The Void: from Imagining to Knowing



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

How A. and V. experienced what was happening to them remains unknown. As a matter of fact, I know only one thing about their fate. Like other Jews of their home town, they were forced to board on a train in the last days of spring in 1944. This train took them to Auschwitz, from where they never returned. I know this from a fragment of a letter that a stranger who travelled with them sent to my family much later. The letter fragment does not offer any concrete insight into how A. and V. experienced their persecutions; it ends with an eerie sentence.

I know nothing about your family. [1]

* * *

I know what the perpetrators did to those who did not return. By drawing on the testimonies of the survivors, I can also imagine how A. and V. or the Voiceless experienced what was happening to them. Based on a testimony by a Hungarian survivor, Freda Weiss, I can, for instance, imagine the moment when they were forced to board the train to Auschwitz.[2]





Another testimony by a Polish survivor, Mark Bader, let me imagine what must have happened at the moment when they arrived at Auschwitz.[3]





* * *

The survivors’ accounts such as the ones above let me imagine what happened from the perspective of the Voiceless. But if I accept their last wish as an ethical legacy, I also want to know it. The heart of the matter is that no firm knowledge about the Voiceless and their experience emerges from the accounts of the survivors.

Survivors often speak about the Voiceless; they often describe the emotional and physical reactions of children, women, and the old. But what we hear about the Voiceless is always changing. When taken away from their parents, children are sometimes crying; sometimes they are quiet. The old are sometimes begging for their lives; sometimes they are numb. The "evidence" about the experience of those who were bound to perish is always changing.[4] History has no method to back up the truth of the always changing evidence; the co-existence of multiple truths (sometimes crying sometimes not crying) is absurd: a historical fact is either true or false.[5]

There are further difficulties when we want to know how the Voiceless experienced what happened to them. What we hear about the Voiceless in the testimonies of the survivors is indirect and secondhand. Strictly speaking, the Voiceless do not speak in testimonies. As a whole, the Voiceless is present in accounts of survivors but their presence is intangible and contradictory.

Consequently, we can form factual knowledge of what the perpetrators did, but how the Voiceless experienced their persecutions must remain in the realm of fiction and imagination. Any effort to reconstruct the voice of the Voiceless is a futile and absurd undertaking if our epistemology is centered around true or false facts.[6]

Nevertheless, behind this futile and absurd undertaking there is an ethical dilemma: can we accept that the history of those millions who could not leave any records equals the history of the perpetrators? In light of their last wish, "tell the world and remember us," this cannot be accepted. Instead, we need a different epistemology by means of which we can know the experience of the Voiceless.

Strangely, this puts us into the same shoes as physics was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Methods of traditional physics could not address that a physical entity without tangible and directly observable existence can be in multiple and contradictory states at the same time. Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment pinpointed this; Schrödinger's cat (representing the invisible physical entity) is closed in a box and as long as it is not observed (i.e. until the box is opened) it is both dead and alive. This is as absurd as knowing anything about the experience of the Voiceless. Just as Schrödinger's cat can be in multiple contradictory states, the Voiceless can be in many different states (begging for life or numb, for instance). Once we read about the Voiceless, these many possible states "collapse" into one state; similarly, once an observation happens in quantum mechanics, the observed physical entity collapses into one state.

Just as an epistemological turn was needed in physics to form a knowledge of the intangible world of atoms, in history an epistemological turn would be needed to know about the intangible experience of the Voiceless.

In the next chapters, I will continue to inquire into this new epistemology. But first I will find a direct path from the survivor testimonies to the Voiceless. I will uncover this path by recalling the way survivors faced their own traumatic pasts.

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1. The Personal Archive of Gabor M. Toth, Budapest, F. Fam. Ser. Son. 1. 29./1

2. USC Shoah Foundation, 8854, Oral history interview with Freda Weiss.

3. USC Shoah Foundation, 10587, Oral history interview with Mark Bader.

4. Lorenz Langer also pinpointed the always changing evidence about the Voiceless: "Listening to accounts of Holocaust experience, we unearth a mosaic of evidence that constantly vanishes, like Thomas Mann's well of the past, into bottomless layers of incompletion. There is no closure, because the victims who have not survived have left no personal voice behind. They can be only evoked, spoken about." Lawrence L, Langer, Holocaust testimonies: the ruins of memory (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007), p. 21.

5. The literary scholar, Hayden White, had a similar point: "I suggested that the Holocaust was not only a novel event in the history of the West and the history of anti-Semitism but also a new kind of event that effectively brought under question the representational practices and modes of explanation both of modern historiography and the modern human sciences in general. I maintained that the older conventions, which presumed that a factually truthful account of events of the past constituted the only valid historical interpretation of them (any other kind of interpretation, such as the meaning of the factualized events, being considered a questionable addition to a properly historical account), had to go by the board when it came to events like the Holocaust. This event, I argued, demanded representational modes, explanatory models, and ethical attitudes that could not be provided by conventional professional historiography, with its fetishism ofthe facts and nothing but the facts." Hayden White, "Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief" in Probing the ethics of Holocaust culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Samuel Presner (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 53 - 54.

6. In the last decades historians have worked with a number of new concepts such as "narrative", "discourse", and "memory." However, the cornerstone of their epistemology is still factuality. In light of wide-scale efforts to deny the Holocaust, the truth that factuality gives is particularly important.