ABSTRACT

This chapter was written with love and gratitude for two people, Eva Ben-Tal, the author's mother and feminine role-model, and Emanuel Marx, his friend and professional role model. It deals with the flickering sensations, insights, comparisons, jumpily changing scenes and periods, in which he become an active-passive participant, through listening, wondering, hesitating, doubting and sometimes laughing over his mother's wandering and sometimes contradicting associations. It examines the annoying doubts that crept into his thoughts all along with his mother, namely her unexpected, inconsistent and inconceivable accounts concerning her experiences during the Holocaust. He argues with her and wonders about her certainty and self-confidence regarding the probability that the Germans were not all the same, and that not all were evil, but were rather trapped without much choice. Sociologists and anthropologists emphasize the cultural and social background of the individual that effects, to a large extent, what and how events are remembered.