Fern Schumer Chapman

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.

Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.

The living take a part of the dead with them, carrying them around in their minds, like a song that lingers after the music has been turned off.

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.