Growing up, I knew that my mother, Anita, had been born in Germany. My father, Karl, was an American on a whirlwind tour of Europe when he met her in a Swiss train station a few years after World War II. He swept her off her feet and they got married in the United States, where my sister and I were born. But my parents divorced when I was seven, and my father took me and my sister out of the country to prevent our mother from seeing us. After three years, she finally relinquished custody rights in exchange for the chance to see her children once or twice a year. Much later I found out that she also promised my father never to tell us that she was Jewish.