Bokelskere.no

There is a reason the word history has, at its heart, the narrative of one's life.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

The biggest mistake people make when they think about Nazi war criminals is to assume they were always monsters; before, during, and after the war. They weren't. They were once ordinary men, with fully operational consciences, who made bad choices and had to fabricate excuses to themselves for the rest of their lives when they returned to a mundane existence.

My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardens shard of rock. This was certainly true of the deaths in my family - if only because they did not live to see me in this state, to see the world in this state.

Drifting in and out of consciousness , I imagined that my mother was here. She wrapped her arms around me and kept me warm. She whispered in my ear: Be a Mensch, Minusa. For the first time I realized what that really meant. As long as you put someone else's welfare in front of your own, it meant you had someone else to live for. Once that was gone, what was the point?

My father had trusted me with the details of his death, and in the end, I was too late.

During that forty-eight-hour stretch, I passed the gallow six times - going to the bakery, to Darija's, to school. After the first two times, I stoppd noticing. It was as if death had become part of the landscape.