These words, by Avner Shalev the Chairman of Yad Vashem, the Israeli national authority for Holocaust remembrance, taken from the institution's website, reflect a public feeling that has become familiar over the last couple of decades. The words express an anxiety that, as the witnesses who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust pass away, their memories and the memory of the Holocaust will be lost too.

This view, which is seen as natural and obvious in many circles, is in fact questionable. While witnesses and testimony have always played a role in the creation of history, memory and culture, it would appear that the status of witnesses has never been so iconic, almost sanctified, as is the case with Holocaust witnesses. It follows that it is extremely unusual for the memory of an event to be identified so absolutely with the personal stories of its subjects and victims as in the case of the Holocaust; so much so that it almost seems as though Holocaust memory has become identical to testimony and the concept of testimony itself has become a super-metaphor of knowledge, truth and ethical authority in regard to trauma, suffering, victimhood and catastrophe – themes that dominate our public sphere.

As is well known, this was not always the case. In the first years after the war the witnesses were not encouraged to speak publically about their experiences and they themselves were not always very eager to do so. When they did, they were not always listened to. The memory of the Shoah in those days was not very central in Europe and America, nor did it have its current significance even in Israel. The witnesses were not such cultural heroes as they are now.

The emergence of the witness to catastrophe as an influential public figure has its roots, as Jay Winter has shown, in the aftermath of the Great War – mostly in France.