ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to a close reading of testimonies. Some of the testimonies were taken years after the war from Holocaust survivors who had been children during the events, while others were taken from young Holocaust survivors very shortly following the end of the war. In the close reading of these texts, special attention will be given to breakdowns in their language, assuming that this is the witnesses' way of inserting an experience of ambiguity into the ostensibly coherent flow of speech; the spots where the text's hidden content casts a shadow on its manifest outer layer. Among the testimonies in question, there will be ones in a predominantly metaphoric mode, as well as ones in which the metonymic and psychotic modes are more present. The testimony of Charlotte Perlmutter is especially interesting with regard to some testimonies, due to its shifting from a position of verbal excess to a wordless state.
