Hearing the Witness's Voice

In works that touch upon an experience of the extreme, such as the one the Shoah constitutes, a great place is given to silence, the corollary of an immense reserve as to the power, the validity, the legitimacy of speaking¹. Thus literature finds itself impugned, writing suspected of being merely the futile art of writing well, while speech itself is invalidated, called into question in the trial brought against language and words, on account of their weakness, their opacity, or their banality. “Words seemed to me stupid, worn out, inadequate, anemic; I wanted them burning. Where to unearth an unheard-of vocabulary, a primal language?” writes Elie Wiesel², an avowal that is found formulated in very similar terms by many witnesses.

On the theoretical plane, this position often takes on the appearance of a prohibition of literature, which is found in Brecht³, in Adorno⁴ — of whom one often knows only the famous formula so lazily reduplicated in the field of our culture — or in George Steiner, who develops it brilliantly in Language and Silence, only to qualify it somewhat later.⁵

In the camp, where her speech is struck with non-existence, then outside the camp, the victim takes the measure of silence, and it is to a transmission of the disaster — silent, ineffable — that a certain number of survivors dream. It is silent archival images that, for a long time, seem most effectively to attest to the inhumanity of what man does to man,⁶ and a long and slow labor of maturation will be needed before there can come about what Shoshana Felman, apropos of Lanzmann’s film, calls the age of testimony.⁷

Resonating in a cultural and affective space ready to hear it, the witness’s voice can then affirm the irreducible singularity of each experience, impugn the abstract accounting of large numbers, attest that the time that was fractured, irremediably, is indeed ours.

The Witness’s Silence.

Staged and represented en abyme in a great number of works, the silence of the witness — mute or obstinately silent — translates this reserve. In Wiesel, as we know, silence is charged with an existential, theological dimension, and in the unfolding of what André Néher⁸ qualifies as scenic silence, the silent witnesses haunt a universe deserted by faith. Thus in The Gates of the Forest,⁹ Gregor, the sole survivor of his family, who can keep himself alive in the village where Maria, the servant, takes him in only by passing himself off as a deaf-mute. Or in The Town Beyond the Wall,¹⁰ the character nicknamed The Silent One, who shares the narrator’s cell and whom nothing can draw out of his hallucinated muteness. Or again in The Oath, Azriel, sole survivor of a pogrom, who expresses his fidelity to the vanished community by making a vow of silence and refusing the role of witness assigned to him.

“Silence is our being,” the messenger of a people of the dead confides to the young Elisha,¹¹ while in the subsequent narratives, the Wieselian characters seem to meditate upon this sentence of Gabriel, an enigmatic prophet: “Every man whose tongue is torn out becomes my friend.”

It is silence, again, that best accounts for the suffering inflicted on children, that assault all the more violent for being incomprehensible, that freezes speech, carries off the being, undoes consciousness. Such as little Binjamin Wilkomirski, who feels everything within him come undone, liquefy, who feels himself dissolve in the colored mud where he is seated and, for a time, renounces speaking¹². Such as the narrator of Kosinski’s The Painted Bird¹³, a child hunted, tortured, and wandering through the countrysides of Central Europe, who, having become mute in the course of one of the ordeals inflicted on him, takes years to recover his lost voice. Such as little Hurbinek, evoked by Primo Levi in The Truce,¹⁴ a child born and dead in the camp, who never learned to speak and who remains the symbol of this silent suffering.

In a different mode from that of the silent characters, the blank, the ellipsis, the suspension points signal what in writing falls silent, tracing the limits that will not be crossed, allowing one to circumscribe the zones into which writing can and will not venture, to apprehend what will not be said, will not be written, but is nonetheless there, in the in-between of speech and silence. When Piotr Rawicz¹⁵ resumes his narration, once the thin cough of the machine guns is hushed, only to evoke the quality of the silence that reigns after the massacre, as he watches the blood of the sky drip, he inscribes his elliptical text within a dimension of inhuman disaster and cosmic silence that no description could have attained, while only tenuous traces — a pair of child’s shoes, a doll left intact, a brassiere of silk — attest, in the silence and humility of everyday objects, that their owners were living beings.

