"Listen, my friend, to what is happening here"

“More than any other autobiographical text, testimony is an apostrophe, an address to another who represents the human community from which the witness was isolated, at one moment of his existence, by the event to which he has come to testify.¹” It is therefore a type of speech-act which, to extend here Régine Waintrater’s point, has not only the function of informing the interlocutor about the experience recounted, but also of reweaving, in the present of the enunciation, the bonds of dialogue and of symbolization. It is indeed no accident that the event which gave rise to a veritable proliferation of the testimonial in Western societies (in a deferred manner, to be sure, as regards its reception) is characterized by its desocializing strategies as much as by the physical abuse and material deprivations that were part of the murderous enterprise.

As early as 1949, the psychologist David Boder, who, about a year after the Liberation, had interviewed a number of survivors of the genocide of the Jews in whom he had detected a particular form of trauma brought about by the deprivation of sites of cultural and semiotic exchange, conceptualized this lack as the result of what he called a process of “deculturation.” Coined in opposition to “acculturation” as defined by John Dollard — namely the process by which “a new person is added to a group²” — the term designates the exclusion of the subject from any symbolic field, from any possibility of exchange, and at the margins of the enunciative circulation that allows each person to make his experience signify in the mirror of collective representations to whose formation he contributes. Excluded, first, from interaction with non-Jews both by physical and juridical separation and by a (new)language (German in particular) that transforms him into a non-human and effectively rejects him from the linguistic community, the individual targeted by the Nazi policy of extermination finds himself, moreover, deprived of the possibility of constructing a space of collective symbolization within his own group by the restrictions placed on education, on writing, on expression and on communication in all its forms. Deprived for several years “of all reading (including prayer books), of religious services, of radios, even of opportunities to speak with others in their language,³” some of the survivor witnesses to whom Boder turns lost both the social skills indispensable to a satisfactory interaction and the cultural and semantic reservoir from which to draw the possibilities of formulation — and thus of integration — of their experience. They are clearly distinguished from those who found the possibility or the necessary resources to maintain a cultural life. It is this wound inflicted upon the symbolic resources, and thus upon the subject as a being of discourse and a social being, that Boder tries to heal in the reactivation of language, by creating an interlocutory space whose aim is to “reculturate” the survivor through the joint cultivation of a common symbolic ground. Now, beyond the traumatological context in which the author forges the notion, it seems that there is also here the intuition of the very site from which the testimonial utterance speaks and forms itself, born of the necessity of reinserting oneself into a human community through the effort to make one’s experience signify verbally, by addressing an “internal” or external other.

Maintaining the cultural bond

There thus appear attempts at resistance, individual or collective, to what had not yet been named by this term “deculturation,” at the very heart of the catastrophe, and even in the contexts where the placing of experience into dialogue seems most improbable. The schools, choirs, concerts, performances, lectures, and publications that flourished clandestinely in the ghettos and, more exceptionally, in certain camps, are so many initiatives that arise from this necessity of preserving a social bond tied through the sharing and circulation of symbolic representations. The Oyneg Shabes archives assembled by Emanuel Ringelblum⁴ and his collaborators in the Warsaw ghetto are a particularly visible manifestation of this, because inscribed within the organization of a vast and meticulous project, but this desire for interlocution also found realization in a multitude of isolated utterances, driven by the need to address another, even an imagined one, and whose persistence is limited to a tiny part of what was produced, most of these writings having in all likelihood disappeared along with their authors. “Everyone was writing,” notes Emanuel Ringelblum, but not all the writings found their interlocutor, and the many songs, poems, diaries, inscriptions engraved on prison walls or scribbled in the margins of books on which Michał Borwicz and Nakhmen Blumental⁵ bent their attention in the immediate aftermath of the war allow us to surmise the extent of the utterances that vanished without ever being read. For the function of these writings to be realized, at least in part, perhaps it is enough that their reception be anticipated, that the addressee exist, in a fictional or projected way, within the locutor’s utterance: the capacity to integrate a dialogic dynamic into one’s own discourse then becomes a way of reinserting oneself into the space of symbolic exchange through the effort to alter one’s own expression in contact with an imaginary other. That, indeed, is what distinguishes speech from petrified silence or inarticulate cry: the effort to share the irreducible of experience, to bring it into the space of language, inseparable from the persistence of a confidence, at least minimal, in the capacity of the “world” to hear what the witness has to say, and even to furnish him with the resources to say it.

