Last Wednesday marked the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Although World War II was well before my time, and apparently none of my immediate family was ever involved in the Pacific theater, I do still have my own memories of the Second World War.

• My father's family fled then-Nazi Germany just under the wire – only 8 months before the orgy of thuggery that came to be known as Kristallnacht. Half of my grandmother's family wasn't so fortunate. They didn't get out in time.

• In the mid-1960s, a few years after my grandfather passed away, my grandmother relocated to Miami Beach. My folks stored some of the things she couldn't take with her immediately in the basement of their home. These included two very old suitcases, ones which her family had used when they fled Germany. On the top of each one, near the handle, appeared a hastily-painted-on Star of David. In yellow.

• In 1968 my high school held a day-long function consisting of seminars, discussion panels and movies, all on the subject of war. One of the films shown that day was a French documentary called Night and Fog. The director had pieced it together from actual footage the Nazis themselves had shot in their own death camps, presumably to monitor the effectiveness of their methods. Before starting the film, the teacher assigned to that room warned us that what we were about to see was extremely graphic, which it most definitely was, and that no one would have to ask for permission to leave if they so desired. I sat through the whole thing. Subjects that were only briefly touched upon in my history classes were shown in unsparing detail. I was both stunned and transfixed. I couldn't even get up to piss, even though my bladder felt like it was about to burst.

• Ten years later I took a cinema course at a local university. My instructor was engaging, intelligent and knowledgeable. So why, when he wanted to show us an example of a documentary, out of all the ones in circulation at the time, did he choose Night and Fog? I loved that class and I know my instructor wasn't acting maliciously, but I had to cut that class. It's a fine film, probably one of the most historically-accurate films about the Holocaust ever made. But even a decade after seeing it for the first time there was no way I could sit through it again. If you decide to check it out, don't watch it on a full stomach.

• In 1977, I went to visit family in Virginia. On the way down I stopped off in Washington DC, strictly as a tourist. I stayed at a youth hostel. I met fellow tourists from Canada, Australia and saw quite a few from Germany, most of whom were of university age. I was staying in a communal room with several bunk beds in it. One evening I picked an upper bunk. There was no one on the bunk below mine. When I woke the following morning I was greeted by the sight of a fiftyish man with a noticeable German accent who had arrived in the lower bunk later the previous evening while I was asleep. He pretty much just politely said hello as he got dressed and went on his way. I didn't say anything to him or anyone else about it but I couldn't help but think, was this man in Hitler's army during the war? If so could he have been involved in the operation of the death camps? I'd never felt so creeped-out in my whole life.

• My father would never buy anything that was made in Germany until the mid-1980's. He figured that by that time anyone who'd been involved with the war would either be retired or dead.