Elinor Brecher, The Miami Herald's obituary writer, is the author of Schindler's Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors (Dutton, 1994). She asked this of Mildred Nitzberg, who with Marilyn Segal wrote I Chose Life (2008: AuthorHouse, $24.99). This was excerpted from a longer reply:

Question: Most Holocaust survivors married other survivors, which was not the case for you. How did marriage to a survivor change and shape you?

Answer: I have also wondered how having a parent who is a survivor (and one who is not) has shaped my children, the people they married, and even the next generation, my grandchildren. I do believe all of these 22 people in my immediate family have been affected in one way or another with a father/grandfather Holocaust survivor.

It is true that while my husband drew me into his 'survivor' world, I also drew him into my world. When I was a teenager, I knew about the Holocaust. The stories we heard that came out of Europe were so beyond ordinary evil that they defied understanding. It was quite a different experience, though, when I later heard the stories from my husband, an eyewitness to the events. His account brought me so much closer to the point where I could at least fathom, on some level, what had occurred.

I met Saul in 1948, when it was only three years since his liberation from Auschwitz. His wounds were not healed. Saul drew such vivid pictures of his parents, his brother, grandmother, that I felt that I knew them, and his sense of loss became mine, in a very limited sense. . .

I know that all of the foregoing led me to work with the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center. I became ever more aware of the dangers inherent in prejudice and stereotyping. I became aware of what tragic events could grow out of that kind of thinking. Is my sensitivity to issues, like Darfur, more heightened because of my husband? I think so.

• 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Room 3410.

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