T.P.R.

I was reading a message on a loop today and they were mentioning the stories of survivors of Nazi Germany. It made me think about the importance of writing as a means to record history. We don't think about it when we write a contemporary story, but we're recording society as it is.
We record the dress, food, slang, what our houses and communities look like and what is important to us, even the type of crimes that might be in the news today and our social mores. I think romance books do a very good job in this respect.
I once gave a blood transfusion to a woman who was a survivor of the second world war and had been in a concentration camp. According to her she was used in an experiment which left her with blood problem and so had to get transfusions. Some of the survivors wouldn't talk about their experiences because it was too painful for them, but the ones who did left the listeners with an indelible impression. What if we were to tell all these survivors that what they said was unimportant and shouldn't be told? How much we would be missing of history.