IN RECENT CRITICAL DISCOURSE, a view of Holocaust testimony has gradually emerged in debates about a set of ideas to do with genre, truth and falsehood, and narrative; the term testimony can be used without explanation in discussing texts, even though most of the texts covered by such a term are a long way away from witness depositions of the kind that came to international prominence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Discussion of testimonies tends to revolve around the following issues: the status of the text as an eyewitness record, thus preserving a direct link back to the legal origins of the genre; the status of the text as a factual record or historical document, and its value as a source in comparison with other kinds of documents; the text as a record of experience, with its language, form, style, and narrative structure shaped directly by the extremity of that experience, rather than by other influences, in other words, psychological causes (trauma) are a greater influence on the writing than are generic conventions or the needs of a present readership; the definition of testimony as a new genre arising from unprecedented circumstances, in contrast with the genres of autobiography, memoir, or autobiographical fiction; the style of the text conceived of as transmitting the voice of the witness, perhaps permitting the reader to become a secondary witness if he or she reads correctly; the text written for ethical purposes—for the witness's family, to make silent voices heard, to commemorate the dead, to counter the danger of forgetting, to promote tolerance—or a psychological impulse to speak for therapeutic reasons.

This is not a definition of testimony as a genre—I find that unhelpful since views of testimony shift through time and across cultures, and affect, and are affected by, the translation of texts—but instead it is a network of discourses and debates which are always invoked in discussion of Holocaust testimonies, and which are all relevant to a study of translation. Eva Lezzi has provided a useful description of what—drawing on Philippe Lejeune's “autobiographical pact”—she refers to as the “referential pact” accepted by publisher, reviewers, and readers of Holocaust testimonies, and which affects their writing, publishing, and reading:

This book aimed to produce a series of close readings of a limited number of case studies in the sacrificial discourse while paying careful attention to the nuances of rhetoric, imagery, and narrative. By doing so, I hoped to identify a trajectory of the sacrificial topos, which continues to provide a strong gravitational zone for various discourses. Today, the language of sacrifice and heroic victimization no longer belongs to the official discourse alone; the intelligentsia, popular culture in the form of talk shows, forums, and flash mobs, as well as government officials all occasionally borrow from its dramatic arsenal. The old models of heroism are still being discussed, in addition to their brand-new incarnations.

One of the most vivid recent examples of sacrificial language appeared on television in July 2014, when the Russian state's TV Channel One ran a story about a little boy crucified by the advancing Ukrainian Army in the eastern city of Slaviansk during the recent conflict with the separatists of Donetsk People's Republic. The video segment featured an interview with an eyewitness, Galina Pyshniak, who described a scene familiar from wartime narratives about the execution of captured partisans: the whole town was gathered in the city square and forced to watch as the little boy bled to death. The story was widely discredited and proclaimed a fake; even Channel One eventually had to admit that they did not have any evidence that this horrific event ever took place. What is interesting about the little boy's story is the ways in which it both resembles and deviates from the standard World War II narrative of victimization. Much like the latter, it stokes anger against the enemy (Ukraine) and rallies the Russian public around the figure of the victim. The method of execution as well as its voyeuristic nature both indicate that this is meant to be a tale of martyrdom on par with the wartime stories, though more religiously overt, and the witness's narrative contains many obvious references to the atrocities committed by Germans in Soviet territories.

