If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the rise of Nazi Germany, it’s whatever you’re doing in this moment.

I know precisely what my family was doing "during the rise of Nazi Germany" because my uncle wrote detailed memoirs.

My Jewish great-uncle was a pediatrician. He emigrated from Vienna to Queens, New York in 1929. He sent a steady stream of letters to my grandfather, a math professor at he U in Vienna, keeping him advised of the rise of the Reich as explained by the free press that was rapidly disappearing in Nazi occupied regions.

He urged my grandfather in 1932 to get visas for 'the boys.' My grandfather, being Jewish and paralyzed from the waist down had no chance of getting a visa. He committed suicide on krystallnacht because, as he explained in 'the note' he knew his boys would never leave without him. And to his brother in New York, "Paul, please watch over my boys."

Between 1932 and deserting the German army to which all male students were conscripted, my uncle completed his PhD in physics and fought Nazi youth in the streets of Vienna. My father, a medical student, tended to the medical needs of the neighborhood; victims of the brown shirted punks... and that's what they were doing as my grandfather committed suicide on Krystallnacht.

My Catholic grandmother, a school teacher, continued to work until she was fired for being married to a Jew. She did what she had to do to keep her husband and 3 boys fed ... selling off their possessions to survive and pay for their escape from Vienna in the spring of 1939- my dad and uncle to the US army. She and her youngest son fled to Ljubljana with nothing....to sit out the war with her Catholic family.