Photoessay #2811 - The Lost

We'll put our disability odyssey on hold for awhile, but I'm pretty darn sure something will happen.

I did hear back from the young professor though the message was missent.  Very nice if misaddressed.  He suggested one of Hasia Diner's books.  I had already heavily used one of her other books regarding the Second Migration of the German Jews.

This book "The Lost" I had checked out of the UW library for some darn reason now forgotten but now, I'm really reading it.  It's a sleuthing genealogical Holocaust book.

On page 42, here's a paragraph that really speaks to me.  The book was written in 2006; the author is 8 years younger than me.

He's referring to his great aunt and uncle and their four daughters presumably lost in the Holocaust, somehow.

But as time went on it hurt less and less to think that we'd never know anything more about them, since with each passing decade the entire event receded, and with it they, too, grew dimmer, blunter, not only those six but all of them; and as decade followed on decade they seemed more and more to belong not to us but to History.  This, paradoxically, made it easier not to think about them, since after all so many people were thinking about them - if not them specifically, then about a kind of generic them, those who had been killed by the Nazis, and for this reason it was as if they were being looked after.

 And the cover.  That hug  bouquet just catches my eye every time.  No sure about the intention, hard to imagine that a publisher would allow it but what he knows, it's just around the edges but the center is blank.  Not gone, just blank, unknowable.  Makes you wonder if that blank center can be known.  Is that what we are searching for.

"The Lost" by Daniel Mendelsohn