— for Book Day, 2010

BOOKS can fuse with trauma, at least in my experience.

When I was about 6 years old, the occupying Dutch Army arrested my father and ransacked our house. That day, after they had bound my father’s hands and put him on a truck, our family sat terrified. I still remember one thing clearly: two soldiers took some books from my father’s study and threw them down the well.

I did not know what books they threw, or why. The