When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains

If you want to be truly just in this life, when you see people who are weak, you must stand with them. Because you are strong, and it is the weak who need you more, not the strong.

…it was during a period he had so much time on his hands that he felt that time had stopped. How could time have stopped? ‘Because,’ he said, ‘and you will understand this when you are older, sometimes you feel that everything around you has come to an end. You feel that you are completely alone, that time is frozen and that you are invisible. At first, you might feel exhilarated by the sense of freedom, but then you’ll be frightened that you are lost and you will never be able to go back.’ He explained that when he first felt this, he had been isolated and afraid and had prised open his watch case to verify that time was indeed passing. The rhythm of the watch might have been imagined. Sound was not enough, he needed to see and touch it. It was the first time that he had dismantled a mechanism. The turning wheels, ticking each second away, had reassured him. It was then that he had comprehended the importance of time.

Perhaps all remembrance is a process of compilation and creation. Every day we absorb what is around us and assemble observations of a specific time: sounds, smells, textures, words, images, and feelings. Of course, we prioritize and edit as we go, subjective witnesses to our own lives, providing recollections that are often biased and incomplete.

Memories, like misfiled documents, are not always where you expect to find them...I learned that detailed questions often did little to trigger specific memories. People returned to distant facts in roundabout ways, along their own winding paths, which seemed more mapped by emotion than by logic.

He had scraped his arms and legs, and reddened dirt had lodged in his cuts. Tomorrow, undoubtedly, the contusions would be obvious, but this was of no consequence. Hans seemed to be perpetually covered in bruises. He struggled with coordination and constantly walked into things, misstepping, losing his hat or scarf, or leaving his school books behind. He frequently fell off his bicycle. Organizing his body, his things, or his time was not a strength or,