Holocaust Testimonies

A sustained analysis of the ways in which oral testimonies of survivors contribute to the understanding of the Holocaust, Holocaust Testimonies also aims to shed light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss.

Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the author shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling one to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting from these interviews, Lawrence L. Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as one might a written text.

He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organising impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs.

He argues that it is necessary to deromanticise the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the "indomitable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally, he explores the task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the spirit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these Holocaust testimonies.