Dad switched to a photograph of a young woman with a plain, oval face and a weak smile. “This is your grandmother,” he said before he flipped through the photographs as if he were being timed. What glimpses of the monochromatic past I caught were puzzling. Their expressions were unchanging; my grandfather wore a permanently angst-ridden grimace, while my grandmother’s smile looked more depressing than the saddest frown.

Dad pulled out another photograph. “This is father number two. My real father. People always think biological is more ‘real’ than a man who actually raised you, but you’re not raised by a potent drop of semen, are you?”

He held the photograph under my eyes. I don’t know if faces can be the polar opposite of each other, but in contrast to the solemn face of the first grandfather, this one grinned as if he’d been photographed on the happiest day of not just his life but all life everywhere. He wore overalls splattered with white paint, had wild blond hair, and was streaming sweat.

“Actually, the truth is I don’t look at these photos much, because all I see when I look at photographs of dead people is that they’re dead,” Dad said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s Napoleon or my own mother, they are simply the Dead.”

That day I learned that my grandmother had been born in Poland right at the unlucky time Hitler annihilated his delusions of grandeur by making them come true- he emerged as a powerful leader with a knack for marketing. As the Germans advanced, my grandmother’s parents fled Warsaw, dragged her across Eastern Europe, and, after a few harrowing months, arrived in China. That’s where my grandmother grew up- in the Shanghai Ghetto during the war. She was raised speaking Polish, Yiddish, and Mandarin, suffering the soggy diseases of monsoon seasons, severe rationing, and American air raids, but surviving.

After the U.S. troops entered Shanghai with the bad news of the Holocaust, many in the Jewish community left China for all corners of the globe, but my great-grandparents decided to stay, having established themselves as owners of a successful multilingual cabaret and kosher butcher shop.