Think back. Try to remember a time, hiding behind your history textbook sneaking a midday snooze, when you were asked to remember dates and facts that seemed to have no bearing on your life. Were you interested enough to question whether what you were learning was the whole truth?

"The first event that got me interested in the question, 'What is history?' happened when I was an undergraduate," reveals Toronto-based author Erna Paris. "I was sitting in a class where the professor was talking about the fact that history might be interpretive and that it might be interpreted in some malevolent way. This came as a big shock to me."

It was this, apparently, that sparked her desire to uncover how the facts and fictions of history affect our world, generations later. Having authored several books dealing with specific national and cultural questions, Paris sees her latest, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, as the culmination of a 20-year pursuit.

"I was looking at how countries remember their history after difficult periods in that history. How do they deal with these enormous events after they're over, when life has to go on?" Paris spent three years and spanned four continents trying to find answers to her questions. And while one aspect of her research is the memory and healing of Germany, France and Japan after World War II, Long Shadows cannot be labelled a history book, since the conflicts Paris addresses, from American slavery to the struggles of former Yugoslavia, are very much issues of the present.

As a longtime journalist, it's not so surprising that Paris consciously chose the role of "outside observer" in her explorations—an idealistic attempt to minimize the prejudices she might bring to the tale. However, it means that Canada's own historical foibles, from the treatment of natives to the abuse of Chinese railroad workers, are exempt from the author's critical eye. "I could have chosen any country," asserts Paris. "Because every country shapes its history and there are no exceptions."

The Japanese example

Her book is rife with examples of how nations turn history into a national mythology, conveniently omitting or twisting details of the past. She recounts the efforts of a few Japanese academics who are attempting to re-write their country's history books to include the aspects of World War II that have been deliberately excluded.

For many years, official school texts told of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but made no mention of Japan's own contributions to the conflict. The 200,000 enslaved "comfort women," brought to the world's attention only after decades of silence, have barely been addressed by Japan. And the estimated 300,000 Chinese tortured, raped and murdered in Nanking have been denied or downplayed even recently.

Paris interviews not only progressive Japanese academics, but also survivors from Hiroshima trying to cope with memories they cannot seem to face in a culture of silence, as well as ordinary Japanese citizens who are angered that they have been deceived.

"One of the conclusions I came to is that there is no statute of limitations on memory, and that the longer these things go on unaddressed, the more explosive they become." Paris depicts a complex and layered nation struggling to move from denial to naked truth. And it's no small point that some of Paris's research was funded by the Japan Foundation in Toronto.

Back in the Balkans

Her interviews with various sides of the Yugoslavian conflict and her reflections as an observer provide a revealing perspective of the events that have again captured the world stage. She quotes a remarkable passage by Serbian writer, Dobrica Cosic, who spent one year as president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992: "Lying is a form of our patriotism and is evidence of our innate intelligence. We lie in a creative, imaginative and inventive way." Many of the Serbs interviewed cite Cosic as a major perpetrator in the hate-mongering that led to ethnic cleansing.

The fate of Milosevic is a burning question for Paris. "I pray nobody offers him amnesty in exchange for his disappearing somewhere," she stresses. One year after her research in the Balkans, Paris went to observe some of the trials at the UN's war tribunal in the Hague. For all her explorations of history, memory and reconciliation, she seems passionate about one thing: the necessity for formal justice.

"In the long term, there is no peace without justice. With amnesty, with so-called forgetting and trying to start again, the traumatic periods do not get resolved. They just stay there in the air. And they stay there because for the victims and victims' families the issues remain unaddressed." (Originally published in the now defunct Montreal Mirror, October 2000) ( )

"Combining gripping storytelling with sharp observation, Erna Paris takes us on
a remarkable journey through four continents, exploring how nations reinvent
themselves after cataclysmic events such as the Holocaust or genocidal war.
Taking us directly to the places of reckoning - be they hometowns, courtrooms
or concentration camps - she finds rage and sorrow, but also hope, in the way
ordinary people grapple with the defining events of their lives, in the
changing face of international justice. And she helps us question where we
stand as individuals in relation to our own country's history." --back cover