Distant witnessing.

My seven-and-a-half-year-old son recently came home from school with his head filled with a jumble of fragments about current events and history. Friday afternoon is usually our time together to enjoy the feeling of expansiveness that the end of the week provides, and a time when Miles often reflects on something that delights or intrigues him, unwittingly revealing to me his innocence. On that Friday, his questions were relentless. "Why did people hate Martin Luther King? . . . Why was President Kennedy assassinated? . . . And what is the 'Holycaust'?" He already had some familiarity with the first two questions, but entering the realm of World War II's Holocaust was uncharted and unexpected territory. I had thought many times about how I would begin to unravel this history to him - now it was being forced on me because the substitute teacher who taught in his class that day callously ignored the lesson plan his regular teachers had so carefully prepared.

As our discussion unfolded, Miles allowed stories to surface slowly, haltingly. They included both cliched images (big boots, the Seig heil salute) and unexpected scenarios of babies stuffed into toilets. And then, finally, Miles voiced the question I think he had really wanted to ask from the beginning, "Mommy, did Hitler hurt your family?" These snippets of information made me sad and angry. Most vexing were the psychic and photographic images this teacher had unleashed, without providing a framework for receiving them.

This incident fueled my concerns about reconsidering appropriate forms of remembrance of the Holocaust through photographic representation. The use of photography as evidence, the transference of events into memory and the passage of images into postmemory are crucial bridges that help translate the history from one generation to the next. The most tense point along this fragile bridge occurs where contemporary rethinking of documentary discourse is faced with the uneasy intersection between the demand for historical accuracy and for respectful remembrance of those who were violated. More traditional and relentless displays of Holocaust history rely almost entirely on abject documentary photographs. Such photographs do not always bring the viewer to look, to really see, nor can they be counted on to create empathic bonds between the contemporary subject and the person from the unimaginable past. The dilemma is that these photographs offer crucial information that cannot be discounted. At stake are the ways the photographs are set in motion, how they are employed to stand in for wrenching, almost unrepresentable events.

The sheer horror of the events of the Shoah complicates their representation; the trauma they imprint on survivors and the post-Auschwitz generation compounds these difficulties. The events themselves as traumatic history resist simple understanding, accessibility and representation. If recounting and representing the events are lined with the desire to attain an ultimate understanding, the incomprehensibility of the Shoah would seem to defy traditional historical attempts to explain. For some historians, understanding the unfathomable cruelty and hatred of Hitler's regime, its calculated policies to exterminate the Jews of Europe and to decimate millions of Communists, Catholics, Romas (Gypsies), homosexuals, political dissenters, the handicapped and the mentally retarded is impossible. As Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander has characterized it, an opaqueness remains at the very core of the historical understanding and interpretation of what happened.

The traditional mandate of the documentary photograph to "bear witness" can thus no longer go unquestioned. Its precious if not uneasy burden to "never forget" reigns over its unarticulated occlusions. The issue is not to invalidate documentary evidence. To the contrary, the evidence and the mandate are imperative. At stake is precisely what images are remembered in the imperative to never forget - what become the postmemories of the events. My concern is also to clarify that the demand to never forget is not directed at survivors, who can never forget, but to those who never experienced the events. As such, the demand that photographs have been made to carry out is always one of retrospective witnessing. They make their appeal to contemporary spectators.

Given the challenge to understanding and to representation that the Holocaust presents to documentary forms of witnessing, Holocaust-related photographs are situated precisely in the demand that they perform as history lessons ("never forget") and provide sites for mourning. However, it is partially due to the utter horror of these photographs that the contemporary viewer's approach to these indispensable documents is made especially difficult. The daunting, delicate and volatile subject of Holocaust representation calls for a reevaluation of photography in the service of contemporary witnessing. Contemporary reemployments of documentary photographs often seek to redress the lens of abjectness and the displaced claim of "obscenity" through which victims of the Holocaust have been remembered.

