The Last Wish of the Voiceless: a Legacy
Cite as: Gabor Mihaly Toth, In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust (Yale Fortunoff Archive, 2021), lts.fortunoff.library.yale.edu
A few years ago something unexpected happened. My late grandfather’s cousin gave me approximately two hundred letters. They were written by my ancestors during and after the Holocaust; the authors, among others, are my great-great-grandmother and her sister, A. and V., who were deported from a Transylvanian town in the late spring of 1944. They both left farewell letters. In her last message, V. also left a last wish.
Think of us every now and again, who had to suffer for being born. [1]
V. was one of those many victims who asked to be remembered. In their testimonies, survivors often recall the last wish of the Voiceless.
In 1981 Suzanne Claire Holzer-Wester, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, gave a testimony to her daughter. In her testimony she recalled the last wish of those who were destined to perish.[2]
A memory fragment by Leo Bretholz, an Austrian-born survivor, also perpetuates a last message from the Voiceless, as well as the perpetrators’ effort to silence it.[3]
Others were trying to leave their last wish by engraving it into walls and objects. In his testimony, Leizer Hoffer recalled inscriptions he found in a town in Moldova.[4]
The last wish from the Voiceless is an ethical legacy that carries the obligation to remember them. This legacy has different meanings from different perspectives.
For survivors the obligation to memorialize the Voiceless meant telling what happened to them through their own personal stories and remembering their loved ones who perished. The often heard message Tell the world what happened to us expresses this obligation.
For the historian the obligation to remember the Voiceless translates into the task of reconstructing truthfully and objectively what happened to them and why. Inevitably, the main protagonist of these reconstructions is the perpetrator who acts; the Voiceless is the passive subject who perishes; the unspeakable cruelty and the "genius" of the perpetrators are the at heart of the narration. The Voiceless are often represented as a number ("the six millions") and their human sufferings are sidelined.[5] A different setting is possible when writing about a murdered victim who left a diary, letters or participated in resistance groups that left historical records.[6] When telling the history of those millions whom the word Voiceless refers to, however, a narrative setting that brings the perpetrators and their actions into the fore seems to be unavoidable.
From the perspective of the Voiceless this is troublesome; they could hardly have wished to be remembered through the deeds of their tormentors or only as names and numbers. The last wish of the Voiceless must also involve the truthful, the objective, and the unquestionable reconstruction of how they experienced what happened to them. We need documentation of not only what perpetrators did but also the subjective realities in which the Voiceless had to live. Tell the world what happened to us also implies the obligation to find the truth of subjective mental, emotional, and physical experiences that any victim, including the Voiceless, had to go through.
The last wish that survivors have memorialized assigns two very tangible tasks: complementing the history of what the perpetrators did with the subjective realities of the Voiceless and inquiring into the place of these subjective realities in human history. Symbolically, the accomplishment of these two tasks in the following essays will also give voice to the Voiceless.
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1. The Personal Archive of Gabor M. Toth, Budapest, F. Fam. Ser. Son. 3.
2. USHMM, RG-50.061*0010, Oral history interview with Suzanne Claire Holzer Wester.
3. USHMM, RG-50.030*0038, Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz.
4. USC Shoah Foundation, 945, Oral history interview with Leizer Hoffer.
5. Cf. "A fundamental problem faced by anyone who wishes to teach the Holocaust, or any other mass slaughter, is the tension between the desire to allow the dead their voices to make the silence heard, and a historical narrative that often deals almost exclusively on perpetrator actions. This bias in the narrative derives from the tendency in history, particularly in classroom teaching, to focus on historical actors. In the case of the Holocaust, this results in teaching the event from a German-centered perspective." J. Blutinger, "Bearing witness: teaching the holocaust from a victim-centered perspective" History Teacher, 42, p. 269.s
6. In the last decades a number of important works about diaries and letters of victims, as well as about their effort to document the Holocaust, have been published. L. Jockusch, Collect and Record!: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Garbarini, Numbered Days; M. Kaplan, Hitler's Jewish Refugees Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); A. Goldberg Trauma in first person. Diary writing during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).