Testimony and Translation

Peter Davies

As victim testimony has established itself in the last few decades

as a key locus for testing and developing our understanding of
the Holocaust and its consequences, as well as for a whole range
of other defining ethical, political, and philosophical debates in
Western societies, a perceived need has been felt to define exactly
what constitutes a testimony, as opposed to other kinds of personal
statement or narrative. There are compelling reasons for doing this,
arising from a desire to assert the uniqueness of Holocaust testimony
both as a document of an unparalleled experience and as a precious
resource that needs to be defended against attacks by Holocaust
deniers, denigration by professional historians, and the exigencies
of a marketplace saturated with autobiographical and testamentary
material. Discussion of the generic characteristics of testimony has
thus become part of the discourse of Holocaust Studies in the last
couple of decades: it has been a way of rescuing autobiographical texts
from their previously secondary status in historical and legal discourse,
distinguishing them from literary productions, and bringing them out
of the context of victim communities while preserving some of the
significance personal narratives have in this context. This process has
brought with it anxieties about misinterpretation or appropriation of
victims’ experiences, and about assimilation or erasure of identities
within a majority culture that uses reference to the Holocaust for its
own purposes: defining clear generic boundaries has been a way of
dealing with these anxieties. It is also inseparable from the debate
about the uniqueness of the Holocaust: such an event, it is felt,
must by definition produce texts that are sui generis. For this reason,
much theoretical effort has been expended on establishing boundaries

Translation and Literature, 23 (2014), 170–84

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2014.0148
© Edinburgh University Press
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between Holocaust testimonies and other kinds of autobiographical

text.
Almost all the discussion of testimony as a genre has relied on texts
in translation, which are treated as if they were originals; the effects
of, and influences on, translation play no role in the theorizing of
testimony as genre, implying that ‘testimony’ has universal features
across cultures, and that translation makes no difference. However,
after setting out some aspects of the genre discussion, I will argue
that drawing attention to translation not only reveals culturally specific
aspects of the testimony discussion, but also shows how translation can
transform texts into testimonies.
The genre discussion takes its cue from Elie Wiesel’s statement that
‘the Holocaust invented a new literature, that of testimony’, one which
can only be produced (and truly understood) by those who experienced
it; and also from Primo Levi’s discussion in Se questo è un uomo of the
disruptive effect of the Holocaust on language.1 For the non-victim, an
encounter with a testimony is an encounter with strangeness, and many
writers have stressed the impossibility of communicating an experience
of such extremity that it evades expression in the shared language
of witness and reader.2 For Robert Eaglestone, ‘Holocaust testimony
needs to be understood as a new genre, in a new context, which
involves both texts and altered ways of reading, standing in its own
right.’3 Others suggest that testimony works in paradoxes: a witness
testifies to something not assimilable to any common framework
of understanding, and in a first-person narrative which discourages
reader identification.4
But it is also argued that testimony cannot be defined through
textual features, being instead a mode that arises from the social role
and status of the figure of the survivor-witness, and from the cultural
position of the texts. For example, Eva Lezzi writes that no stylistic
feature of a testimentary text could guarantee its authenticity; instead,
the text is marked as a testimony by extra-textual elements (such as
historical documentation, photographic and other material connecting
the text with the witness and with the historical situation, supporting
material from experts), and by the author’s identification – willing or

1
Elie Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration’, in Dimensions of the Holocaust, edited
by Elliot Lefkowitz (Evanston, IL, 1977), pp. 4–19 (p. 7); Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The
Truce, translated by Stuart Woolf (London, 1979), p. 129.
2
See, for example, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, 1992), p. 7.
3
Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford, 2004), p. 38.
4
See Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, translated by Patrick Camiller (London,
2005); Wiesel, p. 7.

