A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

As we race into the new year, most of us don’t glance back at the fast dwindling generation of witnesses to the Holocaust. By year’s end, will there be even one remaining to remind us how far a government run amok will go unchecked? Although collective memories have been preserved by various organizations, the art of surviving is more elusive to grasp, especially when characterizing survival in terms of emotional well-being. It is this aspect of Mouillot’s memoir that propels this thought provoking work into a category of its’ own.

This memoir is written with such compressed passion that the concise prose expands upon digestion, and stays with you long after setting aside the book. On the surface, Mouillot appears to document the odd story of her grandparents, who refused to speak to each other for eternity after a very brief marriage. However, under the surface, through one unexpected discovery after another, we are forced to grapple with something much more personal to all of us–“what to do with our nightmares?”

Mouillot weighs the risk of forgetting with the risk of remembering, and finds the delicate balance of maintaining happiness in spite of unspeakable horror.