Second, the Shoah is, in a strong sense, incomprehensible to us. We are still living in the same western civilization that produced it and, as such, are still deeply implicated in it. Its causes, events, ramifications, and lessons are still becoming apparent, and any attempt to reduce the scope of historical documents to commentary on the Einsatzgruppen or the death camps reduces our ability to approach an understanding of it. The impact of the Shoah is still uncertain; who can say which features of it are the most important? For the videos to be cut up by an editor with particular (even if well-meaning) intentions would be more of an intrusion of one arbitrary moment of history (ours) than we should, with integrity, accept.

Watching the video testimonies we are aware that the people telling their stories are wearing clothes from five, ten, fifteen . This is interesting, and occasionally funny (big wing collars, large moustaches), but not particularly important. However, the editorial mores of the 1980s, or late 1990s, or now, would have more than a stylistic effect, and to allow them to substantively change the video testimony watched by future generations is inappropriate for testimonies in general and Shoah testimonies in particular. By leaving the testimonies as the witnesses presented them, the facilitators and archivists display no editorial presumption that they, now, know what will prove to be of use in them. (In this way a document differs from a documentary because its primary responsibility is to preserve the past for the future, and not to present the past now. The cultural, ideological, or economic preferences of any given time will end up being censorial if they are given the power to edit history.)

Third, and relatedly, as Arendt and Bauman in their own ways began to point out, the Shoah is not just about the sensational cruelties that humans inflict on one another, but about the potential for evil in the daily blindness and mundanity of modern civilization. Returning, in the testimonies, to a description of the mundanity of daily life reminds us not only of lost life, lives, and culture but also to the scope of an event that infects the daily life of billions. A highlights reel would miss precisely those aspects of the story which humanize, develop, and expand the tragedy of the event: those aspects which show that people are whole worlds in themselves.

[1]       [2]       3       [4]       [next->] Image: Fortunoff Video Archive