Bearing Witness
To bear witness is not merely to read or tell a story; it is to engage in an act of transmission in which the witness both recalls and constitutes the event. Felman and Laub argue that Holocaust testimony is not a matter of reconstructing the past as a coherent, linear narrative. Rather, it is an attempt to register the shattering of that coherence — to give form to the fact that what happened exceeds what language, or even memory, can fully contain.
Felman and Laub describe the Holocaust as producing a rupture in historical intelligibility — that is, a break in our ability to make moral or narrative sense of events using the tools we normally rely on. We cannot explain it away with cause and effect. We cannot fit it neatly into a story of progress or tragedy. In this framework, to testify is not to restore what was lost, but to mark the loss itself — to speak from the wound without assuming it can be closed.
For Oyneg Shabes, this was not abstract. They understood that what they were witnessing could not be captured in full, and they did not try to. Their writings — urgent, messy, personal, sometimes contradictory — do not pretend to offer a single story. Instead, they record fragments of experience: hunger, hope, betrayal, prayer, terror, love, death. They create a record not of what the Holocaust “meant,” but of what it felt like to live through the annihilation of a people in real time. That allows us to witness this testimony not as reconstruction, but as transmission of a rupture.
Felman and Laub describe the Holocaust as producing a rupture in historical intelligibility — that is, a break in our ability to make moral or narrative sense of events using the tools we normally rely on. We cannot explain it away with cause and effect. We cannot fit it neatly into a story of progress or tragedy. In this framework, to testify is not to restore what was lost, but to mark the loss itself — to speak from the wound without assuming it can be closed.
For Oyneg Shabes, this was not abstract. They understood that what they were witnessing could not be captured in full, and they did not try to. Their writings — urgent, messy, personal, sometimes contradictory — do not pretend to offer a single story. Instead, they record fragments of experience: hunger, hope, betrayal, prayer, terror, love, death. They create a record not of what the Holocaust “meant,” but of what it felt like to live through the annihilation of a people in real time. That allows us to witness this testimony not as reconstruction, but as transmission of a rupture.
If testimony is speech from a rupture, then the archive — especially the Oyneg Shabes archive — is the material trace of that rupture. It does not present a complete or seamless history. It gives us fragments: diaries with missing pages, unfinished essays, menus from vanished cafes, drawings by children who did not survive. But these fragments are not failures. They are, in fact, the only honest form the truth could take.
Emmanuel Levinas argued that the face of the Other — the face of the human being who suffers — confronts us not with information, but with an irreducible vulnerability. The face says: You are responsible for me. In a similar way, the documents of the archive do not just tell us things; they demand things from us. They are not there to be decoded and explained away. They insist on our attention, our response, our inability to walk away unchanged.
The Oyneg Shabes archive also exemplifies what Jacques Derrida calls archive fever — the idea that every archive contains within it both the desire to preserve and the impossibility of ever preserving fully. In his words, “the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.” That is, the archive does not just collect the past. It speaks to a future it cannot predict. It is an act of hope that someone will read, someone will care, someone will carry the memory forward.
Emmanuel Levinas argued that the face of the Other — the face of the human being who suffers — confronts us not with information, but with an irreducible vulnerability. The face says: You are responsible for me. In a similar way, the documents of the archive do not just tell us things; they demand things from us. They are not there to be decoded and explained away. They insist on our attention, our response, our inability to walk away unchanged.
The Oyneg Shabes archive also exemplifies what Jacques Derrida calls archive fever — the idea that every archive contains within it both the desire to preserve and the impossibility of ever preserving fully. In his words, “the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.” That is, the archive does not just collect the past. It speaks to a future it cannot predict. It is an act of hope that someone will read, someone will care, someone will carry the memory forward.
When we speak of “bearing witness,” we usually focus on the speaker — the survivor, the chronicler, the poet. But bearing witness is never a solitary act. It is not complete until someone listens. And not just listens passively, but becomes responsible for what they’ve heard, to participate in the trauma. This is not meant to dramatize the role of the listener, but to reframe it. Because the person who receives testimony — whether a historian, a student, or someone exploring this website — isn’t neutral. Just as the witness assumes risk and vulnerability in speaking, the listener takes on a kind of ethical burden in hearing.
What you do with what you’ve read matters —
especially in the context of Holocaust testimony, where speech itself is fragile. Many survivors described how difficult it was to speak at all. Some felt no words could be adequate. Others, like Elie Wiesel, insisted on speaking despite that impossibility. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that “to write poetry [about the Holocaust] after Auschwitz is barbaric,” but later revised this view, acknowledging that silence can become its own form of cruelty. In his revision, he added: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream.” The problem, then, is not that we cannot speak — but that we must do so without pretending that speech makes things whole again.
That means your role as the reader is not just to absorb facts. It is to become the listener they hoped for. That doesn’t require you to agree with anything, or to understand it all. It does mean reading with care. Slowing down. Not skipping past the harder parts. It means recognizing that these texts don’t just describe trauma — they enact the difficulty of trying to speak from within it.
What you do with what you’ve read matters —
especially in the context of Holocaust testimony, where speech itself is fragile. Many survivors described how difficult it was to speak at all. Some felt no words could be adequate. Others, like Elie Wiesel, insisted on speaking despite that impossibility. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that “to write poetry [about the Holocaust] after Auschwitz is barbaric,” but later revised this view, acknowledging that silence can become its own form of cruelty. In his revision, he added: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream.” The problem, then, is not that we cannot speak — but that we must do so without pretending that speech makes things whole again.
That means your role as the reader is not just to absorb facts. It is to become the listener they hoped for. That doesn’t require you to agree with anything, or to understand it all. It does mean reading with care. Slowing down. Not skipping past the harder parts. It means recognizing that these texts don’t just describe trauma — they enact the difficulty of trying to speak from within it.
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