God, I've been thinking when did my Holocaust fascination start and I have to blame those ultra progressive hippie people who taught at my high school. We learned everything about the mass murder and torture of people. First how the American indians were wiped out, then how the Hawaiian people got wiped out, then slavery before the civil war, then how the Japanese were interned during World War 2, then the civil rights movement and Jim Crow laws in the South, then the Holocaust, then the killings happening in South America and my last high school memory, those pits of bodies they discovered in Rwanda, I think or some african country and then of course apartheid in South Africa. Oh yeah, how could I forget, of course the biggest hippie issue of them all, The Vietnam War.

I read my first holocaust book at age 16 and there were no jewish people in my high school. It was what we had to read in history or was it English class. Then I went to hippie liberal college and it was more of the same except this time I was going to school with kids whose grandparents or relatives had numbers tatooed on their skin and were survivors of the Jewish death camps. And I got to hear all about that. I even took courses on the Holocaust because my college offered them at the time and even consider taking Yiddish just to feed my holocaust obsession. Alas, no yiddish but 2 years of russian just in case I wanted to discuss the russian jewish pogroms with someone.

What strange paths your life takes you on sometimes. I guess all this knowledge will come in handy when I write my Elf Girl Chronicles, but who knew at the time.