

Nora Krug lives in Brooklyn with her Jewish husband, but is a native of Karlsruhe, Germany. Her family memoir is scrap book, drawings, cartoons, and hand-written notes as she searches through her ancestry to ascertain her family’s level of culpability during WW II. Krug was raised, and fully imbibed, in Germany’s post-war preoccupation with wartime guilt. Krug interviews her parents, aunts, uncles, and archives, doing her best to parse family memories from documentable evidence. She discovers that some relatives were soldiers and at least one was a member of the Nazi party, although he may have joined under duress to save his job and consequently the wellbeing of his wife and daughter. Her book raises questions regarding the blameworthiness of subsequent generations and guilt by association. Are all Germans forever to be associated with the horrors of the Holocaust?