Reviewed by: Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz by Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams Sarah Cushman Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz By Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams. New York: Berghan Books, 2016. 254 pp. Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams’s Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz is bold and fascinating, and provides a fresh and insightful analysis that contributes to scholarship about the Sonderkommando (SK), Holocaust testimony, Holocaust writing, the material culture of Auschwitz, resistance, and the Auschwitz camp complex itself. Their main assertion is that these testimonies matter. Past reluctance to engage with them deeply, in part because of who the authors were, has led to a missed opportunity. Chare and Williams embrace the prospect. They consider matter in its various meanings: materiality, significance, substance, importance, and actuality. They do not simply mine the scrolls, but engage them critically: where they fit in relation to other Holocaust testimonies; how they represent the Holocaust; which documents to include as “Auschwitz Scrolls”; as well as when they were written, by whom, in what order, to what end, and whether they were individual or collective efforts. Chare and Williams engage with others’ interpretations as well. In short, the “writings are not . . . simply sources of information (although they are this), but are also archives of feelings, memorials to fellows and loved ones, acts of resistance against all odds, assertions of self. For these purposes and more, they continue to merit our careful and sustained attention.” The final paragraph of the introduction summarizes the book: Having discussed the circumstance in which they [the scrolls] were found . . . we begin with a consideration of the material state of these documents as an aspect of their status as testimony. We move on to consider the most striking of the writers from a literary perspective, Zalman Gradowski. We then show that the other Yiddish writers in the SK also repay close reading: Langfus for affective and ethical dimension, Lewental for historical and memorial. Next we consider the letters of Herman and Nadjary which add an extra dimension in relation to understanding the group dynamics of the SK and considering issues related to masculinity. The theme of resistance, and of the power of [End Page 99] writing to contribute to it, runs through all these chapters. Finally, we draw upon all of our previous readings to revisit the SK photographs and show that a greater familiarity with the Scrolls reveals aspects that have not been covered. Dehumanization was central to the Nazis’ project of genocide. Rendering camp inmates unrecognizable as gendered individuals figured in that project. Knowing that men alone comprised the SK, historians still have balked at exploring how the SK scrolls address masculinity, in fact, explorations of Jewish masculinity during the Holocaust are, until recently, nonexistent. Was it that Jewish men in general and the SK in particular embodied a degraded masculinity—impotent, morally compromised, vulnerable, debased, incapable of protecting, or involved in the destruction of, loved ones? Chare and Williams interrogate the testimonies about masculinity and the discussion that unfolds is among the most important in their book. For the SK writers, the writing itself undermined efforts to expunge individuality—the authors asserted their identities, including their masculinity. Women (and female bodies) are essential to the SK testimonies in which masculinity figures. For most, the center of the Holocaust was genocide. For the SK, it was the destruction of evidence of genocide, a process they were tasked with and to which their testimonies responded. The SK utilized the mass murder of women and the destruction of their bodies to illustrate their particular horror. The SK writers, for different reasons, contrast themselves with naked female bodies: their own dulled existence versus bountiful (sexualized) energy; their own clothed alive bodies versus mass burning bodies. Chare and Williams view Gradowski’s passionate and sexualized portrayal of women as memorialization—a way “to give a sense of them as living beings,” and to represent their feelings. His effort succeeds only partially, as he prioritizes “his own desires—to be a writer, to speak for the dead, to be seen as their brother and not their enemy, perhaps even...