Lowry’s book was not my older daughter’s introduction to the Holocaust. I don’t remember when we first told her about it, just as I don’t remember first learning about it myself. Religious and ethnic persecution is the reason all of my ancestors came to America — the Holocaust on one side, pogroms on the other — so those stories are baked into our family history. But when she was younger, I did have to explain that she can’t just bring up the Holocaust in any conversation, after she once casually told a neighborhood dad that her relatives were “executed” by...