She traces the "second generation's" trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman - a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished - probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implications of the second-generation experience. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? The most surprising story of all is why, more than sixty years after the end of the war, so few people - Arab and Jew - want this story told.Īs the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. The story is very cinematic the characters are rich and handsome, brave and cowardly there are heroes and villains. We follow Satloff over four years, through eleven countries, from the barren wasteland of the Sahara, where thousands of Jews were imprisoned in labor camps through the archways of the Mosque in Paris, which may once have hidden 1700 Jews to the living rooms of octogenarians in London, Paris and Tunis. The story of the Holocaust's long reach into the Arab world is difficult to uncover, covered up by desert sands and desert politics. Looking for a hopeful response to the plague of Holocaust denial sweeping across the Arab and Muslim worlds, Robert Satloff sets off on a quest to find the Arab hero whose story will change the way Arabs view Jews, themselves, and their own history.
Thousands of people have been honored for saving Jews during the Holocaust - but not a single Arab.
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