Proceduralizing Evil, Proceduralizing Dignity: Memory, Trauma, and Post-Conflict Ethics in a Shared Biography

Abstract

This article analyzes how large-scale violence in Central and Eastern Europe be-comes administratively thinkable – and how dignity is later re-instituted – through a shared biography that fuses two extreme trajectories in postwar Romania: a Holocaust survivor (Nazi camps) and a former political prisoner subjected to the Pitești Reeducation and forced labor. Rather than juxtaposing sealed histories, the study traces the proceduralization of evil (lists, approvals, selection, transport) and the proceduralization of dignity (measured utterance, micro-solidarities, routines of care). Methodologically, it advances a triangulation of archives, memoir, and oral history, paired with an ethics of measure (tempered voice, economy of qualifiers, disciplined detail). Conceptually, it foregrounds relations between victims and persecutors beyond rigid binaries by mobilizing the gray zone of distributed responsibility and the banality of procedure. The analysis shows how written testimony (a deliberately “low voice”) carries memory from the communicative to the cultural register, while post-1989 silence – read through moral injury – relocates testimony into lived practice (care, work, continuity). Addressing reconciliation and transitional justice, the article argues for “slow infrastructures”: archival openness with clear finding aids, editorial standards that keep document and evocation apart, curricula that teach operations alongside narratives, and ethically curated memorial sites (including former communist prisons). On the question Is forgiveness possible? the article follows Minow and Teitel: forgiveness is a personal ethical option, not a public policy tool; recognition, truth, and accountabil-ity are prerequisites, and no substitute for justice.