You think you would have survived the Holocaust? Tal and I dealing with some big questions. Part I

The ever present and constantly unsettling question - is it even possible to testify about the Holocaust? Based on the perspective that says that those who experienced the true essence of the Holocaust were those who were murdered, who did not return to testify, and those who did return, the survivors, are sharing an “incomplete” and “unfinalized” experience - is it possible? And furthermore those survivors who did share, are recounting events that cannot truly be transferred - there are no morals, no lessons, no solace. Survivors agonized over the question whether the true, authentic even, testimony, can only be expressed by those who experienced it to the fullest - remaining painful ghosts, existing only in the horror of the constant discontent they create. Whereas they, the survivors, the carriers of knowledge and the storytellers, remain powerless in their inability to provide the words, language, meaning and names. “What’s burning is me,” Dahlia Ravikovitch wrote in her horrifying poem, which is a form of personal testimony turned aflame - the body sizzling, annihilating the soul until nothing remains, besides the remnants of the body. And maybe it is the act of testifying itself that is the “dress of fire” that burns itself and the body with it. Did they not alert the poet, Jason’s wife, Medea’s revenge? They warned, they cautioned: “they made you a dress glowing like an ember/ burning like coals/ [...] What will become of you, she said, they made you a burning dress.” But the poet, the witness, still cannot understand nor trust ancient and modern Greek tragedies, and only when reaching the end, the complete downfall, the end of all ends, is the blaze revealed, the pillar of fire, the final light which accompanies those who walk and those who will remain alive: “But the dress, she said, the dress is on fire./ What are you saying, I shouted, what are you saying?/ I'm not wearing a dress at all, what's burning is me.” Does the testimony not burn also the bodies of those who returned, their souls trembling?
In her book “A Certain Kind of Orphanhood” Eleanora Lev writes: “Isak Dinesen wrote - ‘one can bear anything, withstand anything, if only you turn it into a story’. No one has been able to turn Auschwitz into a story, that is to paraphrase it, to illuminate the nightmare in a way that will enable catharsis; to name it by its true name (usually, the method to overcoming the horror is by getting to know it closely, by coming to terms with it in some form. With Auschwitz that’s impossible: the more you attempt to look at it directly the more the horror worsens).” But can you gaze upon Medusa’s face without a mirror?
(from my article Can You Gaze Upon Medusa’s Face Without a Mirror? in Her Story, My Story? Writing About Women and the Holocaust, Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz (Volume editor) Dalia Ofer (Volume editor), Peter Lang, USA ©2020, Edited Collection382 Pages