In French there is a word for people who lose their memory, or forget things: “les amnésiques”. The word comes from the Latin word “amnesia”, also used in English, which means a complete or partial loss of memory due to trauma, injury etc. Géraldine Schwarz uses this term as the original title of her book (translated to Those Who Forget in English), and I think it accurately sums up the main theme that prevails through-out the book: that awful tendency that we humans have to erase and forget certain parts of our history in order to live guilt-free. That whole “I didn’t participate in XYZ, so I was not part of it” attitude that is still a core part of our make-up today. The ability that we have to not hold ourselves accountable for acts committed by those around us, telling ourselves that because we did not actually physically commit those acts, we were not part of it. Well, silence is complicit, and silence allows violence to become genocide, and hatred to become state-sanctioned mass murder. 

Géraldine Schwarz is a German and French journalist, and Those Who Forget is a deep dive into her family’s past, but also a general overview of Germany before, during, and after the war, and the Germans in general during that time. There is a term for Germans who were not active Nazi followers, those who just followed the current: “Mitlaüfer”. Schwarz grew up thinking that her German grandparents were Mitlaüfer, but when she discovers that her grandfather appears to have taken his own advantage of anti-Semitism in 1938, she starts to wonder how complicit he actually was, and how complicit the entire population was. Schwarz also studies the actions of the French side of her family as her mother’s father was a Vichy policeman during the war. I really love how the author creates a story by weaving through three generations of her family, and each generation's own way of reckoning with what their country and their people did during the war. Within these studies the author takes us on a personal journey of discovery, but also on a more general journey into our collective ability to forget and move on, while burying the past, and what this actually means for our future. If we bury the past how can we move forward without committing the same acts down the road? If we remain silent in the face of wrong, how can we really hope to make a change in the future?

This is such a timely book, as I feel that, once again, we are at a crossroads, and our actions, as individuals and as populations in general, will dictate how the future unrolls. Nazism, Fascism, and Anti-Semitism were never wiped out, but hastily buried in a shallow grave with a breathing tube. I appreciated the parallels that the author draws with other atrocities committed elsewhere (slavery in the US for example), portraying how none of us are safe from being persecuted and/or complicit in persecution of others.

I asked my sister to send me a copy of this book in the original language as I want to be able to read it again in French. Part memoir, part history, part warning, this is a must read in my opinion, and also a call to action: do we really want to continue to watch the same atrocities be committed over and over again, standing by and pretending that we are not guilty by association? Or do we want to stand up and actually say NO MORE and mean it? I know what side of history I want to be standing on.

Thanks to Netgalley and to the publisher for the advance copy in return for an honest review.