Testis And Superstes: A Holocaust Study

The era of the direct witness and of a living memory, according to French historian Annette Wieviorka, is coming to an end. The possibilities for conducting first-hand interviews with people who lived through the actual event are declining. Studying the Holocaust has challenged all attempts at comprehension and definition, causing the renunciation of categorization and rational understanding because there is no absolute judgment of what “actually” happened and the specific statistics of the barbarisms. This is significantly expressed through words that acknowledge such failure from those first-hand witnesses because they themselves experience the common notion of memory loss just like any other human individual. The Holocaust, therefore is unspeakable, overwhelming, and unimaginable.
It is important to study the Latin word for “witness” as there are two words: Testis and Superstes which carries two completely different denotations. To begin, the word Testis is a person who is a third party during the time of the event but not directly involved; thus, in judicial process, the role of the testis is to testify. However, the meaning of Superstes is somebody who lived through the event and bears witness. Through Primo Levi’s argument, the Superstes is the one who makes judgment impossible and share their experience without the judicial process. This is justified through as Levi argues “It is a judgment that we would like to entrust only to those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had the opportunity to test for themselves what it means to act in a state of