In the short story, In Search of the Banished Children, the author Peter Quinn compares the Irish famine emigration into America to the slave trade and the boxcars of the Holocaust early in the essay. The author uses a quote by Robert James Scally to describe that the shear volume of the passage as well as its nature being similar to the tragedies of the Holocaust and the slave trade in that the, “spectacles of civilian suffering in nineteenth-century Europe…drove most of them to leave” (48). Shortly after, he rejects that comparison. Unlike the survivors of the Holocaust and the slave trade, the Irish famine emigration survivors rarely talked about their past history or the events that they endured. In fact, many descendants of the Irish famine emigration at that time were unable to trace back to their ancestors to understand the hardships they went through, for, “They had been swallowed by the anti-romance of history, immigrant ships, cholera sheds, [and] tenement houses” (55). Going beyond the fact that the survivors of the Holocaust had more memoirs written, Quinn makes a point that they, “are very different events and should not be confused or equated” (53). He does this because even though the Irish Famine was a disastrous event, the Holocaust was a death sentence against every Jewish person under German rule. The Famine was not such a targeted event in that sense. This short story is all about the lack of remembrance of the Irish famine emigration and Quinn compares it to other disastrous events in history to detail the tragedy of the lost memories of the Irish.
