I feel haunted by a book I finished reading today: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. This is a massive book, published last year, that covers Europe’s history from the end of World War II, through the Cold War and the end of Communism, into the beginning of the new century.

It’s a great book – very long, over 800 pages, very exhaustive and insightful. But the book is not just a history of Europe – it’s a book that delves into the meaning of history of itself. Judt says that the remarkable comeback of Western Europe from the ashes of World War II required a massive exercise in forgetting.

In his introduction, he writes about the recent influx of Muslim immigrants:

This new presence of Europe’s living “others” – perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey – has thrown into relief not just Europe’s current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead “others” of Europe’s past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

The Jews of Europe were largely eviscerated during the war, of course, and here are some actual numbers:

Of 126,000 Jews removed from Austria, 4,500 returned after the war. In the Netherlands, where there had been 140,000 Jews before the war, 110,000 were deported – of whom fewer than 5,000 returned. In France, of 76,000 (mostly foreign-born) Jews who were deported during the years 1940-44, less than 3 percent survived. Further east, the figures were even worse: of Poland’s pre-war population of over 3 million Jews, fully 97.5 percent were exterminated. In Germany itself, in May 1945, there remained just 21,450 of the country’s 600,000 Jews.

And the Jews were mostly not welcome even when they returned home. According the book, one Dutch Jewish survivor, Rita Koopman, was greeted thusly by one Dutch citizen upon her return to her home country: “Quite a lot of you came back. Just be happy you weren’t here – how we suffered from hunger!”

Much of Europe was either complicit in what happened to the Jews or at least managed to bury the memories of what had happened to them. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when a new generation started to grow up, that people really started to talk about it again. This accelerated after the end of the Cold War. The 45 years of the Cold War are no longer seen as a permanent state of affairs, as they were at the time; instead, they were an extraordinarily long parenthesis that kept Europe from processing what it had just gone through during the war. It was not until Communism fell apart and history returned that Europe could truly begin to address its past with clear eyes.

The way the book presents this is what I found most haunting. The last few chapters of the book talk about post Cold-War Europe, how the Eastern European nations started to build up their economies, how the European Union solidified and expanded, how Europe has become a modern, generally peaceful place. It’s a note of optimism.

And then, after all the optimism, is an epilogue – “From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory.”

Even if you don’t read the entire book, you should stop into a bookstore or library and read the epilogue.

It is the epilogue that offers the above numbers of Europe’s Jewish dead. Not only Jews were killed during the war in Europe, of course, and the 45 years of the Cold War left many more people dead – not to mention the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The epilogue acknowledges this. In fact, while it is specifically about the lost Jews, it is more generally an essay on how to deal with the collective memory of a painful past.

Judt’s point is this: while it’s great that so many memorials and museums to the dead have been built in recent years, they are not enough. “[T]o memorialize the past in edifices and museums is also a way to contain and even neglect it – leaving the responsibility of memory to others.” But people who lived through those times are dying every day; “the cycle of active memory is closing.”

More important than memory – because it’s more accurate than memory – is history. “Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive.” But it needs to be learned.

If this were being portrayed cinematically, you would see a big, bustling, multicultural and cosmopolitan European city: people hurrying about, talking noisy into cellphones in numerous languages, hopping onto high-speed trains with their newspapers and Blackberries.

And then we zoom out from the city, and we zoom in on a desolate field, filled with gravesites marking the dead.

The quiet, long-forgotten dead.

The epilogue’s, and the book’s, final paragraph reads as follows, and it left me reeling.

If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europe out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past. If Europeans are to maintain this vital link – if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose – then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. “European Union” may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.