Witness Holocaust

Witness through imagination Gary Weissman evokes the term "non-witness" in order to stress that subsequent generations only experience the Holocaust through representations of it. The term “non-witness stresses that those who did not witness the Holocaust, and that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is not an experience of victimization. While there is the opportunity to read books or watch films on the Holocaust, listen to Holocaust survivors, visit Holocaust museums, take trips to Holocaust memorial sites in Europe, research and write about the Holocaust, look at photographs, but in none of these cases are we witnessing the actual events of the Holocaust. This is exactly to point where contemporary authors have nothing but their imagination and the possibilities engendered by fiction to represent and thus bear witness to the Holocaust. For them, the Holocaust is nothing but a vast void, the trauma it engendered an “impossible history". Narrative theorist Ernstvan Alphen explains that "[i]f we are to make sense of the Holocaust, the …show more content…
The power of trauma can destroy testimonies and thus it is crucial for the post- Holocaust generations to preserve the memories of the Holocaust. In this paper, I have argued that the importance of proxy witnesses reinforces the living connection between the past and the present through the help of first-hand witness testimonies. Especially in the case of the Holocaust being “an event without a witness”, the living memories in this current time is the last effort for anyone to study the knowledge directly. Soon after, the Holocaust will be taught and learned all from proxy witnesses. As the time progress, the only matter that does not change is the history. Let us hope all the survivors of the Holocaust can make their individual stories to serve as a treasure to the history and not the epigraph only on their