The shiny metal showerhead was staring down at me. From where I stood, it seemed impossibly high above my eight-year-old body. Yesterday, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Today I stared back at it with fear.

Earlier that day, my grandparents had begun telling me about what they had lived through during the Holocaust. My grandmother described the relief she felt each time she showered in Auschwitz-Birkenau and gas did not come out and kill her.

I had never heard a story like that, and I wasn’t about to take any chances that gas might come out of my own showerhead. I couldn’t completely understand what she was describing to me, so for about a year I did the only sensible thing. I took baths.

I asked my grandmother, “Why did people hate Jews? Did they stop hating Jews after the Holocaust?” She shrugged gently. “That’s just the vay it is!” She seemed agitated. But I kept pressing her. “Why would someone who doesn’t even know me hate me?” Her expression softened. “I don’t know, Gitaleh,” she said quietly. “Maybe that’s vat they vas taught.”

I remember speaking with my mother about what she knew. “We never talked about it,” she would tell me. “I knew something bad happened and all of my mother’s family was killed, but I didn’t want to upset her more by asking questions.”

Her childhood had been shaped by silence.

Mine would be shaped by what my grandparents shared.

Years later, after hearing me tell my grandmother’s story, a friend said, “I was so upset your grandparents told you about gas chambers at such a young age that I couldn’t even listen to the rest.” Her reaction surprised me. Until then, I had never seriously considered whether my grandparents had shared too much too soon. I had always experienced their honesty as a gift, not a burden. But the truth is, my friend was right. After all, I stopped taking showers for a year. They told me too much too soon. And yet, their story does not end with horror because they survived. And the people telling me about Auschwitz were also my Grandma Rose and Grandpa Boris, the same people who made me laugh, danced with me, and made me feel loved. Yes, they said more than my eight-year-old self could handle. But they surrounded those truths with a life that showed me there was something on the other side of it.

My grandparents had reasons to believe that time was fragile. My grandmother had undergone medical experiments intended to sterilize her and spent much of her life worrying about what those experiments might still do to her body. My grandfather had survived a massive heart attack at 65 and seemed to live as though he had been given borrowed time.

And there was something else. In the filmed testimony they later recorded, an interviewer asked Rose whether her children knew what had happened to her. “Yes,” my grandmother answered. But my mother didn’t know the stories. Somewhere between what my grandparents had lived through and what they assumed their children had overheard, an........

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