In I Truly Lament, Mathias Freese has gathered together twenty-seven stories, all of them (in essence) meditations on the holocaust. Freese's collection is about obsessions, mainly Jewish obsessions: the death camps, the unimaginable cruelties, bottomless terror, senseless torture, humans rendered into ashes and smoke, miraculous survivors who are little more than walking dead men and women for the rest of their lives. As Freese says in a brief prelude to one of the stories, "To survive the camp is to live a lifelong suicide, for how can one live in this hell and return whole to the world?"