Libman’s book begins with a family photo taken at Vienna Hauptbahnhof on 16 September 1938, just six months after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the window of a train shortly to depart are the author’s great-grandparents, Anna and Eugene, and their two daughters, Ada and Eva, all of whom escaped Europe for North America. Standing on the platform below them are 10 family members who stayed behind, and of whom only four survived past 1945. “This is the last photograph they’ll take together,” Libman writes. He recounts his own journey back to Vienna in his early 20s to meet a distant relative of his grandmother Eva, a woman from whom he receives a large bundle of photographs, letters, and other documents that had once been in possession of Eva’s uncle Max’s widow.

And yet The Third Solitude resists telling the author’s family history, tempting though it must have been to commit what W. G. Sebald, in The Emigrants, calls “a wrongful trespass”. The terrible, uncertain fate of Max, Libman’s great-grandmother’s sibling, practically calls out for novelistic speculation. All that can be ascertained is that he was arrested by French police while trying to reach Spain and put on a train to the Majdanek concentration camp. Libman learns as much from a 1947 “act de disparition“, a sort of belated death certificate issued by the French government. It reads: “Interned on 26 February 1943 at GURS; Transferred on 2 March 1943 to DRANCY; Deported on 4 March 1943 in the direction of LUBLIN-MAJDANECK (Poland).” As Libman explains, the vague “in the direction of” represents an official uncertainty about the location and manner of Max’s presumed death. He is not recorded (as he would have been) as having ever arrived at Majdanek. He “disappeared in the worst way imaginable”, Libman writes: “vanished in a question mark, in the space between one railway station and another, in the black ink of the words ‘in the direction of’.”

Libman’s restraint here is impressive. “Some memories are better left undisturbed,” he writes, adding: “How to stop speaking to our artifacts, stop breaking the shell for the sake of the nut, and instead let them speak to and through us: that is the challenge.”

It is a challenge he lives up to by wandering down a series of intellectual cul-de-sacs instead, chapter-length reflections on the varieties of nostalgia (“nostalgia is a defense mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage”); on the self-mythologization of Québécois nationalists; on the peculiar history of the Jewish day school in Montreal that Libman, like his brothers and his parents, attended. What unites these seemingly disparate considerations is a skepticism towards the uses and abuses of history. The way, for instance, Québécois nationalists have feigned ignorance of the historical forces that brought them to Canada in order to see themselves as a kind of indigenous nation always threatened by the Anglo-canadien.

But, of course, the “black hole” at the center of The Third Solitude is the history of Zionism and the problem of Israel, a country Libman’s great-grandmother, Anna, described as a miracle, but which the author can only view with shame. Libman’s book is thus a contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rebellion, a millennial Jewish writer’s reckoning with the pieties and shibboleths of his education and the capture of Jewish life by political Zionism. Why, Libman asks, was it necessary for students at a Canadian Jewish day school to sing the Israeli national anthem or participate in the annual Israeli Independence Day rally? Why did almost all of the students, Libman included, visit Israel as part of a high-school fellowship? And why were Palestinians, let alone the Nakba, never mentioned?

The Third Solitude is a forceful protest against this seizure of Jewish life by Israel and political Zionism. And while Libman is never as rude or irreverent as Philip Roth, I was nevertheless reminded at times of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman who, in The Counterlife, describes Israel as a militant escape from traditional forms of Jewish life: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once so universally popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

One of The Third Solitude’s most memorable moments is Libman’s account of the time he went on the March for the Living, which every year brings Jewish students from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust. In Libman’s telling, however, an ostensibly important educational experience becomes a bizarre historical pageantry. It involved students singing old Jewish songs at the top of their lungs in the middle of a residential area in Kraków, as though Poland remained stuck in 1939-1945. “It was like going to the United States and insisting that everything was as it had been during the Civil War,” Libman writes. Later, during a trip to the Buczyna woods, where 10,000 people, most of them Jews, were killed and buried in a mass grave in 1942-43, Libman notices a plaque displaying the opening lines of the Israeli national anthem, the “Hatikvah”, as well as an Israeli flag. What, he wonders, has Israel got to do with the horrors that befell European Jewry back then?

