Felman - in An Era of Testimony - Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah
Author(s): Shoshana Felman

Source: Yale French Studies , 1991, No. 79, Literature and the Ethical Question (1991),
pp. 39-81
Published by: Yale University Press
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SHOSHANA FELMAN
In an Era of Testimony:
Claude Lanzmann's Shoahi
History and Witness, or the Story of an Oath
"If someone else could have written my stories," writes Elie Wiesel, "I
would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify. My role
is the role of the witness .... Not to tell, or to tell another story, is ... to
commit perjury."2
To bear witness is to take responsibility for truth: to speak, implicitly,
from within the legal pledge and the juridicial imperative of the witness's
oath.3 To testify-before a court of Law or before the court of history and of
the future; to testify, likewise, before an audience of readers or spectators-,
is more than simply to report a fact or an event or to relate what has been
lived, recorded and remembered. Memory is conjured here essentially in
order to address another, to impress upon a listener, to appeal to a commu-
nity. To testify is always, metaphorically, to take the witness's stand, or to
take the position of the witness insofar as the narrative account of the
witness is at once engaged in an appeal and bound by an oath. To testify is
thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the nar-
1. The present essay is part of a more extensive study, constituting the chapter on
Shoah in my forthcoming book: In an Era of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Liter-
ature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1991; volume coauthored with
Dori Laub, M.D.)
2. "The Loneliness of God," published in the journal Dvar Hashavu'a (magazine of
the newspaper Davar): Tel-Aviv, (1984). My translation from the Hebrew.
3. "To tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;" an oath, however,
which is always, by its nature, susceptible to perjury.
YFS 79, Literature and the Ethical Question, ed. Claire Nouvet, C 1991 by Shoshana
Felman.
39

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40 Yale French Studies
rative, to others: to take responsibility-in speech-for history or for the

truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the
personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences.
But if the essence of the testimony is impersonal (to enable a decision by
a judge or jury-metaphorical or literal-about the true nature of the facts of
an occurrence; to enable an objective reconstruction of what history was
like, irrespective of the witness), why is it that the witness's speech is so
uniquely, literally irreplaceable? "If someone else could have written my
stories, I would not have written them." What does it mean that the testi-
mony cannot be simply reported, or narrated by another in its role as testi-
mony? What does it mean that a story-or a history-cannot be told by
someone else?
It is this question, I would suggest, that guides the ground-breaking work
of Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah (1985), and constitutes at once the
profound subject and the shocking power of originality of the film.
A Vision of Reality
Shoah is a film made exclusively of testimonies: first-hand testimonies of

participants in the historical experience of the Holocaust, interviewed and
filmed by Lanzmann during the eleven years which preceded the production
of the film (1974-1985). In effect, Shoah revives the Holocaust with such a
power (a power that no previous film on the subject could attain) that it
radically displaces and shakes up not only any common notion we might
have entertained about it, but our very vision of reality as such, our very
sense of what the world, culture, history, and our life within it, are all about.
But the film is not simply, nor is it primarily, a historical document on
the Holocaust. That is why, in contrast to its cinematic predecessors on the
subject, it refuses systematically to use any historical, archival footage. It
conducts its interviews, and takes its pictures, in the present. Rather than a
simple view about the past, the film offers a disorienting vision of the pres-
ent, a compellingly profound and surprising insight into the complexity of
the relation between history and witnessing.
It is a film about witnessing: about the witnessing of a catastrophe. What
is testified to is limit-experiences whose overwhelming impact constantly
puts to the test the limits of the witnesses and of the witnessing, at the same
time that it constantly unsettles and puts into question the very limits of
reality.
Art as Witness
Secondly, Shoah is a film about the relation between art and witnessing,
about film as a medium which expands the capacity for witnessing. To

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 41
understand Shoah, we must explore the question: what are we as spectators

made to witness? This expansion of what we in turn can witness is, however,
due not simply to the reproduction of events, but to the power of the film as a
work of art, to the subtlety of its philosophical and artistic structure and to
the complexity of the creative process it engages. "The truth kills the pos-
sibility of fiction," said Lanzmann in a journalistic interview.4 But the truth
does not kill the possibility of art-on the contrary, it requires it for its
transmission, for its realization in our consciousness as witnesses.
Finally, Shoah embodies the capacity of art not simply to witness, but to
take the witness's stand: the film takes responsibility for its times by enact-
ing the significance of our era as an age of testimony, an age in which
witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma. Shoah gives us to witness a
historical crisis of witnessing, and shows us how, out of this crisis, witness-
ing becomes, in all the senses of the word, a critical activity.
On all these different levels, Claude Lanzmann persistently asks the
same relentless question: what does it mean to be a witness? What does it
mean to be a witness to the Holocaust? What does it mean to be a witness to
the process of the film? What does testimony mean, if it is not simply (as we
commonly perceive it) the observing, the recording, the remembering of an
event, but an utterly unique and irreplaceable topographical position with
respect to an occurrence? What does testimony mean, if it is the uniqueness
of the performance of a story which is constituted by the fact that, like the
oath, it cannot be carried out by anybody else?
The Western Law of Evidence
The uniqueness of the narrative performance of the testimony in effect

proceeds from the witness's irreplaceable performance of the act of seeing-
from the uniqueness of the witness's "seeing with his/her own eyes." "Mr.
Vitold," says the Jewish Bund leader to the Polish Courrier Jan Karski, who
reports it in his cinematic testimony thirty-five years later, in narrating how
the Jewish leader urged him-and persuaded him-to become a crucial
visual witness: "I know the Western world. You will be speaking to the
English.... It will strengthen your report if you will be able to say: 'I saw it
myself' (171)".5
In the legal, philosophical and epistemological tradition of the Western
world, witnessing is based on, and is formally defined by, first-hand seeing.
"Eyewitness testimony" is what constitutes the most decisive law of evi-
4. An interview with Deborah Jerome ("Resurrecting Horror: The Man behind

Shoah"), The Record, 25 October 1985.
5. Shoah, the complete text of the film by Claude Lanzmann (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1985). Quotations from the text of the film will refer to this edition, and will be
indicated henceforth only by page number (in the parentheses following the citation).

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dence in courtrooms. "Lawyers have innumerable rules involving hearsay,

the character of the defendant or of the witness, opinions given by the
witness, and the like, which are in one way or another meant to improve the
fact-finding process. But more crucial than any one of these-and possibly
more crucial than all put together-is the evidence of eyewitness testi-
mony."J6
Film, on the other hand, is the art par excellence which, like the court-
room (although for different purposes), calls upon a witnessing by seeing.
How does the film use its visual medium to reflect upon eyewitness testi-
mony, both as the law of evidence of its own art and as the law of evidence of
history?
Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders: About Seeing
Because the testimony is unique and irreplaceable, the film is an exploration

of the differences between heterogeneous points of view, between testi-
monial stances which can neither be assimilated into, nor subsumed by, one
another. There is, first of all, the difference of perspective between three
groups of witnesses, or three series of interviewees; the real characters of
history who, in response to Lanzmann's inquiry, play their own role as the
singularly real actors of the movie, fall into three basic categories:7 those
who witnessed the disaster as its victims (the surviving Jews); those who
witnessed the disaster as its perpetrators (the ex-Nazis); those who wit-
nessed the disaster as bystanders (the Poles). What is at stake in this division
is not simply a diversity of points of view or of degrees of implication and
emotional involvement, but the incommensurability of different topo-
graphical and cognitive positions, between which the discrepancy cannot be
breached. More concretely, what the categories in the film give to see is
three different performances of the act of seeing.
In effect, the victims, the bystanders, and the perpetrators are here differ-
entiated not so much by what they actually see (what they all see, although
discontinuous, does in fact follow a logic of corroboration), as by what and
how they do not see, by what and how they fail to witness. The Jews see, but
they do not understand the purpose and the destination of what they see;
overwhelmed by loss and by deception, they are blind to the significance of
what they witness. Richard Glazar strikingly narrates a moment of percep-
tion coupled with incomprehension, an exemplary moment in which the
6. John Kaplan, "Foreword" to Elizabeth R. Loftus: Eyewitness Testimony

(Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press: 1979), vii.
7. Categories which Lanzmann borrows from Hilberg's historical analysis, but which
the film strikingly embodies and rethinks. Cf., Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the
European Jews (New York: Holmse and Meier, 1985).

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 43
Jews fail to read, or to decipher, the visual signs and the visible significance
they nonetheless see with their own eyes:
Then very slowly, the train turned off of the main track and rolled ...
through a wood. While he looked out-we'd been able to open a win-
dow-the old man in our compartment saw a boy ... and he asked the
boy in signs, "Where are we?" And the kid made a funny gesture. This:
(draws a finger across his throat) ...
And one of you questioned him?
Not in words, but in signs, we asked: "what's going on here? And he made
that gesture. Like this. We didn't really pay much attention to him. We
couldn't figure out what he meant. [34]
The Poles, unlike the Jews, do see but, as bystanders, they do not quite
look, they avoid looking directly, and thus they overlook at once their re-
sponsibility and their complicity as witnesses:
You couldn't look there. You couldn't talk to a Jew. Even going by on
the road, you couldn't look there.
-Did they look anyway?
Yes, vans came and the Jews were moved farther off. You could see
them, but on the sly. In sidelong glances. [97-98]
The Nazis, on the other hand, see to it that both the Jews and the exter-
mination will remain unseen, invisible; the death camps are surrounded, for
that purpose, with a screen of trees. Franz Suchomel, an ex-guard of
Treblinka, testifies:
Woven into the barbed wire were branches of pine trees. . .. It was known
as "camouflage"...... So everything was screened. People couldn't see
anything to the left or right. Nothing. You couldn't see through it. Impos-
sible. [110]
It is not a coincidence that as this testimony is unfolding it is hard for us

as viewers of the film to see the witness, who is filmed secretly: as is the case
for most of the ex-Nazis, Franz Suchomel agreed to answer Lanzmann's
questions, but not to be filmed; he agreed, in other words, to give a testi-
mony, but on the condition that, as witness, he should not be seen:
Mr. Suchomel, we're not discussing you, only Treblinka. You are a
very important eyewitness, and you can explain what Treblinka was.
But don't use my name.
No, I promised ... [54]

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In the blurry images of faces taken by a secret camera that has to shoot
through a variety of walls and screens, the film makes us see concretely, by
the compromise it unavoidably inflicts upon our act of seeing (which, of
necessity, becomes materially an act of seeing through), how the Holocaust
was a historical assault on seeing and how, even today, the perpetrators are
still by and large invisible: "everything was screened. You couldn't see any-
thing to the left or right. You couldn't see through it."
Figuren
The essence of the Nazi scheme is to make itself-and to make the Jews-
essentially invisible. To make the Jews invisible not merely by killing them,
not merely by confining them to "camouflaged," invisible death camps, but
by reducing even the materiality of the dead bodies to smoke and ashes, and
by reducing, furthermore, the radical opacity of the sight of the dead bodies,
as well as the linguistic referentiality and literality of the word "corpse," to
the transparency of a pure form and to the pure rhetorical metaphoricity of a
mere figure: a disembodied verbal substitute which signifies abstractly the
linguistic law of infinite exchangeability and substitutability. The dead
bodies are thus verbally rendered invisible, and voided both of substance and
of specificity, by being treated, in the Nazi jargon, as Figuren: that which, all
at once, cannot be seen and can be seen through.
The Germans even forbade us to use the words "corpse" or "victim."

