Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz

by Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando-the "special squads," composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process-buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "Scrolls of Auschwitz," which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

Genres: History, Holocaust

254 pages, Library Binding

Published December 31, 2015

Reviews

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing hermeneutic exploration of the writings buried by Sonderkommando members in the vicinity of the krematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau; the actual documents are described; physical appearance, provenance, texts; and discussed, enabling us to become witnesses to the literal heart of the Nazi-forged hell.

"Collectively, as indexes of specific personalities, these writings graphically challenge the assertion of Dori Laub that the Holocaust created a world ‘in which one could not bear witness to oneself’.36 The distinct scripts reflected back to those who wrote them – who they were, that they were. Laub argues that the Holocaust produced a situation ‘in which the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible’."

"History, as discussed earlier, is a representational practice, one that requires operating at a remove from the past. The historian figures from out of the gap between present and past. There are still some historians who believe that ‘history is “concealed” in the facts and that telling a history is a matter of digging out and making explicit what is already there’.74 The majority, however, would concede that history is created rather than discovered. It emerges from out of a representational practice that produces knowledge of the past based on justified beliefs. History is a ‘textual substance’ that involves ‘authorial assumptions and narrative choices’."

"Gillian Rose suggested that to argue that the Holocaust is unrepresentable is ‘to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human’."

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and valuable concept for a book, but I do find it a shame that the author spent more time describing the texts vs. letting the texts speak for themselves, which is what I was looking for when reading this book.

[Stephen Cranney · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s fine, but I wish they would have included more if the actual scrolls and not just commentary on them.