Quotes from Fern Schumer Chapman

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.

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. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.

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.

I could not describe my loneliness. For the first time, I grasped that I was truly on my own. I could depend on no one. There was no one to share my struggles and hopes.

They died, but you must live. To honor their memory, you must live.

When you are living under the wolves, you have to howl.' ....'I will never howl with these wolves.

Does anger empower me in a powerless situation? If so, can I find another source of strength?

Surviving felt like its own punishment. What had I done to deserve this? How could I live if my parents weren't somewhere in this world?

I know that you will do your best," my father said, handing me my boarding pass. "I know that you will make me proud of you." "I'll try," I said automatically, but I didn't know what to do to make him proud. I kissed and hugged him, whispering, "I promise I'll try.