ABSTRACT
We live in an age when those who survived the Holocaust are succumbing tothe frailties of old age; a great many others have already died. Though we live in an “age of testimony,” it won’t be long before the testimonies we have can’t be verified by others who were also there. We’ll be left to take them on faith, or to place them against the backdrop of what we already know about the Holocaust, or to go back to the historical record and either confirm the eyewitness accounts or allow the content of the testimonies-their facts-to change what we think we know about the event. In the last chapter we examined different kinds of testimonial accounts of the Holocaust, and described how their different genres yield different kinds of “information,” and different species of problems, to the reader or the viewer (the “secondhand witness”). Each testimony-written during the events, or recollected afterward-gives us the words of the victim (or bystander, or perpetrator) and we quite literally take them at their word: we take seriously their descriptions of events, even at times when what they have to say boggles the imagination and works against what we think of as normal human behavior.
