Garden City Park, NY: As a book publisher for nearly 50 years, I have frequently been asked: Why do I publish real-life stories about the Holocaust?

The answer is simple. I was born in an American Displaced Persons (DP) camp located in Foehrenwald, Germany right after World War Two. The camp was a safe shelter for homeless Jewish survivors—and as it turned out, my parents were lucky enough to make it to their sanctuary. After one year, my folks were able to emigrate to the United States of America and settled in the New York City borough of the Bronx. As a child, I was pretty nosy. One day, I was looking through a box that my parents had stored in a closet, and I came across a group of black and white postcards. On the cards were photographs of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps, which I would learn later had been taken by Nazi soldiers. Some photos showed bodies being burned in ovens, others of starving prisoners, and high piles of bodies. It turns out that these postcards had been produced by the US Army, specifically to be given out to the German civilians to show them what atrocities had gone on in these death camps. The pictures needed no explanations.

Soon after I found them, I asked my father what the postcard photos depicted—and why my parents kept them in our home. He was not happy that I had come across the images, but he did answer my question. He said, “This is what happened to millions of Jewish people who were prisoners in the concentration camps. Your grandmother, all my sisters, their husbands, and their children were killed by the Nazis. We survived—but you should never forget what happened.”

Today, while there are those who relish the distortion and outright denial of atrocities throughout history, it is crucial that we all never forget what really happened. And so, to do my part in remembrance of my family’s history and to help ensure that it will not happen again, I have chosen to publish books about the Holocaust.