Senior Thesis
The Sound of Silence: Understanding Silence as a Signifier in Holocaust Witness Testimony
In his book of essays The Drowned and the Saved, Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi quotes SS militiamen berating Jewish prisoners: “However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him… people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed” (P. Levi 11-12). To foster German racial purity, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime promoted the systematic erasure of Jews, an intentional silencing and extermination of an entire race, as well as the death of millions of others, including homosexuals, the Roma, the disabled, and many more. As the quote demonstrates, not only were the Nazis deliberate and calculated about no one surviving, but they also understood the immensity of their horrible actions – that there is a limit and inaccessibility to language that can capture and describe those types of events. By creating events that are “too monstrous to be believed,” the Nazis hoped to not only silence through death but also through methods of language and representation. Though the Holocaust has often been thought of as beyond representation, as incomprehensible and unspeakable, witnesses still press on to tell their stories. In fact, while the Nazis thought that silencing would erase the event, it is through witnesses’ silences that it remains real. The stories push beyond traditional language – they are told through gestures, stammers, and especially silence. Because the events defied description, silence is a crucial part of the survivor’s narrative. The spaces between the survivor’s words, the stillness in their recollections, carry as much weight as the words themselves do.
Many survivors feel a moral obligation to bear witness and give testimony. As literary critic Shoshana Felman writes in her piece “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” “To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility—in speech—for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences” (204). It is a duty, a responsibility, to tell their story for those who were silenced forever in death, for those who still live, and for the future generations that are in danger of never knowing at all. To not speak raises the risk of being forgotten, and “to forget would not only be dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time,” as Holocaust survivor and author Eliezer Wiesel asserts (Wiesel, Night xv). Still, while many survivors are compelled to bear witness, finding language that can communicate such experiences remains extremely difficult. The immensity of the Holocaust demands a broader definition of storytelling, of language itself. Silence is a key representational strategy in relation to the Holocaust as it opens up a space for the audience to participate in and derive meaning. In this essay, I examine different examples of Holocaust oral testimony to illustrate that those moments of silence and faltering pauses are another kind of language that signifies the depth of the agony and pain as well as strength and resilience.
As structuralist and semiotic criticism states, language is a complex system through which we give meaning to the world. Rather than calling it a system, which refers to something that is fixed and structured, many scholars and theorists understand it as a signifying practice, something that is active, fluid, and in motion (Hebdige 119). The practice is made up of signs, forcing us to make sense of categories and associations, codes and conventions. According to Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, a sign is a unit composed of the individual utterance (signifier) and the concept (signified) in which the signifier points to the signified. We create and manipulate signs in order to understand and make meaning through representations. How, then, can we come up with images, symbols, and representations for events that push beyond our traditional categories, that exceed our imagination and ability to comprehend? In “The Dialects of Unspeakability,” scholar Peter Haidu writes: “Our grasp of the Event [the Holocaust] must inevitably be mediated by representations, with their baggage of indeterminacy” (292). There’s no representation without taxation, as literary analyst W.J.T Mitchell states, and every representation requires some type of loss or consequence (Mitchell 21). But a Saussurean analysis cannot account for spaces where language fails to communicate the signified. Claiming that a signifier must be a sound-image, Saussure disregards silence as a signifier all together. But silence, too, flows as a signifying practice. Many have chosen not to speak because they cannot find words that can truly capture their experiences or are worthy of the experience itself. Instead, they find meaning and communication in silence.
Trauma also engages in language, asking us to look at the moments of silences, the gestures, the hesitations as expressions of trauma. The Greek word, trauma, translates to “wound,” which Sigmund Freud understands as a wound of the mind rather than a wound of the body. Cathy Caruth, a literary theorist who specializes in trauma and testimony, describes trauma in terms of a complex relation between knowing and not knowing, explaining Freud’s concept as “the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” that is “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Caruth 4). Trauma theorists believe this breech that emerges from the crisis cannot be known, listened to, or represented, and is only understood in its inaccessibility (Caruth 5). While trauma theory allows a space for those breaks and gaps, it still focuses on their incomprehensibility. In addition to listening to the spoken words in testimony, we should listen to those gaps, those silences, as they do represent content. Scholars Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glezjer touch on trauma in witness testimony, writing: “Thus the significance of the gaps, the inability to speak, the hesitations, in the Holocaust testimonies: they are points at which the act of witnessing makes itself fully apparent to the witness himself, but which can only be glimpsed, through those gaps, by the interviewer or reader” (9). Though I can only briefly touch on it in the space of this paper, trauma offers an enriching angle to my analysis by taking into account the gaps and breaks. As I demonstrate through language theory and trauma theory, silence means differently and requires a separate set of expectations and signification processes.
Two Holocaust survivors and well-known authors, Eliezer Wiesel and Ruth Kluger, have approached testimony through literature, yet they have found that language cannot represent or communicate the depth of pain. Novelist, professor, political activist, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel spent much of his life grappling with the ethics of testimony and language, wrestling with whether testifying is the right thing to do and how best to do it. Authoring 57 books by the end of his lifetime, Wiesel used literature as his main form of testimony. Finding the precise words and breaking out of silence, however, remained a predominant theme throughout his work. In the prologue of Night, perhaps his most celebrated piece, Wiesel explains the moral obligation of bearing witness, yet he acknowledges the difficulty of finding words that could convey his experience.
Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. But how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. (Wiesel, Night ix)
In this quote, Wiesel explains how words – even commonplace ones like hunger, thirst, or fear – had been charged with new meanings, new signifieds. He encountered the boundaries of traditional language, finding that expression, written or spoken, became noise instead of meaning. So, he turned to a “new language” – silence. “And so I persevered,” Wiesel continues, “and trusted the silence that envelops and transcends words” (Wiesel, Night ix). Rather than avoiding the silence, he needed to endure it and use it, imbue the words with silence (Wiesel, Against Silence 119).
