This chapter compares Lengyel’s narrative strategies in her written and oral testimonies in relation to the differentcontexts of publication to gain a better understanding of Lengyel’s sustained quest for authority over herexperiences. Hannah Pollin-Galay’s concept ‘ecologies of witnessing’ helps demonstrate the adaptation oftestimonial narrative to the vastly different contexts of the immediate post-war years and late 1990s America.Focusing on the narrative of three episodes—deportation, resistance and liberation—the chapter suggests that aclose reading of and listening to Lengyel’s words in French and English yields insights in relation to the following: asurvivor’s need to maintain narrative authority; the encoding of gender-based violence in narrative and in the studyof testimony across several decades and about the close links between Lengyel’s narrative and herself.