There are some stories that need to be told over and over again because telling them helps to define what is good or contemptible in our humanity. The difficulty comes in compelling our attention on the thousandth iteration; humans get bored or resistant or deny the stories have anything to do with us, personally. The story of the Holocaust is one of those stories, no more and no less; it is one of many sets of facts that we deny at the peril of failing to understand ourselves, of committing sins of which repetition is only one.
Six million is a figure so vast we cannot comprehend it; those 6 million were killed one at a time or in batches and each of them was an individual who did not deserve to die. Lemelman tells the story of his relatives who died, and of his relatives who lived and bore witness – plucked, all of them, from life in a Ukrainian village so ordinary in its mild exoticism that this recitation of cooking and cleaning and going to school would be boring were it not the peaceful prelude to bleakness.
Being a distinguished illustrator, Lemelman does not just tell his mother’s and uncles’ stories; he draws them in greys and blurs that show the origin of some drawings in photographs. The delicate realism of this work reminds us of what cannot otherwise be documented because it has been lost. And every so often, fellow villagers are named, and alongside their name comes their fate.
The one time Hitler is mentioned in these pages, it is with the curse ‘may his name be erased’; to be forgotten is the worst, and this book serves as memory.
