The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

REDEFINING HEROIC BEHAVIOR
reached the conclusion that the process of recall divorced from literary effort
results in a narrative form unlike the written text, equally valuable, rich in
spontaneous rather than calculated effects. A member of the Norwegian
underground who survived Natzweiler, Dachau, and other camps, and is writing
a book about his ordeal, is asked how his oral testimony differs from his written
account. “The book is different because you have more time to phrase your
words,” he replies. “In a book, you’re also trying to be poetic—you’re trying to
write.” 5 The equation of “writing” with “poetic,” though perhaps a trifle
unsophisticated, nonetheless confirms the role of style in the written memoir—
that is, having time to face the conscious choice of “phrasing your words.”
This is a complex issue, and I mention it here only because it affects, in different
ways, the sense of character that emerges from written and oral testimonies.
The “headlong fall” in the first passage quoted above unavoidably (and
maybe deliberately) conjures up the image of Satan plummeting into Milton’s
hell, and this in turn influences our response to the experience of the victim.
Such analogies rarely intrude on oral testimonies. When they do, they create a
disjunctive resonance, attesting to the insufficiency of familiar analogy. I am
reminded, for example, of the woman who tells of being transported from
Auschwitz to a labor site in Germany, looking out from the tiny window high up
in her boxcar as it pauses at a small station during the journey, and exclaims: “I
saw Paradise!” 6 What she saw was a group of people standing on the platform,
including a mother and her child, and this normal, innocuous view, far from
Edenic, nevertheless in the context of her deportation comes to represent for
her a vision of Paradise. We witness a metamorphosis of meaning before our
eyes, as a commonplace panorama displaces the archetypal idyllic scene, leading
in turn to a spontaneous adaptation of familiar formula to an alien situation.
Devotion to orthodox versions of the self, an inability to pry oneself loose
from these versions paralyzed the will of many former victims, by their own
account. Rarely, however, do we find a simple opposition between paralysis
and action. Oral testimonies dramatize for us, often implicitly rather than explicitly,
the constantly warring impulses that bewildered the former victims. Such tensions
are frequently evident in the narrative manner itself. Schifra Z., for example, born
near Vilna (Vilnius), begins her testimony with perfect composure, a model of
the integrated self. Slowly, as her narrative unfolds, her facial gestures and head
movements, her stretching neck, the licking of her lips, her uncontrollable
perspiring, and deep sighs reveal a woman increasingly possessed by rather
than possessing her story. For the rest of her narrative, she alternates between
control and submission, a clear illustration of the struggle to remain intact despite
the disaster at the heart of her testimony.
She was between twelve and thirteen years old when German troops entered
Vilna. She reports that some friendly members of the Wehrmacht asked her, “Why
don’t you just walk west and get out of here” “I couldn’t just walk off by myself,”
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