"Every
student of the Holocaust knows the crucial importance of survivor’s testimonies
in reconstructing the crime.
They
bring us as close as we are likely to get to the multifaceted essence of the
experience,
whether
that involved being abandoned or helped by one’s neighbors; concentrated in
ghettos or sent directly to labor camps;
witnessing
actual mass murder or the piecemeal brutality of “extermination through work”;
escaping
the Nazis or enduring the worst that they could do.
It
may be, as some have said, that close attention to survivors’ accounts buys
texture and historicity at the expense of coherence.
If
so, it is a risk we need to take if we are to grasp the complexity of the
process and approach an understanding of what happened to the victims.