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Trauma is antibiographical. Trauma separates its victims from them selves, and it separates them from the time in which subjectivity finds its story: its days, dates, and durations. When trauma survivors say, as they often do, that they have lost track of time at particular moments, we have come to understand that they are also saying that they have lost track of themselves. In Holocaust memoirs, time often dissolves in relation to unexplained, unpunctuated waiting. While waiting endlessly in the cold, while waiting for soup, while waiting for news, while waiting for death, one's own or someone else's, while waiting we lose time, ourselves, the world. The effort to reckon time in these memoirs is chronically unhinged by an unreckoning. We hear it in phrases like “it might have been hours, but it may have been days”; “it might have been weeks, but it may have been months.” A subjunctive relation to the duration of one's suffering makes it both overwhelming and beyond narration. One waits for a restoration of meaning, of human time, of the unhesitating, unconditional grammar of present, past and future, the language of definite duration. This is the ordinary grammar of autobiography: it is something we reflexively think of as “given,” but not “given” in the sense of “possible to take away.”
Trauma cannot be undone or reversed; it is not easily addressed, much less written down. Because trauma “is not a mere wound somewhere that can be healed or left alone. Trauma, rather, consumes the self. The trauma of trauma is that it does not have a beginning or end, no space from here to there, no time of before or after, and thus cannot allow any discourse that might address trauma” (Breithaupt, 2005). Trauma, then, cannot be narrated.