Boston Book Festival 2018

As Julie Lindahl researched her memoir, The Pendulum: A Granddaughter’s Search for Her Family’s Forbidden Nazi Past, she saw things that disturbed her. It was not just at the German Federal Archives where she learned that her grandfather was an SS Special Führer for Landed Estates in East Prussia and Poland, although that was plenty disturbing. What she saw around her was a resurgence of the kind of racism that reached a fever pitch during her grandparents’ time. Her memoir became not just a reckoning with a past that was hidden from her as a child growing up in Brazil, where her grandparents had fled from prosecution for war crimes, but also a plea to the descendants of both the perpetrators and the survivors to sound the alarm. Lindahl will be interviewed by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, whose memoir, Bending Toward the Sun, tells the story of her mother, a Holocaust survivor, and the ripple effects of trauma through the generations.