The Task of Testimony: On "No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn"

Video testimony of Alina Z., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1922. She recalls attending an ORT school; German invasion; ghettoization; hunger and round-ups; marriage in 1941; jumping from a train to Treblinka with her husband, having been warned by a Pole of their destination; hiding with a farmer; returning to Warsaw because they feared exposure; living on the Aryan side; returning to her parents in the ghetto because of blackmail threats; hiding in bunkers during the uprising; and deportation to Majdanek in May 1943 and Birkenau several months later. Mrs. Z. recalls her realization that she was pregnant; establishing contact with her husband; sharing extra food he supplied with her friends; the midwife taking her son away immediately after birth (she never saw him again); a death march to Ravensbrîck; transport to Neustadt-Glewe; and liberation. She describes returning to Warsaw; traveling to Katowice and Prague; reunion with her husband in Germany; her second son's birth in Marburg; reunion with her sister; and emigration to the United States. Mrs. Z. discusses her pervasive memories; fears of discussing them with her children, and recently feeling able to talk about her experiences; the importance of learning lessons from this period; and her fears that the lessons are lost when observing events in Yugoslavia. ¹

From 1993 to 1997 I worked with Alina Bacall-Zwirn, referred to above as Alina Z., and her family on a book titled No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn. ² The facts detailed in the above-quoted bibliographic summary of Alina's video testimony, from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, are therefore familiar to me. Yet in reading this electronic record, available to the millions of users of online library catalogues, I cannot help but ask a question that I confronted daily while working on No Common Place, namely the question of the relation between Alina's traumatic past and the attempt to retell her story, between personal memory and public history, whether at the archive or in the form of a book.

If I take the bibliographic summary as a point of departure, it is because it seems to offer a coherent formula for this process as it adapts the individual and variable voices of the thousands of survivors who have contributed to the archive to the strict demands of the bibliographic genre: a fixed number of characters and words, events related in chronological sequence, uniform spelling of place names, the embedding of searchable key words. ³ Above all, there is constant attention to the status of these videotapes as testimonies. In the case of Alina Z., the witness's experience is related entirely under the aegis of "she recalls," words carefully chosen to reflect the scope and nature of the testimony. (Consider, for instance, the choice of words in the summary of Hella H.'s testimony: "She recounts her father's death prior to her birth.") ⁴ The summary, moreover, records only material testimony. During the videotaping process, nothing is inadmissible; "the interview," writes archivist Joanne Rudof, "belongs to the witness." ⁵ Nor, of course, are the original tapes ever edited, abridged or annotated in any way. ⁶ The summary, however, serves a different function: it records only the experiences of the witness herself—no hearsay, no interpretation. When the witness reports that her mother was gassed at Majdanek, that her younger sister died during the Polish uprising in Warsaw, these parts of her testimony are excluded from the summary. When she talks about how her husband was beaten in the camps, how he risked his life by begging an SS guard to help his wife, this too will be omitted.

Yet the archival summary is careful to avoid the impression of comprehensiveness. In underscoring some of the witness's prevalent concerns and some of the important themes raised by the...