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Intending to write a paper based on this talk for my History of Civil Rights class, I scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad. The speaker was deadly earnest—the way people are when they’ve experienced war. And when she referred to the detention centers that had popped up in Texas as concentration camps, I knew I had to go.

My grandmother, Paulette Oppert, had lost a husband to the Nazis, placed her children (including my mother) in hiding during the occupation of France, and seen trainloads of Jews deported to the East. Maman had always taught me that my greatest responsibility was to remain vigilant against genocide. I was on this Earth above all, she often told me, to help make certain there was never another Holocaust. To this end, she had always encouraged me to write, and to keep a gun in the house.

Three days after hearing the Sandinista speak, I set out for the Rio Grande River Valley, 1500 miles south of Minneapolis. As I accelerated onto Interstate 35, blasting punk rock mixtapes, I felt as if I were finding my destiny. I had interviewed Maman extensively over the years, and I intended to write her biography. After years of searching for an identity, and having exprienced dozens of instances of anti-Semitism myself, I had settled on a personal narrative based on my grandparents’ involvement in the French Resistance. Maquis members served as guerilla fighters, underground newspaper publishers, and manufacturers of forged government documents. They fought alongside the American and British soldiers who liberated France from the Nazis. As I headed for the American concentration camps, I finally had a mission that paralleled this history.