Bearing witness to testimony allows the listener to come to terms with this complicity. This act is restorative for the listener as well as the survivor. Listening to testimony of the incomprehensible is difficult. Of Literacy, Courage and Guarantees Reading and writing, teaching and learning about the trauma of atrocity and broken social compact require courage. Courage is found among those who choose to tell, to listen, to believe and to remember.
Courage is in choosing to face and accept anguish and grief.
Perhaps we have to accept the pain of reality so as not to lose touch with it. Crimes committed by the Nazis were of immense proportions, their consequences beyond imagination. Furthermore, we learn from the writers of the literature of the Holocaust that a literacy of testimony and witness has not guarantees. Notwithstanding, both choose to take their own lives. Not so for Samu Schonberger, who remarried and wrote until he died of natural causes in his eighties.