This is organized remembrance, the monopolization of memory. “Holocaust is perpetually yesterday and tomorrow,” Libman writes, adding that this could just as well be the motto for the State of Israel, mired as the country is in a “presentist ideology” that cannot let the past be past, let alone dare to imagine the future. At the end of the book, Libman returns imaginatively to the arrival of Anna and Eugene, his great-grandparents, in North America in 1938, at a moment when different futures were still possible. “Concretely,” he writes, “they were the visions of Jewish life that had yet to be captured and assimilated into political Zionism: pluralistic belonging in North America, for example; or a global, secular socialism in which traditional cultures and languages were nurtured as syndicates; or even, in a bid to divert the already moving colonial-Zionist project toward a more humane direction, a non-theocratic, multi-national, democratic state in Palestine.”

Libman emphasizes the need to resuscitate some of those “vanished visions of the future”, not in the sense of turning back the clock, but as a reminder that the future, no matter what the presentist ideologues may claim, is something that can yet be created. What exactly this future might look like is beyond the purview of The Third Solitude, as perhaps it lies beyond the scope of any single person’s imagination. To recognize this is simply to accept that imagining a better future is one of our shared responsibilities, and that any political project that consigns us to a doom loop is not worth having. As Louis MacNeice once wrote: “What we are about to do / Is of vastly more importance / Than what we have done or not done hitherto.”

But I suppose I had some idea what he was up to. Aged 17, studying for my A-levels at boarding school, and more interested in the female company of Munich than in the politics going on around me, my father’s work was off-limits. The Cold War was my adolescent playground.

There is one disturbing thing I do remember very vividly. My father was a member of the American PX in a little town 20 miles or so north of Munich. There was a cheap, tax-free supermarket there, and a recreational facility for its military members, including a golf course. There my father taught me to swing a club at a little white ball, to take pleasure in the satisfying sound of a well-struck shot. I still have the bug. But the name of the town was Dachau. And right next door to the club was the former concentration camp.

I still have disturbing dreams about that course, 40 year later, given how inappropriately it was situated. In some I slice a ball out of bounds and into the place where men, women and children were shot and burned — my fun-filled summer holidays coming into direct emotional contact with the horror of the Holocaust. The dreams interweave my father’s mysterious job, his Jewishness, the ovens of the camp, Hitler’s face on a violently defaced poster in the exhibition at Dachau, images of emaciated men being tortured in ice baths — all jumbled up with my own summer holiday recreation, barbecues down on the banks of the River Isar, the nudist colony in the Englischer Garten, of course, and my own teenage fumblings. Lots here for my shrink to unravel.

Of course, I felt guilty at having so much fun. Sex and golf were my peace dividend. My girlfriend was a pacifist; all of the people I met my age were pacifists. We sang 99 Luftballons by Nena. And in the year I arrived in Germany, 1981, a peace demonstration was held in Bonn, a protest both at the existence of nuclear weapons and at the presence of American and British bases on German soil. Around 300,000 people turned up that day: Christians, union members, students. I didn’t tell my new friends what my father did.

I also remember the graffiti. Munich was a seriously tidy and ordered town, but hate-filled graffiti was still puked up on the walls under flyovers, mostly about Turkish Gastarbeiters — immigrant workers. “What is the difference between a Turk and a Jew? Forty years”, was the one I cannot forget. The tidiness of the place wasn’t able to hide the fact that this was Hitler’s home patch.

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How different Germany today is from the Eighties. At Berlin’s train stations — yes, trains too are inevitably a part of the nightmares — tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are now being welcomed by generous open-hearted German volunteers, providing shell-shocked families with hot drinks and food, advising them where to find permanent shelters. In 2015-16 Germany took in over a million refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. During my lifetime at least, the Germans have been the conscience of Europe, responding to their defeat in the war and their national shame with a reinvention of their national consciousness.

This process — Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “overcoming the past” — was the only way Germany could come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust. Nobody wants to look at the darkest parts of their history. It is the equivalent of discovering that your parents were killers. After decades of post-war denial, a new German generation, coming of age in the Sixties, insisted on digging up the past. They were called Nestbeschmutzer (“nest-foulers”) and were derided. But what they began set in motion the process that created modern Germany.