The dead were blocks of wood, shit. The Germans made us refer to the
bodies as Figuren, that is, as puppets, as dolls, or as Schmattes, which
means "rags." [13]
But it is not only the dead bodies of the Jews which the Nazis, paradox-
ically, do not "see." It is also, in some striking cases, the living Jews trans-
ported to their death that remain invisible to the chief architects of their
final transportation. Walter Stier, head of Reich Railways Department 33 of
the Nazi party, chief traffic planner of the death-trains ("special trains," in
Nazi euphemism), testifies:
But you knew that the trains to Treblinka or Auschwitz were

Of course we knew. I was the last district. Without me the trains couldn't
reach their destination ...
* * * Z*Z* * * *- * - * -*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -Z
Did you know that Treblinka meant extermination?
Of course not .... How could we know? I never went to Treblinka. [135]
You never saw a train?
No, never.... I never left my desk. We worked day and night. [132]

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 45
In the same way, Mrs. Michelshon, wife of a Nazi schoolteacher in

Chelmno, answers Lanzmann's questions:
Did you see the gas vans?
No.... Yes, from the outside. They shuttled back and forth. I never
looked inside; I didn't see Jews in them. I only saw things from outside.
[82]
The Occurrence as Unwitnessed
Thus, the diversity of the testimonial stances of the victims, the bystanders
and the perpetrators have in common, paradoxically, the incommen-
surability of their different and particular positions of not seeing, the radical
divergence of their topographical, emotional and epistemological positions
not simply as witnesses, but as witnesses who do not witness, who let the
Holocaust occur as an event essentially unwitnessed. Through the testi-
monies of its visual witnesses the film makes us see concretely-makes us
witness-, how the Holocaust occurs as the unprecedented, inconceivable
historical advent of an event without a witness, an event which historically
consists in the scheme of the literal erasure of its witnesses but which,
moreover, philosophically consists in an accidenting of perception, in a
splitting of eyewitnessing as such; an event, thus, not empirically, but cog-
nitively and perceptually without a witness both because it precludes seeing
and because it precludes the possibility of a community of seeing; an event
which radically annihilates the recourse (the appeal) to visual corroboration
(to the commensurability between two different seeings) and thus dissolves
the possibility of any community of witnessing.
Shoah enables us to see-and gives us insight into-the occurrence of
the Holocaust as an absolute historical event whose literally overwhelming
evidence makes it, paradoxically, into an utterly proofless event; the age of
testimony is the age of prooflessness, the age of an event whose magnitude
of reference is at once below and beyond proof.
The Multiplicity of Languages
The incommensurability between different testimonial stances, and the

heterogeneous multiplicity of specific cognitive positions of seeing and not
seeing, is amplified and duplicated in the film by the multiplicity of lan-
guages in which the testimonies are delivered (French, German, Sicilian,
English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish), a multiplicity which necessarily encom-
passes some foreign tongues and which necessitates the presence of a profes-
sional translator as an intermediary between the witnesses and Lanzmann

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as their interviewer. The technique of dubbing is not used, and the character
of the translator is deliberately not edited out of the film-on the contrary,
she is quite often present on the screen, at the side of Lanzmann, as another
one of the real actors of the film, because the process of translation is itself
an integral part of the process of the film, partaking both of its scenario and
of its own performance of its cinematic testimony. Through the multiplicity
of foreign tongues and the prolonged delay incurred by the translation, the
splitting of eyewitnessing which the historical event seems to consist of, the
incapacity of seeing to translate itself spontaneously and simultaneously
into a meaning, is recapitulated on the level of the viewers of the film. The
film places us in the position of the witness who sees and hears, but cannot
understand the significance of what is going on until the later intervention,
the delayed processing and rendering of the significance of the visu-
al/acoustic information by the translator, who also in some ways distorts
and screens it, because (as is testified to by those viewers who are natives of
the foreign tongues which the translator is translating, and as the film itself
points out by some of Lanzmann's interventions and corrections), the trans-
lation is not always absolutely accurate.
The palpable foreignness of the film's tongues is emblematic of the radi-
cal foreignness of the experience of the Holocaust, not merely to us, but even
to its own participants. Asked whether he had invited the participants to see
the film, Lanzmann answered in the negative: "in what language would the
participants have seen the film?" The original was a French print: "They
don't speak French."8 French, the native language of the filmmaker, the
common denominator into which the testimonies (and the original subti-
tles) are translated and in which the film is thought out and gives, in turn, its
own testimony happens (not by chance, I would suggest) not to be the lan-
guage of any of the witnesses. It is a metaphor of the film that its language is
a language of translation, and, as such, is doubly foreign: that the occur-
rence, on the one hand, happens in a language foreign to the language of the
film, but also, that the significance of the occurrence can only be articulated
in a language foreign to the languagels) of the occurrence.
The title of the film is, however, not in French and embodies thus, once
more, a linguistic strangeness, an estrangement, whose significance is enig-
matic and whose meaning cannot be immediately accessible even to the
native audience of the original French print: Shoah, the Hebrew word
which, with the definite article (here missing), designates "The Holocaust"
8. Interview given by Lanzmann on the occasion of his visit to Yale University, and
filmed at the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale (Interviewers: Dr. Dori Laub
and Laurel Vloch), on 5 May 1986. Transcript, 24-25. Hereafter, citations from this vid-
eotape will be referred to by the abbreviation "interview," followed by an indication of the
page number by its (unpublished) transcript.

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 47
but which, without the article, enigmatically and indefinitely means "ca-
tastrophe," here names the very foreignness of languages, the very name-
lessness of a catastrophe which cannot be possessed by any native tongue
and which, within the language of translation, can only be named as the
untranslatable: that which language cannot witness; that which cannot be
articulated in one language; that which language, in its turn, cannot witness
without splitting.
The Historian as a Witness
The task of the deciphering of signs and of the processing of intelligibility-

what might be called the task of the translator9-is, however, carried out
within the film not merely by the character of the professional interpreter,
but also by two other real actors-the historian (Raul Hilberg) and the film-
maker (Claude Lanzmann)-who, like the witnesses, in turn play them-
selves and who, unlike the witnesses and like the translator, constitute
second-degree witnesses (witnesses of witnesses, witnesses of the testi-
monies). Like the professional interpreter, although in very different ways,
the filmmaker in the film and the historian on the screen are in turn cata-
lysts-or agents-of the process of reception, agents whose reflective wit-
nessing and whose testimonial stances aid our own reception and assist us
both in the effort toward comprehension and in the unending struggle with
the foreignness of signs, in processing not merely (as does the professional
interpreter) the literal meaning of the testimonies, but also, some perspec-
tives on their philosophical and historical significance.
The historian is, thus, in the film, neither the last word of knowledge nor
the ultimate authority on history, but rather, one more topographical and
cognitive position of yet another witness. The statement of the film-
maker-and the testimony of the film-are by no means subsumed by the
statement (or the testimony) of the historian. Though the filmmaker does
embrace the historical insights of Hilberg, which he obviously holds in utter
respect and from which he gets both inspiration and instruction, the film
also places in perspective-and puts in context-the discipline of history as
such, in stumbling on (and giving us to see) the very limits of historiography.
"Shoah," said Claude Lanzmann at Yale, "is certainly not a historical
film.... The purpose of Shoah is not to transmit knowledge, in spite of the
fact that there is knowledge in the film .... Hilberg's book, The Destruc-
tion of the European Jews, was really my Bible for many years.... But in
spite of this, Shoah is not a historical film, it is something else .... To
9. Cf., Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books: 1969), 69-82.

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condense in one word what the film is for me, I would say that the film is an
incarnation, a resurrection, and that the whole process of the film is a
philosophical one."10 Hilberg is the spokesman for a unique and impressive
knowledge on the Holocaust. Knowledge is shown by the film to be abso-
lutely necessary in the ongoing struggle to resist the blinding impact of the
event, to counteract the splitting of eyewitnessing. But knowledge is not, in
and of itself, a sufficiently active and sufficiently effective act of seeing. The
newness of the film's vision, on the other hand, consists precisely in the
surprising insight it conveys into the radical ignorance in which we are
unknowingly all plunged with respect to the actual historical occurrence.
This ignorance is not simply dispelled by history-on the contrary, it en-
compasses history as such. The film shows how history is used for the
purpose of a historical (ongoing) process of forgetting which, ironically
enough, includes the gestures of historiography. Historiography is as much
the product of the passion of forgetting as it is the product of the passion of
remembering.
Walter Stier, former head of Reich railways and chief planner of the trans-
ports of the Jews to death camps, can thus testify:
What was Treblinka for you? ... A destination?
Yes, that's all.
But not death.
No, no ...
Extermination came to you as a big surprise?
Completely ...
You had no idea.
Not the slightest. Like that camp-what was its name? It was in the
Oppeln district .... I've got it: Auschwitz.
Yes, Auschwitz was in the Oppeln district.... Auschwitz to Krakow is

forty miles.
That's not very far. And we knew nothing. Not a clue.
But you knew that the Nazis-that Hitler didn't like the Jews?
That we did. It was well known.... But as to their extermination, that

was news to us. I mean, even today people deny it. They say there couldn't
have been so many Jews. Is it true? I don't know. That's what they say.
[136-38]
10. "An Evening with Claude Lanzmann," 4 May 1986, first part of Lanzmann's visit
to Yale, videotaped and copyrighted by Yale University. Transcript of the first videotape
(hereafter referred to as "Evening"), 2.

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 49
To substantiate his own amnesia lot the name of Auschwitz) and his own
claim of essentially not knowing, Stier implicitly refers here to the claim of
knowledge-the historical authority-of "revisionist historiographies," re-
cent works published in a variety of countries by historians who prefer to
argue that the number of the dead cannot be proven and that, since there is
no scientific, scholarly hard evidence of the exact extent of the mass
murder, the genocide is merely an invention, an exaggeration of the Jews and
the Holocaust, in fact, never existed." "But as to their extermination, that
was news to us. I mean, even today, people deny it. They say there could not
have been so many Jews. Is it true? I don't know. That's what they say." 'I am
not the one who knows, but there are those who know who say that what I
did not know did not exist.' "Is it true? I don't know."
Dr. Franz Grassler, on the other hand (formerly Nazi commissioner of
the Warsaw Ghetto), comes himself to mimic, in front of the camera, the
very gesture of historiography as an alibi to his forgetting.
You don't remember those days?
Not much.... It's a fact: we tend to forget, thank God, the bad times ...
I'll help you to remember. In Warsaw you were Dr. Auerswald's deputy.
Yes ...
Dr. Grassler, this is Czerniakow's diary. You're mentioned in it.
It's been printed. It exists?
He kept a diary that was recently published. He wrote on 7 uly 1941 ...
7 July 1941? That's the first time I've releamed a date. May I take notes?
After all, it interests me too. So in July I was already there! [175-761
In line with the denial of responsibility and memory, the very gesture of
historiography comes to embody nothing other than the blankness of the
page on which the "notes" are taken.
The next section of the film focuses on the historian Hilberg holding, and
discussing, Czerniakow's diary. The cinematic editing that follows shifts
back and forth, in a sort of shuttle movement, between the face of Grassler
(who continues to articulate his own view of the ghetto) and the face of
11. Cf., for instance, Robert Raurisson: "I have analyzed thousands of documents. I
have tirelessly pursued specialists and historians with my questions. I have in vain tried to
find a single former deportee capable of proving to me that he had really seen, with his own
eyes, a gas chamber." (Le Monde, 16 January 1979.) We have "a selective view of history,"
comments Bill Moyers. "We live within a mythology of benign and benevolent experi-
ence .... It is hard to believe that there exists about a hundred books all devoted to
teaching the idea that the Holocaust was a fiction, that it did not happen, that it has been
made up by Jews for a lot of diverse reasons . . . " Interview with Margot Strom, in Facing
History and Ourselves (Fall 1986), 6 and 7.

