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This troubling and moving book studies what it means to attest to the unspeakable event of the Holocaust. It analyzes the unhealed wounds left on its survivors, its historians, and even the scarring effects its memory traces on generations who have never lived through it. The Holocaust emerges from the seven different chapters of Testimony as an indelibly real event to which all of us must bear witness. The authors show that the horrible but vital privilege of reviving the Holocaust does not belong only to the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, political prisoners, and dissidents who found themselves beaten and swept into gas chambers, stuffed into extermination vans, burned in ovens, and shot over lime pits. The absolute terror of the event, its unthinkable presence, forces every living human to come to grips with it, to live through it over and again, and, no less, to use it to invent an ethics built over the pain of its memory.
The book is divided into seven chapters but in reality comprises two parts, each of which is defined by its author's training, style of analysis, and professional orientation. In the first chapter, Shoshana Felman, a scholar and analyst in French studies at Yale University, sets the stakes of her collaboration with Dori Laub, a doctor and clinical professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine at the same institution. Felman recounts the experience of a class she led (in the context of the Yale Holocaust Archive) entitled “Literature and Testimony.” Its innovation hinged, she reports, on the relation between the literary memory and different constructions of an event (in a broad sense, as understood through Mallarmé, Camus, Dostoyevski, Celan) and the testimonies that survivors of the Camps had recorded for the Yale Archive. It happened that the act of performing the testimony began to make the event happen again but with different inflections. They found that the performance