Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

Afterword: Wound and Scar

Afterword Wound and Scar One difference between memory and history as it is written is that forgetfulness belongs to one but not to the other. This does not mean that the written record has no gaps, that ideology and repression do not affect its writing or reception, but that the gaps or unexplained swerves that appear in history’s accounts may themselves be part of the course of events, as 204 afterword “natural” as any of their other features. Memory, by contrast, is dependent on the act of retrieval, and if the impulse for that is diverted or weakens, what it has in its stores becomes endangered. If the impulse disappears, those vestiges do so as well, and although there may be explanations for that disappearance, no appeals to justice can right it. The imperative “Zachor!” (“Remember!”) attests to the fact of forgetting as much as to the possibility of avoiding it. Perhaps there is indeed a pool of recorded images in our subconscious, individual or collective, to which additions are continually made, as if it were the attic of a house in which we store items we want to hold on to as parts of ourselves but for which we cannot at the moment find a place. We assure ourselves that we will return to them later, and even if that “later” never comes, the significance we attached to them in storing them remains. Will weakening of this kind mark the future of the Holocaust? It would be extraordinary if shadows of that process did not occur there, as it has for every other historical moment, including the most intense and honored ones. It is important, at any rate, in reflecting now on the Holocaust, to anticipate this as a possibility; that is, to raise for ourselves, even as the impact of that event seems undiminished, the likelihood that this force will weaken. It is the question of mortality itself: What forms can we turn to that are adequate to the historical occurrence but that also bring it into an ongoing present that requires its own sustenance, its own legs. I am not speaking here about the amber preservation of fossils, although we cannot be afraid to consider that something like that is almost certainly the destiny of most Holocaust monuments, as it has been of so many others . Not that those others have been unheeded or neglected (although that too, at times), but that they eventually have become detached from the history of which they are marks, and then have to sustain themselves, with few of them successful at this. Some, like the pyramids at Luxor, become independently monumental, hardly commemorative at all. More often, as in the memorials marking the Civil War or World War I that dot so many towns and cities in the United States, the monuments become anonymous, identifiable only by the engravings or plaques attached to them that might as well have been placed elsewhere or even gathered collectively together. But one knows, from the list of names inscribed, that those monuments were once fully alive, their dead known and cared for by familiar, devoted Wound and Scar 205 visitors for whom the particular names and the particular place mattered greatly. And why should the present differ in this respect from the past? What is involved here is not a question of concern or effort or good will; there is no more reason to ascribe a deficit of these to the past than to the present. Nor is it our responsibility to bring all of that large past into our own circle of concern. When Donne wrote in his Meditation that “Any man’s death diminishes me,” could he have been referring to all the dead of human history ? Even “Diminishing,” it seems clear, has its limits. It is difficult�painful and dangerous�to imagine the future in the present, to anticipate experience yet to come in a present that asserts a different , possibly conflicting account. But the presence of the Holocaust also now is striated, with varied and contrasting lines. The shock is still in evidence, like waves moving across an ocean that reach distant shores in their own time, often intensified by the journey itself. Then too, there is the continuing reflection and analysis: Few historical events have been the subject of such persistent and intense scrutiny from so many different angles of vision. And then, beginning and end...