The Voice of the Voiceless and the Collectively Endured Experience: the "Suitcase Analogy"
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
The disappearance of A. and V. was a great sorrow for those who survived them. Sometime after 1945 my great-grandmother, the daughter of A., sent a letter to her brother. To console him, she closed her letter with the following words.
Don’t give yourself to despair, this is our destiny shared with millions, we have so far endured it - but until when?! [1]
Finding consolation in the shared destiny is a leitmotif in the testimonies of the survivors. They often recall the memory of gathering with other survivors and talking over the collectively endured experience of persecutions.
Nesse Goding, who lived through persecutions from the age of 13 to 17, recalls this experience in her testimony.[2]
Jacob Rosenber, a Polish survivor, tells what motivated survivors to gather and address the collectively endured experience of persecutions.[3]
"Understanding the unspoken word" is another a leitmotif in testimonies; it suggests an invisible community of shared experience that connected all victims. Another survivor, Dora Freilich, described the shared experience as "a silent bond" connecting victims.
And we kept together, the survivors. It was something, there was a silent bond between us that remains up until this day. We tried to live near each other and to come together, go together. We talked, we went to the movies, we went to the theater, we started to live again. We were also trying to decide what we are going to do with our lives.[4]
Beyond the collectively endured experience and the mutual understanding of each other’s pain, there was also something else that held the community of survivors together: the last wish of the Voiceless. Madeline Deutsch, a survivor who was born in former Czechoslovakia, put this into words.[5]
These memory fragments of survivors suggest that the collectively endured experience and the voice of the Voiceless are bound together. The path to the voice of the Voiceless must lead through the collective experience of persecutions.
Nearly fifty years after the end of the war, a survivor of Auschwitz, Fritzie Fritzshall, returned to the camp. Her recollection of this journey helps uncover this path.[6]
Just as the suitcases in the Auschwitz Museum could have belonged to anyone who was deported to the camp, there must be a set of experiences that could have been the experience of any of the six million victims. This set of shared experiences is the collectively endured fate that established the "silent bonds" among survivors.
The Voiceless' individual and their very concrete experience certainly perished with them. Nevertheless, through the collective experience of persecutions we can still approach their fate. This is how a survivor put it into words.[7]
Collective experience understood as a set incorporating what could have been the experience of any victim again takes us back to Schrödinger’s cat.
Based on the suitcase analogy, we can define collective experience as a set of possibilities. What the Voiceless experienced as a matter of fact cannot be reconstructed; what they were likely to experience can be reconstructed, however, through the collective experience. But collective experience defined as a certain world of possibilities is not a meaningful historical category; yet it is absurd since its backbone is probability (or likelihood) and not true or false facts. I believe, a key element of the epistemological turn we need to hear the voice of the Voiceless is the acknowledgement of world of possibilities as a valid form of knowledge.
Next, we will see what world of possibilities meant from the victims’ perspective. This will pave the way to reconstruct collective experience as a set of possibilities from thousands of testimonies.
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1. The Personal Archive of Gabor M. Toth, Budapest, F. Fam. Ser. Son. 1. 2./2
2. USHMM, RG-50.549.01*0009, Oral history interview with Nesse Godin.
3. USC Shoah Foundation, 20686, Oral history interview with Jacob Rosenberg.
4. USHMM, RG-50.462*0007, Oral history interview with Dora Freilich.
5. USHMM, RG-50.549.01*0027, Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch.
6. USHMM, RG-50.549.02*0020, Oral history interview with Fritzie Fritzshall.
7. USHMM, RG-50.462*0023, Oral history interview with Ellen Tarlow.