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The Power of Witnessing is a collection of essays reflecting the traumatic experiences of Holocaust survivors edited by Nancy Goodman and Marilyn Meyers. Artwork presented in the book illustrates how survivors have used creative pursuits to master and express traumatic experience. Psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically informed therapists, scholars, poets, filmmakers, and artists provide examples of witnessing through their “exquisitely personal and intimate” stories (p. 35). Goodman and Meyers's purpose in editing the book is to create a broader awareness of genocide and its psychic consequences and to illustrate how witnessing of these experiences by an “other,” real or imagined, is essential for healing from traumatic experience.
Goodman and Meyers have organized the book to allow the reader to participate in an experiential journey into the world of traumatization. They begin by elucidating the relation between witnessing and trauma. Witnessing, as they view it, is a way of obtaining a deeply personal experience of something that has happened to another. The presence of a witness is required to bring the unimaginable and unspeakable into existence and to make it real and known to an “other.” Without this connection between people, the experience remains unsymbolized as “dead space” and “nothingness.” Following this introduction, Goodman and Meyers bring the reader affectively closer by providing stories of direct experiences that are personal, intimate, and horrifying. These stories are followed by essays that are again more informative and distant from the raw experience. This oscillation between understanding and experience lets the reader take in the intensity of the horror in measured amounts, making reading of the experiences more tolerable and