Move the mouse pointer over a red word in the main text, to view the glossary entry for this word. The filter of memory has played its role, letting slip through a mixture of the essential, the incidental, the anecdotalโa selection determined by no apparent logic except, perhaps, the instinct of self-preservation.
His account follows the chronological order of the events only roughly, however. Though he begins with his arrest in Paris in September due to a denunciation and ends with his freeing and return to Paris in , he continually draws connections to the postwar period, shifting between the time frames as required by the internal, associative context of the memories, often tied to individuals. Steinberg already had raised his hand to slap him before he stopped just short. I cannot say what his reaction was, whether he got up, whether he made his bed, or what happened to him.
Then I walked away, and that incident, a banal event in the daily life of a death camp, has haunted me all my life. So the contamination had done its job, and I had not escaped corruption. The strangest thing about this acquaintance that seems to have left such precise traces in his memory is that I do not remember him at all.
Which would confirm his judgment. Can one be so guilty for having survived? Paul Steinberg describes how he came to the camp as a year-old youth who had become accustomed to a lack of emotional bonds and thus was prepared for some of the difficulties of camp life. In his family, he writes, he never felt at home and had no experience of close friendships because of the frequent changes of location and school. In writing his memoirs, Steinberg explores the way in which the experiences of the camp, in their violence, as well as the experiences of help and friendship, became virtually physical memories: The music he learned about in the hospital was music he treasured all his life, and even later on, he says, he enjoyed eating soup at every opportunity that presented itself.
His lifelong fear of cold and winter weather, too, had its origin at the camp. Paris: Ramsay, New York: Henry Holt, Glossary Move the mouse pointer over a red word in the main text, to view the glossary entry for this word. MN; transl.
