The Echoes of Trauma
By Michael O'Krent
This topic is a very personal one for me. The work I do organizing my grandmothers' memoirs falls precisely within the category of archiving trauma. "The Voice of Testimony" bothered me as someone who engages in this sort of work. The shots that were cropped to show only a person's lips seemed grainy and clearly had been edited, making the digital nature of the work obvious. That then made the survivors' testimonies seem unsympathetic. The editing was so distracting that it was difficult to pay attention to the stories, which reflects differing approaches to how future generations ought to handle the trauma of the past. I think that memories of trauma should be presented in the most complete form possible, with as much resemblance to the original story as possible. "The Voices of Testimony" instead relies on a creative re-imagination of how trauma is remembered."Where the Buffalo Roam" seemed more impactful to me, both despite and because the faces of the testifiers were never visible. Yet it seemed more organic that way - it featured the entirety of an audio recording, undistorted, edited smoothly. That seemed more natural than the clearly cropped shots in "The Voice of Testimony."
For me, my aunt, and my sister (who are the collaborators on the family memoir project), the purpose of remembering trauma is to prevent its reoccurence. In our minds - and I think many others share this view - sympathy is the road away from violence. The most important task of the memoirist or the archivist is to elicit that sympathy in one's audience. That is why we store memories of trauma, and that is why we urge future generations to re-live those foreign memories.
The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it. . . . To justify it would be monstrous in the face of the monstrosity that took place. . . . Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all education strives against. One speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it is not a threat—Auschwitz was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror.
-Theodor Adorno, "Education After Auschwitz"
Education does not just take place in schools. I would go as far as saying that in its broadest sense, education means nothing more than a type of learning, the acquisition of knowledge due to the intervention of another person. The archivist has the duty to be that person, to refuse to be a bystander to the disintegration of history. While digitization and the creativity that comes with it may be interesting, such techniques are best left to subjects that are more fitting subjects of innovative art. To chop up the testimony of a Holocaust survivor and depict it as if it belonged in an art house is to ignore that things like this are real. Inspiring sympathy for those who are persecuted and attacked should be the main task.
Central to the moral imagination is seeing what is humanly important. When it is stimulated, there is a breakthrough of the human responses, otherwise deadened by such things as distance, tribalism or ideology. It checks conformity and obedience, bringing to the fore what matters humanly rather than the current norm or the official policy. It makes vivid the victims and the human reality of what will be done to them.
-Jonathon Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
I see no better way to do so than by presenting memories of trauma as cleanly as they were retold.