Kelly Oliver WITNESSING SUBJECTIVITY Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst interviewing survivors as part of the Video Ar- chive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, remarks on a tension between histo- rians and psychoanalysts involved in the project. He describes a lively debate that began after the group watched the taped testimony of a woman who was an eyewitness to the Auschwitz uprising in which prisoners set fire to the camp. The woman reported four chimneys going up in flames and exploding, but historians insisted that since there was only one chimney blown up, her testimony was incorrect and should be discredited in its entirety because she proved herself an unreliable witness. One historian suggested that her testi- mony should be discounted because she “ascribes importance to an attempt that, historically, made no difference” (Felman, 1992, p. 61). The psychoana- lysts responded that the woman was not testifying to the number of chimneys blown up but to something more “radical” and more “crucial,” namely, the seemingly unimaginable occurrence of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz, that is to say, the historical truth of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz. Laub concludes that what the historians could not hear, listening for empirical facts, was the “very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination” (Felman, 1992, p. 62). The Auschwitz survivor saw something unfamiliar, Jewish resistance, which gave her the courage to resist. She saw something that in one sense did not happen — four chimneys blowing up — but in another made all the dif- ference to what happened. Seeing the impossible — what did not happen — gave her the strength to make what seemed impossible possible, surviving the Holocaust. While the historians were listening to hear confirmation of what they already knew, the psychoanalysts where listening to hear something new, something beyond comprehension. While the historians were trying to recog- nize empirical facts in the survivor’s testimonies, the psychoanalysts were trying to acknowledge that the import of these testimonies was unrecogniza- ble. Although undeniably powerful in their impact, the empirical facts of the Holocaust are dead to the process of witnessing, that which cannot be report- ed by the eyewitness, the unseen in vision and the unspoken in speech, that which is beyond recognition in history, the process of witnessing itself. The process of witnessing, which relies upon address and response — always in tension with eyewitness testimony — complicates the notion of historical