The phenomenon, while more widespread in the ghettos, also exists in the places where the assault on the cultural bond was most radical. The concentration and extermination camps, doomed to “babelism” by the very nature of the societies transitorily recreated there, subjected to extreme conditions that isolated the subject from his own intellectual resources at the same time as from any authentic contact with his fellows, were places that rendered perilous and exceptional any reinstatement of the signifying function of language, a fortiori any recourse to a past cultural experience. And yet, there too, the effort to return to a language prior to that of the camp creates spatio-temporal pockets through which the locutor can momentarily reconnect with an outside world to which he is linked by the persistence of his symbolic competences. One recalls that chapter of If This Is a Man in which Primo Levi shares with the Pikolo of the Kommando a gratuitous moment, freed from the logic of the place, a moment when, undertaking to teach him Italian from a passage of Dante’s Inferno, he rediscovers at once the complexity of his own language, the strata of meaning associated with each word, and the necessity of making this symbolic experience audible to the interlocutor so that it may take on its full meaning. Even more than the return of the words themselves, it is the attention of this fortuitous interlocutor, the possibility of having been heard and understood, that is experienced as a genuine reintegration into human society: “Perhaps, despite the flat translation and the summary, hasty commentary, he has received the message, he has felt that these words concern him, that they concern all men who suffer, and us in particular; that they concern the two of us, who dare to pause over these things with the soup-fetching poles on our shoulders.⁶” The capacity to make Dante’s verses speak outside their context of emergence opens the possibility of a “we” that encompasses both Levi and the Pikolo, but also the transtemporal community of beings endowed with language. In this, it is not only with his immediate interlocutor, but also with a vast imaginary collective, encompassing fourteenth-century Italy at the same time as a possible world to come, that the Auschwitz prisoner dialogues.

Bottles into the earth

Perhaps it is also as a will to recreate this “we” in the places where social amputation manifested itself in its most radical form that one must understand the effort of testimony accomplished by the members of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau,⁷ and in particular the writings of Zalmen Gradowski, of a resolutely literary cast. The Sonderkommando — or special commando —, so named through a euphemization typical of the language of the Third Reich, was composed of a contingent of deported Jews, regularly decimated and renewed, whose members were forced to participate directly in the apparatus of putting-to-death through their labor in the crematoria. Contact with the other prisoners was forbidden them, even if, as Philippe Mesnard notes, the isolation to which the Sonderkommando was subjected had its flaws, which notably made possible the organization of a resistance movement. The fact remains that the possibilities of interaction with the rest of the camp, and a fortiori with the outside, were minimal, reduced both by the physical separation that set the members of the “special” team apart from their fellow prisoners and by the ambivalent situation that made them accomplices in the murder of their own.