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otherwise – with a particular social role.5 This allows for more variation
in what can be considered a testimony than definitions based on intra-
textual characteristics, and it also gives us a means to investigate
the function of testimonies in the context of their production and
reading: we can account for potential cultural differences and historical
shifts under the influence of developing historical, philosophical, or
psychological views of the Holocaust and victim experience. We can
also investigate the ways in which translators and editors of translations
negotiate between potentially differing conceptions of testimony in
source and target context.
The value placed on testimonies has to do with the uniqueness of
these texts. Valuations connect truthfulness with the relation of an
individual experience of suffering (and witnessing of others’ suffering),
the unique extremity of the experience conferring unique value. It is
worth noting, however, that the kind of truth these texts are considered
to convey has shifted considerably in the decades since 1945. They
have over time been considered acceptable as legal evidence, as
historical proof, as underpinning for philosophical arguments or
ethical systems, or as a medium for conveying authentic experience.
This has affected the way they have been read, published, and
translated.
These value criteria are established with or against other genres,
depending on the task that testimonies are seen to fulfil in any
particular context. As Martin Sabrow has noted, the role of the
eyewitness has shifted from a position of opposition to particular
forms of culturally significant discourse about the Holocaust – for
example, the rules of evidence of historians such as Raul Hilberg in
his pioneering The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) – to a more
affirmative role, in which victim testimony is the privileged medium
for knowledge about and discussion of the Holocaust, with other forms
of speech and writing playing auxiliary roles.6 One can sometimes
exaggerate the supposed conflict between professional historians and
survivors, but one of the reasons for developing the conception of
testimony as a genre in its own right seems to have been to secure
its own truth-claim as distinct from historians’ rules of evidence.
The truth-claim is based on a number of factors, but the key issue is
the ethical concern for the voice of the individual and the prioritizing
of experience (including the experience of the reader/listener) over

5
Eva Lezzi, Zerstörte Kindheit: Literarische Autobiographien zur Shoah (Cologne, 2001), p. 147.
6
Martin Sabrow, ‘Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten’, in Die Geburt des
Zeitzeugen nach 1945, edited by Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 13–32
(p. 22).

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factual accuracy according to historical or legal rules of evidence. The

authenticity of the voice and an ethical imperative to allow the victim to
speak in his/her own terms and without appropriation are key concerns.
Recent years have seen criticism of instances in which writers and
editors voiced survivors’ experiences inappropriately, imposing their
own attitudes and making it impossible to discern and encounter the
victim’s own mode of expression.7 Such ethical concerns mean that it
is nowadays less acceptable for a professional writer to write a first-
person narrative on behalf of a survivor that he or she has interviewed,
as did, for example, Stefan Szende in 1944.8 Szende’s procedure of
introducing factual material to the world packaged in a dramatic
first-person narrative of escape (from interviews with the Warsaw
Ghetto escapee Adolf Folkman) feels uncomfortable now. Nevertheless,
ghost-writing, collaboration, and translation, whether acknowledged
or unacknowledged, are so common in the production of Holocaust
testimonies that one can ask whether the genre discussion disguises as
much as it reveals.
This ethical concern with the individual’s voice and the position
from which he/she is permitted to speak has gone hand in hand
with the establishment of the figure of the survivor-witness as the
centre of commemoration of and knowledge about the Holocaust.
This development has been described variously as the dawning of
the ‘era of the witness’ or the ‘birth of the historical eyewitness’,
and is usually traced to a complex of developments in the 1960s, in
particular the international media attention drawn to witness testimony
during the Eichmann trial.9 A diary from the Kraków Ghetto, such
as that of Julius Feldman, is no longer presented in terms of the
historical knowledge that it might provide when read critically; its
value as a source resides instead in the fact that ‘this text brings us
as close as any text can to those tragic events’ and gives us access
to ‘one individual’s precarious vantage point within the Holocaust’.10

7
See, for example, the case of Ruth Maier’s diary discussed by Ingvild Folkvord in
the present volume, and the debate about Wolfgang Koeppen’s literary reworking of the
testimony of Jakob Littner as discussed by Reinhard Zachau’s Foreword to Journey through
the Night: Jakob Littner’s Holocaust Memoir, edited by Kurt Nathan Grübler (New York, 2000),
pp. ix-xvii.
8
Stefan Szende, Den siste Juden från Polen (Stockholm, 1944).
9
See Annette Wiewiorka, The Era of the Witness, translated by Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY, and
London, 2006); Sabrow and Frei (n. 6); Konrad Jarausch, ‘Critical Memory and Civil Society:
the Impact of the 1960s on German Debates about the Past’, in Coping with the Nazi Past: West
German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–75, edited by Philipp Gassert and
Alan Steinweis (New York, 2006), pp. 11–30.
10
Stephen Smith, ‘Introduction’, The Krakow Diary of Julius Feldman, edited by Stephen
Smith, translated by William Brand (Newark, NJ, 2002), pp. v-vii (p. vii).

