The theme of being the messenger between two worlds abounds in this narrative. Pearl negotiates between the world of the hearing and the world of the deaf, between the prewar world and the postHolocaust world, between the world that is supposed to be and the world that is (the care vs. the cruelty of doctors, neighbors, police), between being a Jew and passing as a Christian. Missing the joyful moment of liberation represented the loss of a momentously imagined bridging link between her various worlds. Such a link is forever yearned for. But the yearning itself stands as a portent of what will be forever denied her. Pearl concludes that she must keep each world separate from the other to preserve their authenticity. This reality is ambivalently accepted only after several failed attempts at witnessing. The diary on toilet paper was an attempt at witnessing for herself all her fears and yearnings. The guard's scorn constituted a betrayal of witnessing made into an internal robbery of witnessing by the temporary loss of hearing--cut off from others as sister, at the end, is eventually cut off from all human contact. At that point sister epitomizes the survivor who, thus cut off from the world, has lost even her internal witness. The impossibility of testifying is made clear in the uncomprehending remarks of American family members, as Pearl later turns to writing poetry about mute eyes. But her struggle with writer's block shows that she remained uncertain about her right to bridge both worlds through artistic integration. The witness that would have allowed for a creative bridging of the two worlds was not to be found among her relatives or in the larger community in which they lived.