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Hilberg (who continues to articulate the content of the diary and the per-
spective that the author of the diary-Czerniakow-gives of the ghetto).
The Nazi commissioner of the ghetto is thus confronted structurally, not so
much with the counterstatement of the historian, but with the firsthand
witness of the (now dead) author of the diary, the Jewish leader of the ghetto
whom the ineluctability of the ghetto's destiny led to end his leadership-
and sign his diary-with suicide.
The main role of the historian is, thus, less to narrate history than to
reverse the suicide, to take part in a cinematic vision which Lanzmann has
defined as crucially an "incarnation" and a "resurrection." "I have taken a
historian," Lanzmann enigmatically remarked, "so that he will incarnate a
dead man, even though I had someone alive who had been a director of the
ghetto."'2 The historian is there to embody, to give flesh and blood to, the
dead author of the diary. Unlike the Christian resurrection, though, the
vision of the film is to make Czerniakow come alive precisely as a dead
man. His "resurrection" does not cancel out his death. The vision of the film
is at once to make the dead writer come alive as a historian, and to make, in
turn, history and the historian come alive in the uniqueness of the living
voice of a dead man, and in the silence of his suicide.
The Filmmaker as a Witness
At the side of the historian, Shoah finally includes among its list of charac-
ters (its list of witnesses) the very figure of the filmmaker in the process of
the making-or of the creation-of the film. Travelling between the living
and the dead and moving to and fro between the different places and the
different voices in the film, the filmmaker is continuously-though dis-
creetly-present in the margin of the screen, perhaps as the most silently
articulate and as the most articulately silent, witness. The creator of the
film speaks and testifies, however, in his own voice, in his triple role as the
narrator of the film (and the signatory-the first person-of the script), as
the interviewer of the witnesses (the solicitor and the receiver of the testi-
monies), and as the inquirer (the artist as the subject of a quest concerning
what the testimonies testify to; the figure of the witness as a questioner, and
of the asker not merely as the factual investigator but as the bearer of the
film's philosophical address and inquiry).
The three roles of the filmmaker intermix and in effect exist only in their
relation to each other. Since the narrator is, as such, strictly a witness, his
12. Statement made in a private conversation that took place in Paris, on 18 January
1987: "J'ai pris un historien pour qu'il incarne un mort, alors que j'avais un vivant qui
6tait directeur du ghetto."

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 51
story is restricted to the story of the interviewing: the narrative consists of

what the interviewer hears. Lanzmann's rigor as narrator is precisely to
speak strictly as an interviewer (and as an inquirer), to abstain, that is, from
narrating anything directly in his own voice, except for the beginning-the
only moment which refers the film explicitly to the first person of the
filmmaker as narrator:
The story begins in the present at Chelmno .... Chelmno was the place
in Poland where Jews were first exterminated by gas.... Of the four
hundred thousand men, women, and children who went there, only two
came out alive.... Srebnik, survivor of the last period, was a boy of
thirteen when he was sent to Chelmno.... I found him in Israel and
persuaded that one-time boy singer to return with me to Chelmno. [3-4]
The opening, narrated in the filmmaker's own voice, at once situates the
story in the present and sums up a past which is presented not yet as the
story but rather as a pre-history, or a pre-story: the story proper is contempo-
raneous with the film's speech, which begins, in fact, subsequent to the
narrator's written preface, by the actual song of Srebnik re-sung (reenacted)
in the present. The narrator is the "I" who "found" Srebnik and "persuaded"
him to "return with me to Chelmno." The narrator, therefore, is the one
who opens, or re-opens, the story of the past in the present of the telling. But
the "I" of the narrator, of the signatory of the film, has no voice; the opening
is projected on the screen as the silent text of a mute script, as the narrative
voice-over of a writing with no voice.
On the one hand, then, the narrator has no voice. On the other hand, the
continuity of the narrative is ensured by nothing other than Lanzmann's
voice, which runs through the film and whose sound constitutes the contin-
uous, connective thread between the different voices and the different testi-
monial episodes. But Lanzmann's voice-the active voice in which we hear
the filmmaker speak-is strictly, once again, the voice of the inquirer and of
the interviewer, not of the narrator. As narrator, Lanzmann does not speak
but rather, vocally recites the words of others, lends his voice (on two occa-
sions) to read aloud two written documents whose authors cannot speak in
their own voice: the letter of the Rabbi of Grabow, warning the Jews of Lodz
of the extermination taking place at Chelmno, a letter whose signatory was
himself consequently gassed at Chelmno with his whole community ("Do
not think"-Lanzmann recites- "that this is written by a madman. Alas, it
is the horrible, tragic truth," [83-84]), and the Nazi document entitled "Se-
cret Reich Business" and concerning technical improvements of the gas vans
("Changes to special vehicles ... shown by use and experience to be neces-
sary," [103-051), an extraordinary document which might be said to for-
malize Nazism as such (the way in which the most perverse and most con-

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crete extermination is abstracted into a pure question of technique and

function). We witness Lanzmann's voice modulating evenly-with no emo-
tion and no comment-the perverse diction of this document punctuated
by the unintentional, coincidental irony embodied by the signatory's name:
"signed: Just."
Besides this recitation of the written documents, and besides his own
mute reference to his own voice in the written cinematic preface of the
silent opening, Lanzmann speaks as interviewer and as inquirer, but as nar-
rator, he keeps silent. The narrator lets the narrative be carried on by oth-
ers-by the live voices of the various witnesses he interviews, whose stories
must be able to speak for themselves, if they are to testify, that is, to perform
their unique and irreplaceable firsthand witness. It is only in this way, by
this abstinence of the narrator, that the film can in fact be a narrative of
testimony, a narrative of that, precisely, which can neither be reported, nor
narrated, by another. The narrative is thus essentially a narrative of silence,
the story of the filmmaker's listening; the narrator is the teller of the film
only insofar as he is the bearer of the film's silence.
In his other roles, however, that of interviewer and of inquirer, the film-
maker, on the contrary, is by definition a transgressor, and a breaker, of the
silence. Of his own transgression of the silence, the interviewer says to the
interviewee whose voice cannot be given up and whose silence must be
broken: "I know it's very hard. I know and I apologize" ( 1 7).
As an interviewer, Lanzmann asks not for great explanations of the Holo-
caust, but for concrete descriptions of minute particular details and of appar-
ently trivial specifics. "Was the weather very cold? " ( 1). "From the station
to the unloading ramp in the camp is how many miles? . . . How long did the
trip last?" (33). "Exactly where did the camp begin?" (34). "It was the silence
that tipped them off? . . . Can he describe that silence? " (67). "What were the
[gas] vans like? . . . What color? " (80). It is not the big generalizations but the
concrete particulars which translate into a vision and thus help both to
dispel the blinding impact of the event and to transgress the silence to which
the splitting of eyewitnessing reduced the witness. It is only through the
trivia, by small steps-and not by huge strides or big leaps-that the barrier
of silence can be in effect displaced, and somewhat lifted. The pointed and
specific questioning resists, above all, any possible canonization of the expe-
rience of the Holocaust. Insofar as the interviewer challenges at once the
sacredness (the unspeakability) of death and the sacredness of the deadness
(of the silence) of the witness, Lanzmann's questions are essentially
desacralizing.
How did it happen when the women came into the gas chamber? . ..
What did you feel the first time you saw all these naked womenz ...

f:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 53
But I asked and you didn't answer: What was your impression the first
time you saw these naked women arriving with children? How did you
feel?
I tell you something. To have a feeling about that ... it was very hard to
feel anything, because working there day and night between dead people,
between bodies, your feeling disappeared, you were dead. You had no
feeling at all. [114-16]
Shoah is the story of the liberation of the testimony through its desacraliza-
tion; the story of the decanonization of the Holocaust for the sake of its
previously impossible historicization. What the interviewer above all avoids
is an alliance with the silence of the witness, the kind of empathic and
benevolent alliance through which interviewer and interviewee often im-
plicitly concur, and work together, for the mutual comfort of an avoidance of
the truth.
It is the silence of the witness's death which Lanzmann must historically
challenge here, in order to revive the Holocaust and to rewrite the event-
without-a-witness into witnessing, and into history. It is the silence of the
witness's death, and of the witness's deadness which precisely must be
broken, and transgressed.
We have to do it. You know it.
I won't be able to do it.
You have to do it. I know it's very hard. I know and I apologize.
Don't make me go on please.
Please. We must go on. [1171
What does going on mean? The predicament of having to continue to bear

witness at all costs parallels, for Abraham Bomba, the predicament faced in
the past of having to continue to live on, to survive in spite of the gas
chambers, in the face of the surrounding death. But to have to go on now, to
have to keep on bearing witness, is more than simply to be faced with the
imperative to replicate the past and thus to replicate his own survival.
Lanzmann paradoxically now urges Bomba to break out of the very deadness
that enabled the survival. The narrator calls the witness to come back from
the mere mode of surviving into that of living-and of living pain. If the
interviewer's role is thus to break the silence, the narrator's role is to ensure
that the story (be it that of silence) will go on.
But it is the inquirer whose philosophical interrogation and interpella-
tion constantly reopen what might otherwise be seen as the story's closure.
Mrs. Pietrya, you live in Auschwitz?
Yes, I was born there ...

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Were there Jews in Auschwitz before the war?

They made up eighty percent of the population. They even had a syn-
agogue here ...
Was there a Jewish cemetery in Auschwitz?
It still exists. It's closed now.
Closed? What does that mean?
They don't bury there now. [17-181
The inquirer thus inquires into the very meaning of closure and of narrative,
political, and philosophical enclosure. Of Dr. Grassler, the ex-assistant to
the Nazi "commissar" of the Jewish ghetto, Lanzmann asks:
My question is philosophical. What does a ghetto mean, in your opinion?

[182]
Differences
Grassler of course evades the question. "History is full of ghettos," he re-

plies, once more using erudition, "knowledge," and the very discipline of
history, to avoid the cutting edge of the interpellation: "Persecution of the
Jews wasn't a German invention, and didn't start with World War II" (182).
Everybody knows, in other words, what a ghetto is, and the meaning of the
ghetto does not warrant a specifically philosophical attention: "history is
full of ghettos." Because "history" knows only too well what a ghetto is, this
knowledge might as well be left to history, and does not need in turn to be
probed by us. "History" is thus used both to deny the philosophical thrust of
the question and to forget the specificity-the difference-of the Nazi past.
Insofar as the reply denies precisely the inquirer's refusal to take for granted
the conception-let alone the preconception-of the ghetto, the ster-
eotypical, preconceived answer in effect forgets the asking power of the
question. Grassler essentially forgets the difference, forgets the meaning of
the ghetto as the first step in the Nazi overall design precisely of the fram-
ing-and of the enclosure-of a difference, a difference that will conse-
quently be assigned to the ultimate enclosure of the death camp and to the
"final solution" of eradication. Grassler's answer does not meet the ques-
tion, and attempts, moreover, to reduce the question's difference. But the
question of the ghetto-that of the attempt at the containment (the reduc-
tion) of a difference-perseveres both in the speech and in the silence of the
inquirer-narrator. The narrator is precisely there to insure that the question,
in its turn, will go on (will continue in the viewer). The inquirer, in other
words, is not merely the agency which asks the questions, but the force
which takes apart all previous answers. Throughout the interviewing pro-

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 55
cess the inquirer-narrator, at the side of Grassler as of others, is at once the

witness of the question and the witness of the gap-or of the difference-
between the question and the answer.
Often, the inquirer bears witness to the question (and the narrator si-
lently bears witness to the story) by merely recapitulating word by word a
fragment of the answer, by literally repeating-like an echo-the last sen-
tence, the last words just uttered by the interlocutor. But the function of the
echo-in the very resonance of its amplification-is itself inquisitive, and
not simply repetitive. "The gas vans came in here," Srebnik narrates: "there
were two huge ovens, and afterwards the bodies were thrown into these
ovens, and the flames reached to the sky" (6). "To the sky [zum Himmel],"
mutters silently the interviewer, opening at once a philosophical abyss in
the simple words of the narrative description and a black hole in the very
blueness of the image of the sky. When later on, the Poles around the church
narrate how they listened to the gassed Jews' screams, Lanzmann's re-
petitious echoes register the unintended irony of the narration:
They heard the screams at night?
The Jews moaned.... They were hungry. They were shut in and starved.
What kinds of cries and moans were heard at night?
They called on Jesus and Mary and God, sometimes in German ...
The Jews called on Jesus, Mary, and God! [97-98]
Lanzmann's function as an echo is another means by which the voice-

lessness of the narrator and the voice of the inquirer produce a question in
the very answer, and enact a difference through the very verbal repetition. In
the narrator as the bearer of the film's silence, the question of the screams
persists. And so does the difference of what the screams in fact call out to.
Here as elsewhere in the film, the narrator is, as such, both the guardian of
the question and the guardian of the difference.
The inquirer's investigation is precisely into (both the philosophical and
the concrete) particularity of difference. "What's the difference between a
special and a regular train?," the inquirer asks of the Nazi traffic planner
Walter Stier (133). And to the Nazi teacher's wife, who in a Freudian slip
confuses Jews and Poles (both "the others" or "the foreigners" in relation to
the Germans), Lanzmann addresses the following meticulous query:
Since World War I the castle had been in ruins.... That's where the Jews
were taken. This ruined castle was used for housing and delousing the
Poles, and so on.
The Jews!
Yes, the Jews.

