It is not as easy as one might think, when one is a historian, to become a memoirist. The historian deals with facts which, however tragic they may be, do not concern her personally. The memoirist speaks regarding what is close to her. It is probably no coincidence that Annette Wieviorka, who is known as a specialist in the Holocaust and in the history of French Jews in the 20th century, waited so long to write what she calls, in the subtitle of his book, an “Autobiography of my family”. A family made up of two Polish Jewish branches – the Perelmans, on the maternal side, the Wievorkas, on the paternal side – who arrived in Paris in the early 1920s.
