from History and Memory Volume 11, Number 2The Task of Testimony
On "No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn"
Jared Stark
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Video testimony of Alina Z., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1922. She recalls attending an ORT school; German invasion; ghettoization; hunger and round-ups; marriage in 1941; jumping from a train to Treblinka with her husband, having been warned by a Pole of their destination; hiding with a farmer; returning to Warsaw because they feared exposure; living on the Aryan side; returning to her parents in the ghetto because of blackmail threats; hiding in bunkers during the uprising; and deportation to Majdanek in May 1943 and Birkenau several months later. Mrs. Z. recalls her realization that she was pregnant; establishing contact with her husband; sharing extra food he supplied with her friends; the midwife taking her son away immediately after birth (she never saw him again); a death march to Ravensbrück; transport to Neustadt-Glewe; and liberation. She describes returning to Warsaw; traveling to Katowice and Prague; reunion with her husband in Germany; her second son's birth in Marburg; reunion with her sister; and emigration to the United States. Mrs. Z. discusses her pervasive memories; fears of discussing them with her children, and recently feeling able to talk about her experiences; the importance of learning lessons from this period; and her fears that the lessons are lost when observing events in Yugoslavia.1
From 1993 to 1997 I worked with Alina Bacall-Zwirn, referred to above as Alina Z., and her family on a book titled No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn.2 The facts detailed in the above-quoted bibliographic summary of Alina's video testimony, from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, are therefore familiar to me. Yet in reading this electronic record, available to the millions of users of online library catalogues, I cannot help but ask a question that I confronted daily while working on No Common Place, namely the question of the relation between Alina's traumatic past and the attempt to retell her story, between personal memory and public history, whether at the archive or in the form of a book.
If I take the bibliographic summary as a point of departure, it is because it seems to offer a coherent formula for this process as it adapts the individual and variable voices of the thousands of survivors who have contributed to the archive to the strict demands of the bibliographic genre: a fixed number of characters and words, events related in chronological sequence, uniform spelling of place names, the embedding of searchable key words.3 Above all, there is constant attention to the status of these videotapes as testimonies. In the case of Alina Z., the witness's experience is related entirely under the aegis of "she recalls," words carefully chosen to reflect the scope and nature of the testimony. (Consider, for instance, the choice of words in the summary of Hella H.'s testimony: "She recounts her father's death prior to her birth.")4 The summary, moreover, records only material testimony. During the videotaping process, nothing is inadmissible; "the interview," writes archivist Joanne Rudof, "belongs to the witness."5 Nor, of course, are the original tapes ever edited, abridged or annotated in any way.6 The summary, however, serves a different function: it records only the experiences of the witness herself--no hearsay, no interpretation. When the witness reports that her mother was gassed at Majdanek, that her younger sister died during the Polish uprising in Warsaw, these parts of her testimony are excluded from the summary. When she talks about how her husband was beaten in the camps, how he risked his life by begging an SS guard to help his wife, this too will be omitted.
Yet the archival summary is careful to avoid the impression of comprehensiveness. In underscoring some of the witness's prevalent concerns and some of the important themes raised by the testimony, the archivist gestures towards aspects of the testimony that cannot be contained in a sequential narrative, towards a story behind, around and over the account of historical facts--such as, for instance, the story of Alina Z.'s past reluctance to testify. It manages, in other words, to alert the reader to a gap between memory and testimony--a gap that inscribes the question of memory into the act of testimony, that makes the act of remembering part of the sequence of events. With this gesture, the archivist issues an invitation--not only to visit the archive, but also to consider the question of how to listen to testimony, what to learn from it and how to retell it. The bibliographic summary becomes more than simply a fact-finding aid; it represents (along with the notes on which it is based) the initial step in an ongoing process of transmission. It lets us know that there are elements of the story that it cannot simply retell, that perhaps the witness herself cannot simply retell. Indeed, in the case of Alina Z. the summary is even forced to break with its own rules of evidence to deliver, in parentheses, a declarative sentence that ruptures the syntax of "she recalls": "(she never saw him again)." What Alina testifies to here cannot simply be contained in an objective clause. From within, the summary itself testifies to something that cannot simply be described, summarized, recounted or recalled, something that happens or continues to happen in the testimony itself. ("Never" is also now. She continues not to see him again.) This is something (the summary seems to say) you will have to witness for yourself.
By 1992, when I was introduced to Alina Bacall-Zwirn and her family, I had been studying Holocaust video testimonies and following the work of the Fortunoff Video Archive for four years as a student at Yale University. The Bacall family had also heard of the Archive's work and first approached one of its founders, Dr. Dori Laub, for advice on how to go about publishing a manuscript which had been prepared twenty years earlier by Alina's late husband, Leo Bacall, also a Polish Jew, with the help of a freelance writer, Lawrence Murphy.7 After Dr. Laub referred the family to my teacher Cathy Caruth, the manuscript reached me, but its historical inaccuracies and bizarre style made publication an unlikely prospect. Even more significantly, I learned that Alina, who had participated only minimally in the preparation of the manuscript, had, since Leo's death and her second marriage, begun to talk more about her own experiences in the camps. She had even started to wonder, her daughter Sophia told me in our first phone conversation, whether the son she had given birth to in Auschwitz could possibly still be alive.
