Wiesel bemoans the inadequacy of language to convey what he and others experienced, and in doing so he negates his own testimony’s capacity to convey his experiences to others:
Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received. After all, it deals with an event that sprang from the darkest zone of man. Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.87
For Wiesel, the obligation to bear witness becomes itself a kind of trauma because it seems doomed to fail. Wiesel registers this double traumatization not only through expressions of helplessness but in the very representation of his own consciousness as split. To underscore the impossibility of transferring knowledge through testimony, Wiesel portrays a disjuncture between the narrator of this passage and the younger self who wrote Night, referring to himself not as “I” but in the third person (something Wiesel does with some regularity in his prose). And yet that double traumatization mirrors the double articulation of bearing witness—Wiesel must become his own listener, since only one who has experienced what he did can receive his message.88
The prevalence of trauma as a category for approaching Holocaust survivor testimony suggests that tourism, to the extent it relays the experiences of camp prisoners, must overcome the same inadequacies of communication. Trauma theorists posit a breach between the survivors’ experience, one the one hand, and their ability to convey that experience coherently to those who were not there, on the other. This breach is often expressed in terms of the Holocaust’s unspeakability or its incomprehensibility. Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst and himself a Holocaust survivor, likens the Holocaust testimonial’s survivor/reader relationship to patient/analyst relationship in trauma therapy. In laying out a psychoanalytic framework for thinking about survivor testimony, Laub describes a communicative structure involving a wounded speaker and a sympathetic listener. The project of remembering is fraught, and so the patient and therapist must work together to confront a past that seems to elude comprehension even by those who experienced it.89 In fact, Laub advances the incomprehensibility theory one step further, arguing that the Holocaust was an event without witnesses, an alarming notion he introduces as a “theoretical perspective” meant to explain the unique aspect of the trauma experienced by the Nazis’ victims. Laub claims that “what made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.”90 The unfamiliarity of the event was so radical, in others words, that the ability of the human mind to observe and remember was hopelessly compromised.
In response to the trope of incomprehensibility that accompanies so much thought about survivor testimony, the work of the Judaic and literary studies scholar Gary Weissman offers a useful intervention. Countering Wiesel’s contention that only those who experienced the Holocaust directly can understand it, Weissman suggests that “perhaps just the opposite is the case; perhaps because it is a historical concept comprising myriad events which no one person experienced directly, the Holocaust can only be understood historically.”91 That is, if it is the case that the Holocaust lies beyond the witness’s ability to relate testimony in a comprehensive and coherent manner, then it is up to the listener to put that testimony into a historical, explanatory context that reaches beyond the experiences of the individual survivor. Weissman distinguishes between the Holocaust as the individual experiences of all those caught up in it and the Holocaust as an event with discernible components that can be learned as a set of facts: “The Holocaust and a survivor’s Holocaust experience constitute related but distinct objects of knowledge. It is one thing to understand the antecedent conditions of the Holocaust … and quite another to understand ‘what it was like’ to live and die at Auschwitz-Birkenau or in the Warsaw ghetto.”92 The trope of incomprehensibility encountered in so much survivor testimony and its reception makes the mistake of conflating these two objects of knowledge. To know the experience of another person as though one experienced it oneself may be impossible no matter how harmless the event. But as Weissman points out, it is perhaps that cognitive distance that creates an opportunity for a different kind of knowledge, one that he calls “historical.”
Weissman’s reminder that receiving testimony does not require a direct transfer of experience is useful in getting past the debilitating trope of incomprehensibility. Understandably, survivors express anguish about being heard and understood, but that neither silences their expression nor bars their audience from listening and drawing conclusions about the event. The absence of a direct transfer of experience is not a failure to communicate. While written survivor accounts may arouse the empathy of their readers and speak to a yearning to experience secondhand that which the survivor has endured (hence the term “fantasies of witnessing”), Weissman also rightly comments that “no degree of power or monumentality can transform one person’s lived memories into another’s.”93 Indeed, it is the awareness that the survivors are passing that produces a hunger to claim as personal memory that which must become something else when the survivors are gone.94 That something else is collective memory, which, in a strict sense, is not memory at all, but remembrance. The hunger for experiencing from a safe distance what victims and survivors endured makes such experience impossible a priori, but Weissman does not conclude that testimony therefore loses its purpose. The “fantasy of witnessing”—the mistaken belief that there is a way to comprehend the survivor’s experience in its fullness—still enables the compassionate reception of another’s testimony within a historical framework.
Weissman’s admonition not to confuse the reception of witness testimony with experiencing trauma also helps explain the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, which may be motivated by similar “fantasies of witnessing.” In fact, he opens his volume with an account of a son who accompanies his father, a survivor, to the Mauthausen camp memorial in Austria, where the latter was interned. Hoping to know somehow more directly what his father experienced by visiting the site, he is instead disappointed by the normality of the place. He does not encounter abject horror; “instead, he felt distanced from the actuality of what had occurred decades ago in the places where he stood. In response to this feeling, Michael’s desire to experience what Mauthausen had been for his father in 1944 gave way to a more basic effort to feel, to experience something, whatever would enable him to overcome his sense of estrangement from the Holocaust past.”95 (Perhaps Michael’s estrangement is not so different from the experience of some prisoners, as Weissman suggests. Primo Levi’s description of his arrival at Auschwitz recounts a sense of surprise that he is not immediately confronted by the “apocalyptic,” instead encountering a semblance, however brief, of the familiar.) Tourists like Michael hope through proximity to find a sense of immediacy that they cannot find by reading survivor testimony, even if they are the children of survivors.96 But the inability to experience the horror begets something equally important to the transmission of testimony, and that is an act of imagination—in Michael’s case, about what it must have been like for those who suffered. “Finally it was hearing stories of how prisoners suffered and died in the quarry, told at the very scene of the crime, that enabled him to come closest to something of the missing horror, however fleetingly.”97 (We will explore in the following chapters the ways in which Holocaust tourism invites its participants to engage in a more difficult act of imagination—identification with the perpetrators.)
Weissman’s distinction between historical knowledge and experiential knowledge reminds us that we should not discount knowledge that is “merely factual”; instead, we should acknowledge the role such knowledge plays in the act of testifying to experience. Surely the job of Holocaust museums and memorials is to ensure that historical knowledge, too, is transmitted on behalf of the victims. In court cases, where testimony has its primary locus, the jury’s task is not to take on the identity of the victim, to