The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945

Epilogue: To Witness the Experience of Witnessing

167 The preoccupation with the Holocaust has not abated. The publication of Saul Friedlander’s seminal 1996 volume, Probing the Limits of Representation, which examined both scholarly and artistic interest in the Holocaust since the 1970s, did not by any means constitute a conclusive appraisal of the phenomenon.1 Despite Lyotard’s warning that “no one can—by writing, by painting, by anything—pretend to be witness and truthful reporter [of the Holocaust] without being rendered guilty of falsification and imposture through this very pretension,”2 writers, essayists , artists, filmmakers, playwrights, video and television producers, and others have continued to create representations of the Holocaust. The ethicists among the growing numbers of Holocaust scholars have pondered the paradox of the proliferation of imaginative representations of the “incomprehensible” and therefore “indescribable” experience of Holocaust suffering. For instance, James Hatley argues that the obsessive response to the victims’ plight is rooted in the fact that the harm caused by the Holocaust has been “irreparable.” Since the trauma of the Holocaust persists, it impels the post-Holocaust witness to pay constant attention to the story communicated by the victim-witness. The horrific and irremediable aberration of basic human ethics “does not allow life to return to normal,” and thus “the witness is called to insomnia,” which precludes healing and closure. Thus, Hatley’s witness, who “inherited the Shoah only in its aftermath,” remains alert to “the incessant call to righteousness .”3 From Hatley’s perspective, our persistent attempts to reconstruct To Witness the Experience of Witnessing epilogue 168 epilogue the Holocaust experience attest to a forever-unfulfilled desire to repair the irreparable ethical wound that the Holocaust inflicted on humanity at large. Gary Weissman attributes the continuing interest in the Holocaust to its elusiveness. Because “we cannot experience or witness the reality of the Holocaust itself . . . we are still searching for ways to feel closer to that horror.” The inaccessibility of the event creates a lacuna which produces the fantasy of the “nonwitnesses” who did not experience the Holocaust to “feel the horror” of the victim-witness. Weissman questions whether the artistic representations of the Holocaust which intend to confront the nonwitness with the horror of the event lead to understanding of the event. He also doubts the effectiveness of personalizing the horror, as practiced in the U.S. Holocaust Museum, whereby the nonwitness takes on the identity of the witness-victim. As he sees it, the obsession with representations of the Holocaust demonstrates an effort to reduce the experience of the Jewish genocide to “shapes and sizes we can cope with.”4 These discourses show that consciousness of the Holocaust has produced a prolonged psychological and moral crisis, which has ineluctably affected the post-Holocaust generation. The desire to alleviate the inherited trauma has engendered a desire to relive vicariously the traumatic experience of the victim. The impossibility of entering the “planet of death” of the Holocaust victim is doomed to failure and, as Lyotard claims, has resulted in falsified reconstructions of the world of the Final Solution. The enormity of the genocidal crime certainly explains the fixation of “nonwitnesses,” the inheritors of such a horrific legacy, on the source of the trauma, namely, the world of the victim. The Ethics of Witnessing submits that a possibility for approaching the world of the Holocaust lies in the perspective of the non-victim witnesses. These individuals watched the Jewish destruction in its real “sizes and shapes” and were confronted then and there with its ethical ramifications, which they recorded in their wartime diaries. Presented in their private life stories, the diarists’ direct, often spontaneous insights with regard to the Holocaust allow us to see not only the world of the Holocaust through the eyes of another, but also another’s response to the horror. In other words, the diaries make it possible for the post-Holocaust nonwitness to approach epilogue 169 the second degree of separation, namely, to engage vicariously in the experience of the non-victim witness. These unmediated testimonies also make it possible to follow the psychological-ethical impact of the traumatic event on the witnesses’ mindset and worldview. Here a caveat is in order. I am fully aware of the teleological structure of my subjective incursion into the diarists’ minds. The narratives that I have constructed out of their diaristic notations and entries cannot possibly represent conclusive or definitive interpretations of the diarists’ psyches and personalities; such a...