“We are creatures of narrative. We want a story,” said author Daniel Mendelsohn to a packed McCormick Tribune Center Forum in his speech, “Lost Between Memory and History: Writing the Holocaust for the Next Generation.”

The writer of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Mendelsohn traveled the world collecting interviews as he researched the death of six family members who died during the German occupation of Bolechow, Poland.

Emphasizing the importance of the “personal, private, anecdotal” nature of his book, Mendelsohn said his approach to collecting historical material was “not as a historian, but as a family member.”

Recording his family’s history satiated a lifelong desire for narrative, Mendelsohn said. That desire was rooted in a childhood fascination with family stories. Mendelsohn’s “obsession” eventually gained concrete purpose, blooming into his current academic work.

But Mendelsohn said transposing oral stories from lived experience into recorded history is often accompanied by inaccuracies.

“Any history we pick up in our hands when we go to a precious library is a document that, however imposing or authoritative it may be, is already flawed, porous, and problematic,” Mendelsohn said.

Citing a Shoah online database’s inaccurate account of the family members he studied, Mendelsohn said misinformation surrounding the Holocaust is prevalent. Seemingly small errors, he said, can add up to form an inaccurate historical account of the Holocaust and its survivors.

“We are in a hinge moment,” Mendelsohn said. “We happen to be in a position to know the difference between the truth and the inaccuracies that otherwise might have come in time to pass for the truth.”

Personal agendas of both interviewers and the interviewees shape which historical anecdotes are shared and documented. Because these anecdotes are so deeply intimate, objective and unbiased accounts are virtually impossible.

“Stories we tell are inevitably as much about us as about the subject of those stories,” Mendelsohn said.

This rang especially true for one woman Mendelsohn interviewed. When he asked her about her experience during in the Holocaust, she responded, “I’m not telling you my story, because if I tell you my story, it will become your story.”

She refused to allow Mendelsohn to retell or write down her account until after she died.

Many of Mendelsohn’s subjects were similarly possessive and worried their stories would be altered in written form. This fear and reluctance was a prominent theme throughout Mendelsohn’s lecture, and continues in The Lost.

Approaching his endeavor purely as a writer and not a historian, Mendelsohn sought the details to solve the mystery and flesh out his family’s narrative. This “tension between the personal and the historical,” as Mendelsohn put it, is a key element in both his book and in the most accurate retellings of other Holocaust accounts.

To Mendelsohn, the narrative is one of history’s most powerful forces. So, when an audience member asked him what he would suggest to someone traveling a similar path toward historical discovery, Mendelsohn replied: “If you have a story you’re interested in, go for it.”

Hear Mendelsohn’s closing remarks: