In their efforts to reconstruct the history of the Nazi extermination of European Jews, historians have long been reluctant to use survivor testimony. English- and German-language historians have generally held to the position, most famously articulated by Raul Hilberg, that survivor testimonies are less reliable than Nazi documents because they contain more factual inaccuracies. Perhaps surprisingly, historians of Jewish experiences during the Shoah have expressed the same reservations about this body of source material. One consequence of this view is the relative dearth of historical writing that examines Jews as historical subjects in their own right, not merely as objects of Nazi exterminatory policies.

The volume edited by Jürgen Matthäus, Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations, represents a transformation in how historians are lately thinking about survivor testimony. With essays by Konrad Kwiet, Nechama Tec, Matthäus, Atina Grossmann, and Wendy Lower, this collection is unusual because it brings together five analyses of a single woman's testimony, that of a woman not widely known. Helen (“Zippi”) Tichauer, a graphic artist from Bratislava, Slovakia, was deported on one of the first transports from that country to Auschwitz in late March 1942 and was liberated from a subcamp of Ravensbrück in May 1945. Consistent with traditional historical methods, contributors to this volume investigate the “facts” revealed by Tichauer's testimony and what new light they shed on our knowledge of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They share one additional feature: the testimony they analyze did not emerge in a single moment in time, frozen in written form. Because each historian spoke with Tichauer on multiple occasions over several years, Tichauer's testimony is perhaps better described in the plural, as a series of conversations and also transcribed interviews and correspondence.

The first two essays by Kwiet and Tec focus on Tichauer's prewar biography and experiences in Auschwitz. Their interest derives from the light shed by Tichauer on little-known aspects of Auschwitz. Tichauer had a unique vantage point on Auschwitz because she was there for almost three years and because of her position for much of that time on a work detail that registered new arrivals. She painted the markings—stripes, insignia, and serial numbers—on prisoners' uniforms, and she printed and helped to organize the filing system that the German camp administration used to track all female inmates in the Auschwitz camp system. As Kwiet and Tec detail, Tichauer's position in the camp, in conjunction with her keen memory and readiness to talk about her experiences, make this “ordinary” woman's testimony extraordinary. Tec's essay also examines instances of cooperation among women in Auschwitz, with a particular interest in how Tichauer's interactions with the underground movement in Auschwitz might broaden our understanding of resistance.

But what really distinguishes this volume is how some of its contributors move beyond content to investigate the reception of testimonies by interviewers, scholars, and listeners/readers. The essays by Matthäus, Grossmann, and Lower raise questions about how historians and students use testimonies. If Lawrence Langer taught us to be wary of our efforts to derive moral lessons from Holocaust survivors' narratives, these historians caution us that seeking evidence to confirm any preconceived notions can interfere with our apprehension of a testimony's meaning. In a close reading of Tichauer's 1946 interview with American psychologist David Boder, recorded in the Feldafing Displaced Persons camp, Matthäus uses literary critical modes of analysis to examine its language and narrative structure. He methodically traces how scholars have used and sometimes misinterpreted the meaning of Tichauer's statements in this, her first formal testimony. He argues for the importance of contextual readings of testimony rather than treating them “as a quarry for the mining of suitable data or as raw material for the construction of new narratives on the past” (p. 49). As Matthäus demonstrates, the expectations of an interviewer or scholar who seeks evidence of trauma may be disappointed, but what emerges are other fresh insights.

The disappointment engendered by classroom encounters between Holocaust survivors and students is the topic of Wendy Lower's piece on Holocaust education and testimony. Lower situates trends in Holocaust education within the broader movement of “affective” pedagogy emphasizing empathy as a tool for teaching tolerance. Her astute critique of the role that survivors usually are asked to play in college classrooms—to bring this horrific past “to life” and to impart lessons—is sharpened by her analysis of Tichauer's multiple visits to Lower's own classes. Tichauer consciously worked to unsettle students' assumptions about the Holocaust. Lower offers some valuable reflections on how a teacher may transform such “distant encounters” between students and Holocaust survivors into pedagogically meaningful experiences.

Grossmann's essay is a sensitive, nuanced reflection on the difficulties survivor testimony poses to the historian. She offers a frank discussion of how challenging it has been for her to integrate Tichauer's testimony about life as a displaced person (DP) in Bavaria after the war into her work on the social history of Jewish DPs in Germany in the postwar period. In laying plain the points of tension, even contradictions, between Tichauer's memories and other documentary evidence, Grossmann suggests that it may be impossible to construct seamless narratives about the past. Her conversations with Tichauer led her to conclude that historians might be better served by eschewing the goal of integrated history. Historical work on the Holocaust, or indeed on any event or period, may render coherence to the past, but a coherence that falls short of being a seamless narrative.

As a whole, and at its most profound moments, Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor wrestles with the question of who has authority to claim to speak the truth with respect to this history. It challenges the presumption that historians or survivors could be, independent of one another, the arbiters of truth. It suggests, rather, that historical truth can only emerge out of a complex dialogue between them.