But it wasn't just sympathy that drove me on through the fog, it was curiosity, too. What were they doing with their freedom? Why hadn't they ever written about the dead? Why hadn't they ever asked what we knew about the fates of poor Eugene and poor Elizabeth? And about those of poor Otto, poor Leopold, and poor Selma? Why did they kill the dead with their silence?

It doesn't matter that there are no more Gestapo agents asking for your papers, that no trucks are driving through the streets to pick up people, that no one's ringing your doorbell at night, that the concentration camps have been turned into museums where cut-off hair and knocked-out teeth are displayed in glass cases, that there's no reason to run away any more. The running away goes on. Running away from a name. When Auschwitz wasn't yet a name, you didn't need to run away, but who's going to take the name back? Who's going to tell me it's not my hair, my teeth. They meant it for me.

Of course she was lying - I was changed; I would have been deeply disturbed if I'd still looked like I did at the time when I didn't know that name.

When does the past start? When the blade falls or when the corpse is consigned to a mass grave or burned in a crematorium or when the murderer dies or when there's no one left alive who loved the murdered one or when the first tourists buy their tickets to the execution site?

Primo Levi descried the camps in such minute detail that the unimaginable became a concrete picture.
For forty years I'd imagined that I was a witness and that made it possible for me to live the way I have. I'm no longer a witness. I didn't know a thing. Whenever I read Primo Levi, I realize that I couldn't really visualize a concentration camp. My imagination wasn't sick enough.