So far, to me Marianne Hirsch's essay is about how children of victims of a traumatic experience remember it through their parent's tales of the events and by looking at pictures. Its about how people sympathize (not empathize) with victims of the Holocaust when they see the picture of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto or hear the story of Anne Frank. It's about the process of post-memory. As I come to understand it post-memory is the act of remembering an experience that never happened to you directly, and being able to sympathize with the victim or victims, being able to say "it was me but at the same time it wasn't me".
In the essay Hirsch's position is centered a round the idea of "post-memory"- memory that is not the product of direct or lived experience but that is produced by the stories and images that circulate from one generation to the next. Hirsch states that " camera images, particularly still photographs, are precisely the medium connecting first and second generation remembrance, memory and post- memory. I agree with her because when I look at a photo of someone else, I tend to imagine what it was like for him or her and how it would've been if I were there. .
"It is my argument that the visual encounter with the child victim is a triangular one, that identification occurs on a triangular field of looking"-Marianne Hirsch. This statement helped me to understand how post-memory works. For example the picture of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto, Rymkiewicz (the viewer) sees the little boy in the picture (the victim) and remembers that he was also there in Warsaw when he was a child (Rymkiewicz's child self). Throughout the essay Hirsch uses examples of children, and how children remember events that they didn't experience directly but their parents did. In my opinion this helps her argument of post-memory being a triangular field of looking. Mainly because society always feels sympathetic when they see an image of a sad child, or hear of a child being abused.
