“Blame Hitler” said a beloved relative, when I saw Jewish people behaving in strange and tortured ways as a child. I didn’t know what she was talking about back then. Nobody wanted to talk about the Holocaust, least of all my Bubbie and Zayde z”h, who were actually taken to the camps, and who fortunately survived. It was like a heavy blanket of silence covered over with a frantic rush to make babies, make more babies, rebuild the Jewish population, regain a financial future after lives shattered, and simply go on. My grandparents spoke to Yad Vashem on video; not everything was shared. It remained a mystery. I wanted to know more, but nothing prepared me for the shock of meeting a woman who was tortured by Mengele himself — the same man who screamed at my Bubbie in Auschwitz that she was a “stinking Jew” who “would never bear a child.” My Zayde proposed to her and she repeated Mengele’s words, to which he replied, “Let God see about that.” As time went on I burned with anger at this monster. He took so much that was not his. He almost took away my chance at life! So you can imagine my absolute shock at learning that Mengele allegedly worked for W.R. Grace after the war, in New Jersey, just a single town over from where I was raised. And then imagine my further shock to find out that he had not one but multiple victims who he experimented on as part of MK-Ultra after the war. One of those people, a very dear and devout soul, became a good friend of mine. This person has assured me that Mengele is absolutely, completely, 100% now dead. Yet it remains to be understood how such an evil was unleashed on innocent American children after the Holocaust. Now you know why I care so personally.