Author's welcome

Memories. For most of us, the word conjures up an image from our

childhood, our youth. The word has a pleasant and homey feel to it, and

reveries of our past touch our hearts. But as we wander through our

deepest memories, will it occur to us that there might be some people who

would rather forget? These would be people whose hearts do not fill with

satisfaction at the memories of their past, but are even horrified, agitated,

or haunted by them, people who do not know how to deal with their

memories and want only to be free of them, and see liberation from their

irrepressible memories in forgetfulness.

But is this so? Is there freedom in forgetting?

Our website tries to respond to this question, with the help of those whose

experience is most authentic: people who often wish to forget, but yet

ultimately desire to remember. Those who long struggled with their

memories in the wake of the traumas dealt in the 20 th century by history,

and society, before ultimately deciding to face the past and somehow

process it, to confront their trauma, and to share these memories with

others. All this they do for many reasons: since they cannot extricate

themselves from painful memories, their only relief comes through the act

of remembering, no matter how painful it may prove to be. They have also

remembered and reflected in order to share their experiences with us and

keep their memories alive for us, their next generation. We learn of their

sufferings - but also of the lives they had before that. We see that

something once existed, something they lost; and this loss is ours as well.

We would like to understand the role played by memory, and the act of

remembering, in the processing of great societal traumas. Most of these

memories stem from what was perhaps the darkest period in human

history - the Holocaust - and from the lives that existed prior to that: lives

that came before death, a something that came before nothing, an

existence that came before eradication. If we are to understand this

nothing even superficially, we must know the something that preceded it.

The act of recollection can bring relief for the sufferer; the personal nature

of these accounts may inspire sympathy in the reader. The editors of this

site would like to present these personal accounts of memory to readers,

primarily young ones: school pupils and university students, and their

instructors. We want to provide something other than a focus on facts and

numbers - the way traditional textbooks present the twentieth century -

offering students instead a history that draws on personal experiences

while at the same time providing teachers with ancillary materials. The

recollections, memoirs and diaries on the website are personal stories,

not literary creations. Their tellers are ordinary people, most of whom

have remained silent about their experiences for decades. Ultimately they

felt the time had come to speak.

We, and those who follow us, must listen to them.

Andrea Szőnyi