The shape of what is now No Common Place shifted over the five years that I worked with Alina and her family. But from the start I knew that we would have to shelve the existing manuscript and start again. Somehow the text would have to be in Alina's own words, not mine; otherwise I would face difficulties similar to those confronted by the writer of the first manuscript, whose imaginative and philosophical framework distorted the Bacalls' testimony.8 As a non-native speaker of English, Alina did not have the confidence to write her own story, nor did her children feel that they could undertake such a project unassisted. However, it was agreed from the start that I would not "ghostwrite" the story; instead, the book would have to be based on Alina's own testimony. We also arranged for Alina to visit the Yale Video Archive. I was far from certain that I would be able to publish her story, but at least the video testimony would preserve her story for her family and the public.
The initial and, it would turn out, decisive commitment to respect the survivor's own words now seems to me bound up in my own clumsy attempts to participate in the cataloguing process at the Yale Video Archive. For a few hours each week for about a year, my job was straightforward: to watch a video testimony and take notes. My job was to describe what was said on the tape--not to re-order the events, not to isolate overarching themes, but to set down the raw information from which the summary could later be distilled.9 I felt myself, however, gravitate towards an impractical extreme: I wrote down every word. Whatever time the intermediary note-taking process was supposed to save would be lost in attempts to extract information for the bibliographic summary from a tangled verbatim transcript. Yet it mattered to me how the witness said what she said. I feared that any rephrasing of her words, any omissions, even of a stutter, would misrepresent the testimony. At many moments, I would even set down the survivor's words in the first person, unwilling to convert "I" to "he" or "she."
My memory of the tapes I watched that year is strangely poor, but the two episodes I recall clearly seem to touch on some reasons for this perceived obligation to set down the witness's words verbatim. In one video, a survivor giving his testimony in English recalls a song from the camps, which he proceeds to sing in a language unfamiliar to me; although it would not have been difficult to find a translator to help me overcome the language barrier, my inability to understand the song stood in for a more serious and perhaps more insurmountable barrier of experience, one that suggested that even if I had been able to translate the song, I would never be able to fathom its meaning.
The second, fuller memory is of a Viennese Jewish woman who describes how, desperate to leave Austria after the Anschluss, her family meticulously typed and retyped a long letter addressed to all the families that shared their last name in a US telephone book. They sent forty-nine copies of their plea asking the American families to claim them as relatives and sponsor them for an immigration visa. Some were returned unopened, marked "address unknown" or indicating that the addressee had died or moved. But eventually one letter--it turned out to be the forty-ninth one--received a response, and Julianna L.'s family was able to leave Austria.10
Julianna L.'s testimony came to illustrate for me some of the ways in which listening can become biased. For one, it bore out the cautions of the most perceptive commentators on Holocaust testimony, who warn that our need to draw a heroic or redemptive message from survivor testimony is less a mode of listening than a mode of defense against the irrecuperability of the Holocaust.11 Julianna L.'s narrative had all the elements of a potentially heroic tale: the evident resourcefulness of her father, the eleventh-hour response of the American sponsor, a timely flight on the eve of the systematic genocide of Austrian Jews. But to attribute her family's survival to resourcefulness would necessarily imply that those who did not escape had somehow failed, while to celebrate the good sense of their American sponsor would be to forget the scores of unanswered letters.12
Although I was prepared to avoid imposing this sort of redemptive closure on Julianna L.'s tale, it raised another specter for me. For, odd and troubling though it may seem, the witness's story of survival alerted me to the fact that I had nonetheless come to the act of listening with certain expectations--expectations that, in the instant before their implications were felt, were disappointed by the family's escape. Watching the witness's testimony with no prior knowledge of its contents (before, that is, it had been catalogued and summarized), I had been waiting, expectantly, for Auschwitz. In the same way that the reader of Jane Austen's Emma gathers the clues that foretell the heroine's inevitable marriage, my listening had been structured by a prior notion of where the story would lead, by a generic plot that proleptically cast a shadow over the entire testimony. If the story of Julianna L.'s flight from Nazi Europe exposed me to my own ghastly expectations, then the instrument of her flight--the verbatim reduplication of the letter that led to the survival of her family--seemed, on the other hand, to offer transcription as a mode of protecting her testimony against my unwittingly distorted mode of listening.
The decision to base No Common Place on verbatim transcripts of Alina's testimony emerged, then, from an attempt to avoid the potentially distorting mediation of any less neutral mode of recording her tale. By minimizing the number of steps between voice and text, the story would remain as close to unmediated as possible. It would fall to the reader to determine how to interpret the grammatical slips, the repetitions, the lapses and hesitations in Alina's non-native English. Alina's patent discontent with the accuracy of the existing manuscript further suggested that a mere reporting of the story would efface important details, that it would potentially erase or silence a crucial history. Indeed, the history of her family's attempts to retell the tale had more or less paralleled a broader movement in the history of the reception of Holocaust testimony--from an initial wave of information immediately after the war, to relative silence in the 1950s and 1960s, to a wave of renewed attention in the 1970s, to a critical reevaluation of the historiographic, moral and aesthetic assumptions that seemed to shape representations of the Holocaust. The Yale Video Archive was itself founded by a group of survivors in response to the made-for-television series Holocaust (1978), which presented what the survivors saw as a sanitized vision. Similarly, the unpublished manuscript completed by Lawrence Murphy in the mid-1970s, "One Small Candle," cast the Bacalls' experience in mainly redemptive terms, as its title suggests. (Its epigraph was a bit of patriotic rhetoric from John F. Kennedy.) Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), Art Spiegelman's Maus (1991) and the Yale Video Archive (though all very different, of course) presented me with important alternative modes of approaching survivor testimony, focused on the attempt to allow the survivor to speak for him or herself.
