the fluttering of white handkerchiefs like a flock of doves taking off into the air as the parents who were staying behind waved to their children,

I see Victor Hugo’s sombre pen-and-ink drawings of the Rhine castles, and Joseph Mallord Turner sitting on a folding stool not far from the murderous town of Bacharach, swiftly painting his watercolours; I see the deep waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the people of Llanwddyn submerged in them; and I see, said Austerlitz, the great army of mice, a grey hor

When I got out of the train in Lovošice after about an hour, I felt as if I had been travelling for weeks, going further and further east and further and further back in time.

Austerlitz, there was no more movement at all apart from the whitewash peeling off the walls and the spiders spinning their threads, scuttling on crooked legs across the floorboards, or hanging expectantly in their webs.

I had just been reading, several times over, a note on one of the display panels, to the effect that in the middle of December 1942, and thus at the very time when Agáta came to Terezín, some sixty thousand people were shut up together in the ghetto, a built-up area of one square kilometre at the most, and a little later, when I was out in the dese

as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind, which I could not explain either to myself or to Marie, not on this first w

At any rate, as I made my way that morning to Terezín along the main road from Lovosice, I did not know until the last minute how close I already was to my journey’s end. Several

think of my Rhine journeys, the second of them hardly less terrifying than the first, everything becomes confused in my head: