Where were the listeners? Witnessing among Holocaust survivors

Abstract

This article questions two explanations given to Holocaust survivors’ prolonged silence about their experiences. The first highlights psychological impediments from the extreme trauma that set the survivor apart from his or her social environment. The second focuses on linguistic barriers—the limits of language itself—to adequately express the experience of the trauma and the emotions it generated. The author demonstrates that silence was not followed by speaking, as the history of witnessing consists of three periods—an outpouring of post-Holocaust witnessing in the immediate wake of World War II, its abeyance, and reemergence in the 1970s—to argue that the most potent obstacle to witnessing by Holocaust survivors was the absence of listeners. The study of Holocaust witnessing, consequently, should not be the so-called “silence” of the survivor, but the ambivalence and indifference of the world, which only belatedly began to listen to them.