When General Pinochet's junta took over the government of Chile in September 1973 and detained thousands of people in a concentration camp at the National Stadium in Santiago on suspicion of resistance, Victor Jara, the folk singer, theater director, and Communist, was among the victims. He was murdered in a particularly gruesome and symbolically suggestive way: before being shot to death, he was tortured, and his hands were broken, so as to separate the bard from his guitar. The Chilean martyr for Communism, whose media cult Leonid Parfenov mentions in Namedni as a crucial cultural phenomenon of the decade, comes to occupy the sacrificial space in the Soviet press of the 1970s and 1980s, when his image strengthened and legitimized the regime. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben demonstrates how the state's power has always been connected to and expressed through this figure, whose biological life is subject to the king's state of exception, that is, his ability to suspend the law in order to apply capital punishment. On the other hand, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows that, in the seventeenth century, public displays of execution and torture reasserted the state's power on the off ender's body. Similarly, public and graphic descriptions of Jara's death and suff ering affirmed the Soviet state's power before its frightened citizens. Foucault argues that discourse hides the attributes of power while making the objects of its disciplining gaze all the more visible through surveillance: “the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.” Soviet discourse demonstrates Jara's injured body by placing it at the center of its narrative while “revealing” the power at this site. I will specifically explore how these narratives establish the agency of the state as the authoritative and punishing subject outside of the culprit/pain causality through the exhibition of Victor Jara's body. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler discusses a retroactive invention of a subject to be held accountable for the consequences of a hurtful action, and argues that there must be another subject who makes that judgment. I propose that this positing of the authoritative subject is the goal of such discourse.

While working on this study, I found myself returning to Naomi Seidman's claim, which I discussed in the opening chapter, that the Holocaust “remains invisible as a product of translation.”1 The role of translators of testimony has not been simply to transfer a preexisting voice or set of meanings from one discrete language to another, in order to make a work available to a new audience, but they have played from the very beginning an active, if not defining role in the creation, mediation, and interpretation of knowledge about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as we understand it now, is literally unthinkable without translation, and what knowledge we have is structured by translation in ways that it may ultimately be impossible to unravel fully.

Investigating the detail of translation in context reveals more radical implications for our understanding of the Holocaust than a procedure that discusses translation in terms of loyalty or betrayal, accuracy or inaccuracy: these ideas are important, but working with such clear oppositions can blind us to the complexity of the texts that we have in front of us and lead us to condemn translators rather than understanding how translation informs our own knowledge.

There is no single theoretical approach that can be applied to the translation of testimony, even to the limited selection of texts I discuss here. Seeing translation as a form of textual commentary, as I do in this study, has the advantage of allowing translators to emerge as ethical agents in their own right, as cocreators and commentators on the texts they work with: this allows us to make ethical judgments about their work, informed by the concrete context and purpose of the translation, without resorting to simplistic criticism or condemnation.

This study, and the studies that have influenced and inspired my work, are really only beginning to scratch the surface of the issue of translation in relation to the Holocaust, whether in terms of the linguistic complexity of the situations in which the victims found themselves or the desires, anxieties, and dilemmas connected with finding new audiences for witness statements. There are power dynamics at work here that are complex and hard to grasp, but which affect translation and leave their traces in the texts, and can only be revealed by careful contextualization and close reading.

TRANSLATED TESTIMONIES cross many boundaries, not only linguistic or cultural, but also generational or between victim groups and broader readerships. The boundary between the two sides in the Cold War was not only physical and ideological, but also marked the contrast between very different ways of articulating knowledge about and memory of the Holocaust. Many texts made the journey between East and West, and there are important questions to ask about how the differing conditions of production and reception affected translation. This chapter does not claim to offer a comprehensive account, but instead will take a more detailed look at two texts and the translation journeys they underwent from East to West in the conditions of Cold War Europe.

The ideological context of developing interpretations of the Holocaust was inflected by individual national contexts, as well as by the conditions imposed by the Soviet authorities in the Stalinist and post- Stalinist periods; in the West, victim groups had to struggle to establish a visible identity as victims, and understandings of the Holocaust—and the range of familiar images associated with them—developed over time. The opening of Soviet and East European archives in the 1990s supported a shift in attention away from an exclusive focus on the extermination camps and imagery associated with them, to a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of genocide in the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht.

Victim testimonies played a key role in all these struggles, but they not only had to negotiate the tricky political dynamics of relationships between victims and nonvictims in the West or the state-imposed silence about the specifics of the Jewish experience in the Soviet bloc, but also to make themselves visible as testimony to readers with very different expectations.

