Deschutes Public Library

Those who forget, my family's story in Nazi Europe ; a memoir, a history, a warning, Géraldine Schwarz ; translated from the French by Laura Marris

eng

contains biographical information

illustrations

no index present

non fiction

Those who forget

1124322119

Géraldine Schwarz ; translated from the French by Laura Marris

my family's story in Nazi Europe ; a memoir, a history, a warning

"During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz{u2019}s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer{u2014}those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother{u2019}s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe{u2019}s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism."--, Amazon

My family's story in Nazi Europe, a memoir, a history, a warning