Marianne Hirsch introduces us to a new word, postmemory, in her essay "Holocaust Photographs in the Personal and Public Imagination". Hirsch defines postmemory as when the child of a cultural trauma survivor remembers stories from what his parents told him. Hirsch, being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, has many memories of her parents. Post-memory is like receiving a memory from someone else. It is a memory that you did not witness, but was told to you by someone else, and after listening to their memory you feel as if it happened to you. A post-memory is something you may never get to experience. Usually, a post-memory is something that happened, which is very traumatic and affected a lot of people. When you think of a memory, you think of something happy or something good that happened. But then what is postmemory? Postmemory is really different, because I think with postmemory most people remember the things that are most traumatic and that affect a lot of people. For example, in history classes what we are taught and what most of us remember is when people die, not all the good things like when they get married or how much money they have to their name. Also, I remember how many people died in the war, not how many survived. Remembering all the traumatic events is probably not a good thing for some people, because then all they do is worry and think that this will happen to them too. For example, after 9/11 and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, everyone was so afraid to fly because a terrorist might take control of their plane. Or some people wouldn't go shopping at the Mega Mall in Minneapolis because that might be the terrorist's next target. In addition to being a bad memory, if it involves children the memory seems more traumatic. It seems like a person always remembers things that happen to children, and these events tend to stick in your mind a little longer than things that happen to adults. I think the reason why that's the case is because when you see something bad happen to a child you think they're so helpless and defenseless that it sticks in your mind a little more.