Art Spiegelman's remarkable Maus comic books are the only visual representations of the Shoah that I have allowed within my son's reach at this point. The artist's stunning and strategic use of pre-Holocaust family photographs compete with the realism of his cartoon drawings in these complex books. The comic book format of his tales signals that the world of the Shoah turned reality upside down. Although Spiegelman avoids what he calls the "holokitsch" of the documentary photographs, he nevertheless bases his painstaking drawings on documentary photographs, historical research in archives and at sites of genocide, hours of taped interviews with his Auschwitz-survivor father and a fervent desire to recover his mother, also an Auschwitz survivor, who committed suicide when Art was 19 years old. The artist's spare and powerful employment of his parents' pre-Holocaust family snapshots and studio portraits demonstrates how documentary material can be made more accessible through juxtaposition with these more intimate modes of photographic representation in the reconstruction of Holocaust history and memory. Such photographs also provide an eerie shadow ground in signaling the ways the traumatic past always intrudes on the present. Indeed, the only time real photographs are employed in Maus - that is, as photographs from reproductions and not drawn - is to provoke the irreality of the zone between the present and the Holocaust world. Actual photographs appear three times: the portrait of the artist's "ghost" brother, Richieu, at the opening of the book; the snapshot of the artist's mother Anja with Art as a boy, inserted within the fractured mosaic of her suicide; and the "souvenir" studio portrait of the artist's father Vladek wearing a concentration camp uniform just after his release from Auschwitz. All three photographs are family portraits' of people whose lives are intimately and intricately linked to Art's coming to uncertain terms with the repercussion of the events. These photographs uncannily appear unrelated to the two realms of memory - past and present - that are described in the continuous narrative. In Maus, the entire realm of representation is turned upside down, or rather, inside out. Indeed, the comic book format maintaining the structure of the paralyzing stories stands in for what documentary photographs usually narrate. The family snapshots act as counterparts to the extraordinary documentary photographs. These portraits function as markers of traumatic never-forgetting and could only be presented as strange harborings from an irretrievable other world.

Spiegelman's Maus books, however, do not have to contend with the horrific photographic mismatching between events and their re-creation, the task borne by museums dedicated to commemorate and document the Shoah. The museum's imperative to remember often runs paradoxically to commemoration itself, especially as this difficult act of representing remembrance often becomes confused with the necessity of historical documentation on a large public scale. Individual human lives often become lost in the process.

Despite these obstacles, the United States' Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. constructs a provocative web from the problems and possibilities of photographic mourning and remembrance. Within the complex displays of dehumanization that the museum stages, the photographic installation "Tower of Faces" offers a restored vision of identity to the victims similar to how Spiegelman's startling family photographs function in the Maus books. The "Tower of Faces" is a dramatic vertical space that traverses three floors of the museum. It is covered from top to bottom with over 1000 photographs, taken between 1890 and 1941, of former residents of the small shtetl town of Ejszyszki, located near Vilna in what is now Lithuania.

The "Tower of Faces" is remarkable because it is the only space in the museum that implicitly rather than explicitly addresses the genocide. It pictures people fully integrated into the activities of a community run by consensus rather than force, where the everyday of peoples' lives addresses the viewer. The photographs, measuring one to three feet, become not only performative bridges to representation but also pervade the hauntingly articulated space. In the way that Walter Benjamin wrote about the "melancholy, incomparable beauty" of early portraits and the cult of remembrance, the towering faces mime solace and offer oscillating sites of repose. Their gentle strength cuts between solace and warning. Yaffa Eliach, photography scholar and historian of the Holocaust, has written in We Were Children Just Like You (1990),

Because of the events that were soon to transpire, these "survivor photos" take on a new dimension in the post-Holocaust era. To look at them now is to know that behind each peaceful image lurks a tragic tale of death and destruction. Intended simply as mementos of happy times and family occasions, the "survivor photos" now have the much weightier task of restoring identity and individuality to the otherwise anonymous victims of the Nazis.

Like Spiegelman, Eliach's relationship to family and studio portraiture in the "Tower of Faces" is based on intimacy and intersubjectivity, offering the necessary human connectedness to the visitor's journey through the Holocaust Museum. Eliach was four years old when her town of Ejszyszki was massacred by the Nazis during the Jewish New Year, on September 25 and 26, 1941. Besides herself, her father and older brother were the only survivors from her family. Eliach painstakingly reassembled the photographic archive of Ejszyszki by contacting fellow survivors who emigrated before the Holocaust and by tracking the records of the Ejszyszki Society in Chicago. The majority of the 5000 photographs in her archive, however, were reassembled by tracing friends and relatives to whom Ejszyskians may have sent copies of photographs before the mass murders occurred. These photographs were made primarily by Eliach's grandmother and grandfather, Alte and Yitzhak Uri Katz, the prominent town photographers before the murders took place.

The precious few family photographs in Maus and Eliach's assemblage in the "Tower of Faces" attest to a redefined meaning of document - to warn and to teach. In their implicit reference to what is not seen, the photographs point to obscene crimes while at the same time offering respectful remembrance of the people pictured. These mute yet resonant family and community photographs trace the unbridgeable rupture that is the trauma of the events. The ways they are offered as representations of remembrance give new promise to the legacy of distant witnessing, as artists work between spaces of documentation and the impossibility of knowing.

ANDREA LISS teaches art history and cultural theory at California State University, San Marcos. Her book Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust was just published by the University of Minnesota Press.