[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

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form of the verb – to testify – indicates, the roots of the concept of testimony are both religious and juridical. In Judaism, for instance, the divine injunction to remember carries with it, perforce, an injunction to tell as well.14 Even more explicit is the mandatory courtroom oath to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. In both of these contexts, the injunction to tell the truth initially concerns an oral context. Thus, as a form of truth-telling, testimony is, in its structure, more about what people say, than what they write down. This basic orality of testimony has profound implications for how we evaluate it as a historical source, even though, again, most historians will in fact read testimony, rather than listen to it directly.

Finally, testimony differs from oral history, another kind of spoken intentional evidence, in that the interlocutor is not the historian directly. In oral history, the historian talks to the witness him or herself and, as such, is in a position to carefully craft the questions being asked, to follow up on points of uncertainty, to shift topics in pursuit of serendipitous points of interest.15 When using testimony, the historian has none of these luxuries. The questions are asked by others and may or (more frequently) may not be precisely those which the historian wishes to address. Testimony has been gathered for a wide number of reasons but, at least in the twentieth century, two have been the most common. One frequent source of testimony has been court proceedings, where eye-witness testimony has a long, if troubled, history as a major source of evidence. Testimony in this context is guided by the legal proceedings at hand and is shaped by the evidentiary concerns of the court, e.g. the determination of criminal guilt or civil liability. Matters extrinsic to this concern, however interesting to the historian, rarely appear.16 In this respect, legal testimony often remains strongly perpetrator-oriented, treating only tangentially the experience of the victims. Alongside material from legal trials, one might also include testimony gathered by so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, such as the ones created in post-Apartheid South Africa.17 Based on the premise that national regeneration requires the disclosure of past atrocities, truth commissions are generally more interested in the victims’ experience than are trials, although they share with trials the fundamental feature that the questions posed may not be those of interest to the historian.18

If legal or quasi-legal proceedings thus form one principal venue for testimony in the twentieth century, memorial projects, broadly construed, form the other. Particularly in the aftermath of traumatic events, even when there is no prospect for political or legal redress, efforts are often undertaken to collect the testimony of survivors so as to record their experiences. These efforts can be quasi-official, as with the German government’s documentation of the experience of expellees from Eastern Europe after the Second World War or the current Veterans History Project by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.19 Alternately, these can be entirely private, as with the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimony at Yale University or Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah project (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education), both of which videotape testimony by Holocaust survivors.20 Earlier examples of such testimony can be found for the Armenian Genocide.21

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We can thus define testimony for our purposes as follows: it is a form of oral evidence of firsthand experience, gathered by others and accessed by the historian indirectly, usually through reading. It is a form of intentional evidence, in that it seeks to deliberately shape the response of its audience, but it is different from memoirs or oral history in that it is not necessarily aimed directly at posterity.

This then raises the larger question: what use is testimony as a historical source? To answer this question, one must focus on the oral structure of testimony. Even if written down or transcribed, it is usually spoken first; even if never spoken, it is modeled on speech and meant to be comprehended as such. This means that the operative approach to testimony is not reading, as is typical of historical sources. Rather, it is listening and hearing. What difference does this make? Because, in a manner of speaking, we listen to and hear testimony (even when we read it), our mode of understanding it is more immediate and more directly inter-subjective. Reading is a relationship to a text, not a person. Listening and hearing, though, bring us into a relationship with the speaker. This may only form half of a conversation, since testimony is a monologue by the witness, not a dialogue with the historian, but the implicit inter-subjectivity is still there.

At this point, it becomes important, however, to distinguish the precise mode of this relationship by distinguishing listening from hearing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to hear means ‘to perceive or have the sensation of sound’.22 To listen, on the other hand, means ‘to hear attentively; to give ear to; to pay attention to (a person speaking or what is said)’.23 The crucial difference, then, between listening and hearing is the degree of attentiveness involved and, by extension, the degree of inter-subjective recognition accorded the speaker. I can hear what someone is saying without acknowledging his or her humanity but I cannot listen to it without recognizing him or her as a fellow human being, even if I ultimately reject what is actually being said. This may seem to imply that hearing is inferior to listening, that it is callous and indifferent. This can be the case, but often hearing is not so much inferior to listening as it is a different mode for accessing a different kind of truth.

