Świadeczność Leksykon świadków rozproszonej Zagłady

Testimoniality: A Lexicon of Witnesses to the Dispersed Holocaust

• Polish
• English

The authors use the adjective ‘testimonial’ (orig. ‘świadeczny’), i.e. ‘bearing witness, confirmed by testimonies’ to propose an analysis of bottom-up figurations of the role of witness, which are present in communities living in the vicinity of uncommemorated sites of the dispersed Holocaust. The eponymous ‘testimoniality’, or the disposition for bearing testimony or being a witness, is examined as a special situation in which the sites of past violence engage witnesses, both human (e.g. neighbours and guardians) and non-human: the landscape, the biotope, objects, various gestures and relations. By proposing categories grounded in the material gathered during field research, the authors analyse functions which can be referred to as testimonial, or seeking to give testimony to the past. The result is a lexicon of testimonial actors, practices, objects and words.