23. Simon Pasternak’s Surprise Discovery
Danish author Simon Pasternak recalls rooting through his parents’ basement as a child, when he came across a rusty suitcase belonging to his maternal uncle Dirck, who had died in the Ukraine during WWII. When he opened the suitcase, he found some unexpected items: dusty SS documents, an SS dagger, and an Iron Cross. As he put it years later: “I knew that the Nazis were the worst kind of bogeymen. My Danish grandmother married a Russian Jew, my grandfather, and half my family is Jewish. So, how could this suitcase be in our basement?”