Unthinkable ≠ Unknowable: On Charlotte Delbo's 'II Faut Donner à Voir'

This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story [the story of Auschwitz] that I am telling … [I] speak diffusely of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away without a word.Primo LeviP. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 60.The Holocaust, we are often told, is a mystery, the depths of which can never be fully sounded. If there is one thing that otherwise disparate analysts, historians, and commentators on the Nazi genocide in Europe by and lar

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