When thinking of evidence as a way of reconstructing the past, one ought to keep in mind that there are in fact different forms of historical truth that are being accessed thorough that evidence. This is by no means to say that there is no such thing as historical truth, much less its cognate opposite, that there is no such thing as historical falsehood. Both truth and falsehood most definitely exist but neither is homogeneous or unitary. There are multiple forms of truth and of falsehood, even with regard to any single instance or event. Different forms of evidence are useful for accessing different forms of truth. Similarly, different modes of interpreting the same evidence will likewise generate different forms of truth.

In the case of testimony, it makes a difference whether we listen to it or whether we hear it because each will produce a different register of truth. If we hear testimony, that is, if we take in its information without thereby establishing a strong, attentive inter-subjective bond with the speaker, the truth we are thereby accessing is what might be termed ‘forensic truth’. This is truth at its most basic, the truth of facts, of either/or propositions, of location, of sequence and of timing. Something

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either happened at some specifiable location at a specific point in time in the manner described or it did not. Forensic truth allows us to judge such a case. The term forensic, after all, means simply analogous to court proceedings, and it is thus a truth inextricably linked to the faculty of judgment. In short, then, forensic truth seeks to answer the question: what happened? The proper mode of interpretation in this context is analytic.

On the other hand, if we listen to testimony, thereby forging an attentive relationship with the speaker, we are connecting with what might be termed ‘experiential truth’. Because listening is an inherently inter-subjective activity, the truth that it generates is necessarily the subjective truth of the interlocutors. Since testimony is not dialogic but necessarily monologic, at least for the historian, the subjective truth in this instance is simply that of the witness.24 It is the truth of his or her state of mind, the truth of what he felt or she experienced, of how a person is in the world and how he or she responds to that condition. This is a more complicated truth than forensic truth because it is not so directly connected to judgment and either/or propositions. It is, rather, a yes/but truth. Yes, that is true for you, but it is not necessarily true for everyone. As such, it is also a non-falsifiable truth. If I say I am feeling sad or had a happy childhood, how can anyone verify or refute those statements? In short, experiential truth seeks to answer the question: what does what happened mean to the person to whom it happened? The mode of interpretation in this case is hermeneutic.25

Clearly, testimony is capable of generating both kinds of truth and indeed usually does. It can contain both statements of fact and statements of subjective experience. As Robert Eaglestone has noted, ‘specific memories and accounts also function as “counters” or evidence in traditional history: but they are not only this – they open up a world that is not ours’.26 As historians, then, when approaching testimony, it is important to both hear it and listen to it but also to remember the difference between the two. Otherwise, we are likely to either miss half of what is being said in testimony or to confuse one kind of truth for another, with serious and adverse consequences for our analysis of the past.

So now the question becomes one of technique or method. How do we hear? How do we listen? What kinds of interpretive strategies or research methods do we apply? To answer such questions, it is best to offer some concrete examples to illustrate some of the salient features of hearing and listening to testimony.

Hearing and listening

On July 27, 1964, the witness Simon Gotland testified in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. Regarding the defendant Stefan Baretzki, an SS non-commissioned officer who had worked as a ‘block leader’ in Auschwitz, Gotland testified:

I know Baretzki as well as I know my own heart. Everywhere where he was sent, he appeared like a tiger. In the camp, one heard repeatedly, ‘There goes Baretzki! Get out of his way!’ I saw Baretzki several times on the Ramp. He went to the ramp on foot like a tiger. He always had a club in his hand. With

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respect to the unloading of the train wagons, he had a say. He always yelled at the Kapos and at the others who drove the people out of the wagons. It had to go quickly because usually a new transport was expected. He was very active, so active that one can’t really describe it.27

First, let’s hear this testimony. What are the factual claims in this testimony? That Baretzki went to the Ramp, that he was an active and eager participant in the unloading of the arriving trains and that he carried a club, implicitly threatening the prisoners with grave violence. These are significant forensic claims. During the trial, Baretzki had denied in his opening deposition that he had participated in the ramp selections.

[Judge]: Who conducted the selections? [Baretzki]: The officers.

[Judge]: Not you?

