Holocaust Testimonies : The Ruins of Memory

Winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
 
This important an original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. It also sheds light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss.
 
Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling us to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting extensively from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as we might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organizing impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs. He argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the “indomitable human spirit” is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the perplexing task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the sprit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these haunting Holocaust testimonies.

Disturbing and controversial, this work is based on 300 of the more than 1,400 taped interviews with Holocaust survivors preserved at Yale University's Fortunoff Video Archives. It's disturbing because of the survivors' graphic retelling of the starvation, torture, brutalization and cannibalism that occurred in the Nazi death camps. It's controversial because, instead of focusing on the bravery necessary to endure such horrors, Langer's book delves into the psychic wounds that 50 years after their infliction remain unhealed. "We have these double lives," said one survivor. "We can't cancel out. It just won't go away." Holocaust Memories won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for 1991.