One of the first things he told me when we met was that he had been in the Hitler youth.
The oddest thing about this was how casually he mentioned it. My first week in College and all the 1st-year students were expected to meet with their advisors for an introductory lunch.
And here I was, face to face with a man who was part of an organization which would have willingly and obediently murdered me for my ethic ethnic [oops] heritage.
I didn't understand why he did this at the time. I did understand that he wasn't proud of it. He wasn't telling me this to promote himself or to show me what it meant.
I knew that he had been a child at the time, and likely had little choice in the matter, but even so, I found it odd that he began a conversation with this, as though it weren't something to be ashamed of, as though it weren't something to hide from, to run from.
It was a few years before I really understood what was going on, and it took another story for it to make sense to me.
This is not a story about history, though it is tied to it. It is a story about today, and what comes next. It is a story about what we do when we finally acknowledge what we've been part of, what it says about our humanity and how we chose to respond to it.