Based on the data from historical research, we are able to know even the smallest details of how exactly the final phase of the extermination of Jews and other prisoners occurred at Auschwitz. However, the situation is completely different regarding the moral and political significance of the extermination, or at least the human understanding of what happened.

Here, the causes of the behavior of both the victims and the executioners, as well as their own words, continue to resemble an inscrutable enigma. This is not obviously due to the difficulty we encounter when we want to convey our deepest experiences to others.

In this case, the issue concerns the structure of the testimony itself and the fact that it included as a component an emptiness, that is, the survivors testified about something that cannot be testified to. To comment on their testimony necessarily means to ponder this emptiness, to try to listen to it. Even this is a way—and perhaps the only possible one—to voice the unspeakable.