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  • The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939–1945 by Rachel Feldhay Brenner
  • Peter Fritzsche
The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939–1945, Rachel Feldhay Brenner (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2014), x + 198 pp., hardcover, $79.95.

Rachel Brenner is the very capable author of Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust. Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum (1997). There, she examined the ways in which beleaguered Jewish writers explored Jewishness, the nature of God, and the challenges of being both a woman and an outcast during the Holocaust. She has now written a fascinating inquiry into the almost unbearable pressure to which the disaster subjected individuals’ sense of empathy. She does so through a consideration of five important Polish writers who kept diaries during the German occupation and who witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Although not on the rather short shelf of translated twentieth-century Polish authors, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Da˛browska, Aurelia Wylezyńska, Zofia Nałkowska, and Stanisław Rembek were well-known literary figures in Poland at the time and generally well-connected to wider intellectual circles in Europe. As diarists, they worked in the genre of le journal intime, which presumed an affinity between writer and readers and a shared horizon of experience and reflection. The writing and publishing of intimate details and personal thoughts refined a humanist tradition in which the “you” addressed in the diary was another “I” (p. 15). During the Holocaust, however, the diary became the register of the inadequacy of humanism, the deterioration of empathy, and the impoverishment of literary expression. In some ways, The Ethics of Witnessing turns Writing as Resistance inside out. In contrast to that of writers such as Etty Hillesum, the creativity and capacity of diarists in the context of wartime Warsaw was hollowed out, torn, and only tenuously repaired. Remarkably, some authors—Iwaszkiewicz and Wylezyńska included—took the measure of their faltering ability to understand the plight of the Jews. But for the most part, Jews remained beyond the horizon of empathy.

Brenner is an accessible writer in the sense that she offers readers a number of interpretive strands. At first glance the book is about writers, their “sightfulness,” their stubbornness, and their ability to recast themselves. Some are stronger, others more impressionable, and a few are unmoved by the murder taking place around them. But the writers are also examples of how the Holocaust—the “license to murder one part of humanity”—threatened “the essence of social interaction for humanity at large” (p. 23). In this view, the writers are much more tragic figures: they embodied the empathy and humanism that the Holocaust pulled apart. Brenner writes that “the Final Solution tested the steadfastness of the diarists’ humanistic selves.” It posed extraordinary “ethical, mental, and emotional challenges.” When tested, most of the writers failed in some crucial way, which leaves Brenner generally pessimistic about the ethical potential of witnessing. Yet, after the war, Zofia Nałkowska and Stanisław Rembek rewrote passages in their diaries and confronted the moral degradation of Poles, [End Page 510] a reconsideration that leaves Brenner with “a measure of cautious hope” (p. 22). Even so, she emphasizes the “tenuousness of the ethics of witnessing” (p. 170).

Humanism is vulnerable because it depends on the “steadfastness” of the witness. It is also vulnerable when its empathic premise and its recognition of the “I” in the “you” is destroyed. The National Socialist endeavor to murder some parts of humanity, with its attendant assumption of the complete “otherness” of the victim (who is cast out to sea while the witness remains on shore), was the ultimate undercutting of empathy. In Brenner’s account, diarists such as Nałkowska were “disabled” by the horror of the Holocaust; the verb “disabled” operates on a different level, Brenner contends, than Nałkowska’s declared ability “to cope” with the sight of condemned Poles (p. 114). In the first part of the analysis, the terror is the active subject; in the second, it is the comprehended object. It is the “degradation of the Jews,” “the immolation of Jewish...

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