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.

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...

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

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

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....