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.

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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)