I landed a proofreading job over the weekend. At first I thought it was a plum. I’m going over the galley proofs of a book that’s going to be published shortly. It’s in almost-final form. All it needs is a pair of fresh eyes to look for typos. What could be more fun than that? (I know, I know. But you’ll just have to believe me that such a job is balm for the soul of this INTJ, detail-oriented, spelling-, grammar- and punctuation-loving gal. Not that my soul needs balm or anything. But.)

The thing with proofreading is, you can’t get too caught up in the content of what you’re reading, or you lose your focus on the individual words. Yet you need to get into the flow of it enough that you’d notice grammar and punctuation problems. Some proofreaders read the text backwards in order to make sure they really look at every word. I’ve only ever found that strategy useful for proofing legal citations, which is so purely mechanical and by-the-book that there is no flow. Even so, the trick is to pay just the right amount of attention to the content: not too little and not too much. Dusty dry journal articles? Not a problem.

This book? It’s the memoir of a Holocaust survivor. It’s quite short, the language is simple, and the intended audience is the general public. And it’s absolutely harrowing, especially because it’s as much about adjusting to life afterwards as it is about the actual atrocities this woman lived through. There is a lot about survivor’s guilt, a lot about the dilemma — common to many Holocaust survivors — of simultaneously wanting to remember and wanting to forget, wanting to broadcast it to the world and wanting peace and quiet.

Another fascinating and profoundly moving aspect of this book is that it’s the fruit of the deep friendship between the survivor and a professor, a Holocaust scholar. (They are co-authors.) I mean, can you imagine being a Holocaust scholar? I think I admire him as much as I admire her. Just the thought of the Holocaust makes me want to cover my ears and sing “La la la! I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!” And to choose the Holocaust as the subject of your life’s work — !

When the book is published I’ll let you know. This is something the whole world should read. It’s quick. You can read it in a couple of hours. It’s an easy read. A junior high school student would have no problem with it. But it’s not an easy read. And it’s definitely not an easy proofread. How the hell am I supposed to find the typos when I’m swimming in tears?

To end this somber post I’ll leave you with this link which my dad sent around, coincidentally, just a few days ago. It’s a recording made by the BBC on April 20, 1945, a few days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army. It’s about three minutes long; please listen.