The summary of The Address
The story is a touching account of a girl who goes in search of her mother's belongings after the war, in Holland. But, most significantly, even on finding what she so much longed to see, touch , feel and remember, she leaves them all behind, only to move on and live a bleak life sans all former attachments, with only the memories of the former times to haunt her in the post-war days.
The story categorically lays bare the epiphany of wars and their aftermath painstakingly. The daughter, the protagonist of the tale, is torn between two worlds: the one which was her own world with her mother and all kith and kin of her pre-war life and the one that is strange, unfamiliar and devoid of all sorts of physical attachments with her former world, a tragic existence she came to terms with after the war. Significantly, though the war has left her alone in every sense and respect, yet she accepts the stark realities of her post-war life and resolves not to escape from them. She could have committed suicide after losing her loved ones in the war. But she determines to live her life though it is hard for her to forget everything of her past life. Therefore, she decides to forget-the easiest thing-the address of a non-Jewish neighbour's house, where her family's belongings were stored. She collects nothing from that address and instead resolves to forget it. She knows there is nothing that the address can return to her. It can return neither her loved ones nor the peace of her mind nor the former state of well being.
The address that held so much importance to her lost all value as she realised that it could give her nothing but pain. Therefore the address was no longer useful to her.
The story starts with an illusion of a girl about the seeming normalcy returning to her country after the war. But soon she is disillusioned on visiting Mrs. Dorling's house. In fact, behind the facade of so called normalcy the grim realities of the post-war situations were looming large.