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The knowledge gained through this careful balancing of ethical

concerns in dealing with a witness text is of a different order to that
of historiography or law; it is knowledge created through the terms of
the genre of ‘testimony’ as it has developed, and it has transformed
our understanding of the Holocaust, as well as the accessibility of
that knowledge to non-specialists. The value of this knowledge is
undeniable, and the ethical demands made of editors and readers
alike form part of that knowledge. However, the ethical demands
of the encounter with the witness and the key significance of the
‘voice’ mean that certain things are downplayed, in particular issues
of editing, the status of a text as an ‘original’, the circumstances
of a text’s composition, the number of hands at work in creating a
text, the cultural and political frameworks of memory at the time of
composition, and issues of translation, re-editing, and the function of
such a text in a new cultural context.
The structuring oppositions in the establishment of testimony as a
genre in its own right are expressed in the closely-guarded borderlines
with fictional writing and with other forms of autobiography.11 If
aspects of a testimony are ‘fictionalized’, what does this say about its
usefulness in challenging Holocaust denial, and if there are generic
similarities with ‘traditional’ autobiography and memoir literature, or
with victim texts arising from other catastrophic experiences, what does
this say about the uniqueness of the Holocaust itself? The autonomy
of the genre fulfils understandable cultural, political, and emotional
needs, reflecting a desire to consolidate a community of victims, and
demonstrating that the victims have more in common with each other
than with the national contexts in which they grew up (contexts in
which they were persecuted, or at least not protected adequately).
Defining a text as a testimony brings it – and metonymically, its author
too – into communion with certain texts, while establishing boundaries
with certain others.
While this is understandable from a political viewpoint, it poses
particular problems for translators, in that decisions have to be made
concerning the aspects of the text that are made visible or emphasized
in translation. Does one stress the text’s linguistic, cultural, or literary-
historical context(s), or does one ensure that it is legible as belonging
to the genre of testimony? What is one to do if these aims clash with
each other? When approaching the question of genre, translators are
faced with a range of issues that go beyond the formal and linguistic

11
See, for example, on the genre anxiety surrounding Elie Wiesel’s Night, Gary Weissman,
Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY, 2004), p. 67.

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properties of the text. Any discussion about the community of texts to

which a particular testimony belongs is first and foremost a discussion
about something else, which translators are implicated in whether they
wish to be or not. Translating a text into the genre of Holocaust
testimony entails making it recognizable as truth-telling – in other
words, it must read as fulfilling the truth-criteria implied by the genre
label. A decision must be made as to what community of texts it is
to take its place in, which may be very different from the place it
occupied in its original context. These decisions then lead to further
choices about whether the target text has an innovating function
within the genre or whether it confirms existing assumptions: does it
reassure or challenge? What kinds of challenges are permitted within
the genre of testimony, and what are excluded? What do the genre
expectations mean for choices about emphasizing aspects of the text’s
structure, narrative, and language in the translation and paratexts? In
the second part of this essay, I will discuss a number of cases in which
translations have been caught between differing conceptions of the
genre of Holocaust testimony, showing how the paratextual apparatus
is employed in order to make the text available for reading in terms
that identify it as truth-telling, and which confirm the boundaries
between ‘testimony’ and historical or literary writing.
In many cases it is simply a matter of re-labelling the text for the
new publication context and attaching an introduction that leads a
reading of the translation in a way that conforms to genre expectations.
For example, the important early testimony of the German-Jewish
doctor Lucie Adelsberger, who survived Auschwitz as a medical orderly,
was initially called Auschwitz: Ein Tatsachenbericht (‘Auschwitz: A Factual
Report’). The genre label places the text in the context of a period
in the immediate postwar years when establishing facts through eye-
witness evidence was a key function of testimonies.12 But a recent
English translation is entitled Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story, placing the
emphasis firmly on the narrating individual rather than the object of
inquiry.13 The Introduction stresses the experiential aspect of the text,
that it ‘connects us . . . to the past’, helping the reader to ‘vicariously
experience’ both the degradation and the dignity of the victims
(p. xviii). Thus, the text has come to represent an act of testimony
in which the reader participates.14 This is a fairly straightforward