In her own memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, literary critic and holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger, too, touched on the difficulties of language and narrating her experiences. Unlike Wiesel, who grapples with finding words in the context of writing, Kluger writes about her struggle in conversational language. In Still Alive, where she chronicles her journey from her youth in Vienna to her time at Auschwitz to her life post-Holocaust in the United States, Kluger discusses the difficulty of relatability and accessibility in regards to her experiences. Noting a distinct example of this in her memoir, she recounts her journey to Auschwitz on the freight cars. On the train, an older woman panics and breaks down, eventually climbing onto and urinating on Kluger’s mother’s lap. Her mother, without anger or malice, gently pushed the woman off of her lap. “I have just described an unforgettable event in my life,” she writes, “and yet I hardly ever get a chance to speak of it. It doesn’t fit the framework of social discourse” (Kluger, Still Alive 92). The “framework of social discourse” pertains to what we, as a society, have chosen to and not to talk about outwardly, the implicit taboos that have come to be. There are rules of engagement in conversation – for instance: no awkward silence, no ugly words, no making another uncomfortable – that survivors stories explicitly break. In another example, she discusses a conversation she had with her friends about claustrophobia – one man remembered the moment he got stuck in an elevator; Kluger thought about her transport to Auschwitz. These events simply do not compare, so how does one participate in conversation? Ruth Kluger acknowledges that there is a limit to what she can say to people if she wishes not to halt all discourse in horror and ‘other’ herself. So, she chooses not to tell those stories; her experiences from the Holocaust are riddled with taboos and the unthinkable. She writes: “And again I am stumbling through the labyrinth of conflicting comparisons and asking the question how we can understand anything if we can’t relate to it” (Kluger, Still Alive 93). Her stories and words set her apart from others. In this instance, her choice of not speaking – her silence – communicates that she is the same, can relate to others, and can be related to. Her silence opens up a space where her stories can reside until such a circumstance occurs in which they can be told.
As I have shown, Elie Wiesel and Ruth Kluger chose literature as their main form of testimony, but they found words did not suffice in telling their stories. I will now turn to oral testimony to examine the moments where words break down and silence takes over. All forms of narrative, including oral testimony, are manipulated, rhetorical, and a tool of the narrator; the teller crafts and shapes the narrative to represent what they want and how they want. There is much more room for interpretation and imagination for the audience, however, when the words are not scripted or rehearsed and the story is not pre-planned. In testimony, silence opens up a space where the audience – reader, listener, viewer – is asked to do some of the work. Silence asks us to make meaning through interpretation. Going forward, I will ground my theorizing for what the audience is doing in reader-response criticism. Unlike other literary theories – like formalism, which concentrates solely on the formal elements of the text – reader-response criticism focuses on the audience as active participants in the meaning-making of the work. As survivors slip into silence, they ask us to dwell in, respond to, and feel that silence with them, as silence signifies in various, meaningful ways.
When words break down, the gestures, stutters, and silences that pervade oral testimony make tangible the distance between what can be said and what has been witnessed (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 2). In his piece, “Deep Memory: The Buried Self,” Lawrence Langer touches on the tension between written and oral testimony. He discusses Barbara T.’s testimony in which she describes her arrival at Auschwitz. She recalls details including the stench, her thirst, and the sheer amount of death that surrounded her. But in her oral testimony, she begins to falter. “The witness pauses,” Langer explains, “half-hypnotized by her own narrative, as if returning from a strange place, and apologizes for what she calls her ‘absence’: ‘I’m sorry, OK, I… I… forgive me … all right… I’m going to … I kind of was back there’” (Langer 355). When her speech breaks down, however, she asks to read from the book she has written, calling it easier than speaking out loud. Langer describes the passage she reads as “transparently literary” due to the strategies, like style, analogy, and imagery, and devices, like metaphors, similes, and personification, that come along with writing. As Langer notes, her use of these devices, like “screams knife the air” and “torches keep licking the sky like rainbows,” help to “ease us into their unfamiliar world” while testimony keeps the space and separation between witness and audience intact (355). While Langer finds that “written accounts of victim experience prod the imagination in ways that speech cannot,” I disagree and argue that oral testimony, including the hesitations and pauses, provides an even more intimate and nuanced look into their story because it invests the audience in the meaning-making process (355). As she stammers through her narrative, Barbara T. creates meaning by returning to a world in silence that words would not allow us to join.
The destruction, depravity, and terror of this systematic genocide were unlike anything experienced by 20th century people and so defied description. Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld examines this clash of speech and silence in Holocaust witness testimony, commenting on the frustration and anguish that comes when “confront[ing] a subject that belittles and threatens to overwhelm the resources of his language” (2). He continues: “Reality underwent so radical a distortion as to disarm and render no longer trustworthy the normal cognitive and expressive powers. As a result, reason seemed to give way to madness, as language did time and again to silence” (Rosenfeld 2). But silence is more than just the absence of speech. In fact, silence is integral to language, meaning, and representation – we make sense through silence the same way that we do words, for words are entirely enfolded in what and how they do not say (Haidu 278). Surging with its own contexts, circumstances, and intentions, “silence is not a semantic void; like any language, it is infused with narrative strategies that carry ideologies and reveal unstated assumptions. Silence is constituted by the absence of words but is therefore and simultaneously the presence of their absence” (Schlant 7). Just as all language expresses power, silence, too, is not neutral.
As I touched on earlier surrounding reader-response criticism, what makes silence so powerful is that it takes a much more invested act of interpretation to understand. In language, we have the conventional tools to agree on what certain words mean. There is an aspect of communicating with language that allows the audience member – and in this case, listener or viewer – to stay on their side of the divide between audience and writer, speaker, creator that seems to disappear in that gap of silence. Silence opens up a space where the meaning is not entirely clear and asks the audience member to step in and act as an agent. While silence has this overarching impulse of inviting the audience into this space of meaning-making, in this essay, I will analyze three examples of oral testimony to demonstrate what silence specifically communicates in each one. First, I will look at an example of traditional archival testimony through Lucille Eichengreen’s interview where her silence signifies her strength and resilience through hardship. Then, I will explore two interviews from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah where the testimony is built into a larger documentary framework and story. Simon Srebnik’s silence communicates his recognition and return to a place that has both changed and stayed the same while Abraham Bomba’s vulnerable silence expresses his shame, pain, and guilt.
