Burden of Proofplots the coordinates of Holocaust remembrance from the vantage point of a survivor who was and wasn't there. Part I, Name and Address, traces the arc of Nazi persecution, 1940-1945, on a cross-section of Amsterdam Jewry, including the author's family, and postwar restitution processes. In Part II, Memorials Against Forgetting, Burden confronts the "unmasterable" past in a variety of settings: as a participant in a film "visiting the ghosts of the past" in Bergen-Belsen; a "special guest" of the Federal Republic of Germany out to polish its self-image; a botched commission to write up the story of "the Angel of Belsen," and finishes with a bizarre episode involving a Holocaust sculpture dug up in the backyard of a suburban home on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
