What can remain of a family murdered 52 years ago?
By fern | General, Legacy, Loss, Motherland, On Germany, On Writing, Trauma
On my first trip to my mother’s town, Stockstadt am Rhein, I wondered if there would be any physical evidence of her past. “What can remain of a family destroyed fifty-two years earlier?” I wrote in my memoir, Motherland. I learned then that the past has peculiar ways of inserting itself into the present. When we first arrived in Germany, my mother turned to me and said, “We can’t leave ...