However, as Lanzmann, Spiegelman and the Video Archive attest, this attempt would be futile without a corresponding effort to respond. The Video Archive, as suggested above, enables this response not only in the format of the testimony, but in the ongoing efforts to create an audience for this "Archive of Conscience," as Geoffrey Hartman has called it.13 If the summaries, on the one hand, seem to frame and therefore structure the reception of testimonies, they might also, my experience with Julianna L. suggested, serve to dispel a listener's preconceptions and therefore to open the act of listening to the specificity of the survivor's voice and story. Indeed, if this episode has resonated so vividly it must be because it embodied for me the possibility of a meaningful response. Julianna L.'s story suggested that, as an American Jew with no direct familial connection to the Bacalls and whose family had lost no immediate relatives in the Shoah--by hearing their appeal, by responding--I could make a difference.
But what would such a response mean in Alina's case? Wouldn't it represent merely a displaced version of the attempt to redeem the Holocaust? Certainly, for Alina and her family, survival had become inextricably bound up with bearing witness. "If I told him [Leo] stay, and be a witness what happened, tell the story, that's the same thing. Stay alive," Alina would later tell me (NCP, 15). In the past, physical survival constituted the condition of possibility for testimony: to tell the story one had to remain alive. But Leo's and Alina's postwar efforts to publish their story also seemed to suggest the reverse, namely that to deliver their testimony came to appear as a necessary condition of survival. "And finally realizing that the reason that she survived was to tell the story," Alina's daughter would put it (NCP, 12). If it was to avoid the attempt to remedy the past, my work with the Bacalls would therefore have to take this positive association of survival and witnessing into account as well as the larger history of their wish to bear witness--that is, to ensure the survival of their story. It would have to take into account, that is, the fact that the Bacalls came to me only under pressure of Leo Bacall's inability, during his lifetime, to find a publisher for his story, the fact that my work with the Bacalls was irremediably belated. But this belatedness, I venture to hope, does not preclude the possibility of responding, if only to save the story.
The question was, how to save the story? What would it mean to save the story? It should be clear by now that this would mean not simply the recording of facts nor merely the conservation of testimony. Rather, it would demand, it seemed, some sort of encounter between what happened (what Alina recalls, the stuff of the summary) and how that recollection takes place, some sort of confrontation with the role of the book itself in the story the book would tell. One might think of this as a version of what Lawrence Langer describes as the "cotemporality" of survivor testimony, which, he writes,
becomes the controlling principle of these testimonies, as witnesses struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections of the camp experience coalesce with the rest of their lives. If one theme links their narratives more than any other, it is the unintended, unexpected, but invariably unavoidable failure of such efforts.14
Langer asks us to focus not on the meanings that survivors might want to draw from their experience and to communicate in their testimonies, but instead on what evades or disrupts the survivor's testimony. His work carries a necessary reminder that video testimony in itself is not history, particularly when the act of testimony takes place some fifty years after the event and is therefore subject to the vicissitudes of time.
But this insistence on the gap between memory and narration also implies a hierarchical order. We are asked to hear through or around a witness's efforts to make sense of the past to a memory--Langer calls it "deep memory"--that emerges in the act of testifying, and that breaks through the mediations of the speaker's own desire to bring the past into conformity with the present.15 While there is ample evidence that Langer's cautions are not misplaced--that the drive to redeem the Holocaust is strong with us--I wonder as well if the survivor's own desire to tell her story in certain terms (be they redemptive, heroic, martyrizing, etc.) does not call for further discussion. At least, this was the question I confronted in my first taped discussion with Alina. Her first words to the tape recorder flew against what I had learned and had thought to be my obligation in approaching Holocaust testimony, the obligation not to seek redemptive closure or to heroize: "I want my husband to appear as a hero because I stayed alive only because of him."
If the visitor to the video archive might consciously and critically listen for the witness's struggle with the discrepancy between "the camp experiences" and "the rest of their lives," it became clear that any written arrangement or compilation of transcripts would be subject to different conditions. There would be no excuse in a redacted text, however "faithful" it claimed to be to the testimony, to maintain this discrepancy. If Langer was right, Alina's testimony would be unable to sustain the heroic image she began with; and yet, to allow that failure to remain on the page would be to shift the emphasis to what Langer calls "unheroic memory" at the expense of Alina's express purpose.16 Even the decision to intervene as little as possible would therefore influence the shape of the story. To translate Alina's testimony to another medium--to bear witness for the witness contrary to Paul Celan's bleak observation, "Nobody / bears witness for / the witness"17--what would this then mean?