Despite the large number of witness texts that have crossed between East and West, this is still an under-researched area. Therefore, I will refrain from drawing generalized conclusions, tracing instead a small number of texts in their translation journey. I will also concentrate on texts that crossed the border to the West, in order to make comparisons easier.

In this chapter we will return to the wartime sacrificial figures in post-Soviet nationalist literature, specifically in fiction, essays, journalism, and interviews with the popular contemporary writers Zakhar Prilepin, German Sadulaev, and Dmitry Cherkasov against the background of the military conflicts in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and, most recently, in Ukraine. While the figure of a captured partisan, which originated during World War II, continued to serve as a model for the representations of late-Soviet heroes like the flight attendants who were killed during hijackings, the return to military combat created favorable conditions for these authors to revisit one of the figures at the center of the sacrificial mechanism several decades later.

It is important to acknowledge some of the events that influenced post-Soviet nationalist literature that features wartime heroes. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of the satellite states, as well as the lawlessness of the 1990s and the defeat of state ideology that buttressed the people's sense of identity, certainly led to the mainstreaming of Russian and other ethnic nationalisms in the early 2000s. The loss of international prestige, which became especially apparent during the conflict in Yugoslavia, the spread of free market capitalism, which resulted in three defaults of the ruble in the space of a decade, and the acts of terror in Moscow and the provinces in the 1990s all paved the way for the popularity of Putin's tough image and a strongman's tactics as well as a general militarization of the official language and culture. However, it was the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s that provided a watershed moment for portraying the soldier in the official language, literature, and film.

What one observes in contemporary nationalist literature, particularly in the works of Prilepin, is a transformation of the soldier from the heroic captured partisan of World War II to a naive and beleaguered protagonist fighting in Chechnya; it reflects a turn toward a more individualized form of nationalism than that promoted by official Soviet culture.

IN 1962, EVEN THOUGH he had never been to Auschwitz and had seen none of these things, Curt Meyer-Clason wrote: “Nie werde ich diese Nacht vergessen, die erste Nacht im Lager, die aus meinem Leben eine siebenmal verriegelte lange Nacht gemacht hat” (Never will I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that made of my life a long night seven times sealed). We can tell that the “I” that speaks here is not a literary, fictional “I” since the generic label of this German text is “Erinnerung und Zeugnis” (memory and testimony): it is an account of memory and eyewitness testimony. Therefore, Meyer-Clason makes a claim that is factually untrue and identifies his own voice with that of the Holocaust survivor, usurping it for his own purposes. The individual whose name appears on the title page, Elie Wiesel, did not write a single word contained in this book.

The paragraph I have just written is absurd and plainly offensive, and flies in the face of common sense. But it is also true. Why is it, then, that we regard my statement as false? The answer, of course, lies in our recognition of translation, of the modern legal, financial, scholarly, and ethical frameworks surrounding the activity of translation, and of the social institutions that support them: this supplies the “common sense” that is outraged by my first paragraph. The conventions of scholarly referencing form one of these frameworks, as this necessary endnote will attest. Even though it is logical to do so, we do not go to the extreme I have outlined above: we refuse to do so, and ignore the troubling implications raised by the truth of the statements. However, we will happily go to the opposite extreme, thinking nothing of making a patently untrue statement like the following, as if the translator had had no hand in the text at all: “In If this is a Man, Primo Levi wrote …”

This is not a new issue in translation studies, of course, where such issues have been much discussed, and there are well developed fields of debate and frameworks for interpretation and analysis. However, the scholarly endeavors of studies of translation still cause friction, discomfort, and occasionally outrage when applied to Holocaust testimonies, which have their own entirely legitimate ethical, political, literary, and philosophical frameworks of interpretation and institutions to support them.