Lucille Eichengreen’s Strength in Silence
In this section I will be analyzing Holocaust survivor and author Lucille Eichengreen’s oral testimony. This interview is an example of traditional archival testimony, a question and answer interview that is completely unadorned, unframed by setting or landscape, and essential to the historical record. As it became apparent that the narrative of the survivors might be lost to time, several organizations, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, and Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies made it their mission to document, preserve, and honor the memories of the victims and events of the Holocaust. Along with all types of information surrounding the Holocaust, these organizations have compiled thousands upon thousands of oral testimonies to remember and impart the voices of those who were there and ensure that such events never happen again. Most of the testimonies consist of many hour-long interviews from Holocaust survivors around the world. These organizations give them a space to tell their stories and preserve their personal history and the memories they cannot forget.
Housing it in their vast collection of oral histories and testimonies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired Eichengreen’s oral history interview as part of its mission to provide a space for learning about the Holocaust, remembering survivors and victims, and confronting genocide and anti-Semitism. On their website, one can sift through and interact with the many archives of artifacts, documents, photos, films, personal stories, and much more, all dedicated to preserving the stories and voices. Viewers can watch and listen as Eichengreen answers questions and allows us to engage in her stories and memories of the past.
In an interview for the 1990 Holocaust Oral History Project with the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco, Eichengreen recounts everything from her life at home prior to the war to her experiences in the ghetto and concentration camps to what it was like to return to Poland later in her adult life. Lucille Eichengreen, born Cecilia Lundaw, grew up between Poland and Germany before being deported to the Lodz ghetto in 1941 with her family. She survived the Lodz ghetto and several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belson where she was forced to perform manual labor before being liberated by British troops in 1945. She later moved to the United States, eventually settling in San Francisco. Produced and directed by John Grant, the interview consists of a close-up shot of Eichengreen as she answers questions prompted by the interviewers who remain behind the camera. Aside from a few minor shifts, the camera stays put, framing her head and upper shoulders in the shot. While the entire interview runs over four hours long, one of her anecdotes more deeply rises to the fore. In this specific story, Eichengreen recounts the death and burial of her mother in the streets of the Lodz ghetto. Her story signals her will to live and her determination to care for her mother, even in death.
The spells of silence and internal struggle that come from talking about taboos surrounding the violation of bodies and her family are powerful and expressive, conjuring up visceral images. “It was 1942. My mother died,” Eichengreen narrates slowly and softly with her eyes cast downward toward the floor (“Lucille Eichengreen” 0:01). “She did not just die; she blew up like a balloon from hunger. There was nothing one can do,” she continues (“Lucille Eichengreen” 0:05). Like Kluger, Eichengreen’s life brims with taboos. In telling her story, she violates a number of them, especially regarding violence toward the body and family. A certain decorum and reserve have been embedded in our culture and language, but Eichengreen’s experiences move beyond those constraints, making it difficult to talk about, not out of diffidence but horror. In fact, she must describe going to the cemetery hall and seeing dead bodies stacked one on top of another all the way to the celling, waiting to be buried. “They didn’t bury the dead in July of ’42. They didn’t have enough people [to do so],” she explains (“Lucille Eichengreen” 0:23). As Jews, not only was their religion dismissed but their humanity; their family units were split up in the camps, their dignity stripped bare. There were numerous kinds of desacrilizations of sacred places, including the family, the home, and the body. Here, we see the destruction of bodies as they transform into meaningless, anonymous things. After her mother died from starvation, Eichengreen and her sister did not want her to become another one of those unidentifiable bodies with mere name tags tied around their feet. Instead, they found a “little space on the walkway” and started digging (“Lucille Eichengreen” 1:16). She narrates her story slowly but surely, almost as if she must get the words out with as little remembrance as possible. As she speaks about the burial of her mother, however, she begins to lose composure.
By allowing us to step into her silence, Eichengreen asks us to not only feel the pain and loss that she experienced, but also the courage and strength embedded in that silence. Together, her words and her pauses, both subtle and blatant, capture the intensity of her story. “We dug a grave” Eichengreen says softly before swallowing hard and pausing. After a moment, she continues: “And then we went looking for my mother” (Lucille Eichengreen 1:22). She pauses again, this time for a couple seconds before wiping her lips and softly adding, “We found her, and we carried her outside, and we buried her” (“Lucille Eichengreen” 1:33). Her words bounce from one action to the next; she lists these actions, ending in a rising intonation as if this is a normal list of events. Then, her voice quivers and trails off. For the next ten seconds, Eichengreen sits in silence, a distinct contrast to her matter-of-fact way of speaking. We, as the audience, sit in her silence alongside her. As her eyes look up and to the right, we can see that she is reliving, remembering, and now retelling this event that so defined her. Despite the horror of what she underwent, Eichengreen sees the events in her mind without shying away from them, even when she needs to pause. The steady way she recounts her story, with the inclusion of those breaks and rests, communicates her power. It is not only the underlying horror of what she had to do that shines through her breaks; her silence and careful thought seem to cloak her in strength. Because Eichengreen’s story is rooted in her courage, rather than feeling uncomfortable or anxious, we feel secure in her silence. Eventually, she casts her eyes low and away, blinking continuously, and shifts her jaw as if mustering the fortitude to speak again. After taking a sip of water, she finishes her story: “No tears. No prayers. Nothing” (“Lucille Eichengreen” 1:45). In Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub writes:
That the speakers about trauma on some level prefer silence so as to protect themselves from the fear of being listened to – and of listening to themselves. That while silence is defeat, it serves them both as a sanctuary and as a place of bondage. Silence is for them a fated exile, yet also a home, a destination, and a binding oath. To not return from this silence is rule rather than expectation. (Laub 222)
The way that Eichengreen communicates through words – automatic and inhibited – versus silence – at ease and secure – demonstrates that rather than defeat and a fated exile, silence is all of the above: a sanctuary, a place of bondage, a home, a destination, a binding oath. Her continuous return to memory and acceptance of her actions in the space of silence expresses the pain, sadness, and emotion she was forced to dismiss in the days of her containment as well as the strength she needed to undergo such experiences.
