Just hearing the word Holocaust evokes in our modern history the echo of one of the events that has inflicted one of the most devastating pains on the human soul: an extermination that seems impossible to name because of the sheer scale of the horror with which it was perpetrated.
Historical memory, in rescuing the lived experience and the dimensions of the event, grants us the seemingly impossible access to contemplate the unthinkable. This volume is unique in that respect because it accomplishes something unprecedented from a philosophical perspective: an ontology of that memory contained within a new way of recounting history: a new form of narrative, the testimonial narrative.
Greta Rivara conducts a study in which she unravels the meaning and structure of these types of documents created by the victims themselves, who were aware that breaking the silence imposed by injustice and catastrophe would make it possible to reveal the events in diverse ways. Rivara listens to the victims themselves, who named what happened long before academic history did.
In this book we find a classification and systematization of the testimonial accounts of the victims of the Holocaust, who, despite everything, sought to challenge the future reader to speak, to tell, to name the unnamable, to find an interlocutor who would listen to them and, upon listening, would feel the sensation resonate deep within them: never again.