The cue came again from Alina when, after our first meetings in January 1993, she decided to read her daughter a text she had written a few months earlier, just before Rosh Hashanah. She wanted to translate it for me from Polish into English, but for some reason she did not tell me she had done any writing during our meetings. When I later asked for a copy of the text, she told me that it had been lost. Her efforts to set her story down on paper and her lost text added another chapter to the story that would become a second focal point for the book: the story of her story. For however she might choose to relate the events of the past, it was clear that the very desire to create a book emerged out of a complex history that remained to be told, one of a series of interrupted attempts to testify. As we embarked on our joint project, the missing text entered as something of a challenge--a refusal on Alina's part to fix her story in any single form and a warning that any retelling would necessarily fail to record her true past.
The problems raised by this missing text became the starting point for the book: Alina begins her story in and as an act of translation, but the text she translates is itself lost. Her translation, then, cannot be held up against an "original" or "true" text, but rather suggests an analogy between the task of translation and the task of memory, both of which falter against the "meaning" of Alina's experience:
I start preparing, and buying and buying and buying for the holidays. Food, mostly. I'm buying food to eat.
And like, I feel, I don't know. I'm buying so much, sometimes I think that the war is coming. Any day it is going to break out and you have to prepare food.
I realize, you know... nieswiadomie... I don't know how to say it... not knowing that... not knowing something happened to me, something is bothering me, and I really can't find, you know, I can't find the place, i nie wiem why. (NCP, 1)
Perhaps Alina declined to give me her written text out of a lack of confidence in her writing, the symptom of an education cut short by the Holocaust and of a forced exile from her native tongue (even though she had written in Polish). Although she knew that what had happened to her was important--that it had to be told--she placed less value in her own way of saying things. My academic credentials, it seemed, would allow me to give her story the form it deserved--to make it "sound good." But also, her testimony here suggests, it was due to a divorce she seemed to feel between her experience and her mode of expression. The "meaning" she cannot find indicates on the one hand a problem in translating from Polish to English, while on the other hand it gestures towards a meaning inarticulable in any language. If my credentials were supposed to allow me to "understand" her story, and to help others understand it, Alina's testimony extraordinarily begins here with the undermining of the possibility of understanding. "I can't understand. I can't believe," her text concludes (NCP, 3). Not "you can't understand," a phrase that would erect a wall between those who were there and those who were not. Instead, "I can't understand. I can't believe." The story is the story of this incomprehension.
Crucially, however, this story of incomprehension is related here in my absence, in a scene where Alina and her daughter are alone, recording their conversation on tape. During our initial interviews, Alina's daughter, Sophia, had listened more or less in silence as I interviewed her mother. Sometimes, but rarely, Alina would turn to Sophia as she spoke, and sometimes, but rarely, Sophia would ask her mother direct questions. As Alina translates her Polish text, however, Sophia became a direct participant in her mother's testimony. The loss of the written text meant that I could never turn to an outside authority or translator to interpret Alina's words. Instead, Sophia enters the story as the audience to her mother's extemporaneous translation, as a translator herself and as a witness:
ALINA: This is okropna prawda. How you say? This is...
SOPHIA: Terrible truth.
ALINA: This is terrible, terrible truth. (NCP, 3)
What was (and is) at stake in this joint translation emerges in the ensuing conversation between mother and daughter, which revolves around the problem of telling. The very morning of the day when Sophia and Alina recorded this tape (9 January 1993), Sophia had told me that there were parts of her mother's story that she had never known, and that even those parts she had known had reached her only indirectly:
I kept thinking all these years that I knew inside what happened, and I knew some of the stories, not because I asked them or not because I was told them, but only sometimes during the holidays or when my parents had company over, especially other survivors, they would start talking about their accounts in the ghetto and their accounts in concentration camps. My father would basically talk about it a lot more than my mother. My mother would get angry at my father. [...] But I would sit there with eyes open, and listening and listening because I wanted to get out as much as I could. Too afraid to ask questions [...]. (NCP, 4)
I had become "company," a catalyst to Alina's testimony, with Sophia again an eavesdropping, and protective, presence. ("Mom, are you okay?" she would ask repeatedly while Alina spoke to me.) She even characterizes her childhood efforts to learn her parents' histories, in an ostensibly inadvertent phrase, as a need "to get out as much as I could," as if testimony could externalize what she knows inside, as if it could help her escape (get out) from this haunting knowledge. But after I left Alina's home that day, after Sophia had herself borne witness to her own experience of events she had never directly experienced, mother and daughter engaged in a different kind of dialogue, centered on their common failure to know what happened. "I don't know how to say it... not knowing that... not knowing something happened to me" (Alina). "I kept thinking all these years that I knew inside what happened" (Sophia). If Sophia once thought of her mother as concealing an already known past, this encounter suggests that the untold story ("what happened") is not so much deliberately concealed by Alina as it is not (yet) known, not fully available to her. When Sophia begins to ask questions, the distinction between "inside" and "outside" knowledge, between secrecy and disclosure, breaks down; consequently, she is able to claim her right to hear the story. "I want to hear it," she says. And in pressing her demand, she becomes a participant in the process of bearing witness, one who will herself "remember forward."18 Indeed, instead of leaving the task in my hands, Sophia took it upon herself to transcribe a large part of her mother's testimony. (Perhaps tellingly, it was only when she became pregnant with her first child that she found she no longer had enough time to work on the transcripts.)