Analyzing this moment more formally, we see and hear how the words “grave,” “mother,” and “her” (as in her mother) trigger Eichengreen’s silence. Though more directly through “mother” and “her,” all three words represent her mother. Indeed, the grave is where her mother will rest. Each of the words also signal absence and loss that then translates to absence of language. A grave is an emptiness waiting to be filled and signifies the absence of a body. Her late mother also symbolizes an absence. Eichengreen cannot represent her mother in the storytelling because her mother is gone before the story even begins. Her mother can be represented, however, in the lack of words – in silence. As Eichengreen struggles to give expression through words to her grief and horror, her mother surfaces in the silence, powerful in her absence as well as in her presence in memory. Eichengreen took on the dangerous and disturbing task of finding and burying her mother who died, and she again undertakes the near impossible task of telling her story in words and silence.
In the Space of Silence, Simon Srebnik and Abraham Bomba Revisit and Relive
Now, I will turn to two examples of testimony from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah to further demonstrate the power and expression of silence. Unlike traditional archival testimony, such as Eichengreen’s interview where the purpose is to document and preserve, Lanzmann’s interviews are embedded in the larger text of the documentary. Through the addition of sets or landscapes as support, Shoah’s interviews contrast with the the raw, baldness of a seated person testifying without the larger framework, as we see in Eichengreen’s interview. For Eichengreen, memory is the landscape, and testimony is the setting. In the case of classic documentary film, there is footage, staging, and framing that establish the scene and context that supports the subject, all together creating a more extensive narrative.
In 1974, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann took on the mission of creating the documentary Shoah, a film that makes flesh the horrors of the Holocaust and illustrates that the memories and trauma lives on into modern times. Lanzmann, who directed, produced, and conducted all of the interviews, took over a decade to shoot and edit this 566-minute film. Throughout Shoah, which translates from Hebrew to catastrophe and is often used interchangeably with Holocaust, Lanzmann remains in the present, rejecting the use of any archival images, historical footage, or other representations of the era. Instead, the film is made up of only oral, first person testimony and contemporary footage. He tells the story through victims, bystanders, and perpetrators, as well as through the existing vistas where the ghosts still linger. Through the construction of the film, the narratives are shaped, mediated, and manipulated by all types of choices, like the framing of the shots, questions that are asked, and edits that go into the final product.
By forgoing any voiceover narration or other common documentary conventions, however, Lanzmann relies on the people themselves to form the narrative – not only through their words, but also through their silences, their gestures, and their gazes. "It is not to give information that you could find in any kind of history book,” Lanzmann explains in an interview with reporter Howie Movshovitz. “The most important is the faces of the people. No one history book may give you the emotions, the strengths of human face, when the people are paying the highest price in order to revive what they went through," he continues (“‘Shoah’: 25 Years On, Always in the Present Tense” 0:56). Unafraid to push the boundaries of testimony, Lanzmann boldly yet sympathetically probes his witnesses. Caruth defines trauma as something that is not known in the first instance and then returns to haunt the survivor later on – Lanzmann asks the witnesses to return to moments of trauma to remember and, therefore, relive.
There are many moments of testimony from the film where language fails to communicate its signified – the depth of the memories, the intensity of the pain that remains. In those moments, survivors lapse into silence as their experiences resurface. As Felman notes, “Shoah bears witness to the fragmentation of the testimonies as the radical invalidation of all definitions, of all parameters of reference, of all known answers, in the very midst of its relentless affirmation—of its materially creative validation—of the absolute necessity of speaking” (224). Lanzmann chooses to include the moments of fragmentation, forcing the audience to watch as traditional language collapses.
In fact, Lanzmann chooses silence as a storytelling device. What is not said by the witnesses speaks as loudly as what is, allowing the audience to access their testimony in a more immediate way than even their words can provide. Silence asks us to make meaning differently than language does, and by including those bouts of silence in the film, Lanzmann allows us to step into that intimacy and create meaning alongside the survivor. Indeed, Felman believes that Shoah centers entirely around silence, writing: “At the edge of the universe of testimony which is the universe of our era, at the frontiers of the necessity of speech, Shoah is a film about silence: the paradoxical articulation of a loss of voice – and of a loss of mind” (224). Throughout her piece, Felman examines the radical impossibility of testimony and questions what it means to witness the Holocaust from the “inside” – inside the death camps, inside the deadness of the witness. She explains that “it is impossible to testify from the inside because the inside has no voice,” frequently describing the Holocaust as “untransmittable,” “inconceivable,” “impenetrable,” and “entirely ungraspable” (Felman 231). And this is exactly what Shoah attempts to communicate. Although we can never get to the inside of the Holocaust – we were not there, we cannot fully comprehend what happened, and those who did not survive no longer have a voice – silence might just provide a space for us to attempt to get back there. The loss of voice and words represents what it means to be inside the Holocaust.
The film instantly demonstrates the power and signification of silence in the opening scene. Shoah begins in the present at Chelmno, Poland, the first concentration camp where Jews were exterminated by gas. As the beginning title card reads: “Of the 400,000 men, women and children who went there, only two came out alive: Michaël Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik” (Shoah 00:01:44). Srebnik turns out to be one of the main characters, if you will, of Lanzmann’s film, and his experiences from the camp – and unlikely survival – continue to shape him. In this scene, Srebnik, now forty-seven years old, returns to Chelmno for the first time since his imprisonment. The camera points at Srebnik, framing him from his chest up as he walks down a dirt road in a wooded area. The handheld camera provides a shaky yet focused shot, making the viewers feel like they are walking with him. For an entire minute, we watch as Srebnik approaches Chelmno in silence. Lightly coughing here and there, he nods and and sighs heavily as he recognizes the landscape. Finally, he stops in place and looks onto the scene before him. This silence grows less from the inability to speak of his experience and more from the shock and recognition at standing in this place again. His silence communicates that he is taking it all in and reorienting himself. As viewers, we can only imagine what he looks at, but we realize that what he sees is totally different than what we see. Anticipating the emotion that must come forth, the audience sits with him and begins to build empathy even before the story is told.
