Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando ed. by Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (review)

Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams are already well known for their contributions to understanding the testimony and the cultural representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando, and this edited volume extends their earlier work. They not only argue for the ethical centrality of the Sonderkommando to understanding the Holocaust, but also advocate a more expansive definition of testimonial and representational evidence, both necessary to grasp the complex actions of those Jews forced to do the horrific work at the gas chambers and crematoria. The new volume furthers this goal by drawing together scholars from several disciplines to consider both well-known sources and less familiar textual and cultural responses. The latter include literature, film, and painting, among others, bringing into the discussion a wider range of cultural studies than has usually been the case. Indeed, the editors' emphasis on the intersection of testimony-as-evidence with cultural representations and other kinds of responses is one of the strengths of the volume, and well worth considering as a model for other work on the genocide.

As the title implies, the contributors focus on how the forced laborers of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz represented themselves and were subsequently represented by others. The essays speak to each other (even implicitly debating some points) despite the diverse backgrounds of the authors. At the same time, the strong focus may constrain the volume's engagement with the larger field of Holocaust Studies.

The editors have organized the contributions into four major sections. The first, which addresses specifically ethical questions of representation, features essays by Griselda Pollock and Williams himself. The second section treats the testimonies of the Sonderkommando members, especially the so-called "Scrolls of Auschwitz," evocative remnants of texts buried in the ground around the crematoria and discovered after the war. These essays include forensic analyses by Andreas Kilian and co-authors Pavel Polian and Aleksandr Nikityaev, dealing, respectively, with the question of authorship of one surviving letter and digital imaging techniques to read another barely legible one. These essays complement Ersy Contogouris's new translations of the letters left by Herman Strasfogel and Marcel Nadjary, themselves accompanied by an introductory essay by Chare, Contogouris, and Williams. The section concludes with an essay by K.E. Fleming analyzing the specific Greek context of the letter by Nadjary (Emmanouil Natzaris), and another by Gideon Greif on what the scrolls tell us about the daily religious life of Sonderkommando members.

The third section, which discusses postwar representations, shows the most disciplinary diversity: Dan Stone on what can be learned from documents of the International Tracing Service; Carol Zemel on the painting of Sonderkommando survivor David Olère; Williams and Isabel Wollaston on digital and analog exhibition practices of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum; Greif on comparing early and later testimonies by survivors; Sue Vice on the novelist Sebastian Faulks; Steven Bowman on confusions about how Greeks have been represented as part of the October 1944 Sonderkommando uprising; and a new translation of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman's last letter to German artist Gerhard Richter concerning the latter's Birkenau series (four paintings abstracted from the four surviving surreptitious photographs by members of the Sonderkommando in 1944).

The final section of the anthology focuses on representations of the Sonderkommando in film. Essays by Barry Langford, Adam Brown, and Philippe Mesnard necessarily feature Grey Zone (2001) and Son of Saul (2015) as touch points, although the authors take diverse approaches and bring in a range of other examples for their analyses.

The volume ends with an afterword by Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, a personal reflection on how representations have helped him form an "affective geography" of second-generation witnessing.

The unifying thread for the collected essays is an argument for the centrality of the Sonderkommando to understanding the Holocaust. In the introduction Chare and Williams argue that locating the Sonderkommando at...