How things change. In a few months, the village has become unrecognisable. What was a Sensitive Urban Area, Category 1 has become a concentration camp. In a few short minutes, the time it took to flick through a military record that should never have been there, Rachel fell into history’s black hole. In two years, he lost his health, his mind, his job, his friends, his Ophélie, the girl he’d loved his whole life. And me, in ten months I’ve gone from dumb apathy to a state of permanent panic somewhere between madness, anger and the urge to rush half-way across the world and drown myself. I don’t know what to do or what will be done tomorrow. I feel terribly alone. More alone than anyone in the world. My parents are dead, Rachel is dead, Uncle Ali is not much longer for this world and I have no idea what will happen to Aunt Sakina. Life is unutterably sad.

Me and my mates have been saying that maybe it’s time to get the fuck out, to go die somewhere else. Then again we’ve been talking about hanging in and fighting. One day, we’ll swear it’s all worth it and the next day we’re saying it’s not worth shit. We can’t see what kind of miracle could set it off.

Rachel’s Diary - 24 April 1996

Rachel’s Diary

24 April 1996

Time has seemed so slow to me these past few months. I’ve lived through a whole century, and not the easiest of centuries, one filled with horror and shame. My God it has been long and painful, I have paid a price for every step, every word, every scrap of information to know my father, to know in myself the meaning of the extermination and his part in it. I followed his path from start to finish, slipped into his thoughts, set my foot in his footsteps. At no time did I flinch – not before the gas chambers, not before the unbelievable everyday horror of the camps, not even before the grief that every day ate away at my heart. If the walls of the camps, the ghosts of the prisoners, if the men and women I met on my journey into the heart of the Holocaust, if the books I have read could bear witness they would say, this man has given all he can give, he may speak, he knows.