Introduction

Abstract

On January 27, 2009, sixty-four years after the end of World War II, Ruth Glasberg Gold was the first survivor of Transnistria to talk on the International Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust organized by the United Nations. Her emotional testimony is an affirmation for the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Holocaust in Romania. Most importantly, she remembers her mother who, before perishing in Transnistria, had advised Gold to “bear witness!”

My Holocaust experience is different from others. I have no tattoo, because I am a survivor of a less organized and methodical plan of annihilation. The Romanian methods were primitive and barbaric, but not less lethal than those of Nazi Germany. They did not bother with tattooing, filming and photographing their inhuman acts. They threw themselves into action without restraint and with such ferocity that appalled even the Germans.¹

To whom shall we entrust the custody of the public memory of the Holocaust? To the historian? To the survivor? To the critic? To the poet, novelist, dramatist? All of them re-create the details and images of the event through written texts, and in so doing remind us that we are dealing with represented rather than unmediated reality.

—Lawrence Langer