Today, the country pauses to engage in what the historian Susan Neiman calls “public rites of repentance” around events such as Kristallnacht, and the liberation of Auschwitz. There are the “stumbling stones” — plaques placed throughout Berlin to mark where Jews lived before the Nazis deported them. And, where it cannot be missed, at the centre of the capital: the Holocaust Memorial.

Of course, there was (and is) some barely hidden recidivism — especially in the East. But I never really encountered it, apart from dark messages scrawled under flyovers. I lived in Germany before the wall came down. For me, Germany was a place of peace and love. But also a place of hidden secrets. They only met in sleep, when a golf ball was sliced from one psychic realm to another.

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Two weeks ago, the new German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a massive €100 billion rise in German defence spending. This includes the purchase of F-35 fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The rational side of my brain thinks this is a good thing, the Germans rising to the challenge of this new era of Russian aggression. For too long, the Germans have not contributed their fair share to Nato — something Nato has calculated as 2% of GDP — or to the defence of the vulnerable globally. Some might say that they have freeloaded on the defence spending of other countries, and kept their own hands clean by relying on others to make the impossible moral decisions that keep down dictators like Assad and Putin. But my emotional side mourns the final end of that 1981 summer of love in Germany and fears the sight of what looks to me like an Iron Cross on the side of the aeroplanes that my father helped to develop.

Putin’s war against Ukraine has destroyed the long taboo about Germany and the military. After the war, the Germans were allowed to maintain a small army, looking East across the wall, towards the Soviet Union. Out of the ruins of the Forties, a kind of default pacifism was established as the norm.

As recently as 2019, the German government refused to even consider an American request to send ground troops into Syria. One year previously, 72% of the population were against committing the German military against Assad, even if he was using chemical weapons against his own people.

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On the 70^th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, the head of the German Evangelical church, Margot Käßmann , refused to countenance the idea that the defeat of the Nazis could constitute a just war: “There can be no just war,” she said. “That was even true of the Second World War”. No one pushed back against this. “German pacifism is here to stay,” wrote the political editor of Die Zeit in 2019, “and there is no use asking the country to be what it isn’t.”

All of which makes the events of recent weeks so much more extraordinary. German pacifism is no more. Germany is about to have the third largest defence budget in the world, behind only the US and China. Some will feel that this is as it should be. For others it will bring back dark and disturbing memories. For me, it is both.

In the late 2000s, we drifting twenty somethings took our freedom for granted. You might have a friend doing something unclear in Shanghai. Somebody else appeared to be rather bored learning Arabic in Aleppo. You could go to any of these places. Never realising we were living in a low-key golden era: a time when things were more or less open and alright. 

It felt so easy. We went so casually to these places. Now, never again will we spend long afternoons smoking in the French Institute moaning how dull it is in Damascus. Or get drunk in the hutongs by the Drum Tower in Beijing talking big money dreams and see Hong Kong for the first time and think — I could live here forever. We might go back there, someday, and stroll, like we did, through Aleksandrovsky Sad. But never will the ground feel solid beneath our feet.

Because that Moscow I knew — nocturnal, daring, drunk — has finally been destroyed completely. Since we watched him — there’s only been one “him” in Moscow for a very long time — declare “a special military operation”  at 5:45 in the morning. Half of those characters I used to drink with were all WhatsApping in shock: He’s actually done it. Now we are watching a map turn from one country’s colours to another. It’s so horrifyingly simple. It’s happened so many times. And even tweeting that what he’s doing in Ukraine is a war could mean fifteen years in prison. But then: even with all those MAs in Russian Studies we couldn’t conceive of it.

Minute by minute the collapse of Russian capitalism is coming through in Telegram alerts. Apple leaves Russia, Netflix suspends operations, so has Louis Vuitton, brand after brand after brand pulling out until, even though my job is to analyse this stuff, I can barely make sense of the sanctions and capital controls that have cut Russia off from the world. And somehow I’ve ended up at a think-tank Kremlin labelled an “undesirable organisation” and that means I can’t even phone half the people I want to because I’m nervous what it might mean for them. Russia has gone through the looking glass and I can only see my time there like Stefan Zweig. A world of yesterday. 

