Answer: He said:
But not all Holocaust survivors are willing or able to speak of their experiences. I am intimately familiar with the choice to stay silent. My father was a nine-year-old Jewish boy when Nazi Germany invaded his native Poland. He was one of the lucky ones, eventually saved by deportation to Soviet territory where he nearly starved to death in a slave labor camp. Almost his entire extended family—well over one hundred people—were killed. For decades after the war my father suppressed his pain, never speaking of what he had endured and dodging questions when pressed by friends or strangers. This silence was his way of healing and building a new life in the pluralistic America he so loved. My father became a professor of Soviet studies, dedicating his life to fighting totalitarianism and anti-Semitism from a comfortable professional distance.