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Why do you call them Poles and not Jews?
Sometimes I get them mixed up.
There's a difference between Poles and Jews?
Oh yes!
What difference?
The Poles weren't exterminated, and the Jews were. That's the difference.
An external difference.
And the inner difference?
I can't assess that. I don't know enough about psychology and an-
thropology. The difference between the Poles and the Jews? Anyway, they
couldn't stand each other. [82-83]
As a philosophical inquiry into the ungraspability of difference and as a

narrative of the specific differences between the various witnesses, Shoah
implies a fragmentation of the testimonies-a fragmentation both of
tongues and of perspectives-that cannot ultimately be surpassed. It is be-
cause the film goes from singular to singular, because there is no possible
representation of one witness by another, that Lanzmann needs us to sit
through ten hours of the film to begin to witness-to begin to have a con-
crete sense-both of our own ignorance and of the incommensurability of
the occurrence. The occurrence is conveyed precisely by this fragmentation
of the testimonies, which enacts the fragmentation of the witnessing. The
film is a gathering of the fragments of the witnessing. But the collection of
the fragments does not yield, even after ten hours of the movie, any possible
totality or any possible totalization; the gathering of testimonial incom-
mensurates does not amount either to a generalizable theoretical statement
or to a narrative monologic sum. Asked what was his concept of the Holo-
caust, Lanzmann answered: "I had no concept; I had obsessions, which is
different.... The obsession of the cold.... The obsession of the first time.
The first shock. The first hour of the Jews in the camp, in Treblinka, the first
minutes. I will always ask the question of the first time.... The obsession
of the last moments, the waiting, the fear. Shoah is a film full of fear, and of
energy too. You cannot do such a film theoretically. Every theoretical at-
tempt I tried was a failure, but these failures were necessary.... You build
such a film in your head, in your heart, in your belly, in your guts, every-
where" (Interview, 22-23). This "everywhere" which, paradoxically, cannot
be totalized and which resists theory as such, this corporeal fragmentation
and enumeration which describes the "building"-or the process of the
generation-of the film while it resists any attempt at conceptualization, is
itself an emblem of the specificity-of the uniqueness-of the mode of
testimony of the film. The film testifies not merely by collecting and by

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 57
gathering fragments of witnessing, but by actively exploding any possible

enclosure-any conceptual frame-that might claim to contain the frag-
ments and to fit them into one coherent whole. Shoah bears witness to the
fragmentation of the testimonies as the radical invalidation of all defini-
tions, of all parameters of reference, of all known answers, in the very midst
of its relentless affirmation-of its materially creative validation-of the
absolute necessity of speaking. The film puts in motion its surprising testi-
mony by performing the historical and contradictory double task of the
breaking of the silence and of the simultaneous shattering of any given
discourse, of the breaking-or the bursting open-of all frames.
II
A Point of Arrival
The film opens in the filmmaker's own mute voice, which addresses the
spectator from within the very writing on the screen that constitutes the
film's silent opening.
Of the four hundred thousand men, women, and children who went
there, only two came out alive: Mordechai Podchlebnik and Simon Sreb-
nik. Srebnik, survivor of the last period, was a boy of thirteen when he
went to Chelmno ...
I found him in Israel and persuaded that one-time boy singer to return
with me to Chelmno. [3-4]
Something is found, here, in Israel, which embodies in effect a point of

arrival in Lanzmann's journey, as well as the beginning-or the starting
point-of the journey of the film. "I found him in Israel" (My emphasis). I
would suggest that the artistic power of the film proceeds, precisely, from
this finding: the event of Shoah is an event of finding.
What is it exactly that Lanzmann, at the outset of the film, finds? The
inaugural event of finding is itself already constituted by a number of im-
plied-and incommensurable-discoveries, which the film sets out to ex-
plore on different levels.
1) The finding, first and foremost, is the finding of Simon Srebnik, the
astonishing winning survivor, "that one-time boy singer" who was literally
executed (shot in the head) and yet miraculously, more than once, fooled
death and survived:
With his ankles in chains, like all his companions, the boy shuffled
through the village of Chelmno each day. That he was kept alive longer
than the others he owed to his extreme agility, which made him the
winner of jumping contests and speed races that the SS organized for their
chained prisoners. And also to his melodious voice; several times a

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week . . . young Srebnik rowed up the Narew, under guard, in a

tomed boat.... He sang Polish folk tunes, and in return the guard taught
him Prussian military songs ...
During the night of 18 January 1945, two days before Soviet troops
arrived, the Nazis killed all the remaining Jews in the "work details" with
a bullet in the head. Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the
bullet missed his vital brain centers. When he came to, he crawled into a
pigsty. A Polish farmer found him there. The boy was treated and healed
by a Soviet Army doctor. A few months later Simon left for Tel-Aviv along
with other survivors of the death camps.
I found him in Israel and persuaded that one-time boy singer to return
with me to Chelmno. [3-4]
2) The finding is thus also, at the same time, the finding of a site of
entering: the discovery of Israel is the finding of a place which enables
Lanzmann, for the first time, to inhabit his own implication in the story of
the Other (Srebnik's story).
3) The finding is the finding of the testimony-of its singular signifi-
cance and functioning as the story of an irreplaceable historical perfor-
mance, a narrative performance which no statement (no report and no de-
scription) can replace and whose unique enactment by the living witness is
itself part of a process of realization of historic truth. Insofar as this realiza-
tion is, by definition, what cannot simply be reported, or narrated, by an-
other, Lanzmann finds in Israel, precisely, that which cannot be reported;
both the general significance and the material, singular concretizations of
the testimony (Srebnik's testimony, as well as others').
4) Finally, the finding is the finding of the film itself: Shoah rethinks, as
well, the meaning and the implications of the advent (of the event) of its own
finding. To find the film is to find a new possibility of sight, a possibility not
just of vision-but of re-vision. Lanzmann finds precisely in the film the
material possibility and the particular potential of seeing again someone
like Srebnik whom, after his shooting, no one was likely or supposed to see
ever again. Even more astonishingly, the finding of the film provides in
general, in history, the possibility of seeing again what in fact was never seen
the first time, what remained originally unseen due to the inherent blinding
nature of the occurrence.
The Return
The film does not stop, however, at the site of its own finding(s), does not
settle at its initial point of arrival, but rather, uses the arrival as a point of
departure for another kind of journey, a return trip which, going back to the
originally unperceived historical scene, takes place as a journey to another

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 59
frame of reference, entering into what Freud calls eine andere Lokalitdt-
into another scale of space and time: "I found him in Israel and persuaded
that one-time boy singer to return with me to Chelmno."
Why is it necessary to return to Chelmno? What is the return about?
Who, or what, returns?
We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage
the ones who find our way
back to this scene'3
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which our names do not appear.'4
The return in Shoah from Israel to Europe (Poland, Chelmno), from the place
of the regeneration and the locus of the gathering of Holocaust survivors
back to the prehistory of their oppression and suppression, back to the pri-
mal scene of their annihilation, is at once a spatial and a temporal return, a
movement back in space and time which, in attempting to revisit and to
repossess the past is also, simultaneously, a movement forward toward the
future.
The return to Chelmno by the boy singer for whom the Chelmno period
ended with a bullet in the head concretizes at the same time, allegorically, a
historical return of the dead. In a way, the returning forty-seven-year-old
Srebnik ("He was then forty-seven years old," [4]), reappearing on the screen
at the site of the annihilation, the improbable survivor who returns from
Israel to the European scene of the crime against him, is himself rather a
ghost of his own youthful performance, a returning, reappearing ghost of the
one-time winner of chained races and of the boy singer who moved the Poles
and charmed the SS, and who, like Scheherazade, succeeded in postponing
his own death indefinitely by telling (singing) songs. Thus, if Srebnik on the
screen at forty-seven, in the scene of Chelmno of today, embodies a return of
the dead, his improbable survival and his even more improbable return (his
ghostly reappearance) concretizes allegorically, in history, a return of the
(missing, dead) witness on the scene of the event-without-a-witness.
Srebnik had, during the Holocaust, witnessed in effect himself, in
13. "The film," Lanzmann says, "is at moments a crime film . . ., [on the mode of] a
criminal investigation .... But it is a Western too. When I returned to the small village of
Grabow, or even in Chelmno.... Okay. I arrive here with a camera, with a crew, but forty
years after ... This creates an incredible ... event, you know? Well ... I am the first
man to come back to the scene of the crime, where the crime has been committed . . . "
(Panel Discussion), 53.
14. Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck (New York and London, W. W. Norton,
1973), 22.

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
Chelmno, a return of the dead-a return to life of the half-asphyxiated

bodies tumbling out of the gas vans. But he witnessed this revival, this
return of the dead, only so as to become a witness to their second murder, to
an even more infernal killing (or re-killing) of the living dead, by a burning of
their bodies while those are still alive and conscious of their burning, con-
scious of their own encounter with the flames by which they are engulfed,
devoured:
When [the gas vans] arrived, the SS said: "Open the doors!" ... The
bodies tumbled right out.... We worked until the whole shipment was
burned.
I remember that once they were still alive. The ovens were full, and
the people lay on the ground. They were all moving, they were coming
back to life, and when they were thrown into the ovens, they were all
conscious. Alive. They could feel the fire bum them. [101-02]
Srebnik's witness dramatizes both a burning consciousness of death, and a

crossing (and recrossing) of the boundary line which separates the living
from the dead, and death from life. But when Srebnik saw all that, he was not
really a (living) witness since, like Bomba,15 like Podchlebnik,16 he too was
already deadened.
When I saw all this, it didn't affect me.... I was only thirteen, and all I'd
ever seen until then were dead bodies. Maybe I didn't understand, maybe
if I'd been older, but the fact is, I didn't. I'd never seen anything else. In the
ghetto in Lodz I saw that as soon as anyone took a step, he fell dead. I
thought that's the way things had to be, that it was normal. I'd walk the
streets of Lodz, maybe one hundred yards, and there'd be two hundred
bodies. They went into the street and they fell, they fell ...
So when I came . .. to Chelmno, I was already . .. I didn't care about
anything. [102-03]
Therefore, it is only now, today that Srebnik can become a witness to the
impact of the falling (and the burning) bodies,17 only today that he can
situate his witnessing in a frame of reference that is not submerged by death
and informed solely by Figuren, by dead bodies. It is therefore only now, in
returning with Lanzmann to Chelmno, that Srebnik in effect is returning
from the dead (from his own deadness) and can become, for the first time, a
15. Bomba: "I tell you something. To have a feeling about that ... it was very hard to
feel anything, because working there day and night between dead people, between bodies,
your feeling disappeared, you were dead. You had no feeling at all." (116).
16. Podchlebnik: "What died in him in Chelmno? Everything died" (6).
17. On the impact of the falling body, in conjunction with an innovative theory of
reference, cf., Cathy Caruth, "The claims of Reference," in Yale Journal of Criticism,
(Fall 1990), vol. 4, No. 1.

