Against Forgiving: The Encounter That Cannot Happen Between Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators

For Holocaust survivors, barriers to forgiveness include empathic and imaginative failure; investment in memory, memorial, and justice; and humanity's complicity in genocide that undermines trust in relationships. On the part of perpetrators, barriers to reconciliation include the absence of true repentance, avoidance of a factual accounting of crimes, and the use of screens, personal myths, and ambiguous confessions that elide victims' perspectives and suffering as well as one's responsibility to victims. Relationships are renewed for survivors not by forgiveness but by undoing the hierarchical victim–victimizer relationship through testimony that allows survivors to regain agency, transform anger and hate, and reestablish a shared subjectivity that makes the empty, traumatic world feel three dimensional and full again.