Richard Zimler is trying to keep the terrible facts alive in the stories he writes
for the first time. Closing the book’s cover created an ache of guilt in me because I seemed to be shutting the door on Anne in her hiding place in Amsterdam. I wanted to stay with her and somehow keep her from being sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
How to balance our need to learn about crimes against humanity with victims’ rights to keep their pasts to themselves? I grew so troubled in part because I had recently become aware – while promoting a novel of mine that takes place in the Warsaw ghetto – that thewas fading from memory. Indeed, in talks I’d given in the UK and Poland, many readers made it clear from their comments that they had only a very superficial idea about what daily life was like in the overcrowded and disease-ridden ghettoes. Even more troubling, some knew precious little about the inhuman conditions in the extermination camps.
Lorrie explained her mother and father “wanted to put the past behind them”, adding that their daily struggles to remain alive throughout the Second World War remained extremely difficult for them to talk about – too present in the hearts and minds – even after half a century. “Back in the 1990s,” Lorrie said, “I asked my mom why she didn’t want to take part ineffort to collect as many oral histories as possible, and she replied, ‘It’s still too soon’.
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