Testimony in Place: Witnessing the Holocaust in Belarus

Abstract

ABSTRACT Holocaust killing sites in Eastern Europe are of increasing interest to scholars and the public. This article analyzes the production of video testimonies in situ to consider the question of witnessing the Holocaust in Belarus, where mass graves of Jews are at once ubiquitous and invisible. Foregrounding the French organization Yahad–In Unum's efforts to identify and memorialize these killing sites, the article proposes a spatially aware reading of the audio-visual historiography produced in the former Pale of Jewish settlements. Place here functions as both a trigger of memory and a reminder of the nature of the genocide in Belarus as embedded in a larger context of violence and destruction. Confronted with a unique set of spatial parameters, viewers of these video testimonies are exposed to the legacies of the atrocities in the present and encouraged to develop an understanding of the Holocaust that recognizes its social and environmental repercussions.