She then went to Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute and then McGill University, but returned after one year to attend Queen’s University instead. “I thought, ‘I could? Then I will because I want you to be proud of me.’ It meant a huge deal to me.” You could be doing so much better than you are.’ That was the moment the penny dropped for me, academically,” the 47-year-old remembered. “He turned and looked at me - I was quaking in my boots - and said, ‘Rebecca, you have a lot of talent. She remembers him asking her to stay after class one day. History has always been a passion of Clifford’s, starting with her days at the former Victoria Public School in George Turcotte’s class. People actually want to read the book, enough that it’s a book of the year,’” she laughed. “So that was probably the moment when I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. So you can see her making sense of it as she goes through her own life.” “And what you really get a sense of, looking at the collection, is how it’s not she remembers things differently, she always remembers them the same, but her feeling about what she’s remembering changes. “What the whole thing amounted to was a beautiful picture of how this woman had reckoned with her past through four or five decades,” explained Clifford, who took six years to write the book. It gave her a template of sorts from which to trace others’ stories. It was there that she was presented with a private collection of letters and documents of a woman through the decades after the war had ended. Her idea took shape when she spent a six-month sabbatical in Washington, D.C., digging through the archives of the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“So it was really driven by thinking about human stories, people’s identities and the connection between their current identity and their memory.” “And so that was really what kicked off the whole thing, I suppose, was just wanting to understand, ‘OK, let’s say you can’t tell the origin story of who you are - well how do you explain who you are then? What kind of effort do you have to put in to fill in that gap in your identity and story?’” the “Holocaust historian” continued. Often they don’t know who their parents were and they’ve never been to their hometown, they don’t know anything about the house they were born into or maybe they don’t whether they had brothers or sisters. They’re kind of an extreme slice of an experience of the war but they will struggle. “I thought OK, well, child Holocaust survivors are a really interesting case.

“I started to think of groups that might struggle to fill in those early details,” Clifford explained Tuesday from her office at the University of Durham in northern England, where she’s a professor of Transnational and European history.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Survivors by Rebecca Clifford