[Baretzki]: No, only officers, not even noncoms. Your Honour, the commission was made up largely of officers. How do you think they would have liked it if a noncom had run around among them.28

Here we have an either/or proposition. Either Baretzki or Gotland was lying. How do we decide between the two? Sir William Hamilton, who provided our initial definition of testimony, proposed that its validity could be gauged by, first, ‘the subjective trustworthiness of the witness’ and, second, by ‘the objective probability of the fact itself’.29 In other words, who seems more personally reliable, Gotland or Baretzki? And, based on other sources of information, whose claims seem more plausible? At first glance, one would be inclined to say that Gotland was the more subjectively trustworthy, since he had less incentive to lie, while Baretzki’s claim may have been more objectively plausible, given the military hierarchy of the SS. The situation, however, is actually much more complicated than this.

In terms of objective plausibility, it is true, on the one hand, that the SS was organized on military lines, with a fairly strict chain of command and and at least nominally rigorous division of labor.30 So perhaps officers would have objected to overly zealous activity by a noncom. Ultimately, though, this seems unlikely. It is clear that in the concentration camps, SS military discipline was often quite lax and even low-ranking SS men had considerable leeway in their treatment of prisoners and their degree of active participation in atrocities.31 While it is true that medical personnel, including dentists and pharmacists, as well as doctors, were directly responsible for ramp selections in Auschwitz, lower-ranking personnel often played crucial roles in the collective supervision of the arriving transports. On objective grounds, then, there is no reason per se to doubt Gotland’s testimony. It might well be true. Consequently, the validity of Gotland’s forensic claims can only be decisively judged on subjective grounds.

As far as trustworthiness goes, Baretzki was on trial and faced a possible life sentence for his crimes in Auschwitz, giving him every incentive to lie. This is particularly true because German law distinguishes perpetrators from accomplices in

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part based on how eagerly they participated in their crimes.32 Since perpetrators were generally punished much more severely than accomplices in Nazi cases, it would very much have been in Baretzki’s interest to deny active participation in ramp selections. This assumption, that in criminal trials at least, perpetrators have a standing inclination to lie has led Daniel Goldhagen to argue that their testimony cannot be taken seriously, at least whenever it is in the least bit self-exculpatory.33 In a similar vein, other historians such as Jan Gross have made parallel arguments for treating victim testimony as prima facie true:

By accepting what we read in a particular account [by a victim] as fact until we find persuasive arguments to the contrary, we would avoid more mistakes than we are likely to commit by adopting the opposite approach, which calls for cautious skepticism toward any testimony until an independent confirmation of this content has been found. The greater the catastrophe, the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely voices reaching us from the abyss . . .34

Both of these propositions, that perpetrators always lie and that victims can never be mistaken, are overstated and overly simplistic. Perpetrators sometimes tell the truth and victims occasionally make mistakes. The question is how to tell when this is the case.

Here, it is a good idea to hear as much testimony as possible, to approach it, as Christopher Browning has put it, ‘in the individual plural, not collective memory but rather collected memories’.35 Browning and Goldhagen have been explicitly critical of each other’s use of testimony. Goldhagen rejects out of hand all exculpatory perpetrator testimony as dishonest, while Browning insists that carefully collated perpetrator testimony can reveal important truths, even when it is exculpatory.36 According to Browning, it is perfectly possible to reconstruct historical events using even the ‘variety of different, often conflicting and contradictory, in some cases clearly mistaken, memories and testimonies’.37 Contrary to Jan Gross, however, Browning insists that relying on the testimony of a single person sets ‘too low an evidentiary threshold’, that one must always compare as broad a range of testimony as possible in order to detect ‘tendencies and recurring patterns’, what he terms a ‘firm core of shared memory’.38

This is particularly true because, although perpetrators may have greater incentive to lie than victims, outright fraud on the part of purported victims is not unheard of, as the unfortunate case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fake memoirs show.39 Wilkomirski’s ‘memoir’ of his alleged childhood in German extermination camps, initially published in German in 1995 to great acclaim, turned out to have been completely made up. Wilkomirski was in fact one Bruno Grosjean, born and raised in Switzerland, and had never been in a concentration camp at all. Ultimately then, Browning’s rule of thumb that it is necessary to collate and cross-check as much witness testimony as possible, for both perpetrators and victims, seems most persuasive here. Shared memory can be treated as very likely true, precisely because it is independently verified by a large number of different witnesses.

