| Abstract | Perhaps [Alina] declined to give me her written text out of a lack of confidence in her writing, the symptom of an education cut short by the Holocaust and of a forced exile from her native tongue (even though she had written in Polish). Although she knew that what had happened to her was important -- that it had to be told -- she placed less value in her own way of saying things. My academic credentials, it seemed, would allow me to give her story the form it deserved -- to make it "sound good." But also, her testimony here suggests, it was due to a divorce she seemed to feel between her experience and her mode of expression. The "meaning" she cannot find indicates on the one hand a problem in translating from Polish to English, while on the other hand it gestures towards a meaning inarticulable in any language. If my credentials were supposed to allow me to "understand" her story, and to help others understand it, Alina's testimony extraordinarily begins here with the undermining of the possibility of understanding. "I can't understand. I can't believe," her text concludes (NCP, 3). Not "you can't understand," a phrase that would erect a wall between those who were there and those who were not. Instead, "I can't understand. I can't believe." The story is the story of this incomprehension.
I had become "company," a catalyst to Alina's testimony, with [Sophia] again an eavesdropping, and protective, presence. ("Mom, are you okay?" she would ask repeatedly while Alina spoke to me.) She even characterizes her childhood efforts to learn her parents' histories, in an ostensibly inadvertent phrase, as a need "to get out as much as I could," as if testimony could externalize what she knows inside, as if it could help her escape (get out) from this haunting knowledge. But after I left Alina's home that day, after Sophia had herself borne witness to her own experience of events she had never directly experienced, mother and daughter engaged in a different kind of dialogue, centered on their common failure to know what happened. "I don't know how to say it...not knowing that...not knowing something happened to me" (Alina). "I kept thinking all these years that I knew inside what happened" (Sophia). If Sophia once thought of her mother as concealing an already known past, this encounter suggests that the untold story ("what happened") is not so much deliberately concealed by Alina as it is not (yet) known, not fully available to her. When Sophia begins to ask questions, the distinction between "inside" and "outside" knowledge, between secrecy and disclosure, breaks down; consequently, she is able to claim her right to hear the story. "I want to hear it," she says. And in pressing her demand, she becomes a participant in the process of bearing witness, one who will herself "remember forward."(18) Indeed, instead of leaving the task in my hands, Sophia took it upon herself to transcribe a large part of her mother's testimony. (Perhaps tellingly, it was only when she became pregnant with her first child that she found she no longer had enough time to work on the transcripts.)
In this light, a celebration of escape or "freedom" would appear only cruelly ironic. The events she relates here bear witness instead to the collapse of any distinction between "winner" and "loser," survivor and victim. They also seemed to defy mere narration, with Alina each time involving her body in her storytelling, whether in her home with her daughter and me, in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or in the Yale Holocaust Video Archive. In each of these retellings, Alina began to show, with her hands and props, how things took place: "here," "there" "like this." The history at stake here is not simply a history in the past, but one that is in the process of being "made" at the very moment of remembrance and transmission. The question is not simply "what happened," but rather, what is happening. "This is the connection": she struggles, both in the scene and in its retelling, to make a connection, with her husband and with her children, between her husband and her children, between the family's history and the public.
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