We know very well that the death occurs in the very moment when a memory is completely deleted from the collective memory of our community. When is nobody left to pray for your on yahrzeit, or to pass your name to the children you don't exist any more.
Our memory is a complicate archive of all those who died, who were killed who disappeared. We ought not forget anybody, because every one of us is responsible for the other and for the future of all of us.
I will always associate Eastern part of Europe - named and renamed several times during centuries - with genuine fear. The fear of hoping that this Pesach we'll be not hunted for imaginary crimes, or the fear that our neighbors will start hating us again.
Literary speaking, a visit in those lands could be an illumination. From the human and historical points of view you could better understand the historical fear only by looking around and for the former Jewish memories of the places. Omer Bartov's book is an academic approach the memory as part of the efforts to understand the victims of the perpetrators of the Shoah crimes. With his own words (xv): "The present book is in many ways an account of my initial plunge into the region and my encounter with a past mostly forgotten, a present committed to rewriting the past, and a kind of reverse archaeological undertaking in which the last remains of destroyed civilizations are being buried under the new edifices of the new".
The memory of the oblivion represents in this respect an important step against forgetting and an effort to correct a reinvented present where the victims are killed once more.
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