In reviewing a subset of the Reviews in the Digital Humanities repository (Volume 4, Number 6: June 2023; Review: In Search of the Drowned), I would define DH as a tool that can enhance the historiography of Holocaust studies and of Genocide and Mass Violence scholarship, while providing “a voice to the voiceless.” As noted in this Yale, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the historian Saul Friedlander in the 1990s -2000s went against the generally held position of dismissing survivor testimonies in favor of Nazi documents because they were known to have factual inaccuracies. Nonetheless, as Friedlander and DH scholars have uncovered, we now have platforms, such as the one mentioned here, that offer insights into understanding the evolution of Nazi policies toward Jews, perpetrator motivations and German citizens reactions to state promoted antisemitism propaganda. In this archive, DH allows readers and platform users to navigate the site in an attempt to understand the experience of mass violence through the victims’ eyes. In this “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka), testimonies provide us with a view into the past, which have the potential to uncover new information and contribute to our understanding of the experience of mass violence.

A great example of this is that of Ester Fox’s testimony, which provided insight that hasn’t been well-documented. In this and other testimonies, to use Miranda Fricker’s term: “epistemic injustice (a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word)” is avoided and because the platform enhances the victim’s testimony by linking scholarly historiographical references and disclosures (throughout the passage); namely, where addition work can be explored or where more work is needed, and thus the reader can choose to further explore or stop their review.

I believe that this survival story is also of significance in that here we have a unique testimony – an example of a Jewish female doctor, who served as a concentration camp doctor in 2 camps (Guben and Bergen-Belsen) – a testimony that may never have been documented had this DH median not come to fruition. Her story is also extraordinary in that upon liberation, Ester served as a doctor in a displaced persons (DPs) hospital, where “one aspect of this post war healthcare landscape…[has] not yet [been] explored.” In my view, this survival story is also of significance in that Ester provides testimony “that fits the tasks of intersectional feminism…of communal care” in an era (1940s) when “structural misogyny and racism” were met with mass violence and genocide. Her account cannot be taken as a “trivialization of feminist methodologies” as the authors Jacqueline Wernimont & Elizabeth Losh warn us of in Bodies of Information – where modern tech culture can reinforce pre-existing biases.