On a trip to visit my father and stepmother in 1976, I brought a cassette recorder and half a dozen blank cassettes with the intention of interviewing Dad. The first evening after dinner I brought it down to where Dad was sitting, reading the Yiddish edition of Forverts, the Yiddish newspaper. I showed him the recorder and said, “Dad, there is no one alive who can tell me Mom’s story [she had died seven years earlier], and no one can tell me your family’s story better than you. Can we have a discussion that I will record?” He looked at me over his glasses, and, after a few seconds, he nodded.

Over the next couple evenings, we recorded several hours of tapes, which I took home to New York with me. What happened to the tapes is another story. But what those talks started was life-changing for my father. That’s when he began his career as a Holocaust speaker. Not long after our taping sessions, he said, “I realize that I have been remiss in not talking about my experiences.” He would eventually speak to thousands of people, young and old, Jewish and not Jewish, knowledgeable about the Holocaust and ignorant.

I learned about my mother’s family as well as his and about their lives before and after Hitler came to power. I heard the story of the day my mother’s mother and sister died while she was out on a work detail. I learned that my father chose to fight as a partisan in order to choose his own way of dying; he never expected to survive. I learned of his dream of going to Mandatory Palestine after the war to fight for a Jewish state. I learned how those dreams were thwarted because of the emotional toll the war took on my mother. I heard the story of mother’s cousin who discovered that she was the only one of 72 members of their family to survive and how he brought them to the United States.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my father was the importance of telling my family’s story with the hope that others would learn from it. While there were still survivors living, I would always defer to them. They had lived the Holocaust. My knowledge was second-hand. I knew that sadly my time would come.

Dad gave his last talk in the Spring of 2012, a couple months after his 90th birthday. When I spoke to my stepmother after the talk, she told me excitedly that they had given Dad a standing ovation. I wasn’t surprised.

When Dad died a couple months later, I knew that my time had come. It was my turn to make sure that people would not forget.