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In the preface, Ira Brenner describes the following scene: In the Miami Holocaust Memorial, a Hispanic man encounters a Holocaust survivor whose concentration camp number is tattooed on his arm. Although the Hispanic man was well informed about the history of the Holocaust, he becomes totally unglued and “visibly shaken, and in the end all he could mutter was ‘Then it really happened’” (p. 12). The Last Witness is a volume that achieves some victories in the fight against this “tendency toward denial in the face of an overwhelming reality” (p. 12): the reality of atrophied muscles, deformed limbs, and minds of children hidden in such narrow spaces that they could only move when their neighbors moved; the reality of survival by hiding under corpses; the reality of surviving by providing sexual service to “protectors;” and the reality of children continuing to play a game when a playmate drops dead.
The book consists of previously published articles and new material. Most chapters are written individually, or in collaboration, by psychoanalysts Judith Kestenberg and Ira Brenner. It was through the other collaborator, her husband Milton, that Judith Kestenberg had her first contact with child survivors. He was “an attorney who spent many hours helping children remember what had happened to them so that they might qualify for compensation” (p. 18). An anthropologist, Janet Kestenberg Amaghi, also contributed to this volume. Judith Kestenberg had moved from the study of generationally transmitted effects of persecution (in this context, see also: , Generations of the Holocaust, New York: Basic Books) to the study of children who had themselves survived the Holocaust. This book also tells us much about children who did not survive.
In the process of studying “… history, not as historians, but as psychoanalysts who wanted to know what happened to the human psyche …” (p. 19),