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 61
witness to himself, as well as an articulate and for the first time fully con-
scious witness of what he had been witnessing during the War.
The Return of the Witness
Urged by Lanzmann, Srebnik's return from the dead personifies, in this way,
a historically performative and retroactive return of witnessing to the wit-
nessless historical primal scene.
Srebnik recognizes Chelmno.
It's hard to recognize, but it was here. They burned people here .... Yes,
this is the place. No one ever left here again.... It was terrible. No one
can describe it.... And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now.... I
can't believe I'm here. No, I just can't believe it. It was always this peace-
ful here. Always. When they burned two thousand people-Jews-every
day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone went about his
work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now. [6]
Chelmno recognizes Srebnik. The Polish villagers remember well the

child entertainer who "had to . . . [sing when] his heart wept" (6), and they
identify and recognize the pathos and the resonance, the lyrics and the
melody of his repeated singing:
He was thirteen and a half years old. He had a lovely singing voice, and we
heard him.
A little white house

lingers in my memory
Of that little white house
I dream each night. [4]
"When I heard him again," one of the Polish villagers remarks, "my heart
beat faster, because what happened here . . . was a murder. I really relived
what happened" (4).
Lanzmann places Srebnik in the center of a group of villagers before the
church in Chelmno, which, at the time, served as a prison-house for the
deported Jews and as the ultimate waystation on their journey-via gas
vans-to the forest, where the (dead or living) bodies were being burned
away in so-called ovens. The villagers at first seem truly happy to see Sreb-
nik, whom they welcome cheerfully and warmly.
Are they glad to see Srebnik again?
Very. It's a great pleasure. They're glad to see him again because they
know all he's lived through. Seeing him as he is now, they are very pleased.
[95]

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Why does memory linger?, the inquirer would like to know. What motivates
this livelihood of the remembrance?
Why does the whole village remember him?
They remember him well because he walked with chains on his ankles,
and he sang on the river. He was young, he was skinny, he looked ready for
the coffin .... Even the [Polish] lady, when she saw that child, she told the
German: "Let that child go!" He asked her: "Where to?" "To his father
and mother." Looking at the sky, [the German] said: "He'll soon go to
them." [95-96]
When Lanzmann gets, however, to the specific subject of the role of the
Church in the past massacre of the Jews, the Polish testimony becomes
somewhat confused. The evocation of the memories becomes itself un-
knowingly tainted with phantasies.
They remember when the Jews were locked in this church?
Yes, they do ...
The vans came to the church door! They all knew these were gas vans, to
gas people?
Yes, they couldn't help knowing.
They heard screams at night?
The Jews moaned, they were hungry ...

What kind of cries and moans were heard at night?
They called on Jesus and Mary and God, sometimes in German . . .
The Jews called on Jesus, Mary and God!
The presbytery was full of suitcases.
The Jews' suitcases?
Yes, and there was gold.
How does she know there was gold? The procession! We'll stop now. [97-
98]
Like the Nazi teacher's wife (who only "sees things from outside," [82]),
the Poles embody outside witness-present an outside view of the Jewish
destiny, but an outside view which nonetheless believes it can account for
the inside: in trying to account for the inner meaning of the Jewish outcry
from inside the Church, and in accounting for the inner, unseen content of
the robbed possessions of the Jews inside the confiscated suitcases, the Poles
bear in effect false witness. Out of empathy in the first case, with respect to

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 63
the imagined moaning of the Jewish prisoners of the Church, out of hostile
jealousy and of competitive aggression in the second case, with respect to
the imaginary hidden treasures and envied possessions, the Poles distort the
facts and dream their memory, in exemplifying both their utter failure to
imagine Otherness and their simplified negotiation of the inside and the
outside, by merely projecting their inside on the outside. It is to their own
phantasy, to their own (self-) mystification that the Poles bear witness, in
attempting to account for historical reality. Their false witness is itself,
however, an objective illustration and concretization of the radically delu-
sional quality of the event.
The scene is interrupted by the silence-and the sound of bells-of the
procession, a church ritual executed by young girls dressed in white, which
celebrates the birth of the Virgin Mary.
This ritual celebration of the images of youth and the predominance of
white in the religious ceremony connote the innocence of childhood, the
pure integrity and the intactness of virginity, which the ritual is evoking as
the attributes of the Holy Virgin. And yet, the presence of Srebnik at the
scene reminds us of another kind of childhood, and the contiguity of this
rather unvirginal and violated childhood (of the child who had to sing when
his heart wept) with the immaculate virginity here enacted, of itself creates
an almost sacrilegious, and desacralizing resonance, in an astounding, ver-
tiginous and breathtaking cinematic condensation and juxtaposition of dif-
ferent dimensions, of different registers of space and time, of different levels
of existence and experience. The sudden, unexpected superimposition of the
Holocaust in which the church served as a death enclosure (as the ante-
chamber to the gas vans) and of the present Christian celebration of the birth
of the Virgin Mary, brings out a terrible and silent irony, of a church that in
effect embodies a mass tomb, at the same time that it celebrates a birth, of a
site whose history is stained with blood, at the same time that it is the stage
of an oblivious celebration of an ethical virginity and of an intactly white
immaculateness. Very like the whiteness of the snow covering the forests of
Sobibor, Auschwitz, and Treblinka, the whiteness of the ritual itself turns
out to be an image which, quite literally, covers up history, as the embodi-
ment (and as the disembodiment) of a white silence.
Viewing the procession, one recalls Benjamin's discussion of contempo-
rary art and, particularly, of photography and film as vehicles, specifically, of
desacralization, as accelerating agents in the modern cultural process of the
"shattering"-and of the "liquidation"-of the cult-values of tradition:
We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual-
first the magical, then the religious kind... [Now] for the first time in

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world history, mechanical reproduction [photography and film

pates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.... The
total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, [art]
begins to be based on another practice-politics.18
In a surprise translation, Lanzmann's camera converts, in the church scene,

the religious and the artistic into the political. The church scene thus be-
comes the unexpected, sudden cinematographic exhibition of uncanny
depths of political significance within the very ritual of the procession.
The Return of History
After the procession, Lanzmann-who does not forget-returns to the in-

terrupted subject of the inside of the Jewish suitcases.
The lady said before that the Jews' suitcases were dumped in the house
opposite [the church]. What was in this baggage?
Pots with false bottoms.
What was in the false bottoms?
Valuables, objects of value. They also had gold in their clothes ...
Why do they think all this happened to the Jews?
Because they were the richest! Many Poles were also exterminated. Even
Priests. [99]
Lanzmann's tour de force as interviewer is to elicit from the witness, as in

this case, a testimony which is inadvertently no longer in the control or the
possession of its speaker. As a solicitor and an assembler of the testimonies,
in his function as a questioner but mainly, in his function as a listener (as the
bearer of a narrative of listening), Lanzmann's performance is to elicit testi-
mony which exceeds the testifier's own awareness, to bring forth a complex-
ity of truth which, paradoxically, is not available as such to the very speaker
who pronounces it. As a listener, Lanzmann endows the interlocutor with
speech. It is in this way that he helps both the survivors and the perpetrators
to overcome their (very different kind of) silence. Facing Lanzmann, the
Polish villagers, in turn, exhibit feelings that would normally be hidden. But
the silent interviewer and the silent camera urge us not simply to see the
testimony, but to see through it: to see-throughout the testimony-the
deception and the self-deception which it unwittingly displays, and to
which it unintentionally testifies.
18. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
op.cit., 223-24.

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 65
Why do they think all this happened to the Jews?
Because they were the richest! Many Poles were also exterminated. Even
Priests.
In response to Lanzmann's question, Mr. Kantorowski, the player of the

organ and the singer of the church, finds his way out of the crowd which
surrounds Srebnik and, pushing himself in front of the camera, overshadows
Srebnik and eclipses him:
Mr. Kantorowski will tell us what a friend told him. It happened in Mynd-
jewyce, near Warsaw.
Go on.
The Jews there were gathered in a square. The rabbi asked an SS man:
"Can I talk to them?" The SS man said yes. So the rabbi said that around
two thousands years ago the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to
death. And when they did that, they cried out: "Let his blood fall on our
heads and on our sons' heads." Then the rabbi told them: "Perhaps the
time has come for that, so let us do nothing, let us go, let us do as we're
asked."
He thinks the Jews expiated the death of Christ?
He doesn't think so, or even that Christ sought revenge. The rabbi said it.
It was God's will, that's all.'9 [99-100]
Through the voice of the church singer which seems to take on the
authority to speak for the whole group, and through the mythic mediation
19. On the generalizable historical significance of this passage, cf., Peter Canning's
remarkable analysis in "Jesus Christ, Holocaust: Fabulation of the Jews in Christian and
Nazi History": "The compulsive ritual of accusing the Jews of murder (or betrayal, or well-
poisoning, or desecration of the Host) and attacking them is inscribed with bodies in
history; it is not prescribed but only implicitly suggested in the New Testament, which
preaches love and forgiveness. In the Gospel it is 'the Jews' who call down the wrath of God
on themselves: 'Let his blood be on us and on our children!' (Mt. 27:25) Reciting this text,
the Polish villagers whom Claude Lanzmann interviewed . .. excuse themselves, the
Germans and God-all are absolved of responsibility for the Holocaust. Once again, 'the
Jews brought it on themselves'. The Crucifixion was their crime. The Holocaust was the
punishment which they called down on their own heads, and on their children.
The biblical myth functions as an attractor, not only of other narratives but of ongoing
events which it assimilates. What I must risk calling the Holo-myth of Christianity-
divine incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection-is not the one source or cause of the Holo-
caust, it 'attracted' other causal factors to it (the war, inflation, political-ideological crisis,
socioeconomic convulsions), absorbed them and overdetermined their resolution....
Those other critical factors, and their resolution in a fascist syncretism, were not alone
capable of turning antisemitism into systematic mass murder. Nazism reactivated the
cliche it had inherited from the Christian Holomyth and its reenactment in the event of
ritual murder, but transformed it into a regular, mechanized destruction process. (171-72).
In Copyright 1, Fin de sikcle 2000, (Fall 1987).