After over a minute of silence, language reenters the scene to further demonstrate Srebnik’s recognition that this open field is indeed the camp. The camera remains on Srebnik as he gazes out. He stands and stares impassively at the empty grounds that once housed him in torture and now haunts his memories. “It’s hard to recognize, but it was here” (Shoah 00:06:57) he finally says before pausing for a couple of seconds. He continues: “They burned people here. A lot of people were burned here” (Shoah 00:07:07). His eyes skip around the landscape as he purses his lips. At this point, the camera has not yet revealed what he sees, only Srebnik’s face in reaction to a place so painfully familiar. The Chelmno that Srebnik examines is the Chelmno of his imprisonment. Without shots of the contemporary landscape accompanying his response, a landscape nearly devoid of evidence of the atrocities, the viewer is thrust into Srebnik’s remembered reality and denied the comfort of distance and time (Didi-Huberman 121). Finally, Srebnik nods and, with anguish and acceptance, mutters, “Yes, this is the place” (Shoah 00:07:20).
Lanzmann asks people to remember their experiences from the past so as to pull history into the present, and revisiting these locations reinforces that. Shoah erases the line between past and present so that the stories – and more importantly, the silence that permeates them – are as real and immediate as the places they visit, as the contemporary world around them. In his essay The Site, Despite Everything, art-historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman touches on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image to explain how the film “produces a collision between what is Now and what is Past, without transforming the past into a myth or reassuring the present” (121). When Lanzmann finally reveals the landscape of Chelmno to the audience, the collision of past and present is extremely apparent. After minutes of footage focused on Srebnik, the film cuts to a wide shot of the empty landscape as the camera pans slowly across it. In the foreground, green grass and weeds overgrow brick rectangular allotments that were once part of the death camp. Forcing us to feel uncomfortable, the camera moves slowly, grinding on for close to 40 seconds. While Srebnik remains silent, the sound of the wind blowing, birds and insects chirping, and the rustling grass fill the screen. Srebnik remembers the camp, recalling, “It was always this peaceful here. Always” (Shoah 00:09:31). He says later as he walks across the field: “When they burned two thousand people—Jews—every day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now” (Shoah 00:09:35). As this scene demonstrates, Srebnik and the other subjects in Shoah are our guides to the Holocaust, the guidebooks of ancient sites. The terrible irony of the silence and peace of current day Chelmno screams.
The collision of time along with the survivor’s roaring silence allows us to catch a glimpse of their past experience. These shots transport the viewer to Chelmno, as the sounds we hear are the very ones a prisoner would have heard at the time. Paradoxically, the landscape is very much alive and present, yet it was a place of death and destruction. In her analysis on the film, German film scholar and professor Gertrud Koch, too, comments on this type of collision: “Lanzmann marks the boundary between what is aesthetically and humanly imaginable and the unimaginable dimension of the annihilation. Thus the film itself creates a dialectical constellation: in the elision, it offers an image of the unimaginable” (393). The film is designed so that the irony of the peaceful landscape reverberates through the silence. “The juxtapositions, on the same temporal plane, of real events separated by very distant locations… are designed to irritate our realistic sense of spatiotemporal certainty” Koch adds. “The presence of an absence in the imagination of the past is bound up with the concreteness of images of present-day locations” (393). It is the confrontation between survivor and site – Srebnik’s reaction matched with Lanzmann’s choice to show the deceptively peaceful landscape – that says everything is different, yet nothing has changed at Chelmno (Didi-Huberman 121-122). Lanzmann calls it a topographical or geographical film for a reason, for the “landscape lends the words an entirely different dimension, and the words reanimate the landscape” (Chevrie and Le Roux 45). Experiencing the landscape alongside Srebnik’s silence begs us to attempt to understand, or at least imagine, the inside.
Srebnik even outwardly acknowledges his words cannot possibly convey what actually happened, and the words he does say further demonstrate that. The camera finishes panning across the landscape before returning to Srebnik as he recounts how the gas vans would arrive and the bodies were thrown into the ovens. “It was terrible” he says (Shoah 00:08:35). While his words do narrate his story, they are generally anticlimactic and insubstantial in meaning. They are statements of fact in a voice that is without emotion. His silence, facial expressions, sighs, and gestures that accompany his words, however, are a language in their own right. They convey Srebnik’s recognition and disbelief, transporting him back in his mind to what the camp really was. “No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here,” Srebnik explains as he walks across the open field, across Chelmno concentration camp (Shoah 00:08:47). He raises his hand and then touches his forehead as if to pull the memory and vision out of his head. “Impossible! And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now,” he exclaims (Shoah 00:08:58). As Srebnik demonstrates, the events that defy explanation often defy language. But Lanzmann’s point is not to recreate what happened but to revisit it, and it is Srebnik’s reaction to his return that tells the story (Didi-Huberman 117). His silence communicates the difference and sameness of this place – though the extermination camp is no longer there, those experiences and memories are.
Here, two different temporal moments are encoded in silence: one of the past and one of the present, and the film highlights the tension between the two. While the silence of the past revolves around its inaccessibility, the silence of the present revolves around the overwhelmingness and language’s inability. The viewer must examine the difference between something that is silent because it is not present or unreachable – for example: the landscape, the camp, the people who died – versus the silence that revolves around the presence of someone who cannot say something – for example: when Srebnik cannot describe his experiences. This scene demonstrates how place, time, and silence intimately connect with one another to tell a story without words. Kluger describes Lanzmann’s use of sites and space, explaining how “there should be a word like timescape to indicate the nature of a place in time, that is, a certain time, neither before nor after” (“The Camps” 54). “Lanzmann’s greatness,” she goes on, “depends on his belief that place captures time and can display its victims like flies caught in amber” (Kluger, “The Camps” 54). Here, the landscape, too, is identified with silence, but it shifts its meaning from the character’s silence. By remaining in the present and focusing on Srebnik’s failure of words, the film draws attention to the fact that the past is inaccessible. Didi-Huberman encompasses the signification of the site of Shoah and the silence that surrounds it, writing:
Its silence refuses to render visible an event without a witness and engages in dialogue only the witnesses who bear this silence. It shows silence and also augments it, that is, gives it form, constructs it, giving to the site the power to return our gaze, thereby in some way “telling” us what is essential… That is why such a silence is so heavy to bear for everyone in the film (those in front of the camera as well as those behind it, those who are on screen as well as those in the theater who sit before the projected images of their fellow men). This silence is laden with the unimaginable… the silence of the faces and sites filmed contains the destruction of the bodies, transmits this fact and simultaneously preserves them. (Didi-Huberman 119)
As Didi-Huberman’s quote demonstrates, the multiple silences – of the character and of the landscape – contain and carry the weight of the taboos that were shockingly wicked yet utterly real. As we see with both Eichengreen and Srebnik, traditional language cannot fathom such things like the violence against and violation of bodies and the breakdown of the family and home. We see Srebnik’s surprise and recognition as he returns to the landscape and hears the same sounds from his time steeped in destruction. His silence in this recognition precedes his words and invites the viewer to accompany him in his memory, deepening our understanding of his trauma.
