In the often bleak landscape of trauma literature, the discourse of witnessing offers rare hope for healing. Structuring itself on the model of actual eyewitness testimony of survivors to genocide and other cataclysmic traumas, literary texts deploy imagined eyewitnesses to produce moments of profound psychological truth. In their encounter with these texts, readers may experience an irruption of otherness, in Derek Attridges term, that allows them to refigure victims as addressable subjects. Scholarship on witnessing overwhelmingly assumes a witness that is a surviving victim of trauma. We have therefore been ill prepared to appreciate the ethical implications posed to the reader by novels in which the experience of trauma is mediated by complicit witnesses. The positions of the narrators in the occupying armies in Chang-Rae Lees A Gesture Life (1999) and Jonathan Littells Les Bienveillantes (2006) invite us to reflect on a shift in the readers identification from victims to their victimizers. Texts in which the eyewitness is complicit characteristically objectify the survivors whose traumatic experience they represent. The ethical reader, who might co-own the trauma during the witnessing moment, may instead find herself co-owning the objectification of the victims. The otherness being dissolved by the text may turn out to be that of the perpetrator, a potentially destabilizing move. However, such texts may advance the witnessing project unexpectedly. We may find that the road to reconciliation and healing must ultimately pass through texts that humanize victimizers and allow us to figure them as human. We may come to understand that victimizers may themselves be traumatized, even as we search for a way to identify with that traumatization that does not do further injustice to their victims. In the course of such inquiry, we must exercise a heightened ethical awareness of our own positions as readers and teachers.