In November of 1997, my brother and I were visiting our parents to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’ve known since we were sixteen, when our mother let slip one day that she was our father’s second wife, that our father had lost his first wife and three young children in Auschwitz. And long before that revelation, we’d heard about our father’s other relatives who were also killed in Auschwitz. Our father occasionally told us stories of those people. The stories often ended with, “They were taken to Auschwitz.”