As Erna Paris’s life was “forever altered” by a chance visit to a Nazi death camp, the reader too is forever changed by reading Long Shadows, her monumental study of the schism between real and “official” national histories. Working one’s way through this book is akin to listening to complete symphonies of Gustav Mahler in a single sitting – an overwhelming experience, one that raises the profound philosophical questions of our time.

Paris’s journey over four continents begins, appropriately, in Germany, where the Holocaust’s unresolved horror casts a shroud over the German people. This 60-page chapter could be edited by half, but thereafter Paris’s analysis and storytelling talents never let the reader go.

Travelling to Japan, she encounters the atrocity of Hiroshima, but no record of the preceding aggression that brought about the heinous bombing. A section on the United States might strike some readers as displaced, but Paris shows how the legacy of slavery permeates American society. The ongoing battle over competing versions of a nation’s history – what Paris calls “the ambiguities of history” – is further explored in her deeply moving section on South Africa. She attends sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and examines its attempts to stop a nation’s wounds from festering. Paris’s acute, inquiring mind probes the soft underbelly of Calvinism, showing how it gave birth to the concept of white supremacy.

“To lose trust in history is to be set adrift in a floating, detached present,” Paris writes. “Is there justice?” she asks. Long Shadows is an affirmative reply, but the reader is warned that peace without justice cannot hold. Whenever a people can be imagined to be less than human, the rhetoric of hate takes centre stage. A nation’s laws can be depraved, but how we shape historical memory depends upon individual responsibility. Since Nuremberg, no one is exempt from international law; we must all “eat bread and salt and speak the truth,” no matter how much it hurts.