The transmission of the story between mother and daughter, however, does not take place independently of the attempt to bear public witness. The tape recorder is on as they speak, and Sophia, if she energetically pursues her parents' wish to publish their history, does so also in the interest of her own desire to hear their testimony. This is not, then, the story of a mother and daughter that is simply handed down to me and to the reader. Rather, an audience is already inscribed in the process of testimony and its transmission. As they struggle with the mechanics of the tape recorder, Alina and Sophia also struggle with how the story will come across:
ALINA: Here is like, that's all what's left for me, you know, my children, that's what is... zostao... how you say it? Left over...
SOPHIA: That's all I have left.
ALINA: That's all what I have left, that's all what I have left. I have to change that.
SOPHIA: Explain that you want to expand on that point, that your children are all that you have left.
ALINA: My children, yes... but this is something no good. You're stopping here...
SOPHIA: You're recording, you push two to record.
ALINA: Now?
SOPHIA: Yes, you're on the tape. Explain what you want to explain.
ALINA: Oh, I see. I didn't understand... (NCP, 4)
The literal question of how to record the testimony (of how the tape recorder works) intersects here with a larger question about how Alina's testimony will appear to others, what points need clarification and, in particular, what place her children will have in her testimony and in her survival. Faced with her mother's uncertainty as to how her story should be recorded, Sophia provides her mother with both technical and narrative assistance, as she urges her to fill in what she sees as gaps in her mother's testimony. She is, on the one hand, helping to translate her mother's words, but the difficulties encountered in the act of translation also open a space for Sophia to mark her own place in the story ("Explain ... that your children are all that you have left"), a place where Alina's survival of the Holocaust and her children's story seem to intersect, to the point where the children themselves appear as survivors. Explain, one might ask, to whom? This delicate and perhaps unanswerable question marks the way that the children's participation in the production of their mother's testimony might not only serve to encourage the relation of a history that might otherwise have remained silent, might not only serve to enable the preservation and transmission of their mother's story, but might also confront a more complicated relationship between the act of testimony and the community in which that act occurs and on which it depends.
I want to conclude by addressing some of the implications of this dependence as it appears at one of the turning points in Alina's story, when she and her husband jumped from a Treblinka-bound train. One of two main focal points for Alina's story of her husband's heroism, this episode was depicted in the early manuscript, "One Small Candle," as a moment of an almost existential liberation: "THIS WAS FREEDOM." To the extent that this upper-case proclamation reflected Leo's and Alina's own view of their experience, the episode would have to be handled carefully. Leo's actions in particular represented for Alina a heroic and exceptional act--a moment when her husband saved her life. Each time Alina told the story--in our first interviews at her home in Florida, again at the Yale Video Archive and then in the presence of Sophia and her oldest brother George--Leo's heroism entered into Alina's narrative. But by the same token it raised acute interpretive problems, not only concerning the moral value of the episode but also concerning its reverberations for other parts of Alina's story, for her survival and for her children. The passages that follow--which make up the sixth chapter of No Common Place, "A Small Opening"--reflect my attempt to convey the charged significance of this episode.19
April 21, 1993
New Haven
Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale
ALINA: I didn't have any help from anybody. I was hiding, I was scared, especially when we jumped from a train and we didn't have a place where to go. We are free, we are not in Treblinka to be killed, and we didn't have any place to go.
* * *
ALINA: You know, we were with our friends from school, all young people. And the whole wagon was so many people, young people.
And we told them... because when my husband... they put our train on the side and they were waiting for the middle of the night to start us to move. And my husband saw a guy who took care of the station, and he ask him, could you tell me where we are going?
And he said, if you could, save yourself, because you are going to Treblinka, to death camp.
DANA [Kline, interviewer]: Did you ever hear of Treblinka before?
ALINA: No. You know, some people used to receive letters, cards, that they are working, you know. The only thing, very late we find out that they killing us. I didn't think about gas or something like this. And then you get experience.
January 8, 1993
Tamarac [Florida]
ALINA: There were my schoolgirl friends. One was married and the other one was like a sister of my friend's husband, so we were another two couples, three couples altogether.
My husband took a handkerchief and put a knot in one corner, and covered it. And he said, whoever is going to pick up the knot, will be the first to jump.
SOPHIA: I always thought it was straws, I always thought it was like a short stick.
ALINA [demonstrates with a paper napkin]: No, like this, a handkerchief. One of his friends picked up the knot, and they started to file the bars. They opened it. It was a very small opening, like the trains for cows, you know, the cattle cars.
So he is going out, and he was scared, and he said he cannot do it, and he came back. So I remember my husband, the first thing he said is, okay, I am going to do it. He pushed him away, and he went out.
And he said--we were changing in the train--and he said, put something warm, like I have high boots and pants, and he looked at me and said, okay. And he went out, and then he comes back.
And he wants to go after him, his friend, and he pushed him away. He said, give me my wife first.
