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Narrating Suffering: the Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz

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Sokolowska K.

Ruch Literacki

2005

vol. 46

issue 4-5

407-422

This essay deals with the problem of expressing trauma by survivors who were caught up in the Holocaust as children. When asked to present their experiences of the Second World War, children find it easiest to stick to 'dry' facts. Such stories add up to a chronicle of the Shoah in which the tragedy of the Polish Jews is told in plain referential language. The problem of ineffability of liminal experiences in the accounts of the 'Children of the Holocaust' comes up when the narration focuses on emotions. The youngest witnesses prefer conventional figures of speech when talking emotions: in their diaries they try to express the horror of the Shoah by means petrified metaphors from everyday language. Their use of cliches is so thoroughly naive or unselfconscious because they do not see them as hackneyed and stale. Paradoxically, the worn-out phrase turns out to be the only vehicle of the deepest, most disturbing experiences of the 'Children of the Holocaust'. At the same time the writers search for a broader range of expression and for means that would enable them to channel their emotions which are so exceptional as to defy any comparison. However, judging by 'The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz', there exists one vehicle that can objectivize that experience, ie. his own body. Rubinowicz employs his body as a reliable instrument and store-room of both the individual and collective Jewish traumatic experiences. Instead of being invited to share in a journey of mental recollection, we are presented with a record of the body's predicament. The body thus becomes the focus of both physical and spiritual suffering.

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Narrating Suffering: the Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz