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My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.

My grandfather went through a lot in his life.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

My grandfather's death was really hard to deal with.

My parents were of the generation that lived through the Second World War, but I grew up listening to my mother recounting her dad's tales about his terrible experiences during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and later on the Western Front.