On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History

Abstract

HENRY GREENSPAN: On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History, Praeger Trade, Westport, CT, 1998, 199 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0-27595718-7. The art of listening and listening well is basis of psychotherapy Amongst people needing to be heard very well-not only as patients-are survivors of Holocaust. In Holocaust accounts, listener encounters such problems as failure of descriptive language, survivors' difficulties in describing unimaginable experiences without recourse to their first language (Yiddish, Polish, German, etc.) and personal horror elicited by horrors described. In foreword to work of Henry Greenspan, clinical psychologist, Robert Coles, having discussed difficulties inherent in language, states: Still, essence of our humanity is to try to make sense of things, even to make sense of senseless (p. 6). Professor Greenspan sets about this task with sensitivity and tenacity. His book is essentially report on two decades of listening to survivors, not weekly or monthly, but over time. A truth emerges. A first account is not like second telling, which may differ again at fourth recounting, even of same dramatic and tragic event. As one survivor insisted, is not story. It has to be made story. In order to convey it. And with all frustration that implies. Because at best, you compromise. You compromise (xvi). Behind his stories lurked what survivor called a landscape of death. Greenspan states that testimony suggests finished product whereas recounting suggests retelling, process that involves listener and teller more intensely than obtaining of an account. Retelling allows commentary on one's own reflections, remembering, and understanding, or misunderstanding. The experiences of six survivors are recounted in search for truth and truth untold. For there are things survivors cannot tell. They happened but cannot be described. In Chapters 1 and 2, reader is introduced to vicissitudes of recounting and role and impact of listener on teller. Once prepared, reader is drawn to voices of survivors. Greenspan suggests that survivors' testimonies are understood to be the most provisional of construction and that review and interpretation require to enter process by which survivors find words and meanings at all in face of memories that undo their words and meaning (p. …