There was always the mystery of my father's uncles. My father was an enthusiast, loving jokes - especially Jewish ones - songs, poems, plays, stories and football, but he showed sadness in the face of loss. The way he talked of the uncles was, "You know I had two uncles in France ... they were there at the beginning of the war; they weren't there at the end." As my brother and I got older we pressed him, and he would say: "They must have died in the camps." What camps? I asked myself. Where? What did the word even mean? And why France?
Another mystery about our father was that he was American. Though he was born in the US, he had lived in London since he was two. The story was that his mother and Polish father - the brother of these French uncles - had split in Brockton, Massachusetts, back in 1922, with his mother bringing him and his siblings to London. My father didn't ever see his father again.
