Holocaust Education

1
Holocaust Education

• Week 3
• Personal Testimony

2
The Importance of Testimony

• Thanks to a series of increasingly wide-ranging
  and rigorous studies the problem of historical,
  material, technical, bureaucratic, and legal
  circumstances in which the extermination of the
  Jews took place has been sufficiently clarified.
  Future studies may shed new light on particular
  aspects of the events that took place in the
  concentration camps, but a general framework has
  already been established.
• The same cannot be said for the ethical and
  political significance of the extermination, or
  even for a human understanding of what happened
  there that is, for its contemporary relevance
  (Agamben, 200511).

3
The Structure of Testimony

• On the one hand, what happened in the camps
  appears to the survivors as the only true thing
  and, as such, absolutely unforgettable on the
  other hand, this truth is to the same degree
  unimaginable, that is, irreducible to the real
  elements that constitute it. Facts so real that,
  by comparison, nothing is truer a reality that
  necessarily exceeds its factual elements such
  is the aporia of Auschwitz. As Lewental writes,
  the complete truth is far more tragic, far more
  frightening More tragic, more frightening that
  what? (Agamben, 200512).

4
Aporia of Auschwitz (Agamben)

• The aporia of Auschwitz, is indeed, the very
  aporia of historical knowledge a non-coincidence
  between facts and truth, between verification and
  comprehension (Agamben, 200512).
• Some want explanations/understanding for
  everything
• Some refuse explanations/understanding for
  anything
• The only way forward lies in investigating the
  space between these two options (Agamben,
  200513).

5
Silence, Confession and witnessing

• We can only testify after the event
• Restoring the human
• The inmates of the death camps had become
  convinced of their inhumanity (Chare, 200641).
• The damage to the self sustained by the witness
  in the death camps must be at least partially
  undone before the event that has been recorded
  unconsciously can be recounted (Chare, 200641).
  
• Is testimony
• Restoration of self
• Confession
• Record of events

6

• Testimonies largely come from ordinary people
  (perpetrators and victims)
• One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is
  infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an
  ordinary person than to understand the mind of a
  Spinoza or a Dante (Agamben, 200513).
• Holocaust testimony contains at its core an
  essential lacuna in other words, the survivors
  bore witness to something it is impossible to
  bear witness to. (Agamben, 200513).
• To explore survivors testimony one must
  interrogate and listen to this lacuna.
• To listen to the absent
• To listen to the unsaid

7
Witnessing the event

• We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses
  We speak in their stead, by proxy (Levi, 2005
  xi)
• At a distance of years one can today definitely
  affirm that the history of the Lagers has been
  written almost exclusively by those who, like
  myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those
  who did so did not return, or their capacity for
  observation was paralysed by suffering and
  incomprehension (Levi, 20056).

8
Witnessing

• Some survivors said that they were driven to
  survive in order to bear witness
• Some preferred silence
• 2 words for witness in Latin
• The third party (in a lawsuit for example)
  (testis)
• Someone who has lived through/experienced
  something (superstes)

9
The Value of Testimony

• the value of testimony lies essentially in what
  it lacks at its centre it contains something
  that cannot be borne witness to and that
  discharges the survivors of authority. The true
  witnesses, the complete witnesses, are those
  who did not bear witness and could not bear
  witness. They are those who touched bottom
  the muslims, the drowned Whoever assumes the
  charge of bearing witness in their name knows
  that he or she must bear witness in the name of
  the impossibility of bearing witness. (Agamben,
  200534)
• Meaning in unexpected areas

10
Memory reliving the suffering.

• Memories within us are not carved in stone
  (Levi, 200511).
• Can become erased, can increase or can change.
• Recollection is not an orderly happening.
• Personal to us.
• Some things affect memory e.g. traumas (physical
  and emotional)

11
Reliving the memory

• The memory of trauma is itself traumatic because
  recalling is painful or at least disturbing
  (Levi, 200512)
• The wounded block out memory in an attempt to not
  relive/renew the pain
• The perpetrators block it out to be rid of it,
  to alleviate the feeling of guilt (Levi,
  200512).

12

• Read with a critical eye not because of
  inaccuracy but because
• For knowledge of the Lagers, the Lagers
  themselves were not always a good observation
  post. In the inhuman conditions to which they
  were subjected, the prisoners could barely
  acquire an overall vision of their universe
  (Levi, 20056)

13

• Desire to understand and to be understood
• Explain the unexplainable.
• No clarity, no simple explanations
• No simple identifiable separation between good
  and evil (Levi)
• Complexity of human relations (Levi - The Drowned
  and the Saved p23-4)

14

• Lets end, then, with the words of Primo Levi in
  the preface to Survival in Auschwitz
• As an account of atrocities, this book of mine
  adds nothing to what is already known to readers
  throughout the world on the disturbing question
  of the death camps. It should be able, rather to
  furnish documentation for a quiet study of
  certain aspects of the human mind. Many people
  many nations can find themselves holding, more
  or less wittingly, that every stranger is an
  enemy. For the most part this conviction lies
  deep down like some latent infection it betrays
  itself only in random, disconnected acts, and
  does not lie at the base of a system of reason.
  But when this does come about, when the un-spoken
  dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism,
  then, at the end of the chain, there is the
  lager. Here is the product of a conception of
  the world carried rigorously to its logical
  conclusion so long as the conception subsists,
  the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story
  of the death camps should be understood by
  everyone as a sinister alarm signal (Levi,
  19969).