My mother was a Holocaust survivor and my father left Germany in the mid-1930s, when Hitler was coming into power. I grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan — a neighborhood that became known as “Frankfurt on the Hudson” for its large German-Jewish population.

Most of my friends were children of survivors or children of refugees from Hitler’s Europe. Most of our parents did not talk very much about the Holocaust, but we grew up in the shadows of the trauma: the ghosts of family members who did not survive, the ongoing fears of persecution, the pressures to succeed, a contempt for all things German.

Even though I grew up speaking German, I was taught to identify the dialect spoken by non-Jews. When we heard it on our very occasional visits to the Yorktown section of Manhattan, we would discreetly cross the street. My parents also boycotted German products.

When I was first invited in 2023 to participate in the Frankfurt Visit Program — a week-long event for children of survivors whose parents lived in Frankfurt before and during the Holocaust — I wasn’t sure I wanted to attend. The program, organized and sponsored by the city, is designed to show what Jewish life was like in Frankfurt and what it’s like now, with a vibrant Jewish culture and several active synagogues.

Having grown up with antipathy to all things German, I did not want to support any programs that would even begin to relieve the Germans of their accountability.

But I had started on a journey — reading more and more about the progress of German accountability for the Holocaust, and speaking to individual Germans about their roles in remembrance and reconciliation. Perhaps it was time to come to terms with the past and confront the ghosts that inhabited my childhood.

My grandfather had a very successful kosher meat market in Frankfurt. On Kristallnacht, in 1938, everything changed.........

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