Holocaust Survivor Testimony

As the last Holocaust survivors age and slowly pass away, the living memory of the events during the Holocaust will soon be facing the problem of extinction in the context of survivor testimonies. According to Holocaust studies critic Thomas Trezise, this phenomenon is the “anxiety of historical transmission” and accounts for the large part acceleration of testimony production in the past three decades. Through the establishment of the different documentation and archives of written memoirs, the question on the fate of these Holocaust survivor testimonies entirely dependents on the reception by those who “were not there” has been a topic which is often contested by scholars.
The earliest accounts of the Holocaust are all eyewitness accounts, …show more content…
The legacy of the Holocaust has to be carried on by proxy witnesses and it is up to them to not only pass on those witness accounts, but also keep the originality and the respect to those survivors once they pass away.
This paper will begin by investigating the concept of “an event without a witness”. Then I will move on to analyzing the figure the Holocaust Witness through the concept of “postmemory”. I will focus on the study of specific examples of Holocaust testimonies, memoirs, written first hand reports and literature written by proxy witnesses. Finally, the notion of witnessing through imagination will be discussed.
An Event without a …show more content…
One individual lived through both the ghettoization of Warsaw Jews, life in the Warsaw ghettos, the Warsaw Uprising and last but not least, life in Auschwitz- Halina Birenbaum. She speaks in her work of those experiences and, particularly, of being a young girl in the ghetto and in the camps through her personal memoir Hope is the Last to Die. Her memoir was published 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz when Birenbaum realized after the Eichmann trial that she belonged to the past and the present. When Birenbaum was writing her memoir, she was not only remembering but she is also consuming and being influenced by what she knows after the liberation. She narrates what she learns and recreates the point of view of a child at the time of her first- hand witness. She writes “I hazed at all this, and was overwhelmed by a weird sensation of terror, as though the entire world were bring brought here to Auschwitz, to be cast, naked and deprived of all its humanity, into the crematorium furnaces that smoked by day and by night.” From this quote it is clear to see that Birenbaum writes as if she was reliving the experience, being very close to extermination and her thought of the materials being transported to the Third Reich then when she described her “gratefulness” of the SS officer for saving her. “Hela’s [life] and [my life] had