** spoiler alert ** I'm the daughter of German Jews. My mother's family came from Berlin and my father's from Frankfurt. Yes, the same Frankfurt as the Franks. They were a very old German family --- there is still an Edinger Institut at the University begun by my great grandfather, and Edinger Strasse, and other vestiges of my family's existence there. Moreover I still have relatives in Germany, those who came from lines where people had converted.

Anyway, my father (whose father did not leave Germany and was eventually deported and killed) became an academic specialist in German politics and I spent several years of my childhood in Germany. One year was 7th grade. Before we left my father's mother gave me Anne Frank's diary and a diary. Later, upon visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and seeing her original diary, I realized that mine was just like hers. I mean, just like. Clearly my grandmother had given me one she had bought in Frankfurt and Anne's must have also been from Frankfurt, bought around the same time. They are identical other than a difference in coloring

But the diary was what woke me up to the Holocaust as well as to what it was to be a teenager. Anne's voice still echoes in my mind these many years later.