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The Power of Witnessing is an extraordinary and enveloping book. Reading and writing about it drew me to other books about the Holocaust, books I've not been able to finish until now, specifically Primo Levi's Surviving Auschwitz (1958) and The Drowned and the Saved (1989), written 40 years after Levi's camp experience. I have also revisited books I had read earlier in another context (Frankl, 1959; Richmond, 2002) and thought of Holocaust films I've seen in recent years. I had the courage to view Shoah and felt a need to do so, illustrating what the editors note in the opening paragraph of their preface: “The power of witnessing creates space in which courage, resilience and connection are discovered.” And finally, because of The Power of Witnessing, I also experienced a change in perspective on my own life experience that I will discuss further in the course of this review.
Goodman and Meyers have gathered together a collection of pieces that are varied and nuanced and filled with both pain and wisdom. All of the chapters contain personal details about the contributors, and many are written by psychoanalysts—psychoanalysts who are also writers, artists, or poets. Most of the chapters focus on the Holocaust, but not all. It is through the Holocaust that we have learned so much about the importance and power of witnessing and the devastation in its absence. And this is the larger subject of the book—witnessing in all its many forms. Only when trauma is symbolized, when there is a witness, or when one is able to be one's own witness, a concept that Dori Laub has written about so eloquently both in this volume and in his earlier book, coauthored with Shoshana Felman (1992), is there an opportunity to recover and resume life.
The editors, two gifted women who are long-time colleagues and friends, tell us at the start of the book how they embarked on this daunting project. They knew their task was enormous, and they were humbled by it. To keep themselves focused and movin