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both of archetypal stereotypes of anti-Semitism and of the Christian story of

the Crucifixion, the Poles endow the Holocaust with a strange comprehen-
sibility and with a facile and exhaustive compatibility with knowledge: "It
was God's will, that's all.... That's all. Now you know!" (100). It is by
dehistoricizing the events of recent history, and by subsuming them under
the prophetic knowledge of the Scriptures, that the Poles are literally wash-
ing their hands of the historical extermination of the Jews:
So Pilate washed his hands and said: "Christ is innocent," and he sent
Barabas. But the Jews cried out: "Let his blood fall on our heads!"
That's all. Now you know. [1001
Thus the Poles misrepresent, once more, the Jews from the inside, and the
objective nature of the Jewish destiny and slip, once more, across the bound-
ary line between reality and phantasy; they unwittingly begin to dream
reality and to hallucinate their memory. In testifying to a murder which
they go so far as to call suicide, the Poles bear once again false witness both
to the history of Nazism and to the history of the Jews.
But once again, this misrepresentation (this false witness) is itself at-
tributed precisely to the Jews and represented as their inside story. Like the
Nazis, who make the Jews pay for their own death traffic and participate-
through "work details"-in the management of their own slaughter, the
Poles pretend to have the Jews provide their own interpretation of their
history and their own explanation of their murder. Kantorowski thus claims
that his own mythic account is in fact the Jews' own version of the
Holocaust.
He thinks the Jews expiated the death of Christ?
He doesn't think so, or even that Christ sought revenge. The rabbi said it.
It was God's will, that's all. [1001
In forging, so to speak, the rabbi's signature so as to punctuate his own

false witness and to authorize his own false testimony, Kantorowski dis-
avows responsibility for his own discourse. In opposition to the act of sign-
ing and of saying "I" by which the authentic witnesses assume at once their
discourse, their speech act and their responsibility toward history ("I found
him in Israel and persuaded him to return . . . ," says Lanzmann; "I under-
stand your role, I am here," says Karski; "I can't believe I'm here," says
Srebnik), Kantorowski's testimony is destined to remain unsigned.
Mr. Kantorowski, after all, does indeed in some ways remain silent. Not
only because, as he claims, it is the words of the dead rabbi that speak for
him. But because what speaks through him (in such a way as to account for
his role during the Holocaust) is, on the one hand, the (historic) silence of the

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 67
Church and, on the other hand, the silence of all given frames of explana-
tion, the non-speech of all preconceived interpretive schemes, which dis-
pose of the event-and of the bodies-by reference to some other frame. The
collapse of the materiality of history and the seduction of a fable, the reduc-
tion of a threatening and incomprehensible event to a reassuring mythic,
totalizing unity of explanation, is in effect what all interpretive schemes
tend to do. Mr. Kantorowski's satisfied and vacuous interpretation stands,
however, for the failure of all ready-made cultural discourses both to account
for-and to bear witness to-the Holocaust.
The film's strategy is not to challenge the false witness, but to make the
silence speak from within and from around the false witness: the silence
within each of the testimonies; the silence between various silences and
various testimonies; the irremediable silence of the dead; the irremediable
silence of the natural landscapes; the silence of the church procession; the
silence of the ready-made cultural discourses pretending to account for the
Holocaust; and above all, in the center of the film, Srebnik's silence in front
of the church, in the middle of the talkative, delirious, self-complacent
Polish crowd. The church scene is an astonishing emblem of the multi-
plicity and the complexity of layers which unfold between this central si-
lence and the various speeches which proceed from it and encroach upon it.
Like a hall of mirrors, the church scene is a hall of silences infinitely reso-
nant with one another. "There are many harmonies," says Lanzmann,
"many concordances in the film. I knew very quickly that the film would be
built in a circular way, with a stillness at the center, like the eye of a
hurricane."220
The silence reenacts the event of silence. "It was always this peaceful
here," Srebnik had said, "Always. When they burned two thousand people-
Jews-every day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone went
about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now" (6).
Indeed, the church scene is not just a hall (a mirroring) of silences, but the
very stage of the performance-of the execution and the repetition-of an
act of silencing. Although Srebnik here personifies the return of the wit-
ness-the return of witnessing into the very scene of the event-without-a-
witness, what the church scene puts into effect and plays out, not in memo-
ry but in actual fact (and act), is how the real witness, in returning back to
history and life, is once again reduced to silence, struck dead by the crowd.
The scene is even more complex, since what the crowd points out as the
20. Quoted in "A Monument Against Forgetting," The Boston Globe 3 November
1985, 3. Cf., Lanzmann's remarks in his interview with Roger Rosenblatt, for channel 13
(Public Television WNET, USA 1987): "When one deals with the destruction of the Jews,
one has to talk and to be silent at the same moment.... I think there is more silence in
Shoah than words."

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Jews' crime and as the reason for the Holocaust is the Crucifixion, or the
Jews' murder of Christ. But the Polish villagers are not aware that they
themselves are in turn acting out precisely such a ritual murder story;2'
they are unaware of the precise ways in which they themselves are actually
enacting both the Crucifixion and the Holocaust in annihilating Srebnik, in
killing once again the witness whom they totally dispose of, and forget.
What Kantorowski's testimony chooses to deny-his signature, his
voice, the Poles' responsibility-it thus performs, reenacts before our eyes.
What is not available in words, what is denied, what cannot and what will
not be remembered or articulated, nonetheless gets realized. What takes
place in the film, what materially and unexpectedly occurs and what returns
like a ghost is reference itself, the very object-and the very content-of
historical erasure.
I would suggest that what the film shows us here, in action, is the very
process of the re-forgetting of the Holocaust, in the repeated murder of the
witness and in the renewed reduction of the witnessing to silence. The film
makes the testimony happen-happen inadvertently as a second Holo-
caust. The silent Srebnik in the middle of this picture-with his beautifully
dignified and tragic mute smile, and with his mutely speaking face (a face
signed by his silence) is in effect a ghost: a ghost which, as such, is essen-
tially not contemporaneous; contemporaneous, in reality, neither with the
voices of the crowd which surrounds him, nor even with himself-with his
own muted voice. What the church scene dramatizes is the only possible
encounter with the Holocaust, in the only possible form of a missed
encounter.22
I would suggest precisely that the film is about the essence of this missed
contemporaneity between Srebnik and the semicircle which surrounds
him, between Srebnik's voice and his own silence, and fundamentally, be-
tween the Holocaust experience and the witness of the Holocaust
experience.
Shoah addresses the spectator with a challenge. When we are made to
witness this reenactment of the murder of the witness, this second Holo-
caust that appears spontaneously before the camera and on the screen, can
we in our turn become contemporaneous with the meaning and with the
significance of that enactment? Can we become contemporaneous with the
21. For an acute description of the functioning of the "ritual murder story" in history,
cf., again, Peter Canning, "Jesus Christ, Holocaust: Fabulation of the Jews in Christian and
Nazi History" (op.cit., 170-73).
22. Cf., Lacan's conception of "the Real" as a "missed encounter" and as "what re-
turns to the same place." Le S6minaire, livre XI, Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la
psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil: 1973); trans. Alan Sheridan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton: 1978) chapters 3-5.

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 69
shock, with the displacement, with the disorientation process that is trig-
gered by such testimonial reenactment? Can we, in other words, assume in
earnest, not the finite task of making sense out of the Holocaust, but the
infinite task of encountering Shoah?
III
The Return of the Song
If the church scene is thus punctuated, signed by Srebnik's silence, where is

Srebnik's testimony, here lost, to be found? The film includes, indeed, an
element through which the very silencing of Srebnik's voice can be some-
how reversed, through which the very loss of Srebnik's testimony can be
somehow recovered, or at least resist its own forgetting and itself be reen-
countered, in the repetition of the melody and in the return of Srebnik's
"melodious voice" in his reiterated singing. In spite of his own silencing and
of his silence, the return of the witness undertaken by the film nonetheless
persists, takes over, and survives in the return of the song. In the absence-
and the failure-of the contemporaneity between the Holocaust and its own
witness, the song nevertheless creates a different kind of contemporaneity
between the voice and the historical (revisited) site of the voice, between the
song and the place at which the song is (and was) heard, between the voice
and the place to which, at the beginning of the film, the song in fact gives
voice:
... it was here.... Yes, this is the place. [51
The song creates, indeed, an unexpected contemporaneity between its reit-

erated resonance and the very silence of the place.
It was always this peaceful here. Always.... It was silent. Peaceful. Just
as it is now. [61
At the same time, this contemporaneity between present and past, between
the singing voice and the silent place, remains entirely incomprehensible to,
and thus noncontemporaneous with, the witness.
No one can understand it. Even I, here, now.... I can't believe I'm here.
No, I just can't believe it. [6]
It is in hovering between the ways in which it is at once contempo-

raneous with the place and noncontemporaneous with the witness (with the
singer), that the song returns to the inconceivable historical site of its own
singing, and that the harmonies and the disharmonies of this return of the
song provide an entrance, or a threshold, to the film. It is the song which is

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the first to testify, the first to speak after the voiceless opening of
rator. The song encroaches on-and breaks-at once the silence of the land-
scape and the muteness of the writing on the screen. Through Srebnik's
voice, the film introduces us into the soothing notes and the nostalgic lyrics
of a Polish folk tune which itself, however, dreams about, and yearns for,
another place.

lingers in my memory
each night I dream. [4]
The White House
Srebnik's voice inhabits his own song. But does anyone inhabit the "white
house" of which he sings? Who can enter the white house? Does the "I" of
Srebnik (the "I" who "can't believe he's here") inhabit what his voice is so
dreamily and yearningly evoking? What in fact is there inside the "little
white house"? What is there beyond the threshold, behind the whiteness of
the house?
The longing for the white house recalls the white virginity of the proces-
sion. The white house seems as safe, as wholesome, as immaculate in its
invitation and its promise, as the white procession of the youthful virgins.
And yet, we know that it is not only virginity, but an aberrant violation of
lives and of the innocence of childhood, that is implied ironically and si-
lently by the juxtaposition of the church scene, and by the whiteness of the
ritual ceremony.
Virginity is what is not written upon. The white is, on the one hand, the
color of the virgin page before the writing-the white house sung before the
writing of the film-but also, on the other hand, the very color of erasure.23
For the viewer who has seen the film, and who has come full circle-like the
film, like the song-to start again at the beginning, the "white house"
brings to mind not just the snow that, whitely covering the peaceful mead-
ows, covers up the emptied graves from which the dead bodies were disin-
terred so as to be reduced to ashes, burned away, but similarly in a different
sense, the later image of white houses in the Polish village of Wladowa, a
village once inhabited by Jews but whose Jewish houses have been since
vacated (like the graves under the snow) by their original inhabitants (oblite-
rated in extermination camps) and are now occupied, owned and inhabited
23. White is thus, for instance, the color of the blank page of forgetfulness on which
the ex-Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto, Dr. Grassler, claims to "take notes" to
"refresh" the total blankness of his memory about his Nazi past.

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 71
by Poles. The little white house yearned for thus turns out to be itself,
ironically enough, a ghost house; a ghost house that belongs at once to
dreaming ("Of that little white house / Each night I dream") and to memory
("A little white house / lingers in my memory").
Calling us into a dream, the white house, paradoxically, will also force us
to wake up. Plunged into the dreamy beauty of the landscape and into the
dreamy yearning of the melody of the white house, the spectator as a wit-
ness-like the witnesses of history-has to literally wake up to a reality
that is undreamt of, wake up, that is, into the unthinkable realization that
what he is witnessing is not simply a dream. We will be called upon to see
the film-and to view perception-critically, to discriminate reality from
dream, in spite of the confusing mingling of memory and dream, in spite of
the deceptive quality of what is given to direct perception. On the borderline
between dreaming and memory, the song-as a concrete, material residue of
history-is that "small element of reality that is evidence that we are not
dreaming."24 The residue of an implicit violence (the unquantifiable ran-
som with which Srebnik has to keep buying his life) which at the same time
is luringly soothing, the song incorporates the real both in its literal, and yet
also, in its deceptive quality. As a purveyor of the real, the song invites us, at
the threshold of the film, to cross over from the landscape and the white
house into an encounter (a collision) with the actuality of history. It melo-
diously invites us to a crossing of the distance between art and reference.
And no one can suspect that this melodious invitation was in history, and is
now in the film, an invitation to the shock of an awakening; of an awakening
to a reality whose scrutiny requires a degree of vigilance, of wakefulness and
of alertness such that it exceeds perhaps human capacity. No one can sus-
pect that what awaits us from behind the white house is not simply a
nightmare, but the urgency of waking up into a history and a reality with
respect to which we are not and perhaps cannot be, fully and sufficiently
awake.
The place from which the song invokes us at the threshold of the film and
to which it points, at the same time as the locus of the real and as the origin
of singing, designates, I would suggest, the place of art within the film: the
song becomes itself a metaphor for the whole film which is inaugurated by
its melody, and which registers the impact and the resonance of its returns.
Opened by the song, the film does not simply show itself, it calls us. It calls
us through the singing it enacts. It is asking us to listen to, and hear, not just
the meaning of the words but the complex significance of their return, and
the clashing echoes of their melody and of their context. The film calls us
24. As Lacan puts it in an altogether different context. Cf., "Tuch6 and Automaton"
(Chapter 5:2), in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, op.cit., 60.

