6 - Filip Müller's Sonderkommando Testimonies: Witnessing in Translation

Summary

IN THIS CHAPTER, I will take a different angle to my previous approach, which has been to explore the translation journeys of individual texts, with the focus on the translators and on discourse about translation. Here, I want to trace aspects of the career of a single witness for whom translating and being translated played a defining role throughout his life. While it would be an exaggeration to say that translation (in the strict sense of the word) is a precondition of bearing witness—after all, there are many witnesses whose words are never translated at all—there are certain common conditions in which translation may structure and influence the act of bearing witness right from the outset. Translation processes may impact the witness statement in a number of different ways simultaneously, whether in the context in which the statement is made or in the process of mediating it for a new audience in their context. It is also often difficult to draw the boundary between translation and other forms of mediation, but drawing attention to specific processes and effects of translation can add to our understanding of how witnesses operate in concrete political and institutional contexts; one can also explore the way in which institutional contexts shape, influence and affect how testimony is given, and assess the extent to which witnesses are able to exercise control over the use that is made of their words.

Filip Müller talked publicly about his experiences as a member of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommandos on many occasions and for different audiences, until his withdrawal from public life in the 1980s. He went on public record as a member of the Sonderkommando much earlier than most, and his testimony played an important role in breaking the silence about their work and countering the misunderstandings, myths, and denigrating commentaries that had grown up around the group since the liberation of the camp. Müller's testimony is unique for a Sonderkommando member in that he managed to survive from his deportation in April 1942 until his liberation from Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, and thus is able to describe the development of the murder machinery from the beginning to the end.