Against her father’s warnings, Debra resolves to learn about his time in Auschwitz

For much of her life, Debra Fisher knew that her father Oscar’s account of surviving Auschwitz as a teenager had been sugarcoated to protect her – and perhaps him as well – from the reality of the horrors he had experienced there. In this brief animation from StoryCorps, Fisher reflects on asking her father, who was nearing death, to let her into a ‘room that she could never leave’ by sharing the truth about his time at the notorious concentration camp. The resulting short forms a brief yet powerful look at how the drive to know the truth can override one’s desire to guard from its sometimes haunting, life-changing gravity.