Voices, Visions and Silence: Reflections on Listening to Holocaust Survivors

Sidney Bolkosky

and from now on you’re not to talk. It is absolutely forbidden to say a single word, not now, not when you see your mother, not afterward either. You won’t ever talk about it to anyone ever

Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood

In 1981, when I began to interview them, Holocaust survivors reported that few people wanted to hear what they had to say, even when they finally were prepared to break their silence. Just thirteen years later, in 1994, the University of Michigan-Dearborn hosted a reception introducing its program for transcribing and cataloguing the Holocaust survivor oral histories collected there. The tapes and transcriptions were made accessible through inter-library loan, OCLC, an international library network and the World Wide Web. In 1995, the fifteenth annual Holocaust conference, co-sponsored by the University of Michigan and Hillel in Ann Arbor, presented Hank Greenspan's remarkable voice play, Remnants; Unzere Kinder, the last Yiddish film produced in Poland in 1947; an "evening with survivors"; and Claude Lanzmann's superb documentary, Shoah. Each of these events seemed subtly but powerfully to converge on the theme of talking versus silence, a theme that has plagued survivors from the liberation to the present. Now, countless events of the last five years, events of far broader notoriety, have made survivors celebrities, often perceived as nearly saintly, certainly heroic, and in demand to speak about their experiences. Questions have arisen about the voices, questions about form and content, about meaning and despair, about style and simultaneity, about trauma and catharsis.

In sharp contrast to 1981, the American public now expresses a fascination and voracious appetite for Holocaust stories. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sustains its status as one of Washington's most popular national museums; there are Holocaust oral history projects from LA to New York, from Maine to Florida, from Toronto to Dallas, from Yale to Kansas State University. In Detroit, when a member of the Hidden Children Organization offered speakers to a variety of organizations like the Kiwanis Club or specific churches, she had over 25 requests in three days. Historians who had been skeptical of the validity of survivor testimonies now request videotapes for their research, sit on panels about Auschwitz where former prisoners of that place join them. The film "Testimony," which closes out the permanent exhibitions at the USHMM, runs for one hour and ten minutes. Virtually no one leaves early. Movies, fictional and documentary, have received Academy Awards, while Holocaust books regularly make the best seller lists. This wave of interest, to a great extent attributable to his film, gained active patronage from Steven Spielberg. He promised 50,000 new testimonies, 40,000 of which have been completed as of April 1998. His advocacy brought the issue of witnessing to the public and he captured the imagination of Americans, seeming to intensify the allure of the subject. The documentary produced by him and directed by the co-producer of the Shoah Foundation interviews, "The Last Days" won an Academy Award in 1999 just a year after "Anne Frank Remembered," another documentary, won it.

The meaning of this surge of attention to the Holocaust is elusive. In 1978 or 1980 or 1981, "listening ears" as one survivor recognized, were not available. And now here they are, media listeners, as well as others. What does such mindfulness of the Holocaust and such deference to survivors mean and why have they prompted considerable disquiet in numerous veterans of Holocaust studies and in scholars, from psychologists to literary critics, who have grown disquieted over the proliferation of interview projects. I consider myself among this worried group. Some of my own concerns stem from what Alvin Rosenfeld has called the Americanization of the Holocaust. Where once Holocaust historians spoke of victims, perpetrators and bystanders, now newspeople, filmmakers, novelists, literary critics, as well as survivors speak of rescuers, martyrs and heroes. Certainly the Holocaust becomes more palatable if we talk about heroism and rescue than if we focus on death and persecution, on humiliation and inhuman behavior. Better, for example, to speak in Spielberg’s film of 1200 saved Jews in Krakow than the 55,000 who were not saved in that city. It appears to be easier to consider survivors as heroic or saintly than as they usually see themselves in that black time, reduced to animals, compromising all civilized behavior, struggling with what it has meant to be so reduced.

