Remembering to forget

There is no more gruesome and tragic record in the history of the twentieth century than the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. Our memory of the Holocaust has been shaped by these images, and they are seared into our collective consciousness as brutal evidence of the atrocity of war and the evil of which humanity is capable. In her new book, Barbie Zelizer reveals the unique significance of the concentration camp photographs while being mindful of Leon Wieseltier's call to be strangers to these images. "If we are not strangers," he wrote, "if the names of the killers and the places of the killing and the numbers of the killed fall easily from our tongues, then we are not remembering to remember, but remembering to forget." Zelizer shows how the photographs have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent atrocities.