The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable

Drawing on forty years of interviewing Holocaust survivors—in most cases, multiple interviews with the same survivors over months, years, even decades—this article elucidates the range and complexity of different kinds of silence in survivors’ spoken accounts. Although most often invoked in connection with survivors’ silence, psychic trauma does not play a central role in this analysis. Indeed, discourse about trauma has tended to distract from a great many other processes that impact what survivors do and do not retell, especially survivors’ own reflections about recounting, their deliberate strategies and choices, and the impact of listeners—immediate, anticipated, and imagined.