Chicago Tribune

Commentary: Can the world agree upon a 'common memory' of the Holocaust?

My mother and father were survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald.

All that remained of our family tree were a few yellowed photographs tucked away in a drawer.

I can't pinpoint exactly when I first learned that, aside from my parents, every close family member was murdered by the Nazis.

No one ever sat me down and told me such things had happened.

I was aware we had no living relatives. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - these were abstract concepts. Indeed, I remember I would try to figure out, for example, what a cousin was by doing some hypothetical problem-solving. "So if my mother's

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