I bought an Audi this year and with that, World War II finally ended for me.

My father and mother never spoke about what happened to them during the war, which had ended 11 years before I was born. The whole thing was a 6-year black hole in my family history. We discussed it openly just once, when my parents asked that I honor their refusal to buy anything made in Germany while they were alive. Yet the war was always in our home, like some enormous beast, hunched in the corner of every room, still and quiet, except for the breathing.

I waited until I was 6 to ask about the blue numbers tattooed on the arms of some of the other refugees, and was angry when I was told to wait until I was older. When later came, I knew not to ask again. It was all connected to the things that made my mother wake up screaming some nights. I became a little soldier protecting my parents from those things that hurt them, like the time when I was 10, and found my mother watching “The Pawnbroker,” where Rod Steiger plays a Holocaust survivor haunted by flashbacks of concentration camp atrocities. I stood in front of the TV blocking her view until she walked out.

The only stories they did tell were from their happy pre-war lives, or the rare funny war-time incident. One was about the time my mother received a goose as thanks for secretly and illegally teaching local children during the Nazi occupation in Poland, and after great anticipation for this special meal, discovered she had overcooked it to an inedible cinder.

In the battle between my need to fill the holes in my family story and my duty to keep the silence, duty usually prevailed. One exception was on my first trip to Europe, when I was 20, and went to visit the French city Nancy, in Lorraine. In the summer of 1939, when my father was 19, he had arrived there from his town in Poland. He planned to enroll in the engineering school. Then the war started and he was cut off from family and funds. He traveled to Paris and when the Nazis were about to occupy that city, he somehow acquired the papers and uniform of a French Army private and his unit was evacuated, eventually to French Morocco. He liked to joke that he was in Casablanca at the same time as Rick and Sam and Ilsa. On a scorching summer day 37 years later, I stood in front of the same engineering school and unsuccessfully tried to picture myself doing anything like what he had done.