I am here because of your mini-interview--I missed this at the time you posted it, or maybe I was daunted by the subject matter. But I'm reading now, and... your phrase in the interview about it taking the top of you head off--that's happening to me right now as I read. I feel sick and dizzy and frightened, and it's not like I didn't know about Nazis, you know??

All of the stories that provide the jaunty, petty, refugee past of the former press-photographer, now piano-tuner "Karl Braun" are the stolen memories of his victims, their loves, hopes, fears, party pieces and secrets—the only testament of these tortured and murdered people—living on only in mutilated, appropriated form. --it's unspeakable.

As nightmare fuel goes, this is pretty powerful stuff. --I'll say. I feel like I have a chest wound right now that's spurting gouts of blood, but I look down and see I don't, so.

in one horrifying extreme of pain and dementia mistaking the paramedics taking him to hospital for camp guards "taking him to the gas chamber." The Glass Pearls is haunted by its author's own ghost. Man. ... It's like the essay you blogged: some damage makes an imprint that ultimately destroys (although Pressburger didn't lose his moral self--so in that sense not destroyed but shit, the mental cages...)