12
Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: Ein Tatsachenbericht (1956; reprint Bonn, 2001).
13
Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story, translated by Susan Ray (London, 1996).
14
Compare also the adjustment in the labelling of the translated testimony of
the Hungarian doctor Olga Lengyel: Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of
Auschwitz, translated by Clifford Coch and Paul P. Weiss (Chicago, 1947); Olga Lengyel,

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example, and one could argue here that the text’s insertion into the
genre of testimony through translation draws attention to its particular
stylistic qualities rather better than the bald label ‘Tatsachenbericht’.
An example of a translator’s commentary from an earlier text
can serve to illustrate some of the changes in the status of the
witness text. In the foreword to his co-translation of the eye-witness
account of working with Mengele in Auschwitz by the Hungarian-
Jewish doctor Miklós Nyiszli, published in English in 1960, Richard
Seaver apologetically sets out his view of Nyiszli’s style, which is
‘untutored’ and lacking in ‘elegance . . . or literary expression’; clearly,
he is working against an assumption that such texts need to be well-
written in order to be worth reading.15 ‘Non-literary’ expression is
seemingly not a virtue in the context in which Seaver is trying to place
this translation. One could certainly also view these comments as a
translation programme, indicating the aspects of the text that Seaver
and his co-translator Tibère Kremer are keen to emphasize in order to
create space in the genre for this text. The text is important despite
the fact that it is stylistically faulty; its rough edges do not make it more
authentic. However, it is not the direct encounter with the witness that
the reader is led to here: its publication is justified on the grounds
of Nyiszli’s observational skills and his ability to convey detail that is
verified by the view ‘through his eyes’, rather than for its ability to
convey a victim experience.16
These last two examples illustrate the shifting genre expectations
that translated texts are exposed to: from ‘factual reports’ to ‘victim
testimonies’. The role of the translator has shifted too, with translators
often stressing their personal intimacy with the survivor, rather
than their professional skill: the intimacy of the connection between
translator and witness is guaranteed either by a friendship/family
connection, an emotional response, or both. Statements such as
this are common: ‘They are not professional translations but are
true to Mrs May’s voice.’17 Similarly, the English translator of
Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz trilogy stresses her emotional closeness
to and intuitive understanding of the author, which is equated with
understanding the work, downplaying the rigour of Delbo’s style: if
the ‘Holocaust experience’ ‘speaks through’ Delbo, then by extension

Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, translated by Clifford Coch and
Paul P. Weiss (Reading, 1972).
15
Richard Seaver, ‘Introduction’, Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz, translated by Tibère Kremer
and Richard Seaver (New York, 1960), pp. 3–7 (p. 4).
16
Seaver, p. 4.
17
‘Publisher’s Note’, Marianne Zadikow May, The Terezin Album of Marianka Zadikow, edited
by Deborah Dwork (Chicago, 2008), p. vii.

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it ‘speaks through’ a translation that is underpinned by an intuitive