The volunteer interviewers of the Visual History of the Shoah are required to read an article entitled "Survivors or Heroes?" in which the author explains that her motive for becoming an interviewer grew from her "need to make sense of the insanity that happened in Europe to the Jewish race." This "sense," derives from "listening to their [survivors'] stories," each unique, but which "weaves together a tapestry of the Holocaust." Clearly sincere and passionately involved, the author argues that each survivor ought to be considered a hero for what he/she endured. She finds that each individual story may fill her with hope. From the testimonies she extracts affirmations of love that "made it possible to feel rather than go numb," a phenomenon she attributes to her survivor mother.

Having noted the positive consequences of the interviews, the author of the article quotes one of her interviewees: "A concentration camp survivor lives with a broken heart that can never be mended. Time does not heal all wounds, you just learn to live with it." This declaration, contradicting as it does the theme of her article, appears as if an irresistible urge had insisted on its inclusion, regardless of the confuting effect it might have for the optimistic tenor of the piece. From here she moves to a puzzling conclusion about the meaning of survivors' toleration of pain and loss, "starvation, cold, humiliation, the constant threat to their lives": "And doesn't that make Holocaust survivors heroes rather than survivors?" This question, even if rhetorical, seems meaningless itself and no apparent connection exists between such a statement and the inevitable finale: recording the stories perhaps will "prevent history from repeating itself," whatever that may mean in this context.

Reading such an article may establish a mood and an expectation among interviewers as well as among survivors, which simply does not exist for those interviewed. While some survivors have crafted their stories to match standard forms, including depicting themselves as heroic figures, most have not. While some may allude to therapeutic effects of speaking, they continue ambivalently, simultaneously plagued by memories "never mended." Rarely will one encounter a cathartic moment. An interviewer or a listener with such notions may bowdlerize, trivialize them; turn them into a series of cliches, romanticize or sentimentalize them, demean them.

This is only part of the misgiving some of us have these days about the possible--the increasing--misappropriation of the Holocaust. More specifically, my own uneasiness has to do in part with an abiding worry that people will not know how to listen to these stories properly, with the appropriate contexts, appreciation and sensitivity. Biblical scholars often comment about the need for attention to what is left out of the text, the places where the Bible is silent. Such omissions nevertheless became the most discussed and interpreted portions of the Bible: Why the silence? What could have been included? Why was the obvious omitted? Survivor narratives abound in such silences and untrained or inattentive listeners often ignore them. Such disregard may mean neglecting some of the most significant moments of an interview, of a story, of a life.

I would like to reflect about how survivors sometimes speak and, more importantly, how we might listen free of preconceived notions of therapeutic or cathartic results. We need to guard against reducing complicated questions and answers to simple ones. Each survivor is unique, as is each interviewer/listener, but these factors reinforce how impossibly complicated each of these subjects remain. That means vigilance against the Americanization or the trivialization or attenuation of any aspect of the epoch.

This may be especially difficult and vital when dealing with the testimonies of survivors. Both the speaker and the listener encounter an immediate problem of the poverty of language. These narratives often do not conform to familiar linguistic conventions. Western philosophical, historical or scientific thought has rested upon certain linguistic protocols and rigid rules for millennia. The first principle demands univocation, that words have single meanings: "Thus a word can have one meaning and only one meaning. If it has more than one meaning it has no meaning" (Aristotle). This removal of ambiguity laid the foundation for virtually all western thought outside poetry, theology or art. From univocal meanings come sentences with implacable syntax and from those come syllogistic arguments that produce historical or scientific narratives to convince readers or listeners of a particular position.

Contrary to what Aristotle thought, archaic languages--Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew, for example--did not function univocally. Instead, words contained multiple meanings, were plurivocal. Now come Holocaust testimonies, painfully plurivocal, impossible to fathom for their synchronous nature, their conveyance of simultaneity and contradiction. Words do not have single meanings, are not univocal, which makes them ambiguous; and narratives do not necessarily flow in a straight line, may seem disorderly, which makes them confusing. "How can I tell you about this?" may mean literally that the experience cannot be yielded in its totality in serial, univocal speech. Such questions have plagued the greatest writers of the Holocaust: Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Tadeus Borowski and others.

