ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses few videos of Shoah survivors recorded by Dori Laub and his colleagues at the Fortunoff archive. These videos offer a powerful illustration of the psychic impact of severe traumas. While accepting the need to bear witness, certain survivors explicitly or implicitly relent to do so. The first looks at the videos as forms of 'monstration', contrasting the display of survivors to earlier scenographies in the history of medical displays. The chapter looks at the 'validating' gestures performed by interviewers who are at once analysts, fellow survivors, and managers of a memory institution. A witness is a person, someone who offers testimony. A witness is also a text, the content of a testimony. In the Fortunoff videos, many witnesses start as persons, but soon they become texts. Events are not what witnesses tell us about, but rather what has imprinted itself on their bodies, faces, gestures, silences. Each survivor has become an archeological remnant, a footprint.
