I Cannot Forget

I Cannot Forget Vietnam is a tale of how difficult it is to forget all that has happened to me. The cost of one year in Vietnam--all that happened is a result of being there. This is my account of how I was affected. Vietnam was a stark difference to being in the USA. I was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Western Florida. Then I received my orders for Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. The difference was, in comparison, like night versus day. Cam Ranh Bay had revetments and sandbags covering anything that may be hit by rockets. The control tower was where I worked half of the time. It stood out like a sore thumb because of its height. This was what I put in for by joining the military. I had to go in the Air Force. Anywhere in Vietnam was more than I expected. Vietnam was a war zone. Anything could happen, including the loss of one's life.

During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities, towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and following the genocide. Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing, and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years following the genocide.

Jill Price has the first diagnosed case of a memory condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen. Give her any date from that year on, and she can almost instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major world event or cultural happening that took place, as long as she heard about it that day. Her memories are like scenes from home movies, constantly playing in her head, backward and forward, through the years; not only does she make no effort to call her memories to mind, she cannot stop them. The Woman Who Can't Forgetis the beautifully written and moving story of Jill's quest to come to terms with her extraordinary memory, living with a condition that no one understood, including her, until the scientific team who studied her finally charted the extraordinary terrain of her abilities. As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual her memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the unique challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering both the good times and the bad, the joyous and the devastating, in such vivid and insistent detail -- the way her memory works is contrasted to a wealth of discoveries about the workings of normal human memory and normal human forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of what's called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories about childhood amnesia, the loss of memory for the first two to three years of our lives; the emotional content of memories; and the way in which autobiographical memories are normally crafted into an ever-evolving and empowering life story.

During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities, towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and following the genocide. Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing, and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years following the genocide.

Born in Lodz, Poland, Maria Wajchendler Szapszewicz lost her father and her brothers to the Holocaust. She and her mother barely managed to survive the horrors of life in the Starachowice and Lodz ghettos, in Auschwitz, and in Bergen-Belsen, from which, weighing approximately 55 pounds, she was liberated on April 15, 1945. Subsequently, she endured life in communist Poland and experienced many frustrated attempts to leave the unwelcome homeland post-Poland had become after 1945. This volume captures poignant, and at times hopeful, examinations of her wartime and post-war experiences in poetry and essays.