Readers Become Completely Immersed in the Characters and Invested in their Lives.

I felt like I was transported in a time machine back to WWII whenever I opened the book We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein. Readers become completely immersed in the characters and invested their lives. One theme involved how children adapted to their new ghetto environment after their previous lives were so abruptly disrupted by Nazis dictating new living arrangements to their government conquests. The children were motivated to bring income into their often destitute families, and could be very creative and smart in doing so. Adults identified as former teachers were encouraged to set up makeshift classrooms for continuing the education of younger residents, as well as being tapped to contribute to a project the ghetto leaders hoped would become an unvarnished record of what went on in the ghetto. The writers met weekly to report on their progress.

I loved the idea in this book of having many scribes or writers appointed by ghetto hierarchy to create books filled with many different people’s real life stories, ones the residents themselves wished to tell of their lives, before and in the ghetto, as a living testament that they were there, a legacy about what they endured, how their lives showed their dreams, dignity, strength, hopes, resilience,  and that at the end, the book had a note of promise, which we know in our present day was fulfilled by all those who survived the Holocaust, and went on to productive and often highly successful lives, having children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and providing testimony for themselves and give voice to the experiences of those no longer able to speak for themselves by war’s end, through the vast archive of the US Holocaust Museum’s survivor conversations, reflections, and testimony, and the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, whose “Visual History Archive is the largest collection of genocide witness testimony in the world.” There is healing in telling the story, and in reading the stories that demonstrate humanity’s endurance in the face of its greatest wartime depravity. 

There is an  eternal flame that burns in the Hall of Remembrance at the US Holocaust Museum that bears the text from Deuteronomy 4:9 “Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons.”