I didn't realize this was a sad occasion

“And then there’s the lesson that the Holocaust taught me, a lesson nowhere to be found in the books I bitterly flung across the room; the books I was most often given because when my father was young, but no more plucky than the average German Jew, he evaded the Nazis, and came to this country. And he taught me that lesson that I’m talking about when he asked me something. I’d gone to school, and as part of a Unit on immigration I told the story of my father fleeing from Germany in 1939, and the teacher told me my father was very brave. So I went home and I repeated the compliment to my father because at the time he was a certified public accountant, and so I thought that maybe he didn’t get called brave a lot. And I said, you’re very brave, and he asked me,

“Do you think I was braver than the ones who didn’t make it?”

And there it is. The obvious question with a complicated answer. It’s a question that has haunted me since it first hit me in the face.”