The French call it the Côte d’Azur, the Blue Coast. Matisse, Chagall, and Picasso painted there—you can see the jewel-bright colors in their work—and the writer James Baldwin found a haven amid the quiet green hills of Saint-Paul de Vence.

I didn’t know how I was going to step foot in Germany, let alone tour the Dachau concentration camp. Yet summer was coming, when I traveled for research, and I was writing Nothing Is Forgotten, and both Munich and the camp, 25 kilometers outside the city, were central to my novel.

Misha Daniels, who narrates much of Nothing Is Forgotten, spends part of the novel in Munich, Germany, broadcasting rock & roll into the Soviet Union. In fact, these efforts were funded by the CIA and, for me, picturing John Lennon standing beside a crew-cut spy is an endless source of amusement.

In April 1961, the trial began playing on the TV in our den, and the images still hover on the edges of my memory—the mournful parade of survivors testifying while Adolf Eichmann sat in his glass cube.

I learned to touch history before I learned to read it, in the form of an army knapsack that belonged to my Uncle Leonard, my father’s older brother.

Here is my father Lance, shortly before he was drafted. He spent three years stationed Stateside while his brother fought in Europe, and on his first day of basic training, he discovered that his religion didn’t endear him to all of his countrymen.

My mother died young, before I ever published a book. Her name was Evelyn, and she hid a generous fund of sadness and anger behind an exquisite, heart-shaped mask. As a child, I learned to listen by listening to her memories of losing the grandmother who raised her, and her father losing his business in the Depression, and her family losing their home and a little girl leaving her bedroom in the middle of the night.

My paternal grandparents, Mae and Nathan, who emigrated to America as children, told me stories from vanished empires—Mae from Austro-Hungary, Nathan from Russia.

As the publication date of Nothing Is Forgotten approaches (April 10), I’ve been considering what to post about the novel.