OVER THE SUMMER of 2015 I worked at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Along with five other young women, I would come in each morning, put on my headphones, isolated, and watch witness testimonies for the entire day. Our job was to summarize them as accurately as possible, which meant watching the same testimonies two or three times each.

Most of these testimonies were being viewed for the first time since the original interview, dug up from the archives and digitized off old VHS tapes after 30 years in the basement. Housewives in their 40s would buzz to life on our screens, smoking indoors in front of fake plastic scenery, adjusting enormous Chanel sunglasses over their emotions. They might speak first about their parents, their lineage, maybe the school they went to. Factual information to get off to an easy start. Born in the 1920s, a child in the early 30s. The horror begins in 1939 for most. No more stories of classroom bullies or anti-Semitic chants. Now there are beatings in the streets, police at the door, no more school, no more friends, no more work, no more shoes. In the time it takes to chain-smoke four cigarettes, we have passed through a ghetto and are packed into a train; we arrive at Auschwitz in the snow and the tape jams. The screen turns to rigid bars of color for camcorder white balance and I’m brought out of the story for four long seconds. I remember where I am and that there are four other transcribers in the room with me, each staring, fixated, listening to a different tape. My own video staggers back into focus and the Chanel sunglasses have been pushed aside, no escaping what comes next. The second hour of the interview is dedicated to the camps, the most difficult to listen to. The horror of the Holocaust is magnified by a single perspective; a string of sentences trying to build for me a bridge of mutual understanding. But this is something I can’t access, a vocabulary of English words that I know but ultimately mean nothing. To conceive of starvation and torture is like imagining the bottom of the ocean. I cling to what negligible hints my life can provide and I fail, miserably, to form even the murkiest picture.

Survivors have a tendency to skim over the anti-Semitism that colored their childhood before Hitler. The normalcy of small hatred. Remarks were made and life went on. The occasional violence was expected. Survivors fast-forward to the yellow stars and the riots; where they were when the Nazis marched down their main roads. “And then my troubles began,” they will say, chuckling through the irony. The swift integration of Nazi culture and laws like the crack of a whip overhead might have stirred up an anarchic frenzy had it not been for the already festering appeal of anti-Semitism. The lull of it. So many child survivors describe this particular scene: parents huddled over the kitchen sink, a fiercely high-stakes argument in whispers. Should they abandon this place that hates them; three hundred years on the family farm?