Because they are denied at once belonging to the human community, to that of free men, and to the whole body of victims, because they experience their own group as a “body” slashed by the “scalpel” of the selections rather than as the gathering of a plurality of subjects, they have, literally, no one left to address, save for an interlocutor reconstituted in the act of enunciation. How, then, is this partner of the dialogue constructed, reduced in the present of the writing to his sole discursive existence? How is forged the silhouette of an addressee who, because he can exist only outside the space-time delimited by the concentrationary machine, remains wholly contained within the fiction of the “you” that the locutor addresses to him? One should not see in this second person a mere rhetorical device, still less a figure of the other modeled on a simple declension of the self. In Gradowski’s text, where these mechanisms take on particularly complex and stratified forms, the figure of the interlocutor at least partly overlaps with that of the “discoverer.” It is therefore a character who is certainly unknown, imagined and anticipated by the act of writing, but who corresponds to a very real expectation and finds himself invested with a genuine testamentary mission, revealing the author’s concern for the future of his writings. Gradowski writes not only one text, but four, each accompanied by a preface and buried in a different place of the terrain surrounding the crematoria, presumably in order to multiply the chances that part of his writings be found. And because, unlike those similarly buried by other members of the Sonderkommando (Haïm Herman, Lejb Langfus, Zalmen Lewental, and Marcel Nadsari), these manuscripts lay claim to a genuine literary ambition — perceptible in the complexity of the enunciative strategies, the recourse to a tradition of writing, and the lyrical accents into which certain passages slip — the manner in which the figure of the interlocutor forms itself there recalls the metaphor by which, in 1913, Osip Mandelstam gave us to think the posture of the poet and the type of reception to which his work is destined.

Every man has his friends. Why should the poet not be able to address his own, those who are naturally close to him? When the decisive moment comes, the navigator casts into the ocean the sealed bottle that holds his name and the account of his adventure. Many years later, wandering among the dunes, I discover it beneath the sand and, on reading the letter, I learn the date of the events and the last wishes of the deceased. I was within my rights to read it. I did not open a letter addressed to another: the letter sealed in the bottle is addressed to whoever finds it. I found it. I am therefore its secret addressee.⁸

The fate of Gradowski’s writings, true bottles cast into the earth, entrusted to the good care of a hypothetical and providential future reader, seems the material realization of the situation of enunciation thus allegorized. For if this “secret addressee” is already woven into the text itself, he later finds himself incarnated, first literally, in the figure of Wollnerman — the first holder of the manuscript, who would strive to accomplish the tasks, editorial among others, assigned by the author to his “discoverer” — then more symbolically, by the various readers who, once the text is published, will occupy the place of the “you” summoned by Gradowski. It is this identification of each reader with the being of discourse to whom the author addresses himself, this deferred reappropriation of the deixis,⁹ that makes possible the continual reiteration of an addressee who is nonetheless grammatically singular. It is this, too, that makes the narrative particularly disconcerting and contributes to its power of fascination. The text, because it brings into dialogue worlds, subjects, and temporalities radically separated from one another, produces an uncanniness born of the possibilities of disjunction permitted by language at the same time as of the spectrality proper to the voice that makes itself heard there.

“Dear reader”

It is the prefaces above all, as well as the first manuscript, entirely built on a dialogic principle, that induce this disquiet. The reader finds himself there directly and frequently apostrophized, in a manner that constantly places him back in the position of the first discoverer of the manuscript, unsealing a letter of which, the moment he reads it, he becomes the addressee. Let us take, for example, the lines that open the part published under the title “Notebook,” made accessible to the Francophone public in the new edition of Gradowski’s writings that appeared in 2013:

[Come] toward me, you, happy citizen of the world who live in a country where there still exists happiness, joy, and pleasure, and I will tell you how these modern vulgar criminals took a whole people and turned its happiness into misfortune, changed its joy into eternal mourning — destroyed forever its pleasure.

Come toward me, you, free citizen of the world, where your life is protected by human morality and your existence guaranteed by law, and I will tell you how these modern criminals and vulgar bandits trampled the morality of life and annihilated the laws of existence.¹⁰

The text continues thus over several pages, using anaphoric repetition, the juxtaposition of the “I” and the “you,” the movement from outside toward inside, as a means of placing in relation the narrator, riveted to a dreadful and insular reality, and the “free citizen of the world,” guarantor of the perdurance of a human community beyond the barbed wire. The particularity of this first preface, with respect to those that will follow, is nonetheless that it is destined for a reader perceived as contemporary with the author. “Come now,” Gradowski repeats several times, “come, rise up, do not wait until the deluge has passed, until the sky has cleared and the sun has begun to shine, for then you will remain struck with stupor and you will not want to believe what your eye shows you.¹¹” The distance that separates the locutor from his imagined addressee is not temporal, but spatial and circumstantial: he speaks to someone still liable to become a testis, a third-party witness, that is, to “come” and “see” for himself what is taking place.

