It is challenging to write about traumatic memory. The definitions of trauma and memory are still contested, and many debates endure. How can we know that a traumatic experience is remembered differently than a “normal” experience? Are testimonies about traumatic experiences reliable? What kind of response does traumatic memory elicit in survivors? Does it trigger resistance or withdrawal? Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including literature, history, psychology, family memoir, and neuroscience, Myra Sklarew's book provides interesting and important insights into these and many other questions. The book is the product of several decades of work and is based on testimonies from twenty witnesses. It is a pathbreaking work in the study of traumatic memory and a moving narrative about Holocaust memory in Lithuania.

The book explores two major themes. First, it analyzes different versions and different perceptions of the same traumatic events, such as the notorious Lietūkis garage massacre in 1941, when several dozen Jewish men were publicly tortured and executed. (The identity of the perpetrators is still debated.) Second, the book attempts to apply insights from neuroscience and other disciplines to explore “specific cognitive and affective issues having to do with the modulation of incoming stimuli and the formation of memory during trauma” (41).

Drawing on multiple testimonies from Holocaust survivors, such as the author's cousin Leiser Wolpe, whose father was killed by Lithuanians in the cellar of their apartment in Kaunas and who sought refuge with his pregnant mother in a stable (his mother later died in Stutthof concentration camp), Sklarew develops a deep understanding of the ways in which traumatic memory functions. She writes, “It is as if there are concentric circles around an inner core and he [the cousin] must start with the outermost circle which contains the barest details and with each telling he moves to an orbit closer to the fiery inner core of memory” (78). This description is consistent with trauma theory, which suggests that it is difficult to articulate traumatic experiences; instead it is only possible to encircle trauma. Sklarew's cousin struggles with multiple traumatic memories, including the death of his infant brother, whom he had to bury, and he tries to articulate them repeatedly in his conversations with the author. This repetition leads the author to insightfully compare Leiser's attempts to articulate trauma to building an “impermeable wall against what might burst through and take him under” (79).

Sklarew's intimate familiarity with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and her sincere desire to understand the ways in which traumatic memory works help her to develop fascinating insights about language and memory. Many of the victims whose testimonies are analyzed in this book recall the fear of Lithuanians who were engaged in the killing of Jews. Interestingly, the Lithuanian language became associated with death itself. When trying to return to normalcy, the survivors blocked certain information (the images associated with trauma) and the language of the perpetrators. As an illustration, Sklarew includes the case of her relative Masha Wolpe Baras, fluent in eleven languages, who had a vivid memory of violence against Jews during the Holocaust and associated it with Lithuanians and their language. By the end of the war, she completely forgot how to speak Lithuanian (117). Masha was not an isolated case.

Although Sklarew writes that many victims associated Lithuania and Lithuanians with death and destruction, her portrayal of Lithuania and Lithuanians is not completely negative. She documents some attempts to face the dark past in today's Lithuania. For example, she writes about Rimantas Žirgulis, who is related to the Lithuanians who were deported by Stalin on June 14, 1941, from their homes to sites on the Laptev Sea (commonly seen as a collective trauma of ethnic Lithuanians, although residents of other nationalities were deported as well) and who is engaged in the commemoration of the Holocaust in his hometown of Kėdainiai. Sklarew's analysis of the testimony of this memory entrepreneur (he is the director of the Kėdainiai Regional Museum) suggests that traumatic memory can be uniting. Žirgulis remembers his family's traumatic experiences in the Far North of the USSR, and this particular experience inspires him to think about his Jewish neighbors “who could not exit from the mass graves” (147). Thus, he is consumed by the duty of memory and engages in the commemoration of the Holocaust in his native town. In another instance, when visiting Dotnuva, the home of many of the author's relatives, Sklarew meets Aleksandra Balandienė, a friend of her mother's cousin. Having found out about Balandienė's trauma (the death of her husband), the author starts singing “Marija, Marija” (Mary, Mary), a religious song that was sung by Lithuanian deportees on their way to Siberia, together with Balandienė.

Sklarew believes that her research findings on traumatic memory should not be limited only to the study of Holocaust memory. She writes about the multiple traumas of the twenty-first century, which include the posttraumatic stress disorder experienced by returning veterans and the traumas experienced by refugees and civilians who have experienced war. These traumatic experiences have a lot in common with the feelings of Holocaust survivors—“the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion—the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment; and the constriction—the numbing response of surrender” (123). Sklarew's investigation of Holocaust memory has helped her to empathize with her own students who were war veterans, and whose experiences she compared with the children Holocaust survivors. Sklarew's willingness to transcend ethnic, national, and generational boundaries in her investigation of traumatic memory is probably the major strength of her book. Therefore, it will be of interest to scholars from various disciplines and various countries studying traumatic memory in different contexts.