Jean felt a pang of guilt as soon as she stepped out of the taxi and walked toward the main gate of Dachau. She was a historian (albeit an art historian) yet she had paid little attention to her own family history. Her Jewish grandparents had died in this camp, but to her they had always been more myth than reality. She had never met them, only seen one picture of them, and never heard any stories about them—her mother had been three when she parted from her parents and came to America. Nor had Jean ever felt particularly Jewish. Her great-aunt Marta, who had raised Jean’s mother, had married an American and quickly changed from Marta Hochberg to Martha Kelly. So far as Jean knew, Martha had never set foot in a temple in America. At Christmas and Easter, Jean’s mother had told her, the family went to the Presbyterian church. That scant connection to religion had carried into Jean’s own life, though her father had convinced her mother to move from the Presbyterian to the Episcopal church. Neither of them ever talked about Jean’s Jewish heritage.

Now she walked through a pair of wrought iron gates bearing the sickeningly ironic slogan, “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work Will Make You Free.” Jean hadn’t even known that those words, made so famous on the gates of Auschwitz, had also mocked her grandparents when they arrived at Dachau. Jean realized, as she entered the camp, that she didn’t even know exactly when her grandparents had arrived there or when they died. Her grandfather had lost his job at the university because of anti-Semitic laws passed in 1933, and he and his wife had died in Dachau sometime between then and the end of the war. Why had Jean never tried to find out more? Her guilt turned to shame as she read the placards on the few remaining buildings of the camp describing how the prisoners had been used as forced labor at a munitions factory, and how Nazis executed four thousand Soviet prisoners of war at a nearby firing range. She read of how Nazis stripped new arrivals of their clothes and forced them to give up their few remaining possessions—wedding rings, watches, everything. She shivered when she saw a photograph of Heinrich Himmler inspecting the camp in 1936. Had her grandfather been there? Or did he and his wife become prisoners after Kristallnacht in 1938? It suddenly burned in her gut that she did not know.