Thanks to the work of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, the Survivors of the Shoah project by Steven Spielberg, and the efforts of the new National Holocaust Museum, there is no shortage of testimony from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. But Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi regime, and there is surprisingly little testimony from non-Jewish survivors. Delbo is probably the only non-Jewish victim who became an important literary figure in the postwar era, and her position as victim along with her eloquent indictment of Christianity and Christian culture for their complicity in the extermination of the Jewish victims with whom she feels strong kinship and empathy make her work an absolutely unique contribution to post-Holocaust literature. Feel free to e-mail me at schnaibl@fas.harvard.edu for more bibliographical references.
Due to the passage of time, we are losing the remaining Holocaust survivors. Hence, Spielberg's and others' efforts to record the testimony before it is too late. There has been more attention lately paid to the children of the survivors' and how their parents' experiences affected their lives. Delbo's words transcend the words of one survivor - she really makes the reader understand what happned to those who "came back", how little they had to give, in some cases, to their spouses, to their children. American culture puts a lot of emphasis on "getting over, moving on". To some extent, I believe this is usually a healthy thing to try to do; but some experiences fall outside the realm of being able to "get over it". I would suggest that some experiences are so traumatic that one cannot "process" them and get over them. How is forgiveness possible when the entire world is affected as a result? Some experiences mark a person and maybe a culture permanently, and to deny or to try to repress this is unhealthy. At the end of their lives now, most published Holocaust testimonies report that the death camp experience "never leaves you" - something "survivors" probably didn't believe when they were first liberated. The fact that the Holocaust survivors are becoming fewer and fewer makes Delbo's book all the more important because it conveys the true horror, the true evil of human degradation and genocide - and explains why the Holocaust, as well as other genocides have and will reverberate from generation to generation. Her book made me realize that understanding and vigilance, not "processing" and forgiveness is the answer.