In "Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening", Laub commented on something that was present in "The Wire". "Vicissitudes of Listening" basically said, the listening of pain and trauma incites an empathetic emotion in the listener. What they're feeling goes beyond the data, documents, and facts about an event, in this case the Holocaust, and reveals a very naked human truth. Underneath every tragedy there is humanity at its core.
     So what brings me to "The Wire" is, that show is often considered the most realistic and "true-to-life" television show ever. It tells the story of life in a city and the story is grim. Each season looks at the failures, tragedies, pitfalls, high points, and humanity through several facets of every major city, police, politics, schools, the working class, and crime. The last season looked at the media, the storytellers, and how they interact with a city. They tell the stories of the people living inside and relate them to others. However, it is ultimately the media's decision what to tell, how to tell it, and how much is important to the story they're relating. This was a meta sort of comment on the show itself, saying even though all of this was very true-to-life, none of it happened. Each of the characters in the show exist as parallels and amalgams of people who exist in real life, but this isn't a documentary. It's a narrative.
     But the fact that it's fiction doesn't mean that it isn't real. The fact that someone cherry picks what's important doesn't mean it's fake, just the opposite. It's realer than real, it's truer than true. It shows humanity naked, all of the time. Humanity's addictions, wrath, abstinence and kindness and created something that doesn't just indict or romanticize humanity, but philosophizes and finds something to relate to everyone. It allows for me to understand, relate to, and philosophize my existence by comparing it to what someone else.
     "Vicissitudes of Listening"  gives me  a 3rd hand story, one the author wrote by hearing someone else tell it. I'm listening to a summary of a summary, about a woman's experience in Auschwitz. And even so, I can still empathize no matter how the story is changed. Because underneath every story there is humanity at it's core.