Stumbling On History — Fern Schumer Chapman

A Junior Library Guild spring 2017 selection. Edith Westerfeld, an 89-year-old Holocaust refugee, wonders if the memory of the Nazis murdering her parents, along with millions of other victims, will outlive the survivors. Now, 76 years after Edith's parents saved their daughter's life by sending her, alone and terrified, to America she returns to the small German town where her family had lived for hundreds of years. Invited to witness the installation of a memorial to her family -- part of an effort throughout Europe to confront the genocide of World War II -- she experiences how art is helping today's generation face and atone for crimes of the past. Stumbling on History carries the readers along on this journey, as Edith joins the ceremony of Stolpersteine -- Stumbling Stones. Watching her former neighbors and descendants struggle to right their nation's past wrongs, she realizes, at last, the power of hearing, I'm sorry.