Another sequence that demonstrates Shoah’s power of silence comes later in the film with survivor Abraham Bomba where the complexity of his silence mirrors the complexity of his experience. Born in Germany in 1913, Bomba spent most of his life in Czestochowa, Poland before being forced into the Czestochowa ghetto and then deported to Treblinka extermination camp. A lucky but burdensome fate, he was selected for forced labor. At Treblinka, Bomba worked as a barber, cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chambers. He settled in Israel where Lanzmann eventually met up with him to interview him about his time in the camp. In this interview, Bomba, too, grapples with telling the story of his past, continuously lapsing into silence as Lanzmann urges him to bear testimony.
As we saw with Srebnik’s scene, Lanzmann pays careful attention to the construction of his scenes with their setting and composition. His choices are rhetorical and play a significant role in how the scene represents the characters and their experiences in the Holocaust. Rather than revisiting a site for Bomba’s interview, however, Lanzmann recreates a barbershop and interviews Bomba as he cuts the hair of an unidentified man. Once again, Lanzmann attempts to abolish the distance between the past and present, and it is “through restaging, through a sort of theatrical technique, that the past is reintroduced into the present, brutally conferring on it a dramatic intensity and a precision that cannot be achieved by other means” (Szurek 152). This scene, in particular, becomes cinematic because Bomba was no longer a barber – Lanzmann stages a scene and Bomba becomes a character, even an actor (Chevrie and Le Roux 45). He wanted to put him in a situation where Bomba’s gestures would be identical to his ones at the camp (Chevrie and Le Roux 40). By having Bomba act out the exact actions he would have used to do, Lanzmann makes Bomba re-experience this memory. A traumatic event is “an event that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Caruth 4). Making him relive the scene – Lanzmann thrusts Bomba into a site of trauma to draw out the raw, authentic emotions and feelings that Bomba once felt. Together, in staging and action, Lanzmann creates a situation for Bomba and the viewer that is immediate and real, “and it is starting from this moment” – as Bomba cuts his clients hair – “that the truth is incarnated and he relives the scene, that suddenly knowledge becomes incarnated. In truth it is a film about incarnation,” as Lanzmann describes (Chevrie and Le Roux 40). Bomba, as his scissors snip, relives his time in Treblinka, a time so traumatic that words turn useless.
Lanzmann also makes choices surrounding the framing of this scene. It is mostly filmed in a medium shot to emphasize both Bomba’s face and actions. Throughout the scene, however, it moves to medium close-ups and close-ups to capture Bomba’s head and upper shoulders in the shot, forcing the audience to concentrate more closely on his facial expressions and emotions. Bomba rarely looks up at Lanzmann or at the camera. Instead, without making eye contact, we stare at his face and follow the movement of his hands as he performs the haircut. Aside from a few clips of the barbers around him, the camera focuses on Bomba the entire time, whether directly or in the reflection of the mirrors surrounding him. For a room full of mirrors, however, the viewer never sees the camera, a choice that is two-fold. The absence of the camera in the reflections immerses the viewer entirely in the scene, but it also turns the viewer into the camera, an observer with no attachment to the scene. The constant focus on Bomba allows us to watch as emotion overcomes him, and the mirrors make us feel like we have nowhere to turn or get away, paralleling how Bomba might feel with his own story, memories, and past. Once again, we are transported to the scene, completely absorbed in the witnessing, yet we still understand we cannot ever get to the inside.
Bomba has no trouble putting into words the description of the set up and specifics around the event – what spurs him into silence are the questions about his feelings. Lanzmann meticulously asks for every detail surrounding the event, from the precise make up of the gas chambers to what Bomba’s actions looked like to how Bomba felt when he first saw the women. Accounting for every detail, Bomba rattles off the specifics of what happened, almost unemotionally. Forced to do what he was told, Bomba had one job: make them believe they were getting a nice haircut that a real barber would give. The hidden knowledge that these women were going to die as soon as he finished weighed heavily on Bomba and seems to be the crack that widens, breaking down Bomba in his testimony. Bomba mechanically narrates the details, but it is not until he is asked about his feelings and to talk about certain taboos – of the body in general, violence toward the body, and the death of these women – that his language collapses. Bomba skirts around the answer of how he felt, and instead continues to describe what he remembers happening.
Silence turns out to be an inefficient hiding place, however, as Lanzmann continues to inquire. “But I asked you and you didn't answer,” Lanzmann begins to prod; “What was your impression the first time, you saw these naked women arriving with children? What did you feel?” (Shoah 28:40). At this point, the camera films Bomba in the reflection of a mirror. Eyes fixed on the man’s hair in front of him, Bomba snips methodically and replies: “I tell you something. To have a feeling about that… it was very hard to feel anything, because working there day and night between dead people, between bodies – your feelings disappeared. You were dead. You had no feeling at all” (Shoah 28:52). The camera zooms into a close-up shot of Bomba, explicitly searching for the feeling that Bomba says he is lacking and forcing the viewer to confront those feelings, too. Bomba was forced to shut off his feelings in order to get through the day-to-day, watching as people journeyed to their death. He even goes so far as to call himself “dead.” The unsettling irony glares, for he was one of the “lucky” ones that made it out of the Holocaust alive. While his “customers” went to their real death, Bomba underwent a symbolic death – demanded to surrender all emotions that make you human – in order to survive. With the addition of staging, framing, and editing, Bomba’s feelings – that he was forced to not only ignore but also completely bury – return and manifest in Bomba’s silence as well as in the audience.
