Auschwitz

When I was a little girl, my mother dropped me off at the library one day. I never liked going to the library. It was a rainy summer day… I think I was ten. At some point, I opened a book and saw a pile of bodies in that book and I took the book home and I asked my mother, ‘what is this?’. It was the first thing I had learned about the Holocaust. The one thing that impressed me most, from those pictures were the shoes of the people. This is what I remember most – the shoes on the bodies. They looked like some of my mother’s shoes. They were modern shoes and I thought , ‘how could this have been happening in modern times?’. So that was one thing that was in me when I first met the material for “Holocaust” and later on for “Shopie’s Choice”. It made me want to read more deeply into it. (Meryl Streep, European Jewish Press, February 2015)