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However, to truly understand why both Goldhagen and Gross are mistaken, it is necessary to revisit Gotland’s testimony and listen to it. What do we learn of Gotland’s experience, his state of mind? The first thing to note in this regard is that Gotland claimed to know Baretzki as well as he knew his own heart. This was simultaneously an emotional and a self-reflexive claim; knowledge of the dangerous other had become, for Gotland, a form of self-knowledge. He remained what he had been in the camp, a product of his tormenters, as well as of himself. As a result, his knowledge of himself became a form of knowledge of the perpetrators as well. The other striking experiential truth that emerges in Gotland’s testimony is his repeated emphasis that Baretzki was like a tiger. Baretzki appears here as a figure of pure terror, a club-bearing predator, to be avoided at all costs. The dominant experiential truth here is fear.

So far, hearing and listening may seem more straightforward than they in fact are. Nor is it yet clear exactly how the experiential truth of Gotland’s testimony impacts on its forensic truth, for we have not yet heard all that he had to say, or rather could not say. Gotland spoke in a broken mix of French, Polish and Yiddish. He spoke no German and struggled to make himself understood by the court. Here it is worthwhile quoting a journalistic description of his testimony at some length.

His hands gripping the arms of his chair, the heavy-set man sits facing the court as if he needs to be ready to jump up and flee at any moment. He looks helplessly from side to side. He obviously does not understand most of the questions put to him in well-chosen words by the numerous men in black robes. He sometimes starts in shock when his own words come back to him magnified three-fold from the loudspeakers. And the more intensely the memories pour forth from him, the less the remaining trial participants can understand him. It is as if he were surrounded by a wall.40

Gotland’s testimony, which seems so articulate in the trial transcript, was anything but when he delivered it. He was a broken man, stammering, trying to articulate what he himself could barely stand to recall. Had we been able to hear Gotland in person, to listen to his broken efforts to articulate meaning, we might have known better than to assume either task would be easy. Part of the lesson here is simply that testimony always loses something in translation to the printed page and it is important to be aware of that. But we also begin to learn something about the different methods for hearing and listening.

Gotland’s inarticulateness may call into question the forensic value of his testimony, and thus call into question Gross’s assertion that a single witness is sufficient to reconstruct forensic truth. If we merely hear him, without also listening, what we now hear is inarticulate stammering. This is what prompted the Frankfurt court to reject Gotland’s testimony in its final verdict as juridically worthless. Since the court did not even deign to consider Gotland’s testimony in its final verdict, it is necessary to get a sense why they rejected such testimony from their evaluation of another witness, Czelaw Glowacki, who testified against the defendant Klaus Dylewski. The court noted that Glowacki, who had worked carrying corpses to the

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crematoria while in Auschwitz, ‘still suffered a great deal emotionally from those bloody events. They were obviously still on his mind, with all their attendant terrible side-effects, during his testimony.’41 As a consequence, the court rejected Glowacki’s testimony. In effect, the court felt that overt exhibitions of traumatic symptoms rendered witnesses unreliable. The emotionalism that renders testimony valuable as evidence of experiential truth may undermine its forensic value – and, one could add, though a court of law would not – that the reverse is true as well. A purely factual statement may tell us nothing about the experience of the witness. Those who would always reject perpetrator testimony and always accept victim testimony would do well to remember this interplay between forensic and experiential truth, between hearing and listening.

In effect, the Frankfurt court privileged hearing to the exclusion of listening. It followed the forensic impulse to its logical conclusion, rejecting all obviously traumatized testimony. Of course, it thereby excluded one of the central experiential truths of the Holocaust – that all Holocaust experience was traumatic. This tendency to privilege forensic hearing over experiential listening is hardly surprising in a court, but it is not inevitable. Nor need historians follow the Frankfurt court’s lead in this regard. In the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for instance, the lead prosecutor Gideon Hausner sought in ways that went well beyond anything that happened in the Auschwitz trial to stress the essential Jewishness of the Holocaust and in so doing tried to privilege listening over hearing.42 In his opening speech, he proclaimed: ‘When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers . . . I will be their spokesman and in their name I will unfold the awesome indictment.’43 Hausner, in other words, claimed not to be speaking for the state of Israel or even for justice, much less the law. He claimed to be speaking for the Jews of the world, those who were murdered in the Holocaust, those still alive, and even those of the past, noting that ‘The history of the Jewish people is steeped in suffering and tears. “In thy blood, live!” (Ezekiel 16:6) is the imperative that has confronted this nation ever since it made its first appearance on the stage of history.’44