ELIE WIESEL'S La Nuit (1958; Night, 1960) is one of the iconic Holocaust survivor testimonies, having attained a status in the United States matched only by the popular edition of Anne Frank's diary. The text functions as a focus for discussion about the nature and purpose of testimony, about the status of the Holocaust survivor in contemporary culture, about questions of witnessing and authenticity, and about the boundary between the testimonial, the autobiographical, and the literary. However, it is not just the text that has attracted commentary, but also issues connected with translation. In contrast with the majority of Holocaust testimonies, issues of translation and reception in translation have been a defining feature of discussion of this text at least since the 1990s: it is very difficult to read this text now without engaging in some way with questions of translation and mediation, as the author himself has drawn attention to these questions in his preface to the recent English retranslation. As such, it is an interesting example of what happens when translation suddenly becomes visible in connection with a well-known, canonical testimony.

In this chapter, I am going to trace the outlines of the debate about Wiesel's text in translation, expanding the boundaries of the discussion by looking at the German translation by Curt Meyer-Clason as well as the English translations by Stella Rodway and Marion Wiesel. I will consider the extent to which discussion of translation is in fact about something else entirely, and how the relationship between translation and “original” that is identified by critics reflects ideas and anxieties about testimony, witnessing, loss, betrayal, and the status of Jewish remembrance within a more general, universalizing memory culture.

Ultimately, even though critical attention was drawn to translation through an attack on Wiesel and the attendant scandal, subsequent critical discussion, which has had an effect on popular new editions of the text in both English and French, has shown the potentially positive consequences of making translation visible. One can explore what translators do to make texts available to new readers, while also acknowledging that translation talk is often a way of negotiating other issues, too. An open, informed, respectfully critical discussion about translation and testimony can add to our understanding, and can be a source of knowledge about the Holocaust, rather than of anxiety.

On November 2, 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that a man was convicted for bludgeoning to death his seventy-seven-year-old father in Santa Monica, California. For many people in Russia there was poetic justice in this dénouement. The father and son were Pranas and Algirdas Brazinskas, the infamous pair who thirty-two years earlier successfully hijacked an Aeroflot flight 224 to Turkey. About ten minutes into the flight, Pranas passed a note to the flight attendant, Nadezhda (Nadya) Kurchenko, demanding that the plane land in Turkey. This is how the flight's copilot Suliko Shavidze described his experience to the newspaper Izvestiia: “Nadya ran into the cockpit, screamed, ‘Assault!’ and attempted to close the door. We heard a shot. Nadya fell down, and a man of about fifty broke into the cockpit. He held a shotgun and shouted ‘Turkey, Turkey!’” A passenger, Tamara Skorzhevskaya, relates the events from the passenger cabin:

The copilot continues:

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.

Since being first put on trial in what appeared to be a rigged and politically motivated prosecution, Mikhail Khodorkovsky became something of a heroic figure for the Russian intelligentsia. Certainly, some objective facts, such as the court's apparent bias, Putin's personal involvement, and Khodorkovsky's stoicism undoubtedly played a part in creating this ethos. The media, both in Russia and abroad, directly compared this aff air to the Soviet political trials against dissidents and writers, and even to the Stalinist show trials. For the thick journals, this connection also pertains to the issue of Russian history's cyclical nature, which has been widely debated in recent literary reviews. There is no doubt that the two trials’ familiar setting was a contributing factor in galvanizing the intelligentsia to Khodorkovsky's defense because it supplied a field upon which to project, test, and play out the assumptions of similarity between the contemporary political system and its Soviet predecessor. Along with creating the character of a businessman hero for popular culture, the trials also provided an opportunity to work out a new definition of personhood, such as, according to Oleg Kharkhordin, were revealed by the Soviet trials. I am particularly interested in the construction of heroic victimhood and the ways in which these contemporary notions echo the official Soviet discourse on “scapegoats” and “sacred men and women” (such as the partisan hero or the defendants at the show trials) while invoking more appropriate cultural references, be it religious mythology, the nineteenth-century literary behavioral models, “progressive values,” or patriotism. Khodorkovsky's ability to speak for himself throughout the duration of the trials added a new element to this setting and often subverted his defenders’ expectations. Putin's unexpected order to release his most famous prisoner to Germany shortly before the Olympic winter games in Sochi established a new parallel with the Cold War. My goal is to examine the extent to which contemporary Russian intelligentsia continues to use this discursive framework while promoting an antitotalitarian agenda. To this end I will examine the correspondence between Khodorkovsky and the writers Liudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, and Boris Strugatsky, as well as various echoes of the trials in Russian and Western media and popular culture.