So they picked me up, and he held himself with one hand on the wagon and with the other he took me from the hole, and he took me like this, and we were standing together but between the two wagons. You understand how was that? Between the two cars. Do you have a problem to understand me?
April 23, 1993
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Washington DC
ALINA: I don't remember if I came first with the feet or with the head.
SOPHIA: Ma, I didn't hear how you started to tell George. How did you do it again? How did you actually... how did daddy...
GEORGE: Dad filed through the bars.
ALINA: Daddy was first who wants to go, because he was afraid, the other guy... He was, daddy, here with the hand, holding here, and the other hand he hold here, someplace. And he pushes me... and he holds me and then... he holds me like this and pulls me someplace, I don't know where. And I was holding here, and this hand, daddy holds my hand, and daddy's hand was by the second car...
SOPHIA: There were two cars connected...
ALINA: Two cars connected, trains, not trains, wagons, cars. And that's where we were... I think was the... you know, the connection. This is the connection. I think we were on this connection.
GEORGE: Yes, that's where it would connect.
ALINA: See, that's on this connection, and daddy was holding the other hand here, I was holding one here, and we jumped.
But I don't remember how, with feet or with my head. With my feet I think I came out.
April 21, 1993
New Haven
Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale
ALINA: Not a window, it wasn't glass. It's just like wires. My husband went, and then he said, give me my wife. His friend wanted to go after him, he said, no, give me my wife. He was something. He was holding himself with one hand. You know, you have a handle on the train. And with the other hand, he took me like this from the opening and pushed down. Then he moved and hold me by one hand, and then said, catch the other. He move and he told me to take it. We were both like this, holding here and holding his hand, and he was teaching me how to jump.
He said, jump in the same direction the train is going, and jump far away. We were talking and he said, are you ready? And I said... I don't know... I was like ready for everything.
All of a sudden, we saw a light, like a station. That was a station before Treblinka, I think was the name Tluszcz, and he said we had to jump, are you ready? [Tluszcz is located about twenty miles northeast of Warsaw and twenty-five miles southwest of Treblinka.]
I said, yes. He pushed me, I fell and I rolled myself to the ditch, and then I hear shooting and shooting because they were on the top of the train.
"One Small Candle," p. 40-41
We stood between the cars balancing ourselves against the sway and pitch of the train. My wife did not know how to fall, and I demonstrated how to hit the ground with her shoulders and roll. I thought she could hear me. I thought she understood. Then I held her, and kissed her, she closed her eyes and I pushed her into the night. Then I made my leap into freedom.
I felt the impact of the roadbed against my shoulders, and I rolled over and over, for the first time I heard shots. I had lost my bread bag in the fall, then more shots and the train was rushing past--but THIS WAS FREEDOM--this was what freedom felt like. [...]
Others had jumped after us. All those had been shot. I found their bodies after the train had passed. Further down the track I found my bread bag, and then I walked until I found my wife. She was cut and bruised, but alive. We walked back into the woods and threw up by a stream. Then there was diarrhea. We had seen one man curled up dead in a fetal position. This was all freedom and all storms of war and all nights, and I took off my shirt and ripped it for bandages for the cuts on my wife's arms and side. We waited by the stream, stunned with exhaustion.
April 21, 1993
New Haven
Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale
ALINA: I was there like in a dream. I didn't know where I am. I didn't know what to expect. Nothing. I just hear my voice calling. My husband, he jumped after me, but the train was going so fast that he find himself far away from me. And he was coming slowly and calling, Ala, Ala, Ala.
And I said, yes?
He said, so how you been?
I said, I don't know even. (NCP, 29-33)
As Alina attempts to recount the moment when her husband saved her life, something happens--something that does not so much deny the heroism Alina attributed to her husband as set it in the background, rendering it irrelevant. There is no place in this episode for anything resembling moral judgment, at least to the extent that to maintain the possibility of moral action necessarily implies the possibility of immoral action. The randomness of the lottery makes it impossible to interpret the tale as one of heroic choice. The excerpt from "One Small Candle," despite its imminently redemptive tone, seems to recognize this in the description of "one man curled up dead in a fetal position." Alina's own narrative is also haunted by an unheroic story, one where she begins alone and ends on a note of apparent loss and disorientation.
In this light, a celebration of escape or "freedom" would appear only cruelly ironic. The events she relates here bear witness instead to the collapse of any distinction between "winner" and "loser," survivor and victim. They also seemed to defy mere narration, with Alina each time involving her body in her storytelling, whether in her home with her daughter and me, in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or in the Yale Holocaust Video Archive. In each of these retellings, Alina began to show, with her hands and props, how things took place: "here," "there" "like this." The history at stake here is not simply a history in the past, but one that is in the process of being "made" at the very moment of remembrance and transmission. The question is not simply "what happened," but rather, what is happening. "This is the connection": she struggles, both in the scene and in its retelling, to make a connection, with her husband and with her children, between her husband and her children, between the family's history and the public.