connection.18 The auratic connection with the witness is part of the
apparatus of the genre, and where it is not present, this lack is generally
passed over in silence, or compensated for by a claim to ‘transparent’
translation.
On the occasions when genre expectations are challenged in
paratexts, the effect is striking. For a writer to state explicitly that
he/she has made significant interventions in a translation in order to
place it in a new context, as did Ruth Klüger, is rare. As a self-translator
who is able to authenticate her own new version, Klüger is able to
justify her own method. However, it is very unusual for translators
to state explicitly that they have adjusted another writer’s style, even
though this may be a common procedure to make the text accessible
or ‘relevant’ for the target audience. In a translation of the Polish
diary of the Warsaw Ghetto fighter Gusta Dawidson Draenger (known
by her resistance name ‘Justyna’), the translator and editors make it
clear that they have intervened in the register of the text in order to
make it more accessible. In her Preface, the translator, Roslyn Hirsch,
suggests that the editors had ‘initial misgivings’ about the text, due to
its ‘often grandiose and poetic, sometimes vague and opaque’ style.19
Their solution is an intervention in the text’s register, justified by some
ironic hyperbole about the author’s style and a claim that the text is
unpolished:
If [the] statement to the members of Akiba were translated ‘literally’,
it would sound like a speech out of Beowulf. In Draenger’s writing,
matter-of-fact descriptions in a more colloquial Polish mingle with poetic
metaphors and a heroic epic style; observations on everyday life in the
ghettoes are set beside dramatic dialogue and philosophical reflections.
It must be remembered that Draenger wrote under tremendous pressure
and in severely constrained conditions. She did not have time for
leisurely reflection and certainly could not afford the luxury of extensive
revision.20

The implication is that if she had had time, Draenger would have
written a different kind of text, namely one more accessible to the
reader of the 1990s: thus, the translators are completing the job.

18
Rosette Lamont, ‘Translator’s Preface’, Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, translated
by Rosette Lamont (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. vii-viii (p. vii).
19
Roslyn Hirsch, ‘Preface’, Gusta Dawidson Draenger, Justyna’s Narrative, edited by Eli
Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch, translated by Roslyn Hirsch (Amherst, MA, 1996),
pp. vii-viii (p. viii).
20
Hirsch and Pfefferkorn, ‘Introduction’, in Draenger, pp. 1–21 (p. 17).

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This works against critical procedures that ask us to respect the

voice of the witness and to listen out precisely for such breaks and
inconsistencies in the witness text, and to read them as a traumatic gap
between ‘high’ style, metaphor, and the impact of extreme experiences.
By making the text easily accessible, the translator and editors have
worked against the assumptions of testimony as a genre. However,
it is only the explicit statement that is unusual, not the procedure
itself.
The genre labels attached to testimonies reflect shifts in the status of
the witness text over time and between cultural contexts, whether across
linguistic boundaries or crossing from victim communities to a broader
readership. Texts tend to occupy a space between terms implying
objective reporting (‘report’, ‘document’) and the complex term
‘testimony’, with labels such as ‘memoir’ occurring occasionally early
on but becoming increasingly rare, perhaps suggesting a more casual
endeavour. The almost complete absence of the term ‘autobiography’
in discussion of works published in English is striking: the narrative
structure of testamentary texts is seen as running counter to traditions
of autobiographical writing that operate with ideas of Bildung and the
dialectic of individual and society.
Where the term ‘autobiography’ is used, there seems to be a need
to justify its presence, or to stress a text’s difference from the ‘norm’.
This is an issue with translations of literary autobiographies into
English, where the value of the text as a ‘document’ must be stressed
separately from its literary or autobiographical qualities, even though
these aspects may be seen as a unity in the original. For example,
John Bátki’s translation of Emberszag, by the Hungarian author Ernő
Szép, seems to have difficulty with the simple genre label ‘regény’
(novel), labelling it instead (on the cover) ‘a memoir of the Holocaust
in Hungary’. The text is described as both a ‘piece of creative writing
and autobiographical literature of a very distinctive Central European
kind’, and as an ‘important document of the Holocaust in Hungary
in 1944’. Thus, those aspects of the text that are not of documentary
value are explained away as exotic and untroubling for our view of the
use-value of the text as a historical record. The translator intervenes
in the text through footnotes that provide historical underpinnings
for the text’s literary devices. For example, a scene in which a crowd
of Jews who have been rounded up in a sports stadium speculate
wildly about the number of people caught is disrupted by a footnote
referring to research literature that gives an estimate based on
documentation. Thus a literary device in which the reader is invited
to share the Jews’ disorientation and desire to exert some control