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
into hearing both this clash and its own silence. It calls us into what it
cannot show, but what it nonetheless can point to. The song inaugurates
this calling and this act of pointing.
Yes, this is the place ...
Shoah begins with the apparent innocence of singing, only to thrust us more
profoundly and astonishingly into the discrepancy between the lyrics and
their context, only to point us more sharply toward the ambiguity that lies
behind that innocence.

lingers in my memory ... [41
repeats sweetly the song. But another voice proceeds to speak over the reso-
nance of the song:
When I heard him again, my heart beat faster, because what happened
here . . . was a murder. [51
Thus testifies, in Polish, the first voice-over-whose origin is not immedi-

ately identifiable, locatable-in the words of one of the bystanders, one of
the Polish witnesses of history.
Then Srebnik's face in a close-up-the face that carries both the light-
ness, the enticing sweetness of the song and the weight, the outrage and the
cruelty, of history-twists the silence of its pain into a smile and gazes
vacantly, incredibly, incredulously through survival, death, and time,
through piles of vanished burned bodies into the green trees, the brown
earth, and the perspective of the blue horizon:
Yes, this is the place.... No one ever left here again. [51
Darum, Warum
The contradictions riddling the very beauty of the first song are aggravated,
underscored, and sharpened by the appearance of the second song which,
narratively, is a singing replica-or a melodious counterpart-to the first
song but which, rhetorically and musically, sets up a dissonance and a sharp
contrast with the harmonies and with the innocence of the initial singing
invitation.
He sang Polish folk tunes, and in return the guard taught him
Prussian military songs. [3]
You, girls, don't you cry,
don't be so sad, for the dear summer is nearing ...
and with it I'll return.

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SHOSHANA FELMAN 73
A mug of red wine, a piece of roast

is what the girls give their soldiers.
Therefore.-Why? Therefore.-Why?
[Darum. -Warum?, Darum.-Warum?]
[Therefore-Wherefore?, Therefore- Wherefore?]
When the soldiers march through the town,

the girls open their doors and windows.
Therefore. Why? Therefore. Why?

Only because of this [sound]
Tschindarrassa: Bum! [Cymbals, Drum]. [6125
The two songs sung by Srebnik are contrasted and opposed in many ways.
Although they are both folk tunes and are both-by implication or ex-
plicitly-about returns, the dialogue between the tune in Polish and its
counterpart in German is more than a mere dialogue of foreign tongues.
Whereas the song about the white house concretizes a dream of arrival-an
implicit dream of reaching, the Prussian military song is marked by a depar-
ture and a passage and is a ritual, not of arriving or of coming to inhabit, but
of leaving. The act of leaving, at the same time, is disguised, denied, and
masked by a discursive rhetoric of coming back and by a promise of return-
ing. Apparently, the Prussian song is as sweet in its yearning and as harmless
as the Polish song. And yet, the elements of lure on the one hand, and on the
other hand of a subordinating force become (almost) apparent. By virtue of
its function as a military march, and through the forceful beats of its percus-
sions ("Tschindarrassa, Bum!"; "Darum, Warum"), the Prussian song26 in-
corporates the latent rhythms of artillery and bombs. Hinting at both the
malignancy of the deception and the violence to come, the song implicitly
includes the military connotations-and the metaphoric, tactile con-
tiguity-of war, of bloodshed ("a mug of red wine"), of brutality ("a piece of
roast"), and of physical invasion ("the girls open their doors and windows").
The whole song, with the beats of its repeated rhymes between its questions
and its answers ("Darum, Warum"), and with its metaphoric female gifts of
drinking, eating, and of opening ("the girls open their doors and windows"),
is a figure for a sexual interplay; but the interplay is one of conquest and of
transitory military and sexual occupation. It is as though the enigma of the
white house-the enigma of a space that is inviolate and intimate, sung in
the first song-were, so to speak, invaded, cancelled out, forced open by the
25. Translation modified and expanded, transcribing all the German lyrics that are
clearly audible in the film.
26. In my analysis of the Prussian song, I owe both gratitude and inspiration to Dr.
Ernst Prelinger, who has provided me with a sophisticated explanation of the original
German lyrics of the song, an explanation which informs my discussion of it here.

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
second. No wonder that, behind the lure of its enticing surface, the c
the German song (which primarily plays out a sexual tease) turns out to be
itself a sadistic tool by which the singing child becomes a hostage to the
Germans, an instrument of torment and abuse through which young Sreb-
nik is reduced by his adult spectators to a chained, dancing marionette
transformed-playfully and cruelly-into a singing toy.
The Word of Our Commander
It is in this way that the shift between the Polish song and its German reply
("and in return, the guard taught him Prussian military songs") is accom-
plished at the threshold of the film, as a subtle-and yet ominous-transac-
tion, an invisible-yet audible-exchange between the music of the victim
and the music of (and from the point of view of) the perverse oppressor.
Another song which, later in the film, will mark Nazi perversity and
Nazi violence much more explicitly and in which the victim, equally, will
have to sing the point of view of the oppressor, is the song whose singers are
today entirely extinguished and to which only the ex-Nazi Suchomel is able
to bear witness, by singing it to Lanzmann. In much the same way as the
singers of the song sang it in a voice that was not theirs-the voice of
the oppressor-Suchomel, inversely, now reproduces the forced singing of
the victims in the alien and jaunty voice of the ex-Nazi. It is thus that
Suchomel repeats to Lanzmann the Treblinka hymn that the camp pris-
oners were forced to sing, for the guard's pleasure:
Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous, at the world,

the squads march to work.
All that matters to us now is Treblinka.
It is our destiny.
That's why we've become one with Treblinka
in no time at all.
We know only the word of our commander,
we know only obedience and duty,
we want to serve, to go on serving,
until a little luck ends it all. Hurray!
"Once more, but louder," Lanzmann requests, in response to Suchomel's

completed singing. Suchomel obliges Lanzmann. "We're laughing about it,"
he says with a mixture of complicity and condescension, "but it's so sad."
No one is laughing.
Don't be sore at me. You want history-I'm giving you history. Franz
wrote the words. The melody comes from Buchenwald. Camp Buchen-
wald, where Franz was a guard. New Jews who arrived in the morning,

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 75
new "worker Jews," were taught the song. And by evening they had to be
able to sing along with it.
Sing it again.
All right.
It's very important. But loud!
Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous, at the world,

the squads march to work.
All that matters to us now is Treblinka.
It is our destiny.
That's why we've become one with Treblinka
in no time at all.
We know only the word of our Commander,
we know only obedience and duty,
we want to serve, to go on serving,
until a little luck ends it all. Hurray! [105-06]
Having thus repeated once again the song, Suchomel, proud and bemused at
his own memory, concludes:
Satisfied? That's unique. No Jew knows that today! [106]
The self-complacency, the eagerness of Suchomel in obliging Lanzmann

suggests that he, too, in effect enjoys and takes implicitly sadistic pleasure
in the act of his own singing, in his own staged, imitative musical perfor-
mance and in the inconceivable discrepancy of his own representation of the
victims. "You want history-I'm giving you history." Can history be given?
How does Suchomel give history, and what does the act of "giving"-the gift
of reality-here mean? Ironically enough, the song is literally history inso-
far as it conveys this historical discrepancy and this sadistic pleasure, at the
same time that it speaks through the historical extinction of the message
and the objectification of the voice. As a literal residue of the real, the song is
history to the extent that it inscribes within itself, precisely, this historical
discrepancy, this incommensurability between the voice of its sadistic au-
thor and the voice of its tormented singers. What is historically "unique"
about the song is the fact that it is a Nazi-authored Jewish song that "no Jew
knows today." "You want history-I'm giving you history." In the very out-
rage of its singing doubly, at two different moments (in the camp and in the
film, by the victims and by Suchomel) in a voice that is not, and cannot
become, its own, the song is, so to speak, the opposite of a signed testimony,
an antitestimony that consists, once more, in the absence and in the very
forging of its Jewish signature. Like Mr. Kantorowski's mythical account of
the Holocaust, the Nazi narrative of the Jews' victimization (both in the
camp song and in Suchomel's revoicing of it) is a speech act that can neither

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
own its meaning nor possess itself as testimony. "You want history; I'm
giving you history." As the extinction of the subject of the signature and as
the objectification of the victim's voice, "history" presents itself as anti-
testimony. But the film restitutes to history-and to the song-its testi-
monial function. Paradoxically enough, it is from the very evidence of its
enactment as an antitestimony that the song derives the testimonial power
of its repetition, and the historic eloquence of its unlikely and ghostly re-
turn: "Sing it again.... It's very important. But loud!"
The Quest of the Refrain, or the Imperative to Sing
I would suggest that the imperative, "Sing it again," is the performative

imperative that artistically creates the film and that governs both its struc-
ture and its ethical and epistemological endeavor: to make truth happen as a
testimony through the haunting repetition of an ill-understood melody; to
make the referent come back, paradoxically, as something heretofore un-
seen by history; to reveal the real as the impact of a literality that history
cannot assimilate or integrate as knowledge, but that it keeps encountering
in the return of the song.
"Our memory," writes Valery, "repeats to us what we haven't under-
stood. Repetition is addressed to incomprehension."27 We "sing again"
what we cannot know, what we have not integrated and what, consequently,
we can neither fully master nor completely understand. In Shoah, the song
stands for the activation of the memory of the whole film, a memory that no
one can possess, and whose process of collecting and of recollecting is con-
stantly torn apart between the pull, the pressure and the will of the words
and the different, independent pull of the melody, which has its own mo-
mentum and its own compulsion to repeat but which does not know what in
fact it is repeating.
The whole film, which ends only to begin again with the return of the
song, testifies to history like a haunting and interminable refrain.28 The
function of the refrain-which is itself archaically referred to as "the burden
of the song"-like the burden of the vocal echo which, as though mechan-
ically, returns in the interviewer's voice the last words of the discourse of his
interlocutors, is to create a difference through the repetition, to return a
question out of something that appears to be an answer: Darum, Warum
("Therefore.-Why?") The echo does not simply reproduce what seems to
27. Valery, "Commentaire de Charmes," in Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, bibliotheque

de la Pl6iade: 1957), vol. 1, 1510; my translation.
28. "Shoah," says Lanzmann, "had to be built like a musical piece, where a theme
appears at a lower level, disappears, comes back at a higher level or in full force, disappears,
and so on. It was the only way to keep several parameters together" (Panel Discussion, 44).

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 77
be its motivation, but rather puts it into question. Where there had seemed
to be a rationale, a closure and a limit, the refrainlike repetition opens up a
vacuum, a crevice and, through it, the undefined space of an open question.
The flames reached to the sky.

