I’ve been telling other people’s stories in writing for more than 40 years. Telling my own in person… I wasn’t sure about that at all.

“You can write it and read it,” I told myself, having already signed up for Teach the Shoah’s class. That was before I realised what telling in person really meant: not writing and not reading.

There was also this one glaring question: Do I even have a story to tell?

My answer back then was not really. What I had were disparate fragments of reality, motivations that swung from blurry (on a good day) to wildly irrational, and a list of questions that began with “Who would even do that?”

I have asked myself this many times since buying a majestic, boarded-up, double-story red-brick building on the market square in a shtetl in Northeastern Lithuania. I still don’t have a solid answer.

This shtetl is where my father lived, where my story would never have started had my grandparents not escaped with their four children.

The house has neither electricity nor plumbing. Inside, the plaster flakes off in strips, revealing layers, in parts down to the red brick core. The original window frames and the front door are battered but surviving. The wooden staircase is sturdy. The upstairs ceiling is cracked and fallen. The princess balcony is a rusted remnant. Corrugated iron has replaced the original slate roof. No one knows what’s under the large flat round stone on the side of the house.

Not far away, at the edge of a cornfield, is a Jewish mass grave, marked by one of Lithuania’s 200+ memorial stones. I wonder if my grandmother’s sister and my cousins were killed there.

The “Jewish School” I thought I was buying was, in fact, a home-turned-house-of-horrors. In 1941, the Gilelovitz family looked through their windows, climbed down the stairs, and walked out of their home for the last time. I am the first Jewish person through these doors since their murder. The village hangs back, waiting for me to step across the piece of metal sheeting that has been torn from the doorway to open the house.

Preparing and telling this story for Teach the Shoah made me realise that I didn’t just buy a house with no clear vision and no plan. I bought the power to tell its story and to break its silence.