Northwest Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Ethnocide Education

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Black Milk of Daybreak: The Literacy of Testimony and Witness is posted with permission from the American Reading Forum; published in: Yearbook of the American Reading Forum. (1996) Volume XVI, 85-94.

"Black Milk of Daybreak": The Literacy of Testimony and Witness

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it...

Paul Celan, "Death Fugue"

Introduction

Speaking to a group of educators and students at Northwestern University in 1977, Holocaust survivor, professor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel (1977) asserted: "If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony" (p. 19). What role do we, as academics and teachers of literacy, have in helping to define this new literature? How might we best help our students access and respond to this new genre?

Those who work with survivors know the timeliness of these questions because our generation will be the last to witness living testimony from humans with numbers tattooed on their arms and irreparable sadness etched in their hearts. Soon there will be none who may rise up to those who deny the Holocaust to ask: "If what you say is true, then where are my loved ones?" (Ban, 1996).

Do not the exigencies of our colleagues and students, many themselves victims or witnesses to psychological abuse, dismemberment, violence and death within their families and communities, oblige educators to investigate this literature of traumatic memory for its potential support to those who are recovering from psychic sorrows vitiating their learning?

This paper will explore the literacy of "testimony and witness" as manifest in the writing of survivors of the Holocaust. Implications for the teacher of students "at-risk" for school failure due to post-traumatic effect will then be asserted.

Testimony and Witness

The story of literacy of Samu Schonberger and one of his poems, "Why, and For How Long?" provides a concrete example of "testimony and witness." While serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I Schonberger was captured by the Russians and shipped to a prison camp in Siberia. To survive, he and his fellow prisoners studied modern Hebrew. One night he composed the poem "Why, and For How Long?" for his sweetheart, Juliska, back in Hungary.

At the end of the war, Schonberger returned to Hungary, married Juliska, and they started a family in Debrecen. Schonberger taught school and eventually became it's principal. But his nightmares were not over. Two decades later the Nazis marched into Hungary. Along with all the other able-bodied Jewish men, Schonberger was deported to work in a slave-labor camp leaving behind his wife, aging mother-in-law and three children ages twenty, thirteen, and six months. Shortly thereafter they themselves were transported to Auschwitz.

When the war ended Schonberger was liberated. He returned home, to ruins and rumors, to learn that not all Debrecen Jews had been sent to Auschwitz, but that some were shipped to Austria. Futile as his efforts were, Schonberger relentlessly tried to learn of the fate of his dear ones. Tormented by nightmarish imaginings of gas chambers and crematoria, he kept a small diary in which he vented an unending anguish of uncertainty and sorrow.

Months passed before Schonberger was reunited with his oldest daughter, Noemi, the only other person in his family to survive. Noemi wrestled to find words the words to describe for her father the fate of their loved-ones in their final days.

Fifty years have since passed. Seated at her dining room table with her father's diary in her hands Noemi tells me, "When I think of my mother helplessly watching her children and her own mother die from poison gas I pray that their death came swiftly." Noemi then opens the tear-stained pages and turns to her father's poem "Why, and For How Long?"which she translates from Hungarian:

Why? And for How Long?

Do you know?
You the beauty of my world,
Do you feel it?
You the most beautiful on this earth,
Why?The yearning hurts, its is burning.
Why? And for how long?

Did you notice, dear soul?
Did you comprehend, you, the wish of my heart?
Do you feel the hope, my yearning?
Why? And for how long?

I will always wait for you
My yearning is limitless
Where is the end of my sorrow?
Why? And for how long?

On the wings of my yearning
I fly towards you
But to arrive, to get to you
I have not the strength any more
Maybe you have forgotten me?
Why? And for how long?

In 1996, Noemi's father's words have acquired new meaning. Forty-seven years of loving marriage took Noemi to another Auschwitz. Her husband, Earnest, a survivor, teacher of mathematics and synagogue cantor, has had his memories robbed by dementia, his intentional movements purloined by Parkinson's disease. Noemi's eyes are tired, her face long. Of his condition she remarks: "There is no barbed wire or watchtowers, but there is little to look forward to except death itself."

Testimony

"Why, and For How Long?," is more than words, a poem or a story: it is a literature about not forgetting, a literature which is healing. Through words and silences, Samu and Noemi attempt to give voice to the "unspeakable." Many great writer-survivors have wrestled with words to communicate the essence of the ineffable which they felt compelled to remember:

Ask any survivor and he will tell you, and his children will tell you....Between our memory and its reflection there stands a wall that cannot be pierced... We speak in code, we survivors, and this code cannot be broken, cannot be deciphered, not by you no matter how much you try....How can one write about a situation which goes beyond its very description?....