Now, a decade of obsessions make sense. Vladikavkaz. Vladivostok. I would look at these places on that incredible map and know I had to get there. I’ve often wondered why I let that emotion carry me for so long but only now, belatedly, do I realise I was running out of time. I kept on going back to this spot in the Urals, pulled by some force, shuttling on the platskart wagon onwards to Siberia, to stop at this monument, the obelisk on the Europe-Asia border.

I kept wanting to stand there, each time I went east, at this point in the forests. Almost like a premonition. I’d read a story (I didn’t even care whether or not it was true) in a history book that grabbed me. It was about the Decembrists, those officers, exposed to Europe and the enlightenment, in the afterglow of the Napoleonic War, who rose up in St Petersburg for something like a constitutional monarchy. It was a moment Russia could have turned — who knows who she would have been had they succeeded — but of course, she didn’t. And they were exiled, so many of them with everything they had to give, to Siberia. They had stopped here: by the cross on the continental border and wept. Knowing they would never see Europe again. 

Now people can barely even get there. Friends are booking flights to Tashkent. The FSB are interrogating them at the border. Others are panicking; there are hardly any flights left: they’re all booked up, everything’s grounded, sanctions have closed allied airspace in every direction. And these are same people, the same generation, who only ten years ago, were marching happily through Moscow, raising money and fighting corruption, only to dash their heads, just as the Decembrists had, when it frightened Him, when it enraged Him, when He turned out not to be this pathetic topless clown — he was Gollum in all of the memes — but truly a beast. Those were the protests that set it in motion: the squeezing of freedom, the arrests, the filetting of journalists, until now we have this.

Why did I refuse to see it at the Tretyakov Gallery? The whole of Russian history is laid out in wall-sized gold rimmed portraits of autocrats: Nicholas I to Joseph Stalin. Each saying: there is something both very fragile but very durable about repression in this state. Something undying about the spooling “organs” as you say in Russian: security forces with shifting names like the Cheka, NKVD, KGB — who have always supported these tyrants, more or less, since they were founded as the Oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible for the task. Men just like him.     

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Millennials were Putin’s Decembrists. Back in 2011, young Moscow crackled with a kind of giddy excitement that it was happening — that this generation, if it just tweeted, if it just Facebooked and posted enough — could topple Him. This energy that youth, technology, the world as it was and was becoming — would simply prevail. Because who was He really? Just some squinting little bureaucrat in a pinch. Alexei Navalny, he looked so young, he was far away from prison, yelling at the big protest on Prospekt Sakharova, flanked by liberal celebrities screaming: “Rossiya Budet Svobodna” — Russia will be Free. I believed him. 

What is Russia’s future? I must have asked everyone, every EU think-tanker, every sallow faced-Western diplomat I met in Moscow the same question. Like it was the only one that mattered. The answers came in a hundred and one theories, not one of them, it pains me to say, as mad and dark and pornographic as where we are now in Ukraine. I was swamped with academic gibberish such as “competitive authoritarianism” or “mimetic institutions”. They didn’t say that Napoleon is always with us, that in every generation, there’s a leader who has grabbed such control over his society, whose mind is so set on glory, he has to invade somewhere. Like it’s a role coded into the human species in some way we’ll never understand.

Instead, I was told Russia was a “BRIC” or a “normal middle income country” and now all I see is the absolute intellectual poverty of looking at things only in data sets. We should have listened to the one thing — in that language of Fyodor Dostoevsky — that Russian culture has always revered as holding that gift of vision. That is to the prophetic power of art. 

The writer Vladimir Sorokin, with his long, flowing grey hair, was one of the first people who “knew”. He was woken up one morning to be told, His creepy but still little comic youth movement, were chucking his books into a giant toilet. One placed right outside the Bolshoi Theatre. Then they started harassing him. A strange woman came to his house saying she’d got an order to fit his windows with prison bars. The doorbell rang and there was a sack of his books: each stamped porn. Then the prosecutor called. They’d opened a case against him, this satirical novelist, who’d written these weird, funny scenes, about a Stalin clone fucking a Khrushchev one — for pornography. 

