When the war ended, she, her mother and sister were packed into the trans-Siberian railroad headed west. Her father had been taken to a separate camp before she was born. At each stop, they stepped off the train and onto the platform, praying that he had survived. One day, they stepped out of the train and there he was, bags packed. Every morning for weeks he had headed to the station, waiting to join his family, the daughter he had never met.

No one was waiting for them when they arrived in Warsaw. My grandparents had many siblings, each with large families of their own. As far as we know, no one survived. Warsaw was still a dangerous place to be Jewish. The children were put in an orphanage for their safety. One day in the late 1940s anti-Semites beat my grandfather almost to death. Soon after, United States visas arrived, and they set off for a new life in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

My parents explained to me that these pasts meant that they were not Holocaust survivors. My mother told me that in her labor camp, they were hungry, they were put to work, but no one was shooting or gassing them. When they went back to Poland, it was hard, and Jews were hated. But this, she explained, was the fate of Jews. Anti-Semitism was a permanent feature of the world, not special to the Holocaust.

My father’s reaction to describing him as a Holocaust survivor was more severe. He angrily questioned my motivations. Was I seeking a special status as a victim? He urged me to reflect about how offensive this is to those who have to actually live under oppression. He argued powerfully against the stance of the victim. It was morally dangerous, he said, using the actions of Israelis and Palestinians toward one another as an example. He was scornful when he saw signs that I was taking the Holocaust to mean that Jews were special. “If the Germans had chosen someone else,” he often said, “we would have been the very best Nazis.”

Most frequently and passionately, he would reprimand me for taking the Holocaust to be about me, or about my family. The Holocaust was about humanity. It was about what we are capable of doing to one another. It could happen again, it could happen here. The Holocaust was about everyone. Helping to prevent such events from occurring required agency and good moral sense, and good moral sense was not consistent with preferring one’s own people.