Jurek Becker's writing confronts a crucial question of Holocaust literature: how can a survivor with no memories of his own survival, one who does not even remember his mother tongue, grapple with the concentration-camp experience? Because of lapses in his memory, Becker had to rely on others' accounts and on his own imagination to fill in the gaps, but he turned this shortcoming into a creative advantage that made him one of Germany's best-known writers of fiction about the Holocaust. In an interview included in Heinz Ludwig Arnold's Jurek Becker (1992) Becker admitted, "Das meiste, was ich erlebe, ist nicht gut genug, um es aufzuschreiben. Ich nehme mir davon, was ich brauche. Manchmal erfinde ich Erlebtes solange um, wie ich es gern erlebt haben möchte. Denn nicht alles, was ich erlebt habe, möchte ich ja gerne erlebt haben" (Most of what I experience is not...