Bomba’s tears, sighs, and gestures draw us in, urging us to bear the pain he feels. His feelings rush to the forefront when Lanzmann asks what it was like to encounter people he knew go into the gas chambers. “A friend of mine worked as a barber – he was a good barber in my hometown – when his wife and his sister…” Bomba pauses for a moment before continuing: “came into the gas chamber…” (Shoah 04:51:52). Gripping the scissors, he shakes his head and focuses intently on the man in front of him. He cannot go on. Swallowing compulsively, Bomba licks and purses his lips, opening his mouth to speak repeatedly without anything coming out. The people around him, who had stopped to listen to the story, now go back to performing aimless tasks to act like they are not listening. Observing someone burst into tears is an awkward and self-conscious experience for both parties involved. At one point, Bomba wipes his face and eyes with a towel before turning away from the camera, which has become a mirror of sorts, to hide his reaction. Like a child who covers their ears to block out news they do not want to hear, Bomba turns away from his reflection, rejecting the reality of his own story. We submerge in Bomba’s silence for about 90 seconds. Unconcealed and utterly palpable, his emotions are naked, and his struggle to speak communicates the pain, guilt, and sadness that fills him still. Wavering between wanting to hear more and pitying Bomba enough to want him to remain silent, the audience – those in the barber shop as well as the viewers of the film – feels guilty for listening, uncomfortable in the excruciatingly long silence. We do not want to watch him in this vulnerable moment, yet we cannot help but create meaning in his silence, stepping in and feeling his shame, sadness, pain, and horror.
Unlike Lucille Eichengreen’s interview, his silence and inability to speak is less contemplative and more naked, raw, and fervent. After Lanzmann asks him to proceed, Bomba’s voice croaks: “I can't. It's too horrible. Please” (Shoah 04:52:14). No one prompts Eichengreen through her silence, which demonstrates that she has no shame or regret informing her testimony even when she is silent; she controls when she wishes to speak. Bomba’s silence, on the other hand, communicates a sense of shame in that he survived at the cost of so many others. There was such an abundance of emotions at the time that they became mute, for any feeling would be inadequate. Silence parallels – there is so much to say that nothing can be said at all. Silence functions as a space for that absence of feeling, a place where those emotions can boil.
Lanzmann chooses to include the full weight of silence in this scene. For over two minutes, Bomba’s muteness howls through the repetitive snip of scissors, a familiar sound that would have been the very same some forty years before in Treblinka. Much like Srebnik when he confronts the familiar fields of his experience, fields that are empty now, Bomba is silent but the landscape – the scene before him – is not. Sounds from the past return, but the voices of those who did not survive are still missing. Felman explains how “there is loss: of voice, of life, of knowledge, of awareness, of truth, of the capacity to feel, of the capacity to speak. The truth of this loss constitutes precisely what it means to be inside the Holocaust. But the loss also defines an impossibility of testifying from inside the truth of that inside” (231). We are forced to watch Bomba struggle to find words as his forehead creases and lips quiver, leaving us to imagine the events he experienced. We are transported to the horror of the Holocaust as images form in our mind of Bomba snipping inches of hair from the head of not the man we see now, but the frail, scared, and confused women lined up outside the gas chambers.
Lanzmann, as interviewer, also has a stake in silence. His positionality locates him as a type of witness and listener. Felman explores this idea, writing: “The narrative is thus essentially a narrative of silence, the story of the filmmaker’s listening: the narrator is the teller of the film only insofar as he is the bearer of the film’s silence” (218). Lanzmann witnessed the silence throughout the entire process and purposefully chose to include it in the final film, knowing that it would drive the narrative. Laub, too, touches on the importance and agency of the listener. The listener “must listen to and hear the silence, speaking mutely both in silence and in speech, both from behind and from within the speech,” Laub writes. “He or she must recognize, acknowledge and address that silence, even if this simply means respect – and knowing how to wait,” he proceeds (Laub 222). Lanzmann does just that – he recognizes, acknowledges, and addresses the silence throughout the interview. But in this instance, there are multiple other listeners, too, through the audience. We must listen for as long as Lanzmann and the survivor allow us to. Both in the interview and the final edit of the film, Lanzmann makes space for silence and allows it to swell, asking us to participate. Still, he knows Bomba’s story is one that needs to be told. He even urges Bomba to carry on many times.
Lanzmann: We have to do it. You know it.
Bomba: I won't be able to do it.
Lanzmann: You have to do it. I know it's very hard. I know and I apologize.
Bomba: Don't make me go on please.
Lanzmann: Please. We must go on. (Shoah 04:53:37-04:54:15)
By asking questions and prompting Bomba to proceed, then, Lanzmann also plays the role as the breaker of silence. Throughout this scene, and the entire film, Lanzmann both honors and challenges silence. In fact, some critics felt that Lanzmann’s insistence in this scene was too inquisitorial and intrusive. But “who will forget Abraham Bomba’s face, as the full force of what he saw is restored to him, and he pleads for permission to stop remembering?” literary critic and editor Leon Wieseltier asks (93). By infiltrating the privacy of the mind of the survivors, merging time senses, and penetrating the inside, Lanzmann goes where others have not gone before.
Through the scenes with Simon Srebnik and Abraham Bomba, Lanzmann exhibits just how powerful, compelling, and expressive the language of silence is. Srebnik and Bomba are only two of the many characters in Shoah that demonstrate the shatter of their traditional language and words, seeking silence as a place of shock and disbelief as well as safety and power. As listener, witness, and transgressor, Lanzmann, too, has a critical function in the film’s silence. But Lanzmann made the intentional choice to include these moments of breakdown in the film because, as Felman writes, “Shoah is a film about testimony, then, in an infinitely more abysmal, paradoxical and problematic way than it first seems: the necessity of testimony it affirms in reality derives, paradoxically enough, from the impossibility of testimony that the film at the same time dramatizes” (Felman 224). It is in those moments of impossibility – the stammers and falters, the stumbles and hesitations – that we get the most authentic version of their testimony. Together, both Lanzmann and the survivor beg us to enter their intimate space of silence and play a role in the meaning-making process.
