Dori Laub, New Haven, Ct. Not knowing is an active process of destruction. Why the testimonial procedure is of so much importance
- The reading of historical records or of the chronicle of public discourse alone, falls short of representing the truthful dimension of a particular historical event. This is in no way to say that the authors of such documents have the intention to mislead. It is rather a statement regarding their capability to perceive, to register, and to transmit, as well as the technical means at their disposal, and the level of creativity they possess in giving form to what they experience. When the event assumes the proportion of massive psychic trauma, the capability to perceive, to register, to know, to transmit, to record and to remember, even to see the whole Gestalt, is largely impaired. It takes a profound ability to remain stable in the midst of the hurricane of trauma and to keep the registering and the instruments that do it, fully functional. That taxes not only cognitive abilities to their very limits but works likewise against natural human tendencies to not direct one’s gaze towards the center of the traumatic experience, to look away, to overlook, to misperceive, and most of all, to not comprehend. These are often necessary self defenses in order to continue one’s self preservation. Therefore, the record of traumatic events is so frequently lacking, and those events which are transmitted, completely lose their essence, often, because the central details are missing.
A virtual internal truth
My conception, my perception of history, and my witnessing of the Holocaust, does not match the format in which it is commonly described, as an event framed by the Nazi era, that began in 1933 and ended in 1945, and that took the lives of six million Jews, as well as many other millions of people who lived in Europe at that time. From my perspective, it is an event that is witnessed primarily "from inside," and my pursuit is not so much historical accuracy as it is a virtual internal truth. It is a truth, that is at the same time from the past and contemporaneous. It is continuously evolving, and impacting life, reaching beyond the specific generation during which the actual event occurred. Mine is a method and an approach that revisits and reinterprets, both the historical record (the public discourse) and the narrative of the event (the personal testimony), thus trying to reach a "beyond". This approach operates through a very special alertness to subtle cues and mostly unintended signals, to the resonances of the traumatic event. The method pays attention to obscurities, to paradoxes, and applies a free-floating attention that both invites and ventures into the incomprehensible, the cryptic and the "closed." This is the context within which personal, historical testimony unfolds as a composite, a mosaic, of exquisite existential, detailed and profound knowledge; side by side with vast voids, absences and ignorances. It is in this dialectic between rich, unacknowledged and often pre-conscious knowledge on the one hand, and public oblivion and private amnesia on the other that personal, historical testimony is born and continues to unfold.
The "Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies" at Yale was founded in 1981. The first survivor testimonies were recorded as early as 1979. The immediate impetus for me to interview survivors and find out about their truth, was the NBC series "Holocaust" starring Meryl Streep. I saw a studio version of the Holocaust, a Holocaust that practically was non-existent, was nothing but a lie. Paradoxically, when this mini-series was shown in Germany, it was the first time that the German public "emotionally discovered" that the Holocaust took place. Four hundred thousand letters were received by the television station that broadcast it, claiming total ignorance, abhorrence and horror at what had transpired. This existential ignorance persisted in spite of a consistent deluge with historical facts and documentary footage that had been transmitted to the public since shortly after World War II.
Despite its success and although it triggered a lot of memories to emerge also among survivors, for me the Holocaust miniseries remains a totally insufficient portrayal of the Holocaust. I was in search of another, more appropriate medium, for a frame within which the telling of the true story can take place, for a dialogue with another person which allows for the victim to go beyond the safety of not-knowing and to reveal himself or herself.
It was essential from the beginning of the Archive to include people from different disciplines who, coming from their different professional perspectives, would be the immediate and the more remote witnesses and listeners to those who testified. Historians, artists, writers, humanists from sociology and comparative literature, as well as film makers, had to be part of the endeavor. The multiplicity of perspectives (in listening to and understanding survivors) and of languages (to conceptualize their testimonies) is absolutely essential, even though it may lead to contradictions. These very contradictions of the listeners often contain those moments when the real questions open up. Different disciplines, that is different levels of conceptualization, differing vantage points, interests and questions, differing experiences and destinies, join forces in a communality of truth which can only crystallize from such multichanneled dialogue.