Thus, for Hausner, the Eichmann trial was at its core not just about the recollection of Jewish catastrophe, but also the imperative of Jewish survival. In short, Hausner embraced the narrative character of intentional evidence that so troubled Bloch and turned it to redemptive political ends. (This is, of course, precisely what Hannah Arendt found so appalling about the prosecution’s approach in this case.)45 For all the limitations of this narrative approach from a forensic point of view, it meant certain dimensions of the trauma of the Holocaust were acknowledged in the Eichmann trial which had remained submerged in the Auschwitz trial, most especially that it was not just Jews who perished, it was Jewish culture and Jewish life as it had existed.46 Hausner’s approach to listening to testimony was particularly good at eliciting the communal dimensions of Jewish experience, something Nazi sources rarely acknowledge.

This emerges quite clearly in the kinds of seemingly extraneous testimony that Hausner elicited; these were of little forensic value but of tremendous experiential interest. For instance, on May 3, 1961, Rahel Auerbach from Yad Vashem, a

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survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, testified about the Holocaust in Warsaw. At the start of her testimony, however, Hausner asked her for ‘a general description, and a very concise one, of Warsaw as it was, from the Jewish point of view, before the outbreak of the War?’ To which Auerbach responded:

I would want to speak mainly about Warsaw from the spiritual aspect, about the cultural world of Jewish Warsaw. When I came to Warsaw for the first time

. . . I was astonished at the intensity of the Jewish life. It was especially the Orthodox Jews who made an impression on me . . . this Jewry, Orthodox Jewry, was the great reservoir of Jewish life. Jews from modern social strata, the intellectual elite, all the time were leaving Jewish life, but these Orthodox Jews remained and they continually produced new strata of cultural creation. There was a complete Jewish state there.47

What emerges in this testimony, then, is a fuller sense of what was lost in the Holocaust: not just Jews but Jewishness was murdered, a point Auerbach made clear when she asserted that:

[i]t was known that the enemy wanted to destroy us also from the spiritual point of view; this was also a prelude to physical destruction, to humiliate us and to convince their own people and the world at large that this was a nation of parasites who were not fit to live in the world, that they were a kind of gypsies.48

She went on then to describe the incredible efforts made by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to preserve their cultural and educational institutions in the face of German hostility and about various efforts at Jewish self-help in the ghetto. Aside from the unfortunate racism implicit in her reference to the gypsies, what is most telling about Auerbach’s testimony is the way that, in contrast to Simon Gotland, hers is a testimony not about personal trauma, not about self-knowledge, but about the character of Jewish life in Warsaw before and even during the ghetto.

Auerbach’s testimony thus tells us much about the experiential truth of both preand postwar Jewish life as well as the connections between them. This is a particularly important point. For survivors, the Holocaust was only one part of their life. It may have been – and frequently was – a moment which defined all others. But it was nonetheless an experience that had meaning not solely in its own terms but also in relation to the rest of their lives. That aspect of the Holocaust is impossible to recover without listening carefully to what survivors have to say.

The Zionist implications of Auerbach’s testimony could hardly be clearer. And that is how we can know that this is not simply a forensic claim about prewar Jewish life but an experiential claim about the character of the Jewish community as Auerbach experienced it. On a forensic level, Auerbach was right that the Jewish community had considerable autonomy before the war, but she also underplays the assimilationist tendencies among Warsaw’s Jews.49 This raises the important question of how one can verify experiential claims. On the one hand, such claims are, by

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their nature, self-validating. We cannot read people’s states of being, and so must take their self-reported emotions more or less at face value.

There is, however, a fundamental difficulty with testimony such as Auerbach’s in this regard. She was testifying in the 1960s about the 1930s and 1940s. However honest her testimony may have been, it was mediated by twenty years of postwar experience. There was, in effect, a temporal filter in place between her past experience and the moment of her testimony. She had no capacity to recover past states of being except as seen through the lens of subsequent experience. So, when she emphasized the state-like character of Jewish life in prewar Warsaw, might she not have been, perhaps unintentionally, assimilating that memory to her experience of an actual Jewish state after the war? How could we tell?

