The Moral Burden of Telling a Survivor's Story

What happens when a Holocaust survivor's memory contradicts the historical record? Who do you believe—the person who lived through it, or the documents that tell a different story?

It's a question I never imagined confronting when I began recording my mother-in-law's Holocaust testimony. For 12 years, Rifka had resisted my attempts to uncover her past. Now, at last, she was prepared to revisit the three years she had spent imprisoned by the Nazis—in labor camps, a salt mine, Auschwitz, and Schindler's factory.

Rifka was 14 when she was deported to a labor camp in Poland. By the time she emerged from the camps, she had lost almost everyone she loved. For decades, she refused to speak about those years, even to her own children.

When she finally broke her silence, I recorded our conversations, followed leads, and began piecing together a life almost entirely hidden from her family.

I believed I was preserving history. What I hadn't considered was how much responsibility comes with telling someone else's story.

Memory is imperfect, even under ordinary circumstances. We confuse dates, merge events, and forget details. For someone recalling experiences buried beneath decades of trauma and silence, these difficulties can be even greater.

But what happens when a survivor's recollection conflicts with established facts? Suppose she remembers an event occurring in one camp, while archival records place it elsewhere. Does the writer correct her account, preserve it as remembered, or attempt to reconcile the two?

There is something deeply unsettling about questioning the recollections of a woman who survived Auschwitz. Yet to accept every detail without question would be a disservice to history.

Respect for that experience does not relieve a writer of the responsibility to establish the facts.

I decided that neither memory nor documentation should be accepted unquestioningly. I would investigate wherever possible, compare accounts, and distinguish what Rifka remembered from what I could independently verify. Where the evidence remained uncertain, I would acknowledge it rather than force a conclusion.

A mistaken detail does not invalidate a survivor's experience. But respect for that experience does not relieve a writer of the responsibility to establish the facts.

There was another dilemma.

How much horror is too much?

The Holocaust needs no embellishment. Yet anyone writing about the camps must decide how much brutality to describe. Too little, and the reader may never grasp what prisoners endured. Too much, and suffering risks becoming gratuitous.

In one chapter of my book, three teenage prisoners are tortured and executed while an orchestra plays. The details are horrifying but they reveal something essential about the calculated cruelty of camp life.

Still, I questioned how far to go. Was every detail necessary to understand what happened, or was I including it simply for its shock value?

I chose to describe the horrors where they were essential to the story, but not to dwell on cruelty merely to provoke a reaction. I wanted readers to understand what the prisoners endured, not simply recoil.

Nor did I want the prisoners who suffered to be remembered only for the terrible things done to them.

Rifka often spoke about her camp sisters, older women who took frightened younger inmates under their wing. They shared food, offered advice, warned of approaching danger, and sometimes became surrogate mothers to girls who had lost their own.

These acts of kindness were as much a part of camp life as the brutality. To omit them would have presented an incomplete picture of the people who struggled to survive.

I was equally careful not to portray survival as a reward for courage or ingenuity. Rifka was resourceful and determined, but so were countless others who perished. Sometimes survival depended on something as arbitrary as where a prisoner stood in a line or whether a guard happened to look the other way.

Then, while I was still writing, Rifka developed Alzheimer's.

I was only two-thirds of the way through my first draft.

After decades of refusing to revisit her past, she was losing the memories she had finally agreed to share.

Occasionally, during a lucid moment, she could still retrieve a fragment of her story. But increasingly, I had to rely on our recordings, historical documents, and the research I had gathered.

The woman whose life I was writing was gradually losing the ability to correct my version.

And that presented perhaps the greatest danger of all.

With no one to challenge an interpretation, it becomes tempting to fill a gap, supply a plausible thought, or make a sequence of events flow more smoothly. A reconstructed conversation can begin to sound like a verbatim account. An assumption can quietly become a fact.

In trying to preserve Rifka's testimony, I became acutely aware that I could unintentionally give my own interpretations the authority of her words.

So I established a boundary. I could reconstruct events from evidence but I could not claim to know what Rifka had never told me. Where she had spoken, I could draw on her testimony. Where she had remained silent, I had to resist the temptation to speak for her.

That distinction became especially important as her memory failed.

The first time, Rifka was my witness. The second time, I became hers.

Privacy was also a question. Rifka had confided in me, not an audience of strangers. Her willingness to share painful memories did not automatically mean that every disclosure belonged in a book. I had to weigh its historical importance against her right to keep certain experiences private.

Writing her story demanded more than accuracy. It demanded judgment.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub wrote about the essential role of the listener in receiving testimony. But I came to recognize a second responsibility: carrying that testimony beyond the room in which it was first spoken.

The first time, Rifka was my witness.

The second time, I became hers.

As the generation of Holocaust survivors disappears, their stories will increasingly be told by people who were not there. The survivors themselves will no longer be able to clarify, correct, or object.

I spent more than 20 years researching Rifka's life. I could establish where she was imprisoned, reconstruct the conditions under which she lived, and sometimes uncover facts she herself had forgotten or never known.

But I could not enter her mind. I could not know precisely what she felt, what thoughts sustained her, or how she made sense of experiences that defied understanding.

I began this journey afraid that Rifka's story would be lost.

I ended it mindful of another danger: There is a fine line between preserving another person's story and making it your own.