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Then something came over him like a fugue state. He got in the car, with his wife, and they drove north, out of Moscow, out of Russia, until they were in Estonia, in the woods. And then after that he wrote. It was like a trance. Like he was vomiting bile. It had taken him five years to write a novel and this one had come in one month. Published in 2006. 

I read it around then on one of those trains, The Day Of The Oprichnik, those swamps and forests, flashing past on a visa run: my mind half seeing tanks that had been there in the second war world between the birch trees. In this book, The Tsar, at last, has been restored. The country walled off behind a Great Russian Wall: only pipelines sticking out of it. It’s this latter-day Opritchnik’s hours: this fured agent hard at work murdering a boyar, gang raping his wife, then visiting a clairvoyant in the name of The Tsar. One day in 2028. But it’s a fake Empire: utterly dependent on China. Their characters have crept onto everything and even the Tsarina makes sure to educate her son in Mandarin.

I put this book down but it never left me. A feeling like I had seen the future. And now — its pieces falling hour by hour — everyone I know in Moscow is living in it. I don’t know for how long.

With this image, Sullivan ends her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Her subtitle, less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept, trails the book’s bombshell: that a Jewish Council member, Arnold van den Bergh, was in their view “the betrayer”.

It took five years, a €100,000 public subsidy, cutting edge artificial intelligence and a retired FBI special agent, Vince Pankoke, to reach this conclusion — which was launched less than a month ago by an international publishing machine. Sullivan outlines the theory of the Cold Case Diary team: that Van den Bergh “saved his family by giving up addresses, including Prinsengracht 163, to the SD”.

The team described itself as “confident” of this conclusion, which was based on an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived two years hiding from the Nazis in The Secret Annex. But the global publicity campaign, promoting the idea that it was a Jewish man who betrayed the Franks, unleashed a wave of criticism.

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Some scholars and historians immediately questioned the claim, sources distanced themselves, the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos apologised for any offence caused and paused distribution, influential German magazine Die Zeit accused Sullivan of “sensationalism”, and the heads of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Anne Frank Fonds in Basel expressed doubts about the work. The team fiercely defended their conclusions in their blog. But they did  backpedal on earlier interviews, in which they had stated that there was an “85% probability” that they were correct, saying this was not an 85% certainty but a “conditional probability”.

While the book predicts a strong reaction to its “powerful” and “unsettling” conclusions — which are presented like a “true crime” documentary and with the certainty of a court verdict — the team has apparently been surprised and shocked by the backlash. They feel like victims of a kind of witch hunt.

The Dutch wounds of Nazi occupation are clearly so close to the surface that, at a scratch, they still bleed. The Netherlands has the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: an estimated 73% of the Jewish population died. Professor Frank van Vree — a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — points out that Remembrance Day on 4 May was named one of the most important national unifiers in a recent, wide-ranging study by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research.

But just as the Dutch self-image of a tolerant, open society has been challenged by admissions of systemic racism, looking closely at the reality of the Holocaust reveals some uncomfortable truths. “From the mid-Sixties, the story of the destruction of Dutch Jewry and the complicity of the non-Jewish Dutch is a permanent struggle with the rosy Dutch self-image,” says Van Vree. “The knowledge that this really happened… in a society that considered itself a haven of tolerance… It never disappeared, this feeling of guilt”.

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And the story of Anne Frank brings a lot of these tensions to the surface. After it was published in 1947 (and with the 1955 Broadway play that brought it to American attention), the diary weathered claims that it was fake, as well as initial hesitancy from international publishers to make Anne Frank, as some historians have it, the centrepiece of Holocaust memorial.

Her story is also perfectly designed for a global audience. “She comes from a very humanist, Frankfurt-based family; she counts as one of the famous Dutch but in reality she’s German,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, emeritus professor and chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “And the way Judaism was practised in the Anne Frank family comes very close to the American reform tradition.

“Anne Frank is ideal for identification,” he goes on. “She keeps her faith in humanity, she has all the dreams 13-year-old girls have”. And we fulfil Anne’s dream of becoming a writer by the positive act of reading. “The Anne Frank diary has become a sort of mirror of our society”.

