How many things do you vividly remember from when you were in sixth grade?
If you, like me, don’t possess the famously photographic memory of one LeBron James, the answer to that question is probably “very little.” But one of the precious few crystal-clear memories I do possess from those days still hits me from time to time — and has been doing so with increasing frequency this week: It’s of my paternal great uncle Abe, telling me about how Nazi soldiers forced him and my grandfather to leave the body of their brother, the last member of their immediate family who didn’t survive the Holocaust, in the pits they had been forced to dig to use for excrement as they marched away from the concentration camps they had been held in — and oncoming Russian forces — as World War II was coming to a close.