In The Age of Wonders,¹⁶ the reader is confronted with an ellipsis that covers not a few hours but several years. A child recounts, in the first person, the everyday life of an assimilated German Jewish family, progressively ostracized then destroyed by Nazism. The narrative breaks off at the moment when the narrator and his mother are crowded with other victims into a freight car headed south. When the narration resumes, it is henceforth a third-person account. The adult protagonist is called Bruno; he returns for a brief visit to his native country. Between the two narrative blocks, two sentences are inscribed: When all was accomplished. Years later. A laconic formula that translates a choice, Appelfeld’s choice, never to evoke the disaster otherwise than obliquely, to give it to be apprehended only in its premonitory signs and in its traces, to ask the reader to mobilize his own knowledge of what was accomplished, to understand too that the child who was pushed into the freight car is no more, even if Bruno is still alive.

Finally, in W, or the Memory of Childhood,¹⁷ it is three suspension points that are inscribed upon a blank page, articulating the two parts of a narrative itself split into two narrations, the one autobiographical and the other fictional, inscribing them within an irremediable distance between a before and an after, within an irremediable fracture that writing designates without claiming to suture it. Suspension points that also signify other limits: the impossibility in which the orphan child finds himself of putting his story into words, the difficulty of putting History into text, the necessity then of resorting to displacement and metaphor. To tell the death of Cyrla Perec, to evoke the place of her disappearance — Auschwitz — to account for the systematic dimension of a process of annihilation, there unfolds, in a striking Olympic metaphor, the description of W, a concentrationary island, while on the other side of the suspension points is told the death of a fictional character, Caecilia Winckler, a mother who, off the coast of Tierra del Fuego¹⁸, dies in a shipwreck whose sole survivor would be an autistic child.

I Do Not Want You to Speak

To the surviving witnesses, it nonetheless very quickly appears that silence would make itself complicit in the work of forgetting and annihilation programmed by the executioners, that speech alone — whose limits they nonetheless know — is in a position to combat a concerted enterprise of denial and effacement of traces. In The Drowned and the Saved¹⁹, Primo Levi writes that the entire history of the “thousand-year Reich” can be reread as a war against memory. It can also be reread as a war against the speech of the other. The “I do not want you to be” that Robert Antelme analyzes translates into an “I do not want you to speak, to be a being endowed with speech.” The process that aims to exclude the victim from the human race implies the exclusion of that sharing of humanity which speech constitutes. One of the first elements of the deportees’ initiation consists in understanding that one no longer speaks to them as to human beings, that one no longer addresses them as individuals but as a terrorized mass to which orders are transmitted and barked. Correlatively, they must understand that they are no longer supposed to accede to the free use of speech, of their speech. Very quickly, they realize, at their own expense, that no dialogue is possible, that there is no speech to address to their guards and their masters. When the father of the narrator of Night,²⁰ ignorant of these rules, spontaneously addresses a kapo, the latter “stares at him as though he wanted to convince himself that the man who was speaking to him was indeed a being of flesh and blood” before dealing him the blow that will send him rolling to the ground.

Antelme describes the recoil and the fear of German women who, before a water point, encounter the detainees being led at forced march toward Dachau. This fear does not come from their appearance — the women did not seem to see them — but from the fact that one of them makes use of speech. Antelme remembers having pronounced a formula of courtesy, s’il vous plaît [if you please], a reflex come from another world, and it is this speech, bearing witness to their humanity, that renders the sight of the detainees unbearable to these women, until then indifferent, and that makes them flee.²¹

Alongside the formless, utilitarian, mutilated language that builds itself up in the camps, there subsists a speech that persists in stating its humanity. It is no accident that the moments when certain witnesses remember most clearly having fought against a programmed dehumanization often correspond to the moment when they had recourse to poetic speech, speech irreducible and remembering — to poetic speech or to song: Primo Levi reciting Dante to the Pikolo, Robert Antelme’s companions reconstituting, line by line, a sonnet of Du Bellay, an undertaking that he analyzes in these terms: “Thus a language was being woven that was no longer that of insult or of the belly’s eructation, that was no longer the dog-barks around the tub of leftovers. That one dug a distance between man and the muddy, yellow earth, made him distinct, no longer buried in it but master of it, master enough to wrest himself from the empty pouch of the belly.”²² And that moment, evoked several times by Jorge Semprún, when, bending over his master, Maurice Halbwachs, who is dying in a foul distress and the shame of his decomposing body, he recites Baudelaire to him, for he is aware that poetic speech, which appears then as one of the forms of prayer, can restore to death its dignity and to the dying man it accompanies his dimension as a human being.

