The battle of memories is the battle being waged to keep the history of Holocaust lore alive by journalist and author Alan Elsner. It was the topic of discussion in his lecture Wednesday entitled “Dealing with the Holocaust Through Fact and Fiction.”

Elsner is a former journalist for the Reuters news agency and is currently on a book tour to promote his new novel “The Nazi Hunter.” The novel is a work of fiction focusing around the Belzec extermination camp in Poland where nearly half a million Jews were murdered in the winter of 1942 under the reign of the Nazis.

Elsner has a special connection with the extermination camp as he is the son of a survivor and a grandson of a couple who weren’t so lucky.

“I remember as a child seeing the wounds of my father,” he said. “When I was older I devoted my life to writing and I wanted to use this skill to tell the story of my father and also the story of my grandparents, a story by them that could not be told, a story that could not be forgotten.”

The dilemma for Elsner was that he wanted to write a memoir of the stories of his lineage without distorting the memory of the actual events. He wanted to tell the story to “win the battle of memories” so that the story of his grandparents, father and the ill-fated other half-million Jews would not be “forgotten in the realm of a historical footnote.”

Elsner chose to write his latest book as a work of fiction because his belief is that “not everyone is willing to pick up a history book or a memoir and just sit down and read it, but a thriller page turner that doesn’t distort the story gets it into the hands of many more readers,” Elsner said.

Though he wrote numerous books to tell and carry on the story of the atrocities of the Belzec extermination camp, this was not enough for Elsner. The journalist had visited the camp’s remains with his father in 1993 and was disgusted by what he saw.

“Dogs peeing on it, a woman walking through with shopping bags, a house built at the entrance blasting radio music, crumbling steps and a half-hearted attempt at a memorial statue, was not what those people deserved as a memoriam,” Elsner said. “I made a promise to my disheartened father that I would do something, I had to do something.”

Through writing many articles on the subject, Elsner eventually generated interest in the right people and was able to start a program for a memorial.

Eleven years later in 2004 the new Belzec memorial opened and Elsner’s battle of memories took one step closer to victory.

“The daunting tribute almost moved me to tears,” he said. “My father was seeing it for the first time restored too and I said to him ‘I kept my promise.'”