The immediacy of this mode of testimony as well as the problems it engages are particularly striking in the scene at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. As in the opening chapter, where Alina and Sophia speak into a tape recorder, the possibility of public commemoration spurs the attempt to retell and reenact the past. The photograph that accompanies the scene at the museum was taken by Alina's daughter, Sophia, and the transcript of the conversation at the museum is from a videotape filmed by her eldest son, George. Although I recorded most of our visit to the museum on audio tape, at this crucial moment my tape recorder was off. Instead, Alina's children, as they try to piece together their parents' past, here took over the responsibility of documenting their mother's testimony. The lost story of the father is rehabilitated here at the intersection of family and public memory.
The fact that the freight car displayed at the US Holocaust Museum was indeed used to transport Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka animates this "connection." It is, in other words, possible that this was the very car from which Leo and Alina escaped. But this possibility also points to the larger probability that this was not the same car; that, indeed, this "connection" would have been made even if the freight car displayed had traveled an entirely different route. ("Yes, that's what we came by train [to Majdanek]. With the same train that will probably be in Washington D.C. Museum," Alina said in one interview [NCP, 44].)
If the museum allows the children to approach their parents' histories--and their own histories--in an unprecedented way, it does so, then, only at a moment of both connection and disconnection, a moment at which the transmission of a particular story from parent to child occurs through the mediation of cultural remembrance. Whatever is transmitted here is transmitted through the museum, the museum as a place where memory is constructed. In this light, the freight car displayed at the museum could never take the place of the "original" car; in fact, when it was given by the Polish government to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, layers of postwar paint had to be stripped to "restore" the car to the appearance it might have had as it rolled down the tracks to Treblinka. The artifact is already a product of a contemporary idea of its factual nature, a representation of itself.
On the one hand these mediations seem to de-authenticate the history being transmitted here--in that they undermine the immediacy of Alina's narration, in that they complicate the relationship between event and testimony. I want to suggest, however, that it is in this very estrangement, in the performance of an impossible obligation to "see the connection," that Alina's history becomes transmissible. To state matters differently, it seems that the possibility of a connection emerges at a site of uncertainty--uncertainty as to precisely how Alina's retelling is related to the event she retells, uncertainty as to how to interpret her testimony, uncertainty as to how it is being received. In Alina's narrative, these uncertainties most strikingly revolve around her preoccupation with whether she "came first with the feet or the head"--a question that in its obstetric connotations connects the difficulty of accurately establishing a historical fact with the more engrossing problems of a traumatic memory. Alina's words raise the pressing question of how to read this moment of testimony--as a simple failure of recollection, as the intrusion of a conventional metaphor of rebirth (or of the more haunting image of a corpse in a "fetal position" employed by "One Small Candle") or as the echo of the trauma of bearing a child in Auschwitz. What appears to be a moment of the breakdown or loss of memory might then equally be read as a moment of surplus: the past is not forgotten but rather exceeds the bounds of a linear, factual narrative.
My arrangement of the testimony sought to reflect what I heard when listening to Alina's words. I wanted to convey both the specific texture of Alina's delivery of her story and the ways that a gap in her story or a seeming insufficiency of memory might become "a small opening," a place where a reader may begin to hear the questions that impinge on the act of testimony and its interpretation. The chapter reproduced above therefore begins with a statement that is also a question, or even perhaps a plea: "I didn't have any help from anybody." And it proceeds to explore the ways in which this abandonment, devastating and irrecuperable, might, perhaps, find a response at the moment of bearing witness.
These questions are foregrounded, of course, by my editorial decisions. This is one of the moments in the book when my role in shaping the story is most obtrusive--as is underscored by the photograph showing my shoulder and hand. The apparent question is whether my hand, as I called on Alina to speak to her history and to our own--as I arranged her testimony, as I prepared it for publication--whether my hand, whether this book, could, with any degree of justice, help "see the connection," whether in pointing out where the connection took place my hand serves a guiding function or just gets in the way.
My response, as already discussed, was to cling to Alina's verbatim testimony even while sounding out the apparent gaps in her narrative, the inconsistencies and failures of memory and the vicissitudes of her broken English for the emergence of a transmissible history, one that might take into account the pressures exerted on the witness both by traumatic memory and by the very task of testimony. In the book, verbatim testimony is set in a form that recalls two traditional genres of memory writing, the personal commonplace books of Anglo-American belletrism and the collectively authored yizker-bikher or memorial books of East European Jewish communities, books in which Holocaust survivors (and prior to the Holocaust, survivors of pogroms) sought to commemorate their decimated communities.20 No Common Place borrows from these genres the possibility of establishing personal and community history through modes of collective authorship. The echo of these conventions also underlines the fragility of memory, as well as a compensatory belief in the durability of the book.
If these genres offer a structure for memory writing, oral testimony, with its lapses and digressions, with its spontaneity, seems almost antithetical to the quoted material, crafted tales and folkloric impressions that are the staple of commonplace and memorial books. Whether intended as self-edification or as a testament to future generations, these volumes are composed with a view towards rereading; they are composed. No Common Place is equally composed, it is equally invested in the task of commemoration, and it is equally, as Alina made clear in the book's dedication to her husband and to their lost relatives, a kind of tombstone. Running counter to the lapidary epitomization of a life performed in epitaphic writing, however, is the volatility, the vulnerability, the discomposure of the voice. A commonplace book or memory book composed primarily of transcripts brings the role of reading to the foreground, for it imposes on the reader a text that is at once fixed and unstable, redacted and in process. To assume the task of receiving this sort of testimony--whether in the video archive, the museum or the memory book--might then entail an encounter not simply with a closed-off past or a static, fossilized archive, but rather with a continuing history of testimony, a history that emerges and speaks to us from the interstices between various ways a single event might be told, between various modes of memorialization and between various modes of response. To assume a place in this history, then, might also be to allow the story to teach us how to listen to it, to teach us how to inhabit a moment without a predetermined future: "I didn't know what I have to expect. Nothing. I just hear my voice calling."