[It was] a matter of words...Language had been corrupted to the point that it had to be invented anew and purified. This time we [survivors] wrote not with words but against words. Often we told less so as to make the truth more credible. Had any one of us told the whole story, he would have been proclaimed mad....(Wiesel, 1977, pp. 7-8) .

"A code that cannot be broken," context without words, words without context, words with meanings lessened for credibility, even words "against words" -- it is as if writing or reading testimony is an impossible task. Whether possible or impossible, testimony which is "witnessed" has healing qualities, and as such, is restorative.

Witnessing and Silence

Witnessing is the personal process of grasping and responding to the testimony and the meanings its words attempt to communicate. This process takes place when the survivor perceives her listener participating in an event he has never actually experienced. When this happens, a new and common knowledge results. Survivor-psychiatrist Dori Laub explains:

The listener to the narrative of extreme human pain, of massive psychic trauma, faces a unique situation. In spite of the presence of ample documents, of searing artifacts and of fragmentary memoirs of anguish, he comes to look for something that is in fact nonexistent; a record that has yet to be made....

Massive trauma precludes its registration;...The victim's narrative...testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence.... The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to--and heard--is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the 'knowing' of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo... (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 57)

Most often, bearing witness to testimony includes the hearing of silences. "Not a silence as a vacuum or emptiness, but as a presence...of memory, of the dead, of an evil so overwhelming and unspeakable that only silence, in its infinitude, can begin to represent it" (Des Pres, 1979, p. 55). Such silence refills the words of Samu Schonberger's poem, and his daughter's translation, with meaning.

Testimony, Witness, Complicity and Belief

Creation of "knowledge de nova" is inherently restorative because it is binding and mutual. The victim needs to tell the story of her trauma in such a way that it will be remembered and in putting these memories into narrative, she moves towards survivor-hood.

However, the process of testimony and witness is not merely an unburdening by the victim. For the listener, events to which testimony have not yet been witnessed do not exist. Even today there are those who say that the Holocaust never happened. How is this possible? Is it that the listener is unaware of the facts, or is it that he chooses not to listen? Wittingly or unwittingly, denial of the existence of a breech of social contract is a complicit act. Bearing witness to testimony allows the listener to come to terms with this complicity. This act is restorative for the listener as well as the survivor. Wiesel (1977, 1995) has argued that it is insufficient to punish the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Either we actively remember the victims or by omission we obliterate the memory of millions, thereby fulfilling the Nazi's very plan (pp. 18-19)!

Listening to testimony of the incomprehensible is difficult. Who can or even wants to believe that in this century, in a civilized Europe, human beings committed such heinous acts against humanity? It is painful to imagine Samu at the "edge of his grave", even more tormenting to try to imagine Noemi's mother, sister, baby brother and grandmother in a shower room with hundreds of others, choking on insecticide gas, dying before each others' eyes.

What is the alternative? Avoiding the topic? Not listening? Not believing? Primo Levi, survivor, scientist and author explains the harmfulness for the victim to live in an atmosphere of inattentiveness or disbelief :

Almost all survivors, verbally or in their written memoirs, ...remember a dream..., varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed, were not even listened to... (Levi, 1988, p. 2).

This fear of speaking to the incredulous and not even finding ears willing to listen was exploited by the tormentors themselves, the SS prison guards who admonished their prisoners:

However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him....we will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.... [They] will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you.... We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers" (Levi, 1988, p. 1).

Of Literacy, Courage and Guarantees

Reading and writing, teaching and learning about the trauma of atrocity and broken social compact require courage. "It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded" (Levi, 1988, p.18). Courage is found among those who choose to tell, to listen, to believe and to remember. Courage is in choosing to face and accept anguish and grief. Perhaps we have to accept the pain of reality so as not to lose touch with it.

Poet Paul Chelan used "words against words" to create for the reader an approximation of what cannot be described by words. What is "black milk of daybreak?" Is it the choking smoke and ash belching from the chimneys, the pervasive conditions which nurtured their hopelessness, or a literary devise to capture our sense of disbelief? Crimes committed by the Nazis were of immense proportions, their consequences beyond imagination. Yes, words such as "genocide" were invented, numbers reported; but like a "black milk of daybreak", understanding remains impossible.

Furthermore, we learn from the writers of the literature of the Holocaust that a literacy of testimony and witness has not guarantees. Both Celan and Levi had witnesses; their work was published and quoted extensively. Notwithstanding, both choose to take their own lives. Not so for Samu Schonberger, who remarried and wrote until he died of natural causes in his eighties. Elie Wiesel and Noemi Ban are still telling their stories to those willing to listen.