The prefaces of the other texts, by contrast, which all open with a “dear reader” to whom our identification is solicited, address themselves more explicitly to the inhabitant of a future of which the author has renounced being a part. It is no longer a matter of calling the “free citizen of the world” to come and see for himself what is happening “here,” but of anticipating a society of the aftermath that will be able to form an idea of what took place only through the discourse of the witnesses, survivors or not: “I believe that by the hour you read these lines, this name [that of Auschwitz-Birkenau] is already well known to the world; yet no one will be able to believe the truth of what is happening here.¹²” The speech-act then has the function of disarming this incredulity, “of demonstrating to you that everything you have heard, including what I am writing here at this moment, is but an infinitesimal part of what really happened here.¹³” To demonstrate, then, and no longer to show: to produce proofs that do not belong to the domain of the visible, but to the force of conviction of a speech that attests the reality of the event through the perfect coincidence between the time recounted and the moment of the narration. The “here” and “at this moment,” deciphered by the receiver of the message long after these words were written, violently uproot the reader from his space-time to bring him into a chronotope functioning in itself as an object-proof.

Conversely, the act of writing also allows the author to propel himself out of the present, toward a time to which he suspects he will no longer belong, but into which he projects his consciousness through interaction with his addressee and through the mission he entrusts to him. This mission counts a certain number of precisely enumerated acts: to take vengeance on the murderers, to mourn the author’s vanished family, to contact his relatives in the United States or in Palestine, to find a photo of himself and his wife in order to include it in the publication of his writings. All are a way, for the one who writes, of securing himself a place in the community to come, by ensuring that his experience will be understood — in the primary sense of the term — and that his voice, provided it manages to extricate itself from the place where it emerges, will become audible. It is in this aspiration to a reception as faithful and as close as possible to the message he intends to transmit that the dialogic fiction takes on its richest dimension. Not only does Gradowski anticipate the possible misunderstandings of his interlocutor (“you will surely think that this great annihilation that befell our people is due to the damages of war¹⁴”), striving to correct them in advance, but he refers, in the very modalities of his writing, to cultural codes and to a literary tradition whose use attests his aspiration to preserve that common symbolic ground which alone makes interlocution possible. There is no possibility of speaking except in this compromise between an inner language, inaccessible to the other because absolutely irreducible to common experience, and the symbolic resources shared by the cultural and linguistic community to which the locutor addresses himself.

Cultural connivance

The addressee of the manuscript, though he is incarnated in an unknown figure that seems ultimately to encompass the whole of the “vast free world,” is not cut off from all communal anchoring: when he writes, it is to a certain type of interlocutor, to a precisely identified imaginary group, that Gradowski addresses himself, and it is into that community that he strives to reintegrate himself through language. The “dear reader” to whom the writer speaks is therefore endowed with a certain number of distinctive traits that illuminate the symbolic ground on which the locutor places himself. This partner of the dialogue is first of all a Yiddish-speaking reader, that is, not only Jewish, but steeped in references to an Eastern European Ashkenazi culture characterized at once by the cultural connivance bound up with religious education and by familiarity with enunciative and literary practices born of the passage to modernity. Like many intellectuals of his time, Gradowski was educated in the traditional system of the yeshivas before coming into contact with the movements of politicization that, from the beginning of the twentieth century, divided the Jewish world. Having become a fervent Zionist without, however, having renounced religion, he also tried his hand, in the interwar period, at writing short stories — apparently not very promising, if his brother-in-law David Sfard¹⁵ is to be believed, but which testify to an early attraction to literature.