Notes
1. Research Libraries Information Network bibliographic record of Alina Z. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2045), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
2. Alina Bacall-Zwirn and Jared Stark, No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn (Lincoln, NE, 1999) (hereafter cited in the text as NCP). Alina Bacall-Zwirn died in April 1997, one month after the completion of the manuscript of No Common Place.
3. Although some aspects of the archivist's practice as described here are shared with other archives, my focus here is the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Joanne Rudof, archivist there since 1984.
4. Research Libraries Information Network bibliographic record of Hella H. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1562), Fortunoff Video Archive (emphasis added).
5. Joanne Rudof, "Witness Accounts of the Holocaust: Video Testimony? Interview? History? Factoid?" (paper presented at the Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, 1996), 3. In accordance with this principle, the Fortunoff Video Archive sets no limits of time or scope during videotaping and practices "nondirective" interviews. This method and its implications have been described in compelling terms by one of the archive's founders, Dori Laub, and by its faculty advisor, Geoffrey H. Hartman; see Laub, "Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening," in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, 1992), especially 71-74; and Hartman, "Learning from Survivors: The Yale Video Archive," in idem, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington, 1996). See also Nathan Beyrak's description of the ideal conditions for Holocaust video testimony at a related project in Israel, "The Contribution of Oral History to Historical Research," International Journal on Audio-Visual Testimony (June 1998): 15-20. Furthermore, witnesses are given the option of restricting access to their testimony (for example, by limiting it to educational use or by deferring access until a fixed date) and are advised of all requests for permission to publish material from their testimony.
6. All testimonies recorded at the Fortunoff Video Archive are recorded on two sets of videotapes, one master set and another used only to create high resolution copies. A third set of viewing copies is housed in the main library, while the two original sets are stored in an environmentally controlled vault.
7. Lawrence Murphy, "One Small Candle: The True Story of Alina and Leo Bacall" (unpublished manuscript).
8. My initial impressions of the manuscript were confirmed by Alina's own opinions of the text. I will give here just two examples. First, in a pseudo-allegorical mode, the manuscript throughout refers to Jews only as "members of the Tradition," to Nazis as "enemies of the Tradition," to the Warsaw ghetto as "the Walled City." Second, in narrating Alina's childbirth in Auschwitz, the manuscript has her, in the first person, compare her experience metaphorically to the metamorphosis of a butterfly--a moving image, perhaps, but one that Alina entirely disavowed to me.
9. These notes are made available to viewers and also serve as finding aids. More recently, they are entered directly into a computerized, searchable database.
10. Julianna L. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-884), Fortunoff Video Archive.
11. See especially Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, 1991) and Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven, 1998).
12. One of these, Julianna L. recalls, was even addressed to a US senator.
13. Hartman, The Longest Shadow, 144. Irene Kacandes also offers a useful consideration of the role and responsibility of interviewer and audience in "`You Who Live Safe in Your Warm Houses': Your Role in the Production of Holocaust Testimony," in Dagmar Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, eds., Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria (Detroit, 1994), 189-213.
14. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 3.
15. See also Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT, 1998), xiii, 9 and passim. Greenspan also offers an important discussion of the difference between conducting repeated interviews of survivors and the usual format at the Fortunoff Video Archive and other similar projects where follow-up interviews are infrequent. In Greenspan's terms, it is over the course of several interviews with a survivor that listeners stand the best chance of understanding the influence of the "context of recounting" on the stories survivors tell.
16. The implications of this double bind for the factual status of survivors' testimony are explored by Dori Laub in suggesting that one survivor's testimony, in and through an apparent factual error, testifies to another kind of truth, the truth of the very unbelievability of what she had witnessed and the possibility, in her testimony herself, of "bursting open the very frame of Auschwitz." To write this witness's story in such a way that "corrected" her "mistake" would be in effect to re-imprison her. See Felman and Laub, Testimony, 59-63.
17. "Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen." From "Aschenglorie" (Ashglory) in Paul Celan, Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris (Los Angeles, 1995), 179.
18. "The promise of extending experience from past to future via the coherence of the stories we tell each other, stories that gather as a tradition--that promise was shattered. To remember forward--to transmit a personal story to children and grandchildren and all who should hear it--affirms a desegregation and the survivors' reentry into the human family. The story that links us to their past also links them to our future." Hartman, "The Book of Destruction," in The Longest Shadow, 122.
19. Each excerpt is preceded by an indication of its source. Asterisks separate nonconsecutive segments of the same source. Ellipses indicate pauses, hesitations and interruptions that are part of the transcripts. Bracketed ellipses indicate editorial omissions. Brackets indicate my explanations.
20. See Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York, 1983).
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