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over the situation in their increasingly pedantic arguments becomes

an illustration of a point of information, and the reader is positioned
differently.21
In the English-language discussion, the contested space between
‘history’, ‘testimony’, and ‘fiction’ is where much of the anxiety about
genre has been played out. This means that texts translated into
English often have to find a way of negotiating this issue; by contrast, at
least until relatively recently, translations into German were able to find
a place in a genre discussion that accepted ‘fictionalized’ accounts more
readily.22 The complex translation history of Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babii
Yar, which belongs in the Soviet documentary novel tradition, provides
a case in point. It is labelled ‘roman-dokument’, and tells its story of the
German occupation of the Ukraine, the massacre at Babii Yar, and its
aftermath, by interweaving documentary material, eyewitness accounts,
and a first-person narrative drawing on the author’s own experiences.
The text itself, which also contains a condemnation of Stalinism, non-
Jewish Ukrainians’ participation in violence against Jews, and Soviet
memory politics, has a history of censorship and publication abroad,
and of multiple translation in English and German that is too complex
to go into here. For our purposes, what is significant about this text is
the unity of ‘novel’ and ‘document’ implied by the genre label: both
are visible, each supporting the other. The text does not attempt to
disguise the documentary elements in its narrative but draws attention
to them, using German and Soviet archival documents to mark stages
in the political conflict that forms the background for the personal
narrative, and having the fictionalized autobiographical first-person
narrator introduce narratives from eyewitnesses. This complex text,
which draws attention to the processes of its composition, causes
problems when it is translated, since the interest of writers who have
cited the text is in the authenticity of the voices giving testimony, rather
than in the novel’s structure.
Of particular interest is the narrative attributed to Dina Pronicheva,
a Ukrainian Jewish actor who was one of the few survivors of the
massacre at Babii Yar on 29–30 September 1941, and who had testified
at Soviet and West German trials of German perpetrators. It is the
narrative attributed to her in the novel, rather than the trial testimony
or other statements, that has attracted attention in the West, precisely

21
Ernő Szép, The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary, translated by John
Bátki (Budapest, 1994), p. 53.
22
See my ‘Translation and the Uses of a Holocaust Testimony: Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit in
German Translation’, German Life and Letters, 64 (2011), 552–69.

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because of its literary qualities and vividness.23 (Kuznetsov’s narrator

describes having met Pronicheva in the 1960s, when he listened to
her account of her escape and survival, which he then recorded: the
personal ‘kitchen table’ conversation with a sympathetic listener is
clearly seen to be more ‘authentic’ than official statements given in
evidence.) This narrative, in which the original oral component is
impossible to disentangle from its literary sculpting and from the other
sources Kuznetsov drew on, is cited in English-language accounts of
the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, taken out of the context of the
text as a whole and treated as direct eye-witness testimony.24 A level
of fictional framing is ignored, and the excerpt is put to a new use in
a generic context in which questions of literary self-awareness and the
borderline between fiction and authentic speech may not be raised, and
in which the mingling of documentary and fictional material can be
regarded as ethically problematic.25 It is notable, for example, that the
text’s reference to a cruel, colourful figure with moustaches like those
of the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko are absent from the English
excerpts, presumably since it would draw attention to the literariness
of the narrative.26
The ambivalence that arises on the translation of the text into
English is reflected in the translators’ struggles with the genre label,
finding solutions that either sound unnatural and meaningless (‘a
novel in the form of a document’) or sound familiar but are not
entirely accurate (‘documentary novel’). A West German translation by
Alexander Kaempfe, first published in 1970, has no trouble labelling
the text a ‘Roman’, emphasizing its literariness. A new translation (in
fact a substantially revised version of the previous one) by Irina Nowak
was published in 1996, with the new title Babij Jar: Die Schlucht des Leids
(‘Babii Yar: The Ravine of Suffering’), tying the text in with a recent
film release. The text is labelled ‘Roman-Dokument’ in direct imitation
of the Russian, an unfamiliar genre-label that shifts the emphasis back

23
Karel Berkhoff has compared the various accounts by Pronicheva, suggesting that
the narrative as it appears in Kuznetsov’s text needs to be treated with caution as a
historical source. Karel Berkhoff, ‘Dina Pronicheva’s Story of Surviving the Babi Yar Massacre:
German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian Records’, in The Shoah in Ukraine: History,
Testimony, Memorialization, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington, IN,
2008), pp. 291–317.
24
For example, in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London, 1986),
pp. 204–5, or Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, NE, 2009), pp. 174–5.
25
As by, for example, James E. Young, ‘Holocaust Documentary Fiction: Novelist as
Eyewitness’, in Literature of the Holocaust, edited by Harold Bloom (Broomall, PA, 2003),
pp. 75–90.
26
Berkhoff, p. 301.

