Most days he’s not there, standing just this side of the traffic light, his flimsy cardboard sign asking for help for a person down on his luck. When I do see him on my way home from big-boxville, I always pay more attention to the letters—the childish scrawl—on his sign than I do to him.…

I locked myself in my dorm room one weekend my sophomore year of college. I had a double minor in European History and German. In one of my Twentieth Century Europe classes, we’d spent our Friday class watching a documentary about the Holocaust. Though it didn’t contain any “new” information, I was struck as if…