Throughout this essay, I have demonstrated that silence is another form of language with its own contexts, circumstances, and narrative strategies. We can hear the silence roar between the utterances of words, and rather than a semantic void or just absence of speech, silence brims with meaning, purpose, and content. Unlike traditional language and representation, which has conventions and codes that have established the agreed-upon meanings of words, silence opens up a space where meaning is not entirely clear. It demands the audience to infiltrate that space as an active, invested participant. Through their silence, Lucille Eichengreen, Simon Srebnik, and Abraham Bomba ask us to enter that space, read their silence, and feel their emotions. These three survivors engage in an overarching narrative about silence. Srebnik’s silence is pre-linguistic, occurring before he tells his story in words. His silence signifies his recognition, his return to a place that is otherwise inaccessible. Bomba’s silence, on the other hand, takes over and replaces his language entirely as it communicates his vulnerability, shame, and pain. Finally, Eichengreen’s silence supplements or follows her language. She can tell her story through words, and her silence indicates not only the pain and hardship she experienced but also the strength and resilience she has as well. Though silence operates differently in each survivor’s testimony, it invites us, the audience, to take part in an intense process of meaning-making, to feel what a Holocaust survivor might have felt.
Perhaps these moments of inarticulateness encode something larger, some greater idea. Testimony is distinctly unique and functions differently than other genres as it conforms to neither high nor low culture and intersects in collective and life history, literature, and theory (Levi and Rothberg 15). Testimony, and Holocaust witness testimony especially, creates a space for and is embedded with the language of silence. Understanding and redefining silence as its own language shifts what the privileged position is in the chain of communication. Incorporating silence into the semiotic process and interpreting it as a signifier puts both the silent narrator and the audience member into positions of agency and meaning-making. In Holocaust witness testimony, then, the witnesses unite not only through their collective experience but also through their collective silence. Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering touches on the idea of collective experience and identity as it examines case studies of crises around the world to understand how trauma is socially and culturally constructed. In the introduction, sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Elizabeth Breeze write: “Rather than denial, repression, and working through, it is a matter of symbolic construction and framing, of creating a narrative and moving along from there. A “we” must be constructed via narrative and coding, and it is this collective identity that experiences and confronts the danger” (xii-xiii). Holocaust survivors have not only constructed a collective identity and community but also created a narrative that is driven by a new language: the language of silence.
Works Cited
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Tortor dignissim convallis aenean et tortor at risus viverra. Vivamus at augue eget arcu. Rhoncus est pellentesque elit ullamcorper dignissim cras. Gravida dictum fusce ut placerat orci nulla pellentesque. Pellentesque elit ullamcorper dignissim cras tincidunt lobortis feugiat. Id aliquet risus feugiat in ante metus dictum. Sagittis vitae et leo duis ut. Diam vulputate ut pharetra sit amet aliquam id diam maecenas. Imperdiet nulla malesuada pellentesque elit eget. Maecenas pharetra convallis posuere morbi leo urna molestie at. Eros donec ac odio tempor orci dapibus ultrices. Et ultrices neque ornare aenean. Interdum velit laoreet id donec. Dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit pellentesque. Eleifend donec pretium vulputate sapien nec sagittis. Facilisi etiam dignissim diam quis enim lobortis. Imperdiet dui accumsan sit amet. Non tellus orci ac auctor augue mauris augue neque gravida. Maecenas sed enim ut sem viverra aliquet. Mauris pharetra et ultrices neque ornare aenean.
Dictum varius duis at consectetur. Sed velit dignissim sodales ut eu. Id leo in vitae turpis massa sed elementum. Eget nulla facilisi etiam dignissim diam quis enim lobortis scelerisque. Sed nisi lacus sed viverra tellus in hac habitasse platea. Amet mauris commodo quis imperdiet massa tincidunt nunc pulvinar. Mauris in aliquam sem fringilla ut morbi tincidunt augue interdum. Fermentum et sollicitudin ac orci phasellus egestas. Maecenas volutpat blandit aliquam etiam. Risus viverra adipiscing at in. Tellus pellentesque eu tincidunt tortor aliquam. Imperdiet sed euismod nisi porta lorem mollis aliquam ut. Quam viverra orci sagittis eu volutpat odio facilisis mauris. Suspendisse ultrices gravida dictum fusce ut placerat orci nulla. Id diam vel quam elementum pulvinar. Neque gravida in fermentum et sollicitudin ac orci phasellus. Mattis aliquam faucibus purus in massa tempor. Pellentesque elit eget gravida cum sociis natoque penatibus. Elementum nibh tellus molestie nunc non blandit massa enim.
Sagittis vitae et leo duis ut diam quam nulla. Sit amet aliquam id diam maecenas. Quam quisque id diam vel quam elementum. Proin sagittis nisl rhoncus mattis rhoncus urna neque. Elementum tempus egestas sed sed risus pretium quam vulputate dignissim. Orci sagittis eu volutpat odio facilisis mauris sit. Lacus laoreet non curabitur gravida arcu. Nulla at volutpat diam ut. Quam quisque id diam vel quam elementum pulvinar etiam. Netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas sed. Eget egestas purus viverra accumsan in. Dignissim suspendisse in est ante in nibh mauris cursus. Est pellentesque elit ullamcorper dignissim cras. Amet massa vitae tortor condimentum. Nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu cursus vitae congue mauris rhoncus. Viverra nam libero justo laoreet sit amet cursus sit amet. Libero volutpat sed cras ornare. Odio tempor orci dapibus ultrices in. Leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id.
Sed risus ultricies tristique nulla aliquet enim tortor at. Est placerat in egestas erat imperdiet. Convallis aenean et tortor at. Duis at tellus at urna condimentum. In ornare quam viverra orci. Vulputate mi sit amet mauris commodo quis. Arcu ac tortor dignissim convallis aenean et tortor at. Quis ipsum suspendisse ultrices gravida dictum. Eget velit aliquet sagittis id. Ac tincidunt vitae semper quis. Ac auctor augue mauris augue. Porta lorem mollis aliquam ut.