For many years my mother refused to drive a Volkswagen.

Though I was too young to understand it at the time, eventually I did. She was a Holocaust survivor from Germany, a woman whose entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. Volkswagen—German for “people’s car”—had been founded in 1937 as part of Hitler’s promise to provide low-cost transportation for ordinary Germans. Then along came World War II and, poof, what had begun as a car factory started producing weapons of war. And with that came a whole new Jewish workforce, much of it imported as slave labor from nearby concentration camps. Their role: to work long hours under harsh conditions, severe abuse, and with little nourishment until they died. Which, sadly, many did.

Eventually my mom got over her anti-Volkswagen fetish. Which is why the first car I ever drove as a teenager was the now-defunct VW Beetle, otherwise known as a “bug.” And my chief mode of transportation during college was a 1969 VW bus painted in........

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