Caught by images: on the role of visual imprints in Holocaust testimonies

The Holocaust has disrupted the conventional notions of seeing, of the visual domain in Western culture. Since the Enlightenment the observation of the visual world has had a privileged epistemological status: it is a precondition and guarantee for knowledge and understanding. Being an eye-witness of something implies almost automatic apprehension and comprehension of the observed situation or event. This link between seeing and comprehension, however, has been radically disrupted in the experiences of Holocaust victims. It will be argued here that it is because of this disruption that ‘to see’ and the description of visual imprints have such a central role in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. But these eye-witnesses’ testimonies concern events that cannot be processed in the same manner as those recounted in the eye-witness accounts in police reports. In Holocaust testimonies the visual functions more like the unmodified return of what happened, instead of as a mode of access to or penetration into what happened. Readings of the work of Holocaust survivors Tadeusz Borowski and Charlotte Delbo will lead to a probing of vision that does not see, as an image of a memory that cannot relate.