...of denial

2.


In my grandfather’s notebooks, there’s no mention of that journey at all. I don’t know where he boarded the ship, if he managed to get some sort of documentation before he left, if he had any money or at least an inkling of what awaited him in Brazil. I don’t know how long the crossing lasted, whether it was windy or calm, whether they were struck by a storm one night in the early hours, whether he even cared if the ship went down and he died in what seem a highly ironic manner, in a dark whirlpool of ice with no hope of being remembered by anyone except as a statistic - a fact that would sum up his entire biography, swallowing up any reference to the place where he studied and everything else that had happened in his life in the interval between being born and the day he had a number tattooed on his arm.

3.


I don’t want to talk about it either. If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need it’s to hear amy thoughts on the subject. It’s been dealt with in the cinema. It’s been dealt with in books. Eyewitnesses have already recounted the story detail by detail, and there are sixty years of reports and essays and analyses, generations of historians and philosophers and artists that devoted their lives to adding footnotes to all that material in an effort to refresh again the world’s view on the matter, the reflex reaction everyone has to the word Auschwitz, so not for a second would it occur to me to repeat those ideas if they were not, in some way, essential if I am to talk about my grandfather and, therefore, about my father and, therefore, about myself.

[Diary of the Fall, Laub, M.]