Absence Is Presence
Moving and beautiful post by a friend of mine, Elyse Foltyn, a child of Holocaust survivors, married to another child of Holocaust survivors.

There's a story in it, but there's also this:

Over the years, I have come to believe that missing details are often more telling than the details themselves. The lack of something can speak volumes for what is really taking place. I felt this over and over again as we toured Germany earlier this year. In Berlin, we saw a memorial of empty book shelves below ground and in front of the Opera House. The Bebelplabtz book burning memorial by Micha Ullman, called "Library," is on the exact spot at which more than 20,000 books were collected and burned on May 10,1933. In both the Jewish Museum and at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe we got lost in towering cement monoliths. The Memorial, designed by architect Peter Eisenman, consists of 2,711 concrete slabs, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. By all measures, it is powerful. However, as stirring as the concrete slabs were, I could not decide whether the memorial was the cement or the empty space. There is often a sense that absence is presence.