To the sky... [6]
The Singer's Voice
What gives this refrainlike structure of the film-the repetition of the song
and of its burden, the return of the resonance of the refrain-the power not
merely to move us but to strike and to surprise us, the power each time to
astonish us and have an impact upon us as though for the first time? When
Srebnik sings the two songs of the opening, and when the echo of the second
song puts into question the apparent harmony and innocence of the first
tune, what constitutes the power of the singing and the strength-the elo-
quence-of Srebnik's testimony through it, is neither the lyrics nor even the
music (someone else's music), but the uniqueness of the singing voice. The
uniqueness of the voice restores the signature to the repeated melody and to
the cited lyrics, and transforms them from antitestimony into a compelling
and unequalled testimony. What makes the power of the testimony in the
film and what constitutes in general the impact of the film is not the words
but the equivocal, puzzling relation between words and voice, the interac-
tion, that is, between words, voice, rhythm, melody, images, writing, and
silence. Each testimony speaks to us beyond its words, beyond its melody,
like the unique performance of a singing, and each song, in its repetitions,
participates in the searching refrain and recapitulates the musical quest of
the whole film. Like Lanzmann, Srebnik facing an unspeakable event at
thirteen and a half, and again at the beginning of the film-as a singer who
remained alive because of his "melodious voice"-is in turn a sort of artist:
an artist who has lost his words but who has not lost the uniqueness of the
singing voice and its capacity for signature. What is otherwise untestifiable
is thus transmitted by the signature of the voice. The film as a visual medi-
um hinges, paradoxically, not so much on the self-evidence of sight as on the
visibility it renders to the voice, and on the invisibility it renders tangible, of
silence. The film speaks in a multiplicity of voices that, like Srebnik's, all
transmit beyond what they can say in words. In much the same way as the
singing crematorium witnessed and evoked by Philip Muller, the film reso-
nates like a whole chorus of testimonies and of voices that, within the
framework of the film, sing together:
The violence climaxed when they tried to force the people to undress. A
few obeyed, only a handful. Most of them refused to follow the order.
Suddenly, like a chorus, they all began to sing. The whole "undressing

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
room" rang with the Czech national anthem, and the Hatikvah. That
moved me terribly . . .
That was happening to my countrymen, and I realized that my life had
become meaningless. Why go on living? For what? So I went into the gas
chamber with them, resolved to die. With them. Suddenly, some who
recognized me came up to me.... A small group of women approached.
They looked at me and said, right there in the gas chamber . . . "So you
want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives.
That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness
to . . . the injustice done to us." [164-65]
The singing of the anthem in the crematorium signifies a common recogni-

tion, by the singers, of the perversity of the deception to which they had been
all along exposed, a recognition, therefore, and a facing, of the truth of their
imminent death. The singing, in this way, conveys a repossession of their
lost truth by the dying singers, an ultimate rejection of their Nazi-instigated
self-deception and a deliberately chosen, conscious witnessing of their own
death. It is noteworthy that this is the only moment in the film in which a
community of witnessing is created physically and mentally, against all
odds. Erasing its own witnesses and inhibiting its own eyewitnessing, the
historical occurrence of the Holocaust, as we have seen, precluded by its
very structure any such community of witnessing.29 But this is what the
film tries precisely to create in resonating with the singing chorus of the
dying crematorium, whose many signatures and many voices are today ex-
tinguished and reduced to silence. The film, as a chorus of performances and
testimonies, does create, within the framework of its structure, a commu-
nality of singing, an odd community of testimonial incommensurates
which, held together, have an overwhelming testimonial impact.
The Disappearance of the Chorus
Muller wishes to die so as to belong, to be part of this community, to join th

singing. But the dying singers have it as their last wish to exclude him from
their common death, so that he can be not an extinguished witness like
them, but a living witness to their dying and their singing. The singing
challenges and dares the Nazis. The act of singing and of bearing witness
embodies resistance. But for Muller, the resistance cannot mean giving up
life; it has to mean giving up death. Resistance spells the abdication of
suicidal death and the endurance of survival as itself a form of resistance and
of testimony. Resistance signifies the price of the historical endurance-in
29. See above, in part I, the chapter entitled "The Occurrence as Unwitnessed," cf., p.
45.

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 79
oneself-of an actual return of the witness. As a returning delegate of the

dead witnesses, Muller's act of testifying and his testimonial afterlife can no
longer be, however, part of a living community. Facing his singing com-
patriots in the crematorium, Muller understands that the gift of witness
they request from him, and his responsive, mute commitment to bear wit-
ness, leave him no choice but to stand alone, to step outside of the commu-
nity30 as well as of shared cultural frames of reference, outside of the support
of any shared perception. The holding and the inner strength of the common
singing empowers Miller and allows him to escape and to survive. But his
survival cannot simply be encompassed by a common song, and his afterlife
of bearing witness can no longer lose itself in a choral hymn. If his living
voice is to speak for the dead, it has to carry through and to transmit, pre-
cisely, the cessation of the common singing, the signature of the endurance,
the peculiarity and the uniqueness of a voice doomed to remain alone, a
voice that has returned-and that speaks-from beyond the threshold of the
crematorium.
Miller, Srebnik, and the others, spokesmen for the dead, living voices of
returning witnesses that have seen their own death-and the death of their
own people-face to face, address us in the film both from inside life and
from beyond the grave and carry on, with the aloneness of the testifying
voice, the mission of the singing from within the burning.
Suddenly, from the part of the camp called the death camp, flames shot
up. Very high. In a flash, the whole countryside, the whole camp, seemed
ablaze. And suddenly one of us stood up. We knew . .. he'd been an opera
singer in Warsaw.... His name was Salve, and facing that curtain of fire,
he began chanting a song I didn't know:
My God, my God,
Why has Thou forsaken us?
We have been thrust into the fire before

but we have never denied the Holy Law.
He sang in Yiddish, while behind him blazed the pyres on which they
had begun then, in November 1942, to bum the bodies in Treblinka....
30. Cf., Rudolph Vrba's decision to escape, after the suicide of Freddy Hirsch that
aborts the Resistance plan for the uprising of the Czech family camp: "It was quite clear to
me then that the Resistance in the camp is not geared for an uprising but for survival of the
members of the Resistance. I then decided to act . . . [by] leaving the community, for
which I [was] coresponsible at the time. The decision to escape, in spite of the policy of th
Resistance movement at the time, was formed immediately ... As far as I am concerned, I
think that if I successfully manage to break out from the camp and bring the information
to the right place at the right time, that this might be a help .... Not to delay anything but
to escape as soon as possible to inform the world" (195-96).

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
We knew that night that the dead would no longer be buried, they'd be
burned. [14]
A Winning Song
The entire film is a singing from within the burning of a knowledge: "We
knew that night. . .". The knowledge of the burning is the knowledge-and
the burning-of the singing. At the beginning of the film, Srebnik's song
incorporates the burned bodies with whose death and with whose burning it
still resonates. In singing, on the one hand, as he has been taught, about the
girls "opening their doors" to soldiers who pass by, in the very way that he
himself, uncannily, is commanded by the SS to "open the doors" of the
arriving gas vans so as to receive-and to unload-the bodies to be burned;
in singing also, on the other hand, his original melodious yearning for the
sweetness of the white house, Srebnik's singing and his singular, compelling
voice, is the bearer of a knowledge-and a vision-not just of the ashes but
of the living burning, of the burning of the living-a vision of the half-
asphyxiated bodies coming back to life only to feel the fire and to witness,
conscious, their encounter with, and their consumption by, the flames:
When [the gas vans] arrived, the SS said: "Open the doors!" We opened
them. The bodies tumbled right out.... We worked until the whole
shipment was burned ...
I remember that once they were still alive. The ovens were full, and
the people lay on the ground. They were all moving, they were coming
back to life, and when they were thrown into the ovens, they were all
conscious. Alive. They could feel the fire bum them ...
When I saw all this, it didn't affect me. I was only thirteen, and all I'd
ever seen until then were dead bodies. [101-02]
The deadening of the live witness, the burn of the silence of the thirteen-
year-old child who is "not affected," passes on into his singing. The unique
expression of the voice and of the singing both expresses and covers the
silence, in much the same way as the unique expression of the face-of
Srebnik's face at the opening of the film-both covers and expresses the
deliberate and striking absence of dead bodies from Shoah's screen. It is
indeed the living body and the living face of the returning witness that, in
Shoah, becomes a speaking figure for the stillness and the muteness of the
bodies, a figure for, precisely, the Figuren. What the film does with the
Figuren is to restore their muteness to the singing of the artist-child, to
revitalize them by exploring death through life, and by endowing the invis-
ibility of their abstraction with the uniqueness of a face, a voice, a melody, a
song. The song is one that has won life for Srebnik, a life-winning song

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC
SHOSHANA FELMAN 81
which, framed within the film and participating in the searching repetition
of its refrain, wins for us a heightened consciousness and an increased
awareness, by giving us the measure of an understanding that is not trans-
mittable without it. As a fragment of reality and as a crossroad between art
and history, the song-like the whole film-enfolds what is in history un-
testifiable and embodies, at the same time, what in art captures reality and
enables witnessing. In much the same way as the testimony, the song ex-
emplifies the power of the film to address, and hauntingly demands a hear-
ing. Like Muller coming back to testify and speak-to claim an audience-
from beyond the threshold of the crematorium, Srebnik, though traversed
by a bullet that has missed his vital brain centers by pure chance, reappears
from behind the threshold of the white house to sing again his winning song:
a song that, once again, wins life and, like the film, leaves us-through the
very way it wins us-both empowered, and condemned to, hearing.
When I heard him again, my heart beat faster, because what happened
here ... was a murder. [51
He was thirteen and a half years old. He had a lovely singing voice, and we
heard him. [41
lingers in my memory.
each night I dream.

24.48.73.206 on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:24:09 UTC

Felman - in An Era of Testimony - Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

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In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

Author(s): Shoshana Felman

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930246

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History and Witness, or the Story of an Oath

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rative, to others: to take responsibility-in speech-for history or for the

Shoah is a film made exclusively of testimonies: first-hand testimonies of

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understand Shoah, we must explore the question: what are we as spectators

The Western Law of Evidence

The uniqueness of the narrative performance of the testimony in effect

4. An interview with Deborah Jerome ("Resurrecting Horror: The Man behind

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dence in courtrooms. "Lawyers have innumerable rules involving hearsay,

Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders: About Seeing

Because the testimony is unique and irreplaceable, the film is an exploration

6. John Kaplan, "Foreword" to Elizabeth R. Loftus: Eyewitness Testimony

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And one of you questioned him?

-Did they look anyway?

It is not a coincidence that as this testimony is unfolding it is hard for us

But don't use my name.

No, I promised ... [54]

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The Germans even forbade us to use the words "corpse" or "victim."

But you knew that the trains to Treblinka or Auschwitz were

You never saw a train?

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In the same way, Mrs. Michelshon, wife of a Nazi schoolteacher in

Did you see the gas vans?

The Occurrence as Unwitnessed

The Multiplicity of Languages

The incommensurability between different testimonial stances, and the

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The Historian as a Witness

The task of the deciphering of signs and of the processing of intelligibility-

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What was Treblinka for you? ... A destination?

Yes, that's all.

But not death.

Extermination came to you as a big surprise?

You had no idea.

Yes, Auschwitz was in the Oppeln district.... Auschwitz to Krakow is

That's not very far. And we knew nothing. Not a clue.

That we did. It was well known.... But as to their extermination, that

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You don't remember those days?

Dr. Grassler, this is Czerniakow's diary. You're mentioned in it.

It's been printed. It exists?

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The Filmmaker as a Witness

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story is restricted to the story of the interviewing: the narrative consists of

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crete extermination is abstracted into a pure question of technique and

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We have to do it. You know it.