Memory. It is no wonder that, in the invocation that opens his tale of Aeneas, that quintessential refugee, buffeted cruelly on land and on sea by winds of high fate, Virgil cries out, Musa mihi causa memora, Muse, remind me what were the causes of Juno's anger, the reasons for punishing so excellent a man? The past can become dim much sooner than one would have thought possible. Events as painful as being branded with a red-hot iron all at once stand in isolation, without context. Thus, for instance, I remember clearly only certain moments of grotesque horror during our escape from Warsaw, burning like Troy, in September of '44, at the end of the uprising, and the bewildering courage and resourcefulness of my mother, which were worthy of Aeneas and Ulysses. The rest is lost; I cannot find it. Or have I given it all away? In his Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov, that master illusionist, put it this way: When we write a novel, we hand over our belongings, page by page. Here goes the nurse we loved so well, then a certain house and the objects inside it, then our little dog. They turn into the property of our readers. We become paupers. It is possible that something like this has happened to me. Having written Wartime Lies, the material of which is drawn from my life in Poland until '46, I have nothing left of that life except what I set down on the pages of my book.
       In any case, the ability to remember varies enormously. My older son and my 10-year-old grandson have total recall of events, and so does my wife, and she also knows by heart all telephone numbers. My younger son, my daughter, my granddaughter, and I remember words; not especially what happened. Or, we remember things we would have preferred to forget. Watching my grandchildren has not helped me recall my own childhood, perhaps because it was so very different; it has brought back the ways in which I was not a good father. A moment when, theoretically in the interest of discipline and consistency, but really because I was angry, I took away a child's favorite toy. And the child, feeling wronged and helpless, kept on repeating, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. What I did cannot be undone, and the memory won't go away.