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to the ‘factual’ in balance with the novelistic, and draws attention to the
features that are innovative in this new context.27
A German context that had previously seemed hospitable to the
idea of fictionalized autobiographical texts by victims and witnesses has
developed a feeling of unease similar to what we find in the English-
language context. The literary, which enjoyed considerable authority in
the 1960s as a mode of writing for dealing with the legacy of National
Socialism, has ceded its authority to the ‘authenticity’ and ‘immediacy’
of the eyewitness testimony, and written texts are subordinate in a
hierarchy of value to oral testimony. A canonical work like Elie Wiesel’s
La Nuit, whose German translation was labelled ‘Roman’ in the 1960s,
and which was discussed as an innovative literary text by Martin Walser,
has by the 1990s become an example of ‘Erinnerung und Zeugnis’
(‘Memory and Testimony’), implying a very different mode of reading
and set of generic expectations.28
Concern about the possibility of invention or embellishment, which
threatens to disrupt the immediacy of the encounter with the witness,
is one of the key features of discussion of testimony, and the
establishment of the autonomy of testimony as a genre is accompanied
by paratextual features that ensure a text is read correctly. When, for
example, the paratexts of a German translation of a text which has
had a very complex genesis in a process of dialogue between witness
and editor working between Hebrew and English, and between oral
interviews and written narratives, state that the purpose of reading the
testimony is to identify with the victim, then it is clear that the reader is
being asked to ignore the circumstances of the text’s composition and
to concentrate on the description of an experience.29
Since the autonomy of testimony as a written genre is ultimately
dependent on extra-textual guarantors such as the presence of the
witness, the paratexts and genre labels aim to fix the connection
between text and witness. Thus fictional or literary aspects of the text
must be played down or compensated for, as must the shifts involved
in translation and the creative activity of the translator. For a collection
of texts to be introduced as testimony, it is important that effort is

27
Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David
Floyd (London, 1970); Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel, translated by Jacob
Guralsky (London, 1967); Anatolij V. Kuznecov, Babij Jar: Roman, translated by Alexander
Kaempfe (Munich, 1970); Anatolij V. Kuznecov, Babij Jar: Die Schlucht des Leids. Roman-
Dokument, translated by Irina Nowak (Munich, 2001).
28
Davies, p. 560.
29
Jeffrey N. Green, ‘Nachwort’, in Trudi Birger with Jeffrey M. Green, Im Angesicht des
Feuers: Wie ich der Hölle des Konzentrationslagers entkam, translated by Christian Spiel (Munich,
1990), pp. 209–15 (p. 214).

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expended in establishing that the individuals have been able to ‘speak

in their own voice’. This involves stressing where possible a connection
to oral testimony (even if this simply means using the words ‘voice’ and
‘speak’ instead of ‘style’ and ‘write’) as well as downplaying the fact of
translation. For example, a recent collection subtitled ‘a new history [of
the Holocaust] in the words of the men and women who survived’ does
not specify the languages of the original statements, thus preventing
access to aspects of their individuality and cultural background. The
work of the team of translators is praised as ‘excellent’, which by
implication means that they have provided unimpeded access to the
voices of the witnesses.30
There is another strategy, however, which seemingly paradoxically
involves drawing attention to the work and subject position of the
translator. The intensifying focus on the person of the witness, as
opposed to the autonomy of the text, has had consequences for
translation: translators have had to participate in the process of
establishing the dependence of the text on the witness. This entails
drawing attention to the question of translation in order to compensate
for it or explain it away by stressing not the translator’s professional
skill at working with the text, but the translator’s intimate knowledge
of the witness and his or her voice. The translation gains legitimacy
not on its own terms, but through the translator’s participation in the
authority granted by the witness. Hence the translation can become
the ‘embodiment of the witness’ in a similar way to the original, and
the potential pitfalls of drawing attention to layers of mediation and
sociological context can be avoided. Where translation is commented
on, it is commented on in ways that confirm the generic specificity of
testimony.
One example may stand for many. In the English translation of a
2004 text by Johanna Krause,31 the translator discusses her friendship
with the author and her role in the origins of the German text in
a series of interviews. Thus, the translator and her co-editor are
intimately involved in the co-creation of the voice that speaks in this
text, but the text must insist on its authenticity as a representation of
the witness. The result is a text that is introduced in terms appropriate
to the genre of testimony: the voice is authentic and has priority over
the written word; the collaborators are motivated by personal intimacy