Plurivocalism, with its attendant psychological, linguistic and even sociological problems, preoccupied western thinkers and writers like Sigmund Freud or Lewis Carroll, whose term "portmanteau words" (words which carry meanings in them like a portmanteau or bag) capsulized the problem, or James Joyce, not to mention Aquinas and other Church figures like St. Bonaventura. I mention Joyce because he tried to invent a language in Finnegans Wake that would overcome univocal restrictions. It was a nocturnal language, "dreamspeech," in which each word was laden with seemingly endless associations and meanings. Joyce addressed the impossibility of serial or non-poetic language to convey the simultaneity of internal and external experience, and the simultaneity of multiple associations that some words elicit. What Joyce may have perceived as enigmatically frustrating--conveyance of internal/external simultaneity, for example--becomes tragic and deadly when transferred to the realm of the Holocaust. The following examples reflect these awful phenomena that have virtually strangled the voices of survivors.

As he attempts to reconstruct the experience of an Appel, a role call, at Auschwitz, Marton A. struggles with this mystery:

Here was someone dead in front of you. He had to answer too—the dead guy. There was an SS, here more dying, behind you something else, and the smell, the smell, the smell—everywhere. [Long pause, frustratedly searching for words to express what he recalls. Finally he emits:] You know how in Detroit you get eight inches of snow and all around is that eight inches? Well, in Auschwitz all around you was misery, suffering. Everywhere.

Marton A. not only cannot find the words to relate what he

remembers, but the very manner of speech halts him—produces a long pause, and a restrained silence. It all happened at once, the smell, the dying, and the misery, like the snow—everywhere simultaneously; it looms in his testimony as a concurrency that Marton cannot reproduce.

And like Marton A., Abe P. also struggles with the problem as he describes his recollections of the boxcar doors opening at Auschwitz:

[Agitated; rapidly, getting faster] Well, before the doors was opening, I mean we heard the train screeched, and they we all of a sudden, they came and they knocked at the doors and we heard voices, dogs barking, and Jewish language, German language, "Heraus! Heraus!" and we were confused! . . . . And then I saw people thrown out of there. And I saw older people and they had to go and jump out of the train—the platform was low and the train was high and people were beaten, and then when we walked out of there, we finally got out of the boxcars all of the sudden there was a stench hit you and you didn’t know what that is. And nobody told you what is going to happen, nobody told you where you are . . .. The only thing you saw, you saw SS, and we saw prisoners in striped clothes, and I saw dogs who were sniffing and I saw people being beaten up and they tell you to stand in line and way in the distance you hear music, a band playing. My God, it was such a confusion; you didn’t know what was going on.

Abe exudes anger along with or perhaps because of that confusion. At the conclusion of his arrival story, about which I will say more below, he bursts forth with this incredulous yet bitter assertion:

In one day, that very same day, there were so many things have happened to us . . . you really couldn’t sort them out, and I’m still trying to sort out that day, how we’ve turned into, I mean we were just civilized people and all of the sudden we were told we are animals and we are treated like animals, worse than animals.⁶

As he speaks, his voice growing louder and his cadence faster, Abe tries to recapture his memory, restructure his narrative so that he can impart fully the confusion, the rapidity, the pandemonium, the torrent of simultaneous actions, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts. He cannot achieve that, and he knows it, which causes silence.

Confronting the same problem, in his novel Treblinka, Jean Francois Steiner describes the arrival of a train at that abominable place. As they disembark, the victims are confronted with pandemonium: the scene virtually defines the term. In one corner is "Groeysse Paeck," in another, "Kleine Pack," the prisoner members of the "red commando" who yell for large and small bundles. After women and men are segregated, at separate stations "a group of 'reds' shouted at the top of their lungs the name of the piece of clothing that it was in charge of receiving"--trousers here, underwear there--directions to the "hairdresser" and so on.⁷ All simultaneously, as we read it serially, it occurred simultaneously. Reading, as opposed to listening, distances the experience; it provides familiar literary structure and order; the passage, roughly one page long, somehow appears as the obverse of the true, horribly compacted experience. On the page, it cannot transmit the essence of those experiences in ways that emerge from these testimonies.

