The Power of Dignity, Or “Writers Out of Necessity”: The Case of Liana Millu and Edith Bruck

Abstract

Survivors recover memories of the Shoah in choosing to retell their experiences. Recollection and recounting do not always take a straightforwardly mnemonic and anecdotal form—the writing of memory can also take a literary form: when authors/survivors tell of their experiences using literary modes of writing, what they recall is recounted in a transfigurative way. Their recollections go through a doubled process defined by sedimentation and distillation. The writing process takes hold of a story that the author decides can no longer be told as a chronicle of events, and in doing so transfigures its facts into a narrative project. As this process unfolds, writing facilitates the leap from the facts lived toward values that exceed the threshold of detailed memory, thus generating a transition: from a survivor’s story into a survivor’s literary text. The survivor’s own experience in the camp legitimizes the historical relevance of her literary fiction and leads her readers through the deeper layers of the psychological study of her characters. It is a journey that originates in literary writing which, more than nonfictional writing, implies the difference in positioning between the writing subject and the speaking subject:

If there is no articulation between the living being and language, if the “I” stands suspended in this disjunction, then there can be testimony. The intimacy that betrays our non-coincidence with ourselves is the place of testimony. The intimacy that betrays our non-coincidence with ourselves is the place of testimony. Testimony takes place in the non-place of articulation.