Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

1. Philosophical Witnessing: “. . . And only I have survived to tell you”

« 1 » Philosophical Witnessing “. . . And only I have survived to tell you” To consider the concept of philosophical witnessing in relation to the Holocaust and to genocide more generally, I set out from two classical texts. The first of these is the fragmented quotation from the Book of Job in this chapter’s title: “And only I have survived to tell you.” Job himself appears in that narrative as the victim of a series of afflictions he suffers 4 the holocaust at philosophy’s address after God has in effect made a bet with Satan. God is so confident of “his servant Job” that he boasts to Satan that no matter how much Job might be made to suffer, he would remain faithful; Satan disputes this prediction, appealing to a theory of human nature currently familiar as “rational selfinterest ”: “Of course, Job has been faithful,” Satan challenges God; “why shouldn’t he be? Look at the good life you’ve given him: family, prosperity, health. Change those, however, and see then how he acts.” God rises to the bait and allows Satan to test Job. That takes the form of a series of disasters, beginning with four separate attacks on Job’s possessions and family, each destroying more than the preceding one: property, herds, family members. From each attack, a lone surviving messenger arrives to report to Job his new losses. All four announcements (could it have been the same messenger each time? the narrator does not tell us) conclude with the same statement by the witness: “And only I have survived to tell you.” This refrain identifies an archetypal motif of witnessing�of cultural or collective witnessing, and more specifically, of individual testimonies transmitted from the Holocaust�with the repeated statement of Job’s messenger conveying both a literal and a metaphoric reference. In its literal reference, it resembles accounts written from the Holocaust by people who believed that without their words, no record at all would remain of the events engulfing them; nobody would know how what happened happened, perhaps not even that it happened; in effect, they thought of their writing as if “only it alone would survive.” Some of these witnesses survived themselves, some did not. We recall the dramatic statement of Simcha Rotem from the Warsaw Ghetto, who, after having hidden in the ghetto’s sewers during its razing, came to the surface afterward, and reported that, “I said to myself, ‘I am the last Jew.’” Also in the Warsaw Ghetto, Immanuel Ringelblum, organizer of the Oneg Shabbas archives (unequaled as a record of collective witnessing), anticipated the same possibility when he buried in milk cans and other containers the collection of data his team of collectors had assembled, gathering side by side such varied “witness” information as the numbers of the ghetto’s daily death rate together with the programs of evening nightclub acts put on there.1 Even witnesses aware of the existence of other survivors, however, might be inclined to say with Job’s herdsmen that “only I have survived,” and here we encounter that statement’s metaphorical cast. For it is a feature of witnessing that although variant accounts of the same event usually will have Philosophical Witnessing 5 some common elements, differences frequently occur among them�some of them evident contradictions, but also others that call attention to aspects of the event that simply have passed unnoticed in other accounts. The contradictions and other extreme differences in such accounts have raised suspicions about the reliability of eye-witness testimony as such, but discrepancies in witnesses’ accounts otherwise may add weight to the testimony they give by citing details that other witnesses had not noticed or had not thought worth the telling.2 For two remarkable examples, we find Primo Levi and Thadeusz Borowski reporting aspects of their “survival in Auschwitz” that others who suffered there had not taken note of or at least did not write about (or not as fully): the role of chance in his survival that Levi elaborates and the anger toward the camp victims that Borowski experiences, with striking differences between them also in their reactions overall to what they had confronted.3 Undoubtedly, the motivations and abilities of Levi and Borowski as writers made a difference in their reports as witnesses, but it would be a mistake to analyze witness-narratives as if they had nothing to do with the act (or art) of...