Black Milk in the Classroom

Wiesel (1995) and many other survivors argue that "the Holocaust is unique in recorded history" (p. 19). This is not to discount the ten million kulaks and their sympathizers killed by Stalin's cohorts, or the murder orgy that erupted in Cambodia under Pol Pot, or the deliberate destruction of the indigenous peoples of North America. Unique but alike, the telling of the abjectness and torment of each of these atrocities can bind the traumatized and those who will listen, irrevocably. The lesson that we are all ultimately responsible for each other, has profound implications for teachers of students who are themselves victims or witnesses to a trauma that has interfered with their learning (Browne & Finkelhorn, 1986; Courtois, 1994; Gardner, 1971; Pynoos & Nader, 1990; Terr, 1990; van der Kolk, Perry, & Herman, 1991).

An example of these implications may be seen in the wake of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, when Oklahoma teachers stopped teaching their planned lessons and took the time to talk, cry, read, and write about this disaster. Time to talk was needed by the witnesses of the atrocity as well as those who were directly victimized. Many educators, some in classrooms thousands of miles away, realized that television images of death and dismemberment were affecting student learning. Make-shift lessons were devised to contextualize these "unspeakable" events.

Unfortunately, not all traumatic events become explicit content in our curricula. Domestic abuse, rape, homicide, suicide, juvenile gang violence, vehicular-related death and dismemberment, physical and sexual abuse are atrocities occurring commonly in America's communities. These events are becoming more commonplace in the lives of children and youth (Simmers-Wolpow & Askov, in press) . However, in the words of psychiatrist Judith Herman (1992) there are "commonalties... between survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule nations and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule their homes " (p. 3)

Like the events of the Holocaust, it is easier to deny such memories than to free oneself from their reality. Teaching and learning require a courage found among those who choose to tell, listen, believe and remember.

Recently, Samu's daughter, Noemi Ban, herself an award-winning teacher, spoke to a large audience about the lessons of the Holocaust and explained why it was important for her to continue to tell her story:

As a survivor and a witness to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust I need an assurance, that the memories of my dear ones, and the memories of millions of other innocent dear ones, will never be forgotten .

It is important for me to know that wherever there is a child, boy or girl, a young adult, mother or father, grandmother or grandfather who has a terrible hurt, such as a death in the family, domestic violence, physical or sexual abuse, acts of bigotry and hatred, that there will be people like you and me who will listen, who will believe in them, who will believe what they have to say, remembering them with love, and give them hope.

As free woman and a survivor who lived under two dictatorships, I hope you will never take your freedom for granted. Freedom comes with responsibility. I ask that you please remember my story and think of it as a stop sign whenever you are witness to acts of hatred.

Finally, my hope for each of you listening to me tonight, is no matter how horrific a memory, or haunting a feeling to which you may be asked to bear witness, that in your heart, you will know that there is the strength to go on, and the strength to give hope. (Ban, 1996)

References

Ban, N. (1996). "Lessons from the Holocaust" Lecture presented at Western Washington University, April 18, 1996.

Browne, A., & Finkelhorn, D. (1986). Impact of Child Sexual Abuse: A Review of the Research. Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 66-77.

Courtois, C. A. (1994). Treating Trauma Survivors: An Invitation to Dialogue. In The Family Therapy Network Symposium, 714-424 A and B . Washington DC.: The Resource Link.

Depres, T. (1978). The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel's Art. In A. H. Rosenfeld and I. Greenberg (Ed.), Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel (pp. 49-57). Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.

Gardner, G. (1971). Aggression and Violence--the Enemies of Precision Learning in Children. American Journal of Psychiatry, 128(4), 77-82.

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Levi, P. (1988). The Drowned and the Saved. London: Little, Brown and Company.

Pynoos, R. S., & Nader, K. (1990). Children's Exposure to Violence and Traumatic Death. Psychiatric Annals, 20(6), 334-44.

Simmers-Wolpow, R., & Askov, E. (In Press). Teaching Literacy in Our Traumatic Times.

Terr, L. (1990). Too Scared to Cry. New York: Harper.

van der Kolk, B. A., Perry, C. J., & Herman, J. L. (1991). Childhood Origins of Self-Destructive Behavior. American Journal of Psychiatry, 148(12), 1665-1671.

Wiesel, E. (1977). The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration. In E. Lefkovitz (Ed.), Dimensions of the Holocaust (pp. 4-19). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Wiesel, E. (1995, August 7, 1995). Bosnia and the Holocaust. Time, p. 19.

Copyright (c) 1996, by the American Reading Forum, All Rights Reserved

 

 

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