The date was April 27, 2014. The place, Beth Israel Synagogue in Salisbury, MD, the synagogue that our family had belonged to since moving to Salisbury in 1950, the year before I was born. The event was the annual Yom HaShoah program, which my father, who survived the Shoah along with my mother, had begun years before. My father, Litman Litow, had died two years prior; my mother, Zelda Litow, had passed away in 1969.

The program had been renamed in honor of my dad and stepmother, Jean; she died two weeks after he did. And the congregation asked me to speak.

I stood at the bimah remembering the last time I was there, just a couple years before. I had offered to chant haftorah on my way from our home in Gaithersburg, MD to our annual family beach week in Ocean City. As usual, my father led the Torah service and called me up for the maftir Aliyah. As I was preparing to chant the blessings before the haftorah, he took off his tallit and placed it around my shoulders. Then he leaned in. I was prepared for a hug or perhaps a kiss on my cheek. Instead, with a glint in his eyes, he whispered, “Now don’t embarrass me.” I chuckled softly and responded, “Got it, Dad.” He knew as well as I that there was no way I would let him down.

I had been asked to speak about the Shoah previously but always demurred, saying, “There may come the day when there isn’t a survivor to talk about the Shoah, but until then, you don’t want to hear from me.” Then, that day came. To my knowledge, ours was the only survivor family in Salisbury and perhaps on the entire Eastern Shore of Maryland. My father had probably spoken hundreds of times. Now it was my turn.

I had written about my parents’ experiences as partisans and the tremendous losses they experienced (my father survived with two sisters and a brother; my mother was the sole survivor of a family of 72). I wrote out my talk, which was based on hours of Dad’s recordings that my brother Leon had transcribed, Dad’s Shoah Foundation video, and numerous Letters to the Editor he wrote, as well as articles written about him — and proceeded to memorize most of it. When I finished my 20-minute talk, I closed my eyes and thought to myself, “I hope I did you proud, Dad.”