I Want You to Know We're Still Here by Esther Safran Foer

You said in the book that for years, you really didn't know very much about their story.

You know, I think a lot of people who've grown up since Steven Spielberg's epic, you know, 'Schindler's List,' and people who've grown up knowing that there's a Holocaust Museum, that they can visit and learn about these things, will be surprised to know how little that generation spoke of those times. MARTIN: A good part of the memoir is the story of your parents and how they both survived the Holocaust and made their way to the United States and eventually to Washington, D.C. And that's the positive message - we are here. But it's also about life and resilience and about the fact that our family is here, that we have six grandchildren, that the pictures in our annual family photo include more and more members every year. It's certainly about tragedy, about how many members of my family were lost, whose names are only recorded in this book. Why do you call it that?įOER: Well, it's not just the story of the Holocaust. MARTIN: You call this a post-Holocaust memoir. And that makes it so poignant and timely right now. But it's also very much a story of resilience, of courage in the face of difficulty. You know, it's a story about the Holocaust. I think this is such an important story right now. Thank you so much for talking to us.ĮSTHER SAFRAN FOER: Thank you for having me. And Esther Safran Foer is with us now - remotely, unfortunately. Relying on people's memories, a faded photograph and historical records, Safran Foer returns to the small Ukrainian town to try to find the family that hid her father from the Nazis.

The line between history and memory is at the heart of Esther Safran Foer's new book, 'I Want You To Know We're Still here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir.' In it, she tries to piece together what happened to her parents before they arrived in the U.S.

The words used instead really mean memory. There's no word in Hebrew that translates precisely to the English word history. The beginning of a new memoir begins with a fact that may surprise many people.

I Want You to Know We're Still Here by Esther Safran Foer