Following the publication of Prague: My Long Journey Home in 2011, I prepared a presentation about my life as I hit the book-tour trail for the first time. I had fact-checked much of the story and thus was confident that I could answer any question and respond to any comment coming from an audience of readers. Or so I thought…

“So, do you consider yourself more Catholic or more Jewish?” The question was posed to me during one of my earliest book-signings by a lady in the front row of a large room at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library. I was taken by surprise, totally unprepared to respond. I fumbled and stumbled with words, something to the effect of: “Neither. I don’t belong to any organized religion.”

But this answer was not only unsatisfactory to the questioner, but also to me. My inability to come up with an accurate, truthful response began to haunt me. I needed to better understand myself—to comprehend where the complexity of my family’s history had led me.

I had been brought up a Roman Catholic and, along with my Catholic mother, attended church faithfully prior to the war. Because the Jewish men in our household—my father, great-grandfather, grandfather, and great-uncle—were secular and celebrated Christmas and Easter with us, I knew nothing of my Semitic ancestry. In fact, I had no idea what a Jew was.

Once in America, I did as I was told: I dressed like an American and spoke without an accent within a year of our arrival. But when he ordered me to forget everything that happened to us in Europe, Papa may have been thinking beyond that to this country’s anti-Semitic past. No doubt, he had read about the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts, America’s pro-Nazi organizations of the 1930s. He may have been told about workplace quotas, and even hiring prohibitions, of Jews—some of which he would experience personally in the coming years. He may have wanted to shield me from such potential impediments to achieving my American Dream. Accordingly, having driven memories of the war into some deep recess of my soul, there could be no introspection about my roots or my ethnicity.

For years in my new country, to my friends, colleagues, teammates, co-workers—indeed, to myself—I was an overreaching immigrant who at various times was a decent student, good athlete, dedicated teacher, successful entrepreneur, and devoted husband and father.

But since my immersion into my family’s story as I labored through writing the Prague book, every aspect of my life seemed to be affected by a new consciousness. An avid sports fan and former collegiate athlete, now I found myself checking players’ names and wondering if they were Jewish. Devouring stories about one of baseball’s greatest homerun hitters, Hank Greenberg, and finest pitchers, Sandy Koufax, became a subliminal act, as was cheering for golfers Amy Alcott, Corey Pavin, and Morgan Pressel, and for two of the finest female basketball players of all time, Nancy Lieberman and Sue Bird.

Beyond the seemingly inconsequential realm of sports, I found myself admiring the vast contributions of Jews to society as a whole—in science, medicine, art, music, and literature. I was amazed to discover that, while Jews constitute only 0.2% of the world’s population, they have been awarded more than twenty percent of Nobel Prizes.

I realized that millions of parents are indebted to Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin for discoveries that made it possible for children to grow up without the likelihood of being struck down by polio. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity forever revolutionized physics and mathematics. Marc Chagall’s contributions to the world of art, and those of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Hannah Arendt, and Elie Wiesel to literature, struck me as priceless. One can make a strong argument that Jews have contributed more to the world than any other ethnic group. I connected these achievements with Jewish culture’s emphasis on scholarship, and I related it to our family’s near-fanatical devotion to education.

Soon after I returned from a trip to Israel, I attended a lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. At one point, the speaker asked if there were any Holocaust survivors in the audience. Six or seven hands were raised and, when the survivors were asked to stand, I applauded along with the rest of the audience.

“Why didn’t you raise your hand back there?” asked a lady who introduced herself as a member of the Museum’s management at a reception following the lecture.

“Because I’m not a Holocaust survivor,” I replied.

“Oh, yes, you are!” she said. She explained to me that until 1991, children who had survived the war in hiding were not recognized as Holocaust survivors. “Then on Memorial Day 1991, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City, the Anti-Defamation League convened a conference during which it acknowledged the error. On that day, they formed the Hidden Child Foundation to reveal stories like yours to the world.”

So, now I was officially a Holocaust survivor, despite the fact that I am not a Jew. Yet, it dawned on me that I feel an affinity with Jews that I do not have with people of other faiths. It is possible that this feeling has been there throughout my adult life and that it remained below the surface until my father’s death brought it out into the open. I may not be able to differentiate a Shabbat from a Pasach, and I have no desire to convert to Judaism. But I have discovered the correct answer to the question so often posed to me:

“I don’t belong to an organized religion, but I have a Jewish soul.”