Auschwitz: the paradoxes of witnessing experience

The article analyzes the existential experience of witnessing “after Auschwitz”. It has been shown that in its life manifestation, experience is associated with a living - the ability of life manifestation of experience. It is also shown that experience as a process is a direct internal “grasp” of a phenomenon. The experience of the Second World War is designated as existential experience, the experience of living. On the experience of time “after Auschwitz” testify the survivors, the saved. They, testifying to the missing testimony, “speak by proxy”, testify to the impossibility to testify. They describe the “Muslims”, “sank”; the past belongs, however, to the dead, but the dead are bad storytellers. The article in connection with this raises the question: is it possible to speak about the expressibility-inexpressibility of the existential experience of Auschwitz? What is the meaning of testimony, how reliable, truthful, identical is it? The concept of the “aporia of Auschwitz” is conceptually significant in the article. The impossibility to convey the experience of those who passed through the hell of Auschwitz is revealed: the experience that fell to the lot of the unknown is unrepresentable and inexpressible. What is happening is unforgettable, true and at the same time unimaginable. Reality is inevitably greater than the sum of the factual elements presented in the evidence - such is the history of Auschwitz. The testimonies of survivors, as shown in the article, contain an important element. Its meaning lies in the fact that survivors testify to what it is impossible to talk about. The latter acquires the meaning and significance of the symbolic unspoken. The author addresses the phenomenon of the paradoxes of the tragic existential experience of Auschwitz everyday life - the paradoxes of survival and survivor, the paradox of witnessing, the paradox of “everyday death to death”. It is shown that these paradoxes permeated the existential experience of the “sunken” who looked into the face of death. The core of evidence is not witnessed, the Auschwitz paradoxes speak of this. The meaning of these paradoxes is interpreted in the article as follows: the ordinaryness of death, the fear of it turns everyday human experience into “death to death”; witnesses of impossible reality are faced with the inability to live. Having become anonymous, death has lost the meaning of the end of a lived life. Finally, there is absolute evil, there is evidence of the executioner and evidence of the victim. The testimonies of the executioners and the victims are not comparable with the absolute evil prevailing over any of the testimonies. Absolute evil, infinitely prevailing over any of the evidence, transcends the limits of possible experience into an unimaginable reality - this reality, this truth is greater than all that constitutes it. And this is the dominant aporia of Auschwitz experience. The author asks: is it possible to claim that existential experience, inexpressible in testimonies, is expressible in silence?

Keywords

Authors

References