On the one hand, it should be noted, that this may not matter. As long as we are aware that her testimony may tell us more about the 1960s than it does about the 1930s, this temporal filter may be irrelevant. However, if we really need to recover the 1930s and 1940s, we ought, at a minimum, to cross-check Auerbach’s testimony against more immediate sources. These too can take the form of intentional testimony. Although very little of it survives, some testimony given by Jews at the time of the Holocaust itself remains.

Leib Langfuss, for example, worked in the Jewish Sonderkommando in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, whose gruesome job it was to accompany victims to the gas chambers, gather their belongings, remove their hair and gold fillings, and cremate their corpses.50 Prior to his execution in November 1944, he kept a diary which he buried in the vicinity of crematorium 2 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a contemporary document, the testimonies recorded in Langfuss’s diary do not suffer from the temporal filtering of Auerbach’s testimony. One entry, in particular, is of relevance. On Passover 1944 a transport arrived from France, bringing with it, among others, Rabbi Moshe Friedman of Bayon. According to Langfuss, Friedman addressed himself to the Germans as he was being led naked into the gas chamber, still clinging to his clothing:

‘You, cruel murderers, human scum, do not think that you will succeed in destroying the Jewish people. The Jewish people will live forever and will not vanish from the stage of history . . .’ He spoke with great emotion and great strength. Then, when he had finished, he put on his hat and in great excitement called out ‘Shema Israel’, and all the Jews faithfully responded with him ‘Shema Israel’ out of a sense of profound faith which had surrounded them all in the last moments of their lives. It was a moment of supreme elevation, such as may be encountered but once in a lifetime, proving the eternal nature of Jewish spiritual resistance.51

Although more overtly religious than Auerbach’s testimony (Langfuss was himself a rabbinical judge), this account strongly confirms Auerbach’s communal sensibilities. Clearly, for some Jews at least, one of the central experiential truths of the Holocaust was communal solidarity, a sense of shared suffering and hence, shared identity, whether religious or political.

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This raises a final point to consider when listening to testimony for its experiential truth. Experience is always personal and idiosyncratic. No two people experience the same event in the same way. If, for Langfuss, the ultimate meaning of his impending death in Auschwitz was that of ‘Jewish spiritual resistance’, one of his colleagues in the Sonderkommando, Zalman Loewenthal, noted in his own buried manuscript, that many found the price of survival very high indeed.

. . . why do you do [such] unsuitable labor, how do you live, what is the purpose of your life, what is your will - - - what more do you want to achieve in your life

- - - here hides the weak point - - - from our commando, which I do not intend to defend at all. But I must state the truth, that more than one of them lost his human image in the passage of time; you become ashamed of yourself; they have simply forgotten what they do, the nature of their work. [In the course of time] they adapted, until you become filled with wonder - - - at the sound of weeping, until - - - normal, average - - - simple, modest people - - - without realizing, it has become routine; one gets used to everything, and whatever happens no longer makes an impression; someone screams, people look on indifferently, as at an everyday matter, how tens of thousands of people are being wiped out.52

Loewenthal’s account is vastly more pessimistic than either Langfuss’s or Auerbach’s. The price of survival, usually only temporary for those in the Sonderkommando, was not only a coerced complicity in Nazi murder, it was also frequently the loss of one’s own ability to even lament that price. When considering the experiential truth of Auschwitz, one must keep both Langfuss’s and Loewenthal’s perspective in mind. Both are true. Neither is the whole truth.

Conclusion

In the best case, of course, historians should always both hear and listen to testimony. Only rarely is testimony purely of either forensic or experiential value. It is a matter of delicate historical judgment to discern the precise admixture of both in any given testimony. On this issue, there is no substitute for experience and sensitivity. It will of course matter a great deal what exactly the historian is trying to achieve with his or her research. The project will in important respects dictate the method. Still, almost no project is so one-sided as to not benefit from approaching testimony with an ear for its complexity and range of usefulness.

A careful historian, then, will develop the distinct analytical skills to both hear and listen to testimony. Hearing requires both broad and deep historical knowledge to situate what one hears meaningfully, to cross-check one witness against others and against other kinds of sources, to notice minor and major errors and to evaluate both the subjective trustworthiness and objective plausibility of any given witness. Listening requires an intuitive sympathy, as well as an analytical awareness of the limits of such sympathy. Above all, it takes a willingness to take another person’s experience seriously, to remember that it is not just evidence, but that it is a