While in the 1930s the Soviet population was subjected to violence in the form of mass arrests and petitions for the death penalty, the official literature steered clear of its realistic depictions. World War II provided a psychological and artistic release by presenting an enemy whose actions demanded a violent response. As a result, a language of physical struggle based on a new war mythology emerged. Typically, the official discourse of World War II works toward establishing murder as self-defense and avoids portraying the Soviet warriors doing anything morally suspect; there is a clear and unambiguous line between right and wrong, between the Russians and the Germans.

Of particular interest within this mythology is the treatment of the human body, with its inconvenient needs and the tendency to encroach on the life of consciousness, ideological or otherwise. Soviet war stories often show the Nazis going to impossible lengths in their torture of captured partisans, and the Russians persevering through seemingly impossible hardships. While Elaine Scarry demonstrates that torture creates a balance of power, which destroys the victim's world (identity) and turns him or her into a body, in Soviet war stories the bodies of the tortured partisans all but disappear. If, according to Victor Erofeev, prostitutes in the works of psychological realism sold the bodies they did not have, in Russian war stories partisans submit to torture bodies that are immune to pain. Without disputing the issue of historical accuracy, this chapter investigates this stylization and its various vantage points in the context of the Soviet aesthetic.

I believe that the body's disappearance should be read in the larger context of its treatment in the official narratives of the 1930s and 1940s. For example, in the coverage of the show trials, the accused are presented not only as fully embodied but also obscured by camouflage, which must be stripped away to reveal the “body” of crime. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben points out that the history and etymology of the writ of habeas corpus, or the law that demands the presence of the accused at the trial, demonstrates the “law's desire to have a body.” Soviet discourse goes so far as to treat the very presence of the “enemy bodies” as a method of making concrete their alleged crimes of plotting and spying.

IN THE SECOND INSTALLMENT of Aras Ören's narrative poems constituting the Berlin trilogy (1973–80), we encounter a two-line reference to the Dram Tiyatro, the oldest theater in Istanbul. Apart from being the location of an encounter between two characters in the story, and the mentioned detail of torn Brecht posters in front of it, this passage appears in the narrative poem without being supplemented by additional references to its historic, cultural, and political significance. The Dram Tiyatro has a special place in Turkish theater history, in particular with regard to Brecht. Indeed, the “Brecht incident” discussed at length in the previous chapter made the Dram Tiyatro not merely the center of Turkish debates on the politics and possibilities of a revolutionary theater, but also the site to which an international discussion of Turkish cultural politics referred. These public discussions led to an increased interest in Brecht and an intensive engagement with Brecht's writings on epic theater, and Haldun Taner's success with his play The Ballad of Ali Keshan, which employs a Brechtian epic mode and premiered on March 31 of the same year, further intensified the interest in Brecht's dramatic theory and practice.

The transformation and politicization of Turkish theater throughout the 1960s constitutes an important context for Ören's oeuvre after his emigration to Germany—a period during which he has said he “looked for a home in political theories as well as on theater stages.” Indeed, during the 1960s Ören worked as an actor and dramaturg with different theaters in Istanbul, West Berlin, and Frankfurt am Main. His engagement in theater began in Istanbul at the Gençlik Tiyatrosu in 1959. By invitation of the Goethe University's student theater Neue Bühne in Frankfurt/Main, he participated as an actor in two productions in 1962, Nelly Sachs's Eli (1950) and Bertolt Brecht's Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule). The latter production even toured Turkey, with performances in Istanbul, for the international student theater festival, as well as in Ankara and Ordu. Besides working closely with Ongoren in various plays with the Genclik Tiyatrosu ensemble, Ören further collaborated on multiple occasions with Sermet Çağan as a member of the Gen-Ar Tiyatrosu ensemble (founded in 1963) and the TÖS Theater discussed in the previous chapter.