The testimony is not a ready-made text
The focus of attention of the many multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary experts and viewers is the testimony. The testimony is not a ready-made text. It is a process that is set in motion in a place that provides safety, through the presence of the witness (interviewer) to the witness (interviewee). People who come to bear witness do not know what they know. Once the process of the interview is set in motion - the process of reflection, of self-reflection, and of telling to oneself and to the listeners - it has a cascade effect. Memory leads to memory, perhaps even to an explosion of memories. In most instances, very few questions need to be asked. Only a certain structure needs to be provided, like the sequence of time, so that the process can both proceed and be contained, leading from one event to the next. Questions like asking for the completion of a story or what happened next, or what transpires during a silence, are the ones that are more frequent. The presence of the witness, the companion on the journey of the testimony, encourages the "address" to oneself, to the internal other, perhaps the perished family, to one’s past, to things one might have wanted to say to people that are no more, and to one’s future - to one’s children, to future imaginary audiences, and even to future generations.
Why is the testimonial process so essential?
Why is the testimonial process, in all its complexity, so essential in achieving, accruing and maintaining Holocaust knowledge? The answer to this question lies in the fact that we are dealing here with massive psychic trauma. In order to understand this phenomenon, the following four assumptions have to be explicitly stated:
I. Massive trauma has an amorphous, ahistorical presence, not delimited by place, time or agency. Lacking a beginning, a middle, and an end, it weaves through the memories of several generations.
II. Massive psychic trauma colors and shapes the entire representation of reality of several generations, becoming an unconscious organizing principle passed on by parents and internalized by children. Because of trauma’s ahistoricity, its effect tends to be transgenerational, establishing a process of evolution that requires several generations through which to work itself out.
III. (and this can be a more controversial statement): whoever partakes of trauma, whether victim, perpetrator, bystander, or even remote historical witness (such as children), is affected by it, albeit in very different ways.
IV. Trauma precludes its knowing. Not knowing trauma, or experiencing and remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shut-down of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal, an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. Not knowing is an active process of destruction.
Furthermore, Holocaust trauma and genocide trauma for that matter, refuses knowledge because at its very core lies the complete failing of the empathic human dyad; the executioner does not heed the victim’s plea for life and relentlessly proceeds with execution. Human responsiveness came to be non-existent in the death camps. A responsive "thou" to one’s basic needs no longer existed. Faith in the possibility of communication died and intrapsychically there was no longer a matrix of two people, - a self and a resonating other. The victims felt that there was "no longer anyone on whom to count."1 The natural outcome is a lonesomeness in one’s internal world representation: "In the Lager….everyone is desperately and ferociously alone" (Jean Améry). This despair to communicate with others, diminished the victims’ ability to be in contact, and in tune with themselves, to be able to register, reflect, to themselves, about their own experience. To quote Jean Améry, "After the Holocaust, I was a person who could no longer say we."2 The testimonial process with the listener is therefore essential in re-establishing the internal dialogue with oneself, which was destroyed when the victim discovered there was no longer a "thou", a you, either outside or inside himself. The video testimony functions as a dialogue, not only with the listener, but also with oneself and beyond that, with one’s family, and with imagined audiences in the world at large and in one’s future. It’s a step in the restoration of one’s own humanity and the humanity of the world one lives in. It is a step in the rebuilding of mutuality and of trust.
The video testimony is a way of remembering, re-experiencing and reenacting, that in essence constitutes history in the making, on an intergenerational and communal level. A certain level of "knowing" and "holding it together", together with the necessary cognitive and emotional resources are the pre-requisites of the testimonial process to unfold. Otherwise, all we will have are distortions.
It is, to give an example, important to recognize that the concept of time differed in the different circumstances of one’s Holocaust experience – ghettos, hiding, work camps and death camps. We often see the photographs of people waiting in line on the selection ramp. When I ask audiences to estimate how long it took for the selection process to take place, the answers vary from a couple of hours to three or four. The still photographs portray people waiting and that is the impression that one gains. Listening to testimonies, one gets a completely different picture. Trains arrived and people were driven out at maximum speed. There was not even time to say goodbye to a beloved. Everything was done running. Time estimates of the processing of a train were probably closer to fifteen or twenty minutes. Historians could calculate these time episodes by simply dividing the number of hours per day by the number of trains that arrived. But this is not considered to be a question of importance, so this calculation is usually not done, and the impression remains one of almost timelessness in waiting, when in essence, the opposite is true.