If the drawings, the writings, that are attempted to be smuggled out of the camps entail sanctions of such ferocity, it is not only because they constitute a trace of the crime perpetrated, but because they bear witness to a form of resistance, of the victim’s mastery over what is happening to him. And the same is doubtless true of the testimonies given after the liberation. Indeed, if one of the dimensions of testimony is to be addressed to others — to the living so that they may know, and to the dead as the fulfillment of a sacred promise — the other dimension of testimony often concerns only a relation of self to self. One of the stakes of testimony is indeed that of an attempt at the victim’s mastery over what happened to him, a mastery that passes through language. To attempt to give form, to re-establish a duration, or something that would make a link between instants, sequences, discontinuous and dislocated events. To attempt to make coincide a dehumanized, distraught, humiliated self, reduced to silence, and the self that can testify. To attempt to make them coincide in the very body of the text, or in the impetus of speech.

The survivor’s account, when it can be formulated — which is not always the case, there have been so many suffocated utterances — is dramatically linked to the listening capacity of his interlocutor. Welcomed, listened to, heard, perhaps the survivor reassures himself by being able to say what he underwent, in the very movement that brings him back into a humanity circumscribed by speech and from which one had wanted to exclude him. Hence his pain and his anger when he is not heard, for the rejection of his speech, even when formulated in a more courteous manner, in a certain way prolongs the status his executioners had inflicted on him.

Very quickly, Semprún is aware of the limits of his interlocutors, doubtless stronger than his own:

“One can say everything about this experience. It suffices to think of it, to set about it…… But can one hear everything, imagine everything? Will it be possible? Will they have the passion, the compassion, the necessary rigor? Doubt comes to me from this very first instant, this first encounter with men from before, from outside —.”²³

Antelme’s deaf interlocutors need only a single word, Unimaginable, to ensure their protection. The poem that opens If This Is a Man is a speech of prayer, already heavy with an anger that anticipates the refusal to listen; it is a pressing order addressed to the one whom the account takes as witness: Carve these words into your heart… The title of this poem corresponds to a sacred injunction, Shema: Hear, the first word of the traditional Jewish prayer.

When the Image Speaks and Not the Voice.

If the silence that was imposed on the survivor has often been prolonged by his own reserve or his limits before speech and writing, by the uncertain quality of the listening granted to him, it is sometimes as though reinstated by the modalities of representation of the victims put in place from the immediate post-war period onward. Nothing is more eloquent than those archival images showing skeletal survivors, half dead, half alive, staring fixedly at the lens. These images say what man can do to man. But if they arouse dread and stupor, they do not thereby restore the survivors to the plenitude of their status. They bear witness, in a sense, for them, in their place. If it is true that bodies speak for themselves, they do not give the victims back their voice.

It is in this that Lanzmann’s film Shoah effects an irreversible turning point in the transmission of the catastrophe and in our relation to the victims. It puts into operation a fundamental choice, which consists in giving the floor to the surviving witnesses, to the exclusion of any document. It chooses voice against image, and the aleatory process of revivification against the frozen self-evidence of the archival image. It puts into operation an approach of individuation that consists in hearing the witnesses one by one, in respecting the unique character of each account, each rhythm, each voice, all the while embedding them within a polyphonic structure that then makes of all these accounts one long collective account, that of the extermination. The originality of Lanzmann’s work can be read in its relation to another major work, Night and Fog, whose elaboration gave rise to a moral reflection as much as to a meditation, and which for successive generations constituted a first and indelible encounter with the disaster.

Compared to Night and Fog, Shoah can be read as a succession of refusals. Refusal of the archival images on which the staggering impact of Resnais’s film partly rested. Refusal of chronology and of what it could induce as a form of coherence. Refusal of commentary and of the voice-over which, even if it is Jean Cayrol’s text — a former survivor — is no less a text that speaks for the whole body of victims, whereas in Shoah the succession of testimonies restores to each his own history and trajectory. In this sense, by eliciting the testimony of the members of the Sonderkommando, who had been forced to participate in the death machine, by listening to them with a fraternal attention, Lanzmann restores speech to the most silent of the victims, those who had remained shut within a silence seven times bolted. Evoking the video-archives being constituted from the testimonies of survivors, Yannis Thanassékos²⁴ was able to say that it is a matter of bringing human speech back from the very place where it was eradicated. Within the framework of the filmed interview which, in a certain way, stages the witness’s voice, there is realized the paradoxical alliance of a medium of modernity and an old tradition that imposes the absolute pre-eminence of voice over image, of speech over icon. This speech gives silence its due, but words are needed to hear the silence that perforates them, just as writing is needed to hear, to read, to perceive the silent side of the text.

Notes