Uploaded October 2023 | Updated September 2026, 13 hours ago
On his deathbed, a New York psychiatrist’s father poses two unsettling questions: “Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?” Author Joanne Intrator soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade will pass before she fully grasps why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did. Repeatedly, Intrator’s restitution quest forces her to confront her profound fears surrounding Germany and the Holocaust.
LBI Executive Director Emeritus William H. Weitzer speaks with Intrator about restitution, intergenerational trauma, and the power of memoir.
On his deathbed, a New York psychiatrist’s father poses two unsettling questions: “Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?” Author Joanne Intrator soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade will pass before she fully grasps why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did. Repeatedly, Intrator’s restitution quest forces her to confront her profound fears surrounding Germany and the Holocaust.
LBI Executive Director Emeritus William H. Weitzer speaks with Intrator about restitution, intergenerational trauma, and the power of memoir.
