In "The Devil's Candy," Julie Salamon reported on the making of Brian DePalma's dead-in-the-water film version of Tom Wolfe's novel "Bonfire of the Vanities." Here she gives us her own family's memoir, an altogether more personal report, but one which also begins in the film world. Invited to visit Steven Spielberg on the set of "Schindler's List," Salamon asks her mother, Lily, to go along. Lily, herself a survivor of the concentration camps, "came through Auschwitz remarkably unscarred," writes Salamon. "Dropped into madness, she adjusted to madness." Once she saw Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, when he visited the camp. "He was good-looking," Lily tells her horrified daughter 50 years later, "though most men look very good in uniform."

Lily's normalcy is part pluck, part denial. Her Ohio-born daughter, by contrast, approaches this visit to the sites of the Holocaust with dread -- at her distance the evil of the Final Solution can only appear inhuman, monstrous, off-the-scale. The film set, with its artificiality in pursuit of real feeling, enhances the contrast. "The crematoria have been knocked down," Spielberg tells Salamon, "except for the one ABC built for 'War and Remembrance.'" On the set, the mother and daughter see a group of women, actresses in costume wearing frayed farm dresses and yellow Stars of David. Salamon is horrified to see these figures from the Holocaust come to life. Says her mother, "We never wore that kind of dress."

In the end, Lily forces herself to remember all the piercing details, the terrible betrayal of the war, and does so in order to help her daughter come to a just understanding of it. The two exchange their stories and their points of view. This moving, intimate and often funny memoir demonstrates how the stories we must make up to survive can bring us to the actual truth, after all.

--Jim Paul