Silent Witnesses: The Testimony of Objects in Holocaust Poetry and Prose

Abstract

Silent Witnesses:The Testimony of Objects in Holocaust Poetry and Prose Leora Bilsky (bio) and Vered Lev Kenaan1 (bio) The Holocaust brought about a crisis of testimony that led to critical engagement with the limits of representation by lawyers, historians, psychoanalysts, and poets. This question was first addressed by the architects of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945) who preferred incriminating documents produced by the perpetrators themselves over the testimony of their victims. A reversal was brought about 15 years later in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961), where the testimony of Holocaust survivors took center stage. In the last two decades another transformation has occurred, known as "the material turn"—the rising interest in material objects (from artworks to everyday objects) in anticipation of the death of the last survivors. This material turn was accompanied by a wave of restitution litigation over artwork looted by the Nazis. In this article we offer a new theoretical perspective on the complicated issues raised by the material turn in Holocaust memory. What kind of testimony or voice can we attribute to objects? How can the testimony of objects change the relationship between law and literature in representations of the Holocaust? At the center of our discussion are three Jewish-Polish poetic testimonies written by Zuzanna Ginczanka, Władysław Szlengel, and Rachel Auerbach during the war in Poland, under Nazi occupation. Anticipating the crisis of testimony brought about by the new crime of genocide, these writers give voice to everyday objects and assign them the role of witnesses in an imagined future trial, held after the extinction of their communities. By introducing inanimate objects as privileged witnesses in an imagined Holocaust trial, we argue that these authors problematize the notion of courtroom testimony. By adopting and employing the rhetorical figure of the testifying object, these Jewish authors respond to the rich Western humanist [End Page 379] tradition of testament poetry, while at the same time performing acts of intervention. Our reading shows that these texts disrupt the continuity of the European convention of the testament poem, precisely by ascribing the testifying voice to Jewish things. Preface "The Telephone" With my broken and sick heart,with thoughts on the other side,I sat in the eveningBy my telephone. I thought: I will callsomeone on the other side,when there comes my turnto sit by the telephone. And soon I realize—God, there's nobody to call,I went another wayIn 1939. Our ways have parted,Friendships became stuckAnd suddenly, here I am,Without anybody to call. (Szlengel, 1943, pp. 38–41) "The Telephone" was written in Polish by the Polish-Jewish poet Władysław Szlengel (1943/1987) in the Warsaw ghetto (Oneg Szabat Program, 2021). Szlengel's poem is about the dreadful loneliness caused by being forced to move to the Warsaw ghetto away from the familiar habitus. Drawn back to the other, forbidden part of Warsaw where all his Polish acquaintances continue to live, the speaker longs to reconnect with old friends and neighbors. Yet his wish soon resolves into bitter realization: [End Page 380] "God, there's nobody to call." Here the poem shifts from the lyric mode to the satirical. Looking for some other channel of communication, the poet turns to the telephone's speaking clock as a substitute for familiar interlocutors. Szlengel thus produces a Jewish variation of Cocteau's (1928) La Voix Humaine by conducting an imaginary conversation with an automated female voice.2 Associating a broken human voice choked with tears and the voice of the machine, Szlengel conveys the loss of trust between the ghetto's Jews and their former Polish neighbors. When Szlengel (1943/1987) writes, "It will be easier on the heart, knowing that when I call, someone on the other side will listen to me quietly," the voice he craves to hear from the other side is of someone who shares memories of their hometown and is not afraid to talk with one who was cast out of it. In 1939 the telephone could still provide a means of communication to overcome the ghetto walls. Notwithstanding this technical possibility, such an effort is doomed to...