I turn to Dad. “Do you remember our Jewish neighbors in Milwaukee, Mr. and Mrs. Simon, and their granddaughter Gayle?” He nods. “Since we got this assignment, I’ve thought about them a lot. If someone tried to hurt them, we would never stand by and do nothing. If we saw a stranger on the street being attacked, we wouldn’t stand by and do nothing. How would I live with myself if I didn’t pursue this? I couldn’t.”

My dinner sours in my stomach. “I’ve been trying to understand how Mr. Bartley could give this assignment, see this from his point of view. I can’t. I’ve been trying to understand how anyone could advocate for murder. How was it that millions of people either actively participated or passively did nothing during the Holocaust? What happened to their humanity, morality? How could they watch and do nothing, turn their Jewish neighbors over to the Nazis, or worse—become Nazis and be part of murder or commit murder themselves?”

“I don’t know and I have no answer, Logan.”

“I’ve imagined what it would be like if we’d been dragged from our home at gunpoint, made to dig our own graves, and then forced to kneel at the edge. What if Mr. Bartley had us reenact that? There would be such an uproar!”

“Logan, don’t.”

“We have to, Dad. Because no one else in our class is saying this is wrong. These Nazis started out as regular people and became monsters. They had wives, husbands, sons, daughters, parents. They laughed and danced and celebrated birthdays. They went on picnics, walked dogs, and read bedtime stories to their kids. And yet they didn’t hesitate to put a bullet into a neighbor’s head and go on with daily life. They had to be so brainwashed or filled with hate to bear looking at themselves in the mirror.

“When Cade and I researched the alternative assignment, I stumbled upon a 60 Minutes interview with Father Patrick Desbois. He’s a French Catholic priest who’s spent twenty-plus years trying to understand how the Holocaust could happen. His grandfather was a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp in the Ukraine and refused to talk about his experience. So Father Desbois traveled to that village, then throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, to get answers. He and his team recorded over four thousand eyewitness accounts of Jews being rounded up from their homes and shot in massive graves. They’ve found many of those graves.”

I choke back tears, but I have to continue.