This personal essay reflects on my family's relationship to the Holocaust and how this shaped my work. It shows the conflicts of a Catholic-raised German historian, from a working-class family, whose relationship and attitude to the Holocaust is in no way exceptional but rather ordinary in comparison to the majority of German society. Indifference, silence, and refusal mixed with feelings of guilt and shame characterize the ambiguous relationship with National Socialists and the Nazi Party. My work on Holocaust testimonies is shaped by the sense of continued “othering” inside German society towards the formerly persecuted, as well as against those who take an interest in these minorities. In addition, it is a struggle for an integrated and shared historical perception. These deliberations also address aspects of prejudices and “othering” from my side. With the intention of preventing prejudice and the fusion of history between Jewish and non-Jewish narratives in a tradition of disquieting differentiation, I describe the difficulties that exist in a shared history of genocidal events.