An Event Without Eyewitness

An Event Without A Witness: An Analysis of the Distortion of Eye Witness Testimony to Victims of the Holocaust at Auschwitz

This European study will analyze the narrative distortions of first-person eyewitness testimony in the killing of SS-guard, Josef Schillinger, in the Auschwitz concentration camp.. The theoretical premise of “an event without a witness’ will define the distortions of Schillnger’s role and death (by being shot by Franceska Mann) that arise through the “insider testimonies” of Filip Muller and Tadeusz Borowski. The differing interpretations of Mann’s killing of Schillinger take on differing forms of narrative distortion in these two testimonies. Muller’s dramatic description of Mann’s cunning sense of erotic seduction
The theoretical perspective of “an event without a witness’ has examined the first-person eyewitness of Muller and Borowski’s description of the killing of SS guard Josef Schillinger. Muller’s highly dramatic description of sexual prowess of Franceska Mann defines the means in which she gained access to a gun by seducing the SS guards. This is an important narrative point in the story, which reflects the bias and questionable truth to this story, as Muller is attempting to make Mann into a heroine that single-handedly seduced and shot down Schillinger. However, Borowski provides a more realistic perception of Schillinger’s death, which involves an unnamed woman that used her sex appeal to seduce her adversaries. However, the woman is not Franceska Mann, not does she does a strip tease to get access to the gun that would not shoot Schillinger, but to also shoot (and not strike him with her show) Quackernack in the face. However, Borowski tends to describe the questionable aspect of Schillinger’s movement after the shooting incident, which was more likely to have been done by the Nazis, and not the Jewish prisoners. Theoretically, the first-person narratives of these stories define the problem of “an event without a witness” because of the questionable validity and bias of the witnesses that appear to distort these testimonies through fictional literary stylistics. In this way, it is extremely difficult to get an objective historical eyewitness testimony due to the biases and psychological distortions of Schillinger’s death, which define the barrier of an event without a witness in Muller and Borowski’s first person narratives of this event in the Auschwitz concentration