There’s one conspicuous absence in the book, though. “Anne Frank is of course the most famous Holocaust victim”, says ten Cate, “because her book is not about the Holocaust”. The diary ends abruptly; we know where she went, and what happened to her. But “the Holocaust is not mentioned in the book.” The great question the reader is left with is: who betrayed her?

Past theories include warehouse worker Willem van Maaren, Dutch national socialist Tonny Ahlers, famous “Jew-hunter” Ans van Dijk, and a bureaucratic investigation into food stamp fraud. But while ever more books come out to present a new villain to counter Anne Frank’s heroism, the truth of the Dutch war experience was different: collaborating with the Nazis was not the occasional act of the rare individual.

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The Netherlands suffered military defeat in five days. There is evidence of sustained civil service and economic collaboration with Nazism after this — the state railway company, for instance, recently agreed to pay €50m in compensation for transporting people to Nazi camps. The population, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. But many police and civilians betrayed Jewish people in hiding and received financial rewards: kopgeld or “head bounty” (Pankoke, the retired special agent, discovered a microfilm of 956 kopgeld receipts in an American archive).

Solidarity with Jewish people was greater in France and Belgium, which had experience of resistance movements, and where the Germans did not institute a civilian government. The geography there also made hiding easier.

But after the war, the Dutch popular narrative did not recognise that particular groups had suffered more. Stories of the treatment received by Jewish people returning from the camps are appalling: they were given no preferential state help, and sometimes found their possessions taken by other citizens not keen to return them. They even faced housing tax bills for the time when they were imprisoned by Nazis.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the Protestant Church in 2020 declared its sense of guilt for failing to protect the Jewish population. That year, Dutch king Willem-Alexander said in his Remembrance Day speech that his great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina — while in exile in London — did not do enough to support the Jewish community, even “if only by words”.

But it’s very late in the day to recognise some of these injustices. When, in 2016, Amsterdam announced a €10m payment to Holocaust survivors for taxing them while they were in the camps, there were not enough of them left to take it, and the money was instead given to Jewish-related causes.

Meanwhile, after years of examining the cases of museums exhibiting art looted by the Nazis, Dutch restitutions policy has only just been changed to show “more humanity and goodwill”. This year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is expected to hand back a Kandinsky painting, considered a “forced sale”, to the Jewish heirs. Other claim cases are still rumbling.

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During this moment of reckoning, the aim of the Cold Case Diary team was, to quote Pankoke, to “provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured”. But the fact that it points the finger at a Jewish man has been a source of much controversy. Van Vree feels this kind of conclusion should only be made when it is beyond any reasonable doubt. “That’s the last thing that you should suggest — only at the very end, if you are absolutely sure about it”, he says. “The critics are almost all people who are very aware of the non-Jewish guilt about what happened. This is very improper, and if you accept it, you might imply that actually the non-Jews are innocent, so to speak”.

For relatives of Van den Burgh, including his great-niece Elise Tak, the accusation is “appalling”. She questions the proof that any list of hiding places existed, and where the accusatory, anonymous note sent to Otto Frank came from.

Meanwhile the Dutch population is left wondering how to feel about the behaviour of its ancestors. Which is ironic, given that the filmmaker Thijs Bayens started the “cold case” project to try to understand what happens to a population if life is “threaded with fear”.

“The truth never is about the past — it always is about us,” says ten Cate, who expects to see another four or five ‘betrayers’ named in his lifetime. “If it’s only about the past, we don’t give a damn. Historians … isolate particular facts and events from the past and bring them into focus because we want to re-form them to something that is relevant for our own identity. Often it takes the form: what would I have done and what exactly is the relation between us, our identity, our self-image, and what happened in the past? Are we entitled to have a better self-image than our parents?”

Whatever your answer, and whatever you think of Sullivan’s book and the team’s conclusions, we have to confront the facts. Reparations can still be made, especially while there are survivors. “It is important to have these conversations now,” he says. “Belated justice is justice.” And even after attempts at justice, it is important to remember, and to trip over, the painful stumbling stones of the past.