On the Street Where He Lived
The narrator plays a little mixed-up media when describing the panorama of the world which passes by the front door of shop. Using two different metaphorical images, the combination presents a singular vision of wonder and drama:
“The street and the passers-by were like a book that opened the world to me. My father always said: `The street is a theater!’"
As if History Never Happened
The concept of Holocaust denial may seem staggeringly impossible outside of the confines of a world populated by idiots, but in realty erasing history is not that difficult. If one can erase the evidence or merely distract or renovate its façade, the denial can commence fairly rapidly:
“one of the great mysteries in Eastern Europe: it has been my repeated experience that things pertaining to the war are officially invisible. Even though the traces truly exist and are blatantly visible to anyone who would look, an illusion is created: as if, arriving at the gates of Auschwitz, one met people claiming that there were no traces of the camp left, and everyone believed them.”
The Awakening
The author describes the moment of his awakening to certain facts of life about his life and its connection to an unfathomably abominable event taking place before he was even born. The moment when he accepted the Holocaust as not just history, but a responsibility:
“I was suddenly brutally conscious of the unfathomable nature of what it was my grandfather had tried to make me grasp: his deportation, and the Holocaust. The mists cleared from my mind.”
Serial Killer Nation
Trying to wrap one’s head around the vastness of evil that is required to carry out genocide is an almost impossible task. Like many such concepts, metaphor can make things easier by narrowing the focus down to microcosm:
“These perpetrators are like serial killers, only they operate on a much larger scale, at a national or continental level. They certainly are not terrified, and they know that most people cannot and do not want to think of the possibility of an act of genocide.”
Adolf (No, Not That Adolf)
The only real obstruction to erasing history and reconstructing a lie to put in its place is memory. As long as memories of those who know the real history are recorded or passed along, the reconstruction can never be fully completed. There will also be cracks in the foundation and a man named Adolf is an example of one of the biggest fissures in the foundational façade:
“Down a road, next to a garage, we met another old man, Adolf. Thin, very small, and dark, he described himself as a `militant for memory.’"
