History and disaster: Witness, trauma, and the problem of writing the Holocaust

Abstract
The prevailing assumption about history and memory--about the possibility of writing on a subject that one has not himself experienced--is that, while they are not the same thing, the relation between them nonetheless yields partial access to the events themselves. Using writings about the Holocaust, Bernard-Donals examines the relation among the events of history, how they are witnessed, and how they are written as testimony and as history.