The End of the Holocaust

6 Jean Am

Jean Améry: The Anguish of the Witness 163 Jean Améry: The Anguish of the Witness For me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. —Jean Améry To turn from a consideration of Holocaust victims to Holocaust survivors is to turn, one expects, from the dead to the living. In fact, though, the relationship of the living to the dead is less clearly defined within the troubled precincts of Holocaust memory . Far from encountering two sharply differentiated types— “victims” and “survivors”—one often finds an ontological status that is blurred and ambiguous. Lawrence Langer calls it “deathlife .” The term is awkward but points suggestively to a mental state that Langer posits may be a “neglected legacy of the Holocaust experience.” Primo Levi exemplified it when, late in life, he confessed, “I had the sensation that I was living but without being alive.”1 In a wry allusion to Hamlet, Elie Wiesel puts it this way: “The problem is not: to be or not to be. But rather: to be and not to be.”2 The difficult experience of simultaneously living two existences—of being both here and still “there”—is familiar to Holocaust survivors. In the minds of many, the dead six 164 the end of the holocaust and those who have returned from the dead constitute a single, continuous, fated community. The situation is also charged with paradox in another sense, for according to popular perception, some victims seem to attain a posthumous “survival” through the wide dissemination and ready embrace of their images—Anne Frank being the most famous example but by no means the only one—while numerous survivors become belated “victims” through the sufferings they continue to experience in the postwar years. In their most extreme manifestations, these sufferings sometimes even lead to a tragic self-victimization through suicide. Thus, in some cases, the actual victims of the Nazi crimes may seem to return from their graves in the form of powerfully resonant, “living” images, whereas the survivors may continue a tormented existence perilously close to the edge of obliteration and even succumb to the view that they really belong among those who perished. To be sure, not all of those who managed to outlast the ghettos and camps of Nazi-occupied Europe continue to feel that they are victims. Some have apparently adapted to the new and better circumstances of their postwar existences and enjoy what looks like a familiar, unexceptional life.3 Some survivors marry or remarry, have families, careers, and friends, bear normal responsibilities, and partake of common pleasures. What their dreams are like at night only they know, but unless they tell us otherwise, it would appear that such people have not only survived but have gone on to successfully rebuild their lives. Others are less fortunate and continue to feel overwhelmed by forms of suffering that do not let up. Some suffer because they believe their stories about life in the ghettos and camps of Hitler ’s Europe have been largely ignored or have not truly “made a difference.” They live with a sense of futility and failure and may come to the conclusion that the fault lies both with the larger “world” for not heeding them and also with themselves, for not being more faithful and effective spokesmen for the dead. Jean Améry: The Anguish of the Witness 165 Witnesses who speak or write and are not listened to are sometimes beset by forms of anxiety, frustration, and forlornness that can shadow their lives and sometimes lead to their deaths. It hardly matters that they may be widely known or even publicly celebrated as “survivors,” for a private anguish tells them they are still “there,” in that “other country.” Their situation is a heavily burdened one and brings many complex matters to the fore, not the least of which is the question: “What does it mean to bear witness?” For those who set out to record and reflect upon their wartime experiences, this question is often synonymous with the related question: “What does it mean to write?” In the conventional sense of modern authorial composition, writing was hardly possible for most Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and yet a good deal of writing in...