So the question returns: how will someone describe any of that? Here is Shari W. striving to convey that same phenomenon at Auschwitz:

We were about one hundred people in this small wagon . . . Now imagine all the packages that everybody was trying to get into those wagons. Yelling people, old people, young people, children, ahh, frightened and hungry and scared and all of a sudden even the air that you were breathing was taken away from you because the doors were shut on us. So we were scurrying like rats . . . to find a place to get a little air. [Long pause and then almost whispering] I mean I remember putting my face against a crack so that I should feel a little air . . . otherwise you would suffocate . . . . We tried to maintain some semblance of modesty . . . [but] as soon as the train would go and you’re being jogged back and forth everything just fell all over the place. When it finally rained one night because it was very hot, this was already the end of May beginning of June and all the heat from all the bodies and plus the weather was exceptionally hot . . . .And the stench. I couldn’t describe it to you.⁸

Shari, too, recalls the immediacy and synchronous nature of those first moments she found herself, bewildered, in the boxcar to Auschwitz. "I couldn’t describe it to you," follows her comments about the smell, the "modesty," the failed attempts at cleanliness, the heat and the rain, the air and the fear—all at once, simultaneously occurring and simultaneously recalled. But not simultaneously recounted. And each element seems to cry out for a longer and longer exposition.

Speaking, like reading, occurs serially--vexatiously exasperating for survivors who attempt to communicate fully the sights, sounds, feelings, smells and overall milieu they recall in their memories. Is there a Holocaust "dreamspeech" which can address the problems of simultaneity in speaking and of plurivocalism, the Joycean puzzle of communicating interior and exterior experiences as they occur concurrently? There is not. The testimonies, struggling with these and other difficulties, break narrative conventions, do not lead anywhere, seem episodic, anecdotal, often emerge in spurts, halting, sometimes disjointed, with long pauses. They reflect the nature of the experiences they describe: cacophonous, simultaneous, overpowering, "beyond description" as one victim declared. Much of these narratives lack listener context, are destined to be unassimilated and perhaps unassailable. They are mere fragments of fragments--remnants--of the stories that cannot be full and cannot be complete, but only pieces, piled on top of each other, feelings that sometimes sound disjointed to us because we cannot know the source of the sorrow fully or vicariously. Nor should we delude ourselves into believing that the pieces, even when reconstructed to form what seem to be coherent stories, are the stories. We may think we are hearing it all-—we are not—cannot for some of the reasons I have cited here.

At some level, both speaker and listener know this. Joyce's Holocaust writer-counterpart who addressed the issue of plurivocalism in profoundly sadder and deadlier terms was Elie Wiesel. "For the survivor," wrote Wiesel, "every word carries a hundred words."⁹ Implicit in this statement is the sad fact of loneliness that haunts many survivors. Who can intuit those hundreds of unspoken words? How can they be voiced? From these twin afflictions, the impossibility to communicate simultaneity of meaning and feeling, only one conclusion seems possible, a conclusion which survivors have sensed since the liberation, and which are here voiced by those perhaps less poetic than James Joyce or Elie Wiesel, but as poignant and more depressing:

You cannot say in an hour, or a day or a week what it was like during those years. It is not possible to tell you.

I cannot tell you--I cannot. There are no words to tell you.

You don't have enough paper or tape that I can tell you what happened from that day until liberation.

I couldn't tell you everything--about the nightmares, screaming and tears. . . . I can't talk about such things. Even now I don't believe it.

If I could sit with you for hours, I wouldn't be able to tell you of the sufferings we went through every minute of the day.

What I told you is nothing compared to what I went through. Because you cannot say in an hour . . . or a day . . . or a night--there won't be enough paper to put down what children went through during the war.

There is no end . . . no way to talk about it. It's unbelievable.

If I would try to tell you what is really inside, if I would think of my mother in a gas chamber, something inside would snap. . . . It is impossible to speak of it.

It's very hard to talk about this. . . . You want to forget.