The dimension of color, sound and smell
The same considerations raised around the dimension of time apply to the consideration of other aspects of the physical context in which the traumatic experience occurred. One such dimension is color. Most of the film strips and the still photographs are in black and white except for some recently found color film footage of the death camps. While this colorless experience or the ubiquitous gray may accurately reflect how survivors remember those times, we also hear in testimonies mention of a red sun, of a black sun, of the blueness of the sky, and of other colors. The red dress of the little girl in the movie "Schindler’s List" is an example of that. The experience of color may have come and gone for many survivors, depending on what happened.
Another dimension is that of sound. The film footage we have is mostly without a sound strip, as though everything happened in complete silence. This is mostly an artifact of the medium used, although I suspect that the sound track that existed on some of these films, was deliberately removed. From testimonies, we hear a much higher level of sound, of marching of boots, of shots, of screams of terror, even the loudness of silence, and also of singing. The Czech hymn and the Hatikvah sung by the people facing their gassing in Auschwitz reported in Filip Mueller’s testimony in Claude Lanzmann’s film "Shoah" is also an example. Documentary footage can not convey smells, either. They are, however, a very strong and even-present element in oral testimony. They seem to have been an integral part of the "real" experience.
Even specific directions are not a simple matter. Some survivors, recounting selections mentioned "left" as the direction to the gas chambers – others mentioned "right." It is likely that Nazis in the camp were consistent, although other factors may be involved. It is possible, however, that survivors telling of selections – do not specify from whose perspective they speak: their own or that of the Nazi carrying out the selection. What is "left" for the Jews arriving in Auschwitz is "right" for the Nazi. Realistically and symbolically, there cannot be a compromise between these two positions.
The emergence of the "virtual truth of the historical experience"
The video testimony is of crucial importance for the emergence of the "virtual truth of the historical experience", particularly in light of the fact that the vast majority of the documentation of the Holocaust, both written and photographic, originated with the perpetrators of the event. I would say that 80 to 90% of the film footage and of the photographs we have were taken by Nazis and the intent of those filmmakers and photographers was the very same of the actual killers. They wanted to kill the truth by photographing it, filming it, in a very specific dehumanizing way.
In 1981, a group of us were invited to a small museum in Montreal, where Holocaust survivors exhibited Holocaust photographs they had in their possession. We faced a wall of photographs and the curator came to me and said, "All of the photographs on this wall were taken by Nazis except for one. Can you distinguish, can you find the one photograph that was taken by a survivor?" I selected the photograph and she confirmed that this was indeed the one. The photograph was two women kissing each other through a chain link fence. No Nazi would have taken such a photograph.
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Short biographical note
Short biographical note
Dori Laub, M.D., was born in Czernowitz, Romania in 1937. He is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New Haven, Connecticut, who works primarly with victims of massive psychic trauma and with their children. He is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and Education, Advisor to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He obtained his M.D. at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and his M.A. in Clinical Psychology at the Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is co-founder of the above mentioned Video Archive, where he continues fo fulfill a leadership position, and of the International Study Group for Trauma, Violence, and Genocide, which has become part of the wider trauma research net in 1998.
Dr. Laub has published on the topic of psychic trauma, its knowing and representation in a variety of psychonalytic journals and has co-authored a book entitled "Testimony-Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History" with Professor Shoshana Felman.
Dori Laub, M.D.
315 Whitney Avenue, Suite 2
New Haven, CT 06511, USA
Phone 001 203 624 18 97 and 397 50 77
Fax. 001 203 397 16 99
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Room 331 C
130 Wall Street
(mailing to PO Box 208240)
New Haven, CT 06520-8240, USA
Phone 001 203 432-1879
Fax. 001 203 432-7231
Email fortunoff.archive@yale.edu
URL: http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/homepage.html
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Citation Dori Laub, Not knowing is an active process of destruction. Why the testimonial procedure is of so much importance. In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL TraumaResearch.net/focus1/laub.htm
Copyright © 2000, Dori Laub and trauma newsletter, all rights reserved. All rights remain with the author. May not be printed or quoted without permission by the author. For any permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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