A Mother's Secret

Abraham Massaquoi

Prof. Rosu

ENGL108

CRN 66071

Paper 3

In the article “A Mother’s Secret” by Werner Gundersheimer, photographs play a big role in the article, especially towards Gundersheimer and his family’s history. The role photographs play in the history of the Gundersheimer’s family is simply providing memories to try and create a source of identity for himself. The story itself is based off of using photographs as an object-to-think-with regarding memories, and the photographs that the author possesses contains fond memories of his life as an infant all the way up to his high school years and also of various relatives. All families contain photographs of this manner. Whether it is photos of a married couple or a photo of an entire family spending time together, photos that families own are used as a source of nostalgia to reflect on their family history.

The author’s mom arranges the photographs in an album for him as a college graduation present. The impression that the photo album gives at first is simply a mere collections of family photos that is in chronological order. Despite this, there is a much deeper meaning to it. Gundersheimer’s mother hides a secret from him in the story “A Mother’s Secret”. The secret that the author’s mother hides from him, is that she and her parents were put in concentration camps.

Gundersheimer’s mother hides this secret from him for two reasons. The first reason Gundersheimer’s mother hides this secret from him is because she does not want him to live with knowing about it. Finding out your family were in concentration camps is not an easy thing to take in at all, no matter how old you are, so I can see the author’s mother hid that secret from him all this time. The second reason Gundersheimer’s mother hides this secret from him is due to the fact that she herself doesn’t really want to talk about it. In the article Gundersheimer himself states: “some survivors can freely talk about their...