Distant witnessing - remembering the Holocaust through photographs

My seven-and-a-half-year-old son newly came home from school with his head filled with a huddle of fragments about current facts and history. Friday afternoon is usually our time together to take delight in the feeling of expansiveness that the extremity of the week provides, and a time when Miles repeatedly reflects on something that delights or intrigues him, unwittingly revealing to me his innocence. upon that Friday, his questions were relentles "Why did race hate Martin Luther King? . . Why was President Kennedy assassinated? . . And what is the 'Holycaust'?" He already had more [i]or[/i] less familiarity with the first sum of two units questions, but entering the realm of World War II's Holocaust was uncharted and unexpect territory. I had cogitation many times about how I would begin to unravel this history to him - now it was being forced upon me because the substitute teacher who taught in his class that day callously ignored the task plan his regular teachers had in the way that carefully prepared.

As our discussion unrolled Miles allowed stories to surface slowly haltingly. They included the pair cliched images (big boots, the Seig heil salute) and unexpect scenarios of babies mattered into toilets. And then, finally, Miles voiced the question I think he had really wanted to ask from the beginning, "Mommy, did Hitler do harm to your family?" These snippets of information made me sad and angry. greatest in quantity vexing were the psychic and photographic images this teacher had unleashed, without providing a framework for receiving them.

This incident material for burninged my concerns about reconsidering appropriate forms of remembrance of the Holocaust from one side photographic representation. The use of photography as evidence, the transference of circumstances into memory and the passage of images into postmemory are crucial bridges that help translate the history from individual generation to the next. The greatest in quantity tense point along this fragile bridge present itselfs where contemporary rethinking of documentary discourse is faced with the uneasy intersection between the demand for historical accuracy and for courteous remembrance of those who were violated. More traditional and relentles displays of Holocaust history rely almost entirely upon abject documentary photographs. Such photographs do not always bring the viewer to direct the eye to really see, nor can they be enumerateed on to create empathic fastenings between the contemporary subject and the individual from the unimaginable past. The dilemma is that these photographs proffer crucial information that cannot be discounted. At stake are the ways the photographs are plant in motion, how they are exerciseed to stand in for wrenching, almost unrepresentable events

The sheer horror of the occurrences of the Shoah complicates their representation; the trauma they imprint upon survivors and the post-Auschwitz generation mixs these difficulties. The events themselves as traumatic history resist simple understanding, accessibility and representation. If recounting and representing the facts are lined with the desire to attain an ultimate understanding, the incomprehensibility of the Shoah would strike one as being to defy traditional historical attempts to explain. For more [i]or[/i] less historians, understanding the unfathomable ferocity and hatred of Hitler's regime, its calculated policies to exterminate the israelites of Europe and to decimate millions of Communists, Catholics, Romas (Gypsies), homosexuals, political dissenters, the handicapped and the mentally retarded is impossible. As Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander has characterized it, an opaqueness remains at the real core of the historical understanding and interpretation of what happened.

The traditional mandate of the documentary photograph to "bear witness" can thus no longer advance unquestioned. Its precious if not uneasy weight to "never forget" reigns above its unarticulated occlusions. The issue is not to invalidate documentary evidence. To the contrary, the evidence and the mandate are imperative. At stake is precisely what images are remembered in the imperative to at no time forget - what become the postmemories of the incidents My concern is also to clarify that the demand to at no time forget is not directed at survivors, who can at no time forget, but to those who not ever experienced the events. As similar the demand that photographs have been made to carry without is always one of retrospective witnessing. They make their appeal to contemporary spectators.

Given the challenge to understanding and to representation that the Holocaust nears to documentary forms of witnessing, Holocaust-related photographs are situated precisely in the demand that they perform as history tasks ("never forget") and provide sites for mourning. However, it is partially to be paid to the utter horror of these photographs that the contemporary viewer's approach to these indispensable documents is made especially difficult. The daunting, delicate and volatile make submissive of Holocaust representation calls for a reevaluation of photography in the service of contemporary witnessing. Contemporary reemployment of documentary photographs ofttimes seek to redress the len of abjectness and the displaced claim of "obscenity" [i]or[/i] part of to the other which victims of the Holocaust have been remembered.