Tell Me About That

Every year I arrive at WWII Weekend, one of the largest World War II commemorative events in the country, held in Reading, Pennsylvania, prepared to tell my grandparents’ story.

As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I spend months preparing. Organizing artifacts. Thinking about how to help people understand what happened to ordinary families under Nazi rule. I come to educate.

What surprises me every year is how much I learn in return.

This year, that education began at a table displaying a swastika flag.

My reaction was immediate. Visceral.

I will be honest. These were not men I would typically have approached. Heavy metal t-shirts. Long beards. Tattoos covering their arms. The flag on their table stopped me cold. Every instinct told me to keep walking.

I walked over anyway.

I said: Tell me about everything you have here.

The man behind the table explained that it was his first year at the event. He had unexpectedly acquired an enormous collection of World War II photographs, letters, documents, and artifacts and was still trying to understand exactly what he had. We talked. He asked questions. I asked questions. Things moved the way good exchanges do, from one thing to the next, neither of us quite steering it.

At some point he noticed my necklace. Not a Star of David. The Hebrew word Ahava.

Love.

Before I even raised the flag, he looked at me and said, “I want you to know I didn’t purchase that flag. It came with everything else.”

I had not asked. He offered it anyway. Something in the conversation had made him want me to know.

I told him I was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. That this was my second year at the event. That I had only uncovered my grandparents’ story a few years ago, after years of research, after boxes that had been kept closed for decades were finally opened.

He had stumbled into his collection unexpectedly. I had spent years carefully uncovering mine. We were standing across a table from each other at a World War II event, each trying to understand what we had inherited. That felt like the most honest thing either of us had said.

That was when his friend asked if I knew about Geddy Lee.

I said I did not.

He told me that Geddy Lee, the lead singer of Rush, is the child of Holocaust survivors. That he wrote a memoir called My Effin’ Life. That Chapter Three is devoted entirely to his parents’ experience during the Holocaust. That the book spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

A man covered in tattoos, standing next to a swastika flag, making a connection between my family’s story and a rock musician who felt compelled to write forty-one pages about what happened to his parents in the camps.

I had not seen that coming.

Later, the friend came to find me at my table. He wanted to know more about my family. He wanted to look at what I had at the table. I told him about Karl and Mathilde. About Vienna. 

He did not have to come find me. He did anyway.

These men were warm. Compassionate. Genuinely curious. Empathetic in a way I had not anticipated and would not have predicted from the outside. They were not what I had assumed when I saw the flag. They were not what I had assumed when I saw them.

Had I kept walking, I would never have known that.

The story would have ended with my assumption.

Instead, it began with a conversation.

That happened over and over again throughout the weekend.

A retired professor who had spent his career teaching about antisemitism came to my table looking shaken. He had just listened to another speaker use the same language to describe minorities in America that had been used against Jews in the 1930s. He recognized it not as a feeling but as a pattern. He had spent a career learning to see exactly that. He needed to say it out loud to someone who would understand.

I was there.

That was enough.

A Christian man approached me with tears in his eyes. He said he was scared for the Jewish people. That as a Christian, hatred of this kind made no sense to him. He wanted to know what he could do.

I told him that when a non-Jewish person speaks out it carries a different weight than when a Jewish person does. That we need that help. That his voice matters in ways mine does not.

He said: You can count on me.

I believed him.

***

One of those conversations began last year and continued this year.

After my presentation in 2025, a tall man with gray hair approached me. He told me he had been watching who was coming in and out of the tent while I spoke. He told me he was prepared to take a bullet for me.

I did not know what to do with a statement like that.

He came back the next day. And then he came back this year.

When I saw him I recognized him immediately.

I said, “I will never forget you.”

He looked confused. I reminded him what he had told me. How he had watched the room. How he had come back the next day. How much that had meant to me.

He seemed genuinely surprised that I remembered.

He sat in the front row while I spoke. When I finished he told me he had learned something new.

That a complete stranger would position himself to protect a Jewish woman telling her family’s story was not something I took lightly. That he came back the following year and learned something new made it matter even more.

It still does.

***

I used to think the most important thing I brought to WWII Weekend was the shadow box. Karl and Mathilde’s passports. The birth certificate bearing the imposed middle name Israel. The envelope stamped geöffnet, opened by a censor before it ever reached them. These are not curiosities. They are evidence of lives that existed before the machinery tried to erase them.

But what I have learned across two years at this event is that the objects only do their work inside a conversation. A passport behind glass is history. A passport on a table between two people asking each other questions is something else entirely.

It is the beginning of understanding.

We live in a time that encourages us to sort people quickly. To decide who belongs on our side before we know anything about them. To let a flag or a look or an assumption tell us everything we need to know before a single word is spoken.

I stood in front of a swastika flag and chose to ask a question instead.

What I found on the other side of that choice was warmth. Curiosity. Two men who wanted to understand what they had inherited and what it meant. One of them made a connection I had not expected. The other came to find me later in the day. He did not have to. He did anyway.

Conversation does not require agreement. It requires curiosity. It requires the willingness to stay in the room long enough for another person to become more than what you assumed they were.

History teaches us what happens when people stop seeing individuals and start seeing only categories. The antidote is not agreement on every issue.

It is the willingness to walk over anyway.

To say: Tell me about that.

And then to mean it.

Every year I arrive at WWII Weekend expecting to teach.

Every year I leave carrying pieces of other people’s stories as well.

This year I leave carrying the memory of two men I would not have approached, who turned out to be among the most meaningful conversations of the weekend.

I almost kept walking.

I am glad I did not.