti­Iil.acy as a Central Concept in Oral History, " affirms that the concept of intimacy is the central theme of re-. search in his group.

Two aspects of the video testimony collections stand out, then. The first is a constant throughout the Jewish memory of the Holocaust: to return a name, a face, a history to each of the victims of mass murder. This was the project of the memorial books. It was Serge Klars­feld's project when he published Memorial to the Jews Deported from France in 1978, a work containing the names .nd vital statistics of all the adult Jews deported from France, and when he published Memorial to the Jewish Children Deported from France in 1994, which also included photos of the deported children. It was also in the name of the dead, of each of the dead, that Gideon Hausner spoke in presenting the charges against Adolf Eichmann: "As I stand here before you, Judges of Israel, to l,ead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. With me, in this place and at this hour, stand six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger toward the man who sits in the glass dock and cry: 'I accuse!' ... Therefore it falls on me to be 'their spokesman."s6 In the memo­rial books, in Serge Klarsfeld's books, and in Hausner's words, however, what is at issue is the name and mem­ory of the dead. In the video archives, at issue are the










living, the survivors. The concept of intimacy evoked by Nathan Beyrak applies to them. This concept lies at the heartof the current movementto collect testimonies and the frequent appearances of witnesses on radio and tele­vision programs. But this concept of intimacy is not con­fined to Holocaust testimony. Instead, it is at the heart of how our society and our media function. The sociol­ogist Dominique Mehl observes that this concept signals "a crisis of expert discourse and a calling into question


of the pedagogical authority of the learned and of spe­


_

cialists"57-including, of course, historians. The televi­sion ofintimacy, evident in a large number of programs, is based on "the expression of emotions and on testi­monies;" It puts experience on display and·it privileges showing.58 The filming technique, moreover, is the same in television broadcasts and in the recording of survivor testimony; in both, the close-up is favored. "Moreover, the director is on the lookout for body language that may betrayfeelings or emotions; Looks, gestures, hands, are so many offerings to the technicians. In the pro­grams of intimacy, the eye of the camera tracks the eye ofthe witness. "59 Such programs allow the one who tes­tifies to "perfect his social identity," the identity that re­quires the other's gaze, even society's approval, since there are times when a way of being requires socializa­tion in order to become truly constitutive of personality or singularity. "Otherwise, it risks becoming astigma or
a curious eccentricity," Mehl suggests. "Recognition by the collectivity authorizes one to accept oneself and to demand that others assist in the constitution of identity. A certain degree of visibility is necessary to give defini­











THE ERA OF THE WITNESS
143
tion to one's personality and to one's place in the world." This affirmation of identity through witnessing, however, produces a problem
when_the testimony con­cerns not
only an individual trauma (a rape, for exam­ple) but also suffering born of a historical event. The historical event becomes fragmented into a series
of in­dividual stories. We are thus confronted, as Richard Sennett observes,
with "an ideology of intimacy: social ·, relationships of all kinds are real, believable, and au­thentic the closer they approach the inner
psychological c;oncems of each person. This ideology transmutes po­
"60
litical categories into psychological categories.
Testimony appeals to the heart and not to the mind. It elicits compassion, pity, indignation, even rebellion. The one who testifies signs a "compassionate pact" with th one who receives the testimony, just as someone who
.rites an autobiography signs what Philippe Lejeune calls an "autobiographical pact" with the reader. 61 Do­minique Mehl characterizes this pact as a "specific in­teraction between transmission and reception. On the side of the transmission, the compassionate protocol re­quires placing the exhibition of the individual and his particular suffering at the center of the enterprise, and eni'phasizes emotional displays and bodily expression. On the side of reception, identification with the victims and empathy with · the sufferers constitute the spring­board for compassionate response. "62 In this light, Nazism and the Holocaust enter the public sphere prin­cipally because they devastated the lives of in,dividuals who triumphed over death, even if many today affirm .. ... ­
that they have never left Auschwitz.


This vision troubles historians. This is not because historians are insensitive to suffering, or because they themselves are not overwhelmed by these stories of pain and fascinated by some of them. Rather, this uneasiness stems from the sense that this juxtaposition of stories is not a historical narrative, and that, in some sense, it annuls historical narrative. For how can a coherent his­torical discourse be constructed if it is constantly coun­tered by another truth, the truth of individual memory? How can the historian incite reflection, thought, and rigor when feelings and emotions invade the public sphere?