Sometimes I wish I could forget.⁸

(Italics added)

It has become commonplace to speak of "unspeakable" memories. They are, of course, unspeakable in the sense that their horror seems to forbid description, memory or shame inhibiting life: "I pulled the shade on the past. Closed my memory in 1946"; "In a way, we were ashamed of our experience. And we maybe didn't want to open up old wounds by discussing or telling about it." Primo Levi echoed this second comment in his disturbing final essay: "those remain silent who feel more deeply that sense of malaise which I for simplicity's sake call 'shame,' . . . or whose wounds still burn."¹⁰ For most, memories remained omnipresent as these two men suggest: "It's always with you. Try not to think about it, but it's in the back of your mind." "I don't think about it all the time; but I do think about it all the time. It's somewhere in the back of your head. I don't want to tell you; but I do want to tell you. I can't tell you." Not finding the proper word has abetted the silence; the inability to convey the fullness of the experience, its synchronicity, has produced a choked, sometimes angry, sometimes resigned silence.

Serious listeners, people who want to know as much as they can know about these testimonies and about the Holocaust, should pay careful attention to such statements as "I want to tell you. I can’t tell you" and begin to ask questions about their meanings. Aharon Appelfeld, warning readers of survivor accounts to read with caution, has commented on the significance of what is not said when survivors speak or write, "so that one sees not only what is in it, but also, and essentially, what is lacking in it."¹¹ Anger, guilt, frustration may simultaneously accompany a feeling of inability to adequately and fully communicate this particular experience through old language, a phenomenon Primo Levi strove to describe in Survival in Auschwitz. Recalling the unbearable hunger and the bitter cold, Levi wrote that even though as prisoners "we say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things" from the "normal " use of those words; bear different referents.¹² And there is no "new, harsh" language, no Holocaust dreamspeech, to replace it. Acutely aware of a virtual abyss between the experience of the survivor and the listener, survivors frequently assume an attitude of "Why bother? You won’t understand and I am incapable of communicating the experience adequately." This, too, may yield stammering, miscues, repeated words and, finally, silence.

What does it mean to say, as Wiesel and others have, that the silences also speak? In fact, the silences frequently speak more eloquently and meaningfully than words. Here is a woman whose childhood was ruptured by the war and the destruction of her family: "they were all taken [pause] to Treblinka [silence]," and she stiffens, draws a deep breath, slightly weeping, recovers "and that's the last time we saw them [pause]."¹³ And here is Abe P., who upon the arrival at Auschwitz sent his little brother to be with other children and older people thinking he would be safer with them: "So like a little kid he went" [pause] grasping for words; "Little did I know that [pause] I sent him [pause] to the crematorium. [pause] I feel like [longer pause] I killed him."¹⁴ [Silence] Whatever may be occurring during those silences, entangled in the images that seem to flood survivors’ minds at such moments, are the problems of choice: how much should they say or reveal? What words to speak? How will this person (the interviewer) best grasp the meaning of the memory? How communicate the simultaneity and the utterly alien meanings of those words? The paradox of speaking silences derives not from survivors' failings, and not just from the rush of emotion in these particular examples, but from language itself.

This past and its lexicon remain inescapable and permeate the present for survivors. "The two worlds haunt each other," Lawrence Langer has written, the one polluting the other.¹⁵ Some survivors cannot see or speak about chimneys without recalling the chimneys at Auschwitz; some cannot hear a train without reliving the horrifying, box car deportation which caused the deaths of their families and divided their own lives into before and after; some cannot think of a word like "bunk" without envisioning the boards that served as beds in the camps. "It's always with you, it's always in the back of your mind," was followed by a long pause, a silence that articulated a deep, ubiquitous sadness.

The testimonies of the victims will remain fragments, fragments of fragments, incomplete, thinner than the actual experience, never fully known or understood. For numerous reasons, no matter how long we speak with victims of the Holocaust who survived, it is never complete, never done, always leaves a clear, palpable sense--for both listener and speaker--that the full story is incommunicable. After ten or fifteen hours with many interviewees it remains clear that we have uncovered only fragments of fragments. Perhaps we will be able to appreciate the fractured nature of these experiences more as they emerge one by one by one, punctuated by painful and eloquent silences.