Paradoxically, it is the experience of extreme deculturation that consecrates Gradowski’s entry into literature, producing a testimony that, “in order to be one in our eyes, comes about only through the gesture of the writer” and emanates from a subject who “fulfills himself as a writer in order to become a witness.¹⁶” Now, beneath this gesture, there shows through the persistence of narrative and discursive practices drawn from the readings that marked his generation: these make the unprecedented reality of the camp imaginable through the reinvestment of common symbolic resources, productive of shared references. The “journey” to which the author invites his interlocutor in the first manuscript, drawing him along a veritable itinerary of destruction, recalls in particular that famous poem by Bialik which, written in response to the Kishinev pogrom, became the paradigm of the diction of catastrophe for Hebrew-speaking as well as Yiddish-speaking readers. “Come to the city of slaughter, you must see / With your eyes, feel with your own hands,¹⁷” enjoins Bialik’s fictive God to the “son of man,” in a kind of ironic reversal of the biblical “lekh lekha.” “Come, my friend, rise up,” Gradowski in turn commands the reader, inviting him to traverse the sites of destruction and to confront the sight of them. But this observation from above, and as if from outside, of a space situated at the “heart of hell” can also recall a founding text of modern Yiddish literature, whose kinship with the testimony of the Sonderkommando Batia Baum, the French translator of Zalmen Gradowski, has many times underscored.¹⁸ In The Mare, a novel by Mendele Moykher-Sforim¹⁹ whose first version dates from 1873, the young hero named Isrolik flies through the air in the company of Asmodeus, who forces him to look upon all the evil that is done on Earth. The expression Gradowski uses to speak of the Nazis (“the servants of their god the Devil”) weaves a cultural connivance with a reader of whom he expects the same familiarity he himself has with the key texts of modern Yiddish literature.

For the layperson, many elements would therefore remain impenetrable without the gloss that the editorial work embroiders around the text: such is the case of these intertextual references, which presuppose a good knowledge of the cultural milestones of Jewish modernity, but also of all the utterances referring to practices specifically associated with the ritual organization of society. This shared knowledge gives rise, at points, to a veritable coded language in which the author, resorting to the numerical value of the Hebrew letters, ciphers his signature in a manner that presupposes the reader’s familiarity with this procedure. In a more diffuse way, the choice Gradowski makes, in one chapter of the manuscript, to address the moon, also arises from an inscription within a specifically Jewish symbolic universe, structured around the lunar calendar and the ritual of mekhadesh-levone²⁰ (sanctification of the moon). The metamorphosis of the non-human object into an interlocutor thus does not arise from a Romantic sentimentality that would make of nature the privileged confidante of the solitary poet, but rather from the restoration of a social space whose rhythms were traditionally marked out by the appearances and disappearances of the celestial body. In this, to address the moon, even in a vindictive and polemical mode, still amounts to dialoguing with the cultural utterances of the reference group, and thus to maintaining the bond with a collectivity whose symbolic field the locutor continues to share. The modalities of the discourse addressed to it, moreover, partly overlap with those aimed at the imaginary reader: “Come here, moon,” “listen, moon,” “you see, moon,” function as a diversion of the prayer of sanctification by which the author, summoning a tradition he defies, addresses himself to an imaginary group with which he strives to make community in the space opened by writing. This writing, because it makes it possible to make experience signify verbally in a radically de-symbolized universe, because it alters and transforms itself in the representation of an imaginary other with whom the locutor is at once in exchange and in conflict, resists deculturation through the maintenance of the dialogue with the living.

An effort to rally to the community of men in general and of modern Jewish culture in particular, dialogue as it manifests itself in Gradowski would still call to be examined under its other aspect: that of reception. The work of deciphering, translation, annotation, and editing by which new voices make the recovered manuscripts speak invites, indeed, a reflection — not on the nature of the testimonial utterance itself, but on the use that is made of it and on the way in which its mediators make it signify. This “shared authority” that the historian Michael Frisch²¹ claims for the exploitation of oral sources (and which could, beyond that, apply to all narratives subject to forms of co-authorship) opens onto a shifting dimension of the dialogic dynamic that would be usefully illuminated by a critical reading of the different editions of this “testimony of a Sonderkommando of Auschwitz.”

Notes