30
Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women who
Survived, edited by Lyn Smith (London, 2006), p. xv.
31
Johanna Krause, Zweimal verfolgt: Eine Dresdner Jüdin erzählt, edited by Carolyn Gammon
and Christiane Hemker (Berlin, 2004).

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with the witness; and the text contains its own truth that is independent
of other forms of discourse:
How can one guarantee the truth of memories of such long-ago events?
In the end, Twice Persecuted is Johanna’s truth - told in her unique voice,
and not intended to contradict (or even comment on) other truths.32
It is neither fiction nor history, but contains its own autonomous
justification; translation makes no difference to this claim, and the
translated text embodies the witness and transmits the voice in the
same way as the original.
A discourse that defines testimony as a genre is intended to clarify
the relations between certain texts, to define the kinds of knowledge
that are produced in these texts, to give this knowledge legitimacy
in a cultural context that was for a long time unwilling to grant it
legitimacy, and to support the efforts of victims to gain recognition
in the uniqueness of their experience and their right to speak from
a subject-position which they themselves define. Whereas individual
testimony once offered a critique of other ways of speaking about
the Holocaust in the name of a radical subjectivity, the dignity of the
survivor-witness, and an encounter with the unimaginable, it has now
become the central focus of knowledge about and remembrance of the
Holocaust. This development has been accompanied by the definition
of testimony as an independent genre whose characteristics are held
to derive from the uniqueness of the victims’ experiences. It is a genre
unavailable to anyone but the witnesses; thus it is not defined purely
by particular textual features, but through extra-textual factors, such
as the figure of the survivor-witness and its status within discourse
about the Holocaust. For this reason, questions about the conditions
of production of the text – its cultural, sociological, or discursive
context, as well as questions of editorial practice and joint authorship –
tend to be downplayed. The genre itself is a field of unresolved
tensions between a desire for an authentic encounter with the past
and the insistence that this encounter is impossible. Some of the
theoretical discourse on testimony is concerned with warning readers
off identification with the victim, even where the first-person narratives
seem to invite it. There are also tensions in the space between the
absolute denial of any fictional shaping of the narratives, and the claim
to a form of truth independent of legal or historical truths.
Significant tensions are exposed in the act of translating a text into
a fresh context governed by the generic expectations of testimony.
32
Johanna Krause, Twice Persecuted: Surviving in Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany,
translated by Carolyn Gammon (Waterloo, Ont., 2007).

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It is necessary to ensure that the text is seen to be truthful in the

appropriate way. Sometimes this can be helpful in bringing to light
aspects of the text that would otherwise have been hidden, but it
can also obscure the specificity of the text’s origins, which potentially
runs counter to the desire for a direct connection with the witness.
Translators and the editors of translations have to find ways of
compensating for the extra layers of mediation and the co-creation of
the text by the translator. This is done through paratexts that propose
a particular reading, by evading the issue of translation altogether,
or, paradoxically, by drawing attention to the person of the translator
and his/her relationship with the witness. The auratic connection with
the witness is part of the apparatus of the genre, and where it is not
present, this lack is generally passed over in silence, or compensated
for by a claim to ‘transparent’ translation. But it is clear that, on some
occasions, it is in translation that texts first become testimonies.
University of Edinburgh

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