Book review: 'Judith M. Hughes, Witnessing the Holocaust. Six Literary Testimonies, Bloomsbury, 2018'

Witnessing the Holocaust analyses literary testimonies by six Jewish Holocaust survivors stemming from different countries, including Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy and Hungary. The selected corpus includes texts readily available in English, written by secular Jews said to be known for the literary and non-sentimental qualities of their writing. Rather than concentrating on Elie Wiesel, generally considered a key witness in the United States, the book therefore focuses on people such as Primo Levi, whose work is generally more prominent in the European context. The focus on Jewish testimony also explains the absence of “political” witnesses such as Charlotte Delbo or Jorge Semprun. This volume covers writing from different periods, for instance Victor Klemperer’s wartime diary, Primo Levi’s post-war writing or later works by Imre Kertész and Ruth Klüger. It also focuses on writers who have held a less prominent place in the Western Holocaust canon, such as Michael Glowiński and Béla Zsolt.