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Every year, on the occasion of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish students from around the world join genocide survivors in a silent march from Auschwitz to Birkenau. While this march is primarily intended to recall the Nazi evacuation of the camps near the end of the Second World War—an evacuation that led to the deaths of thousands of starved and tortured inmates—it is also meant to demonstrate the survival of the Jewish people. Indeed, the participation of multiple generations of Jews at this event, which is appropriately called the “March of the Living,” dramatically signals the failure of Hitler's genocidal “Final Solution.” Jewish identity, the marchers make clear by virtue of their bodily presence at the former death camp, still remains vibrant and strong, even despite the Nazis' orchestrated attempt to exterminate it.
The prevalence of youthful faces at the annual March of the Living also places into relief another reality: the transferal of Holocaust memory from older individuals who directly experienced the event to young people whose knowledge of it is gleaned from the testimony of their elders. The student marchers, some of whom are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors, are in effect “belated witnesses” to the Shoah. Born long after the liberation of the camps, they are nevertheless indelibly marked by their elders' experiences; thus, in a radically physical demonstration, they bear witness both to their forebears and to their own inheritance of their elders' testimony.
The dynamic and complex relationship between the first- and the second-hand witness lies at the heart of Michael Levine's valuable monograph. Levine shows the figure of the “belated witness” to be a complex, multifaceted one. She is, first, the survivor herself, whose traumatic experience might