My father was born in Bosnia. When he was ten years old his family was killed by the Ustasha, and he was sent to a concentration camp in Germany. His mother, his father, his brothers and sisters — gone. Only an older sister and an older brother survived.

I did not know any of this as a child. He never spoke of it. I learned it from relatives, years later.

I have tried to imagine what those years were like. Ten years old. Family gone. A camp in Germany. Long working hours. Starvation. Horrors I can only begin to name. When the war ended he was fourteen. He was sent back to Belgrade and lived on the streets until his older sister found him and paid for his education.

He never spoke of the Croats who had killed his family. He never spoke of the camp. When I was a child I did not even know there was a difference between Croats and Serbs. I was in my twenties before I understood. His silence was protection — of himself, and of me. What he had seen was not something a child should carry.

After his education he served eighteen months of military duty. Just as he was to be released, a border dispute between Hungary and Yugoslavia kept him for another twenty months.

He was good looking. He managed a state-owned grocery store in the center of Belgrade, and his accounting was exemplary. Most state-owned stores ran at a loss. His showed profit. They put him on the television news — a man who had built something where others had failed. His handwriting was like calligraphy. And he could add numbers in his head faster than anyone I have ever seen. He was a living computer.

He worked long hours. When he came home in the evenings we children were already asleep. We saw him on Sundays, when he worked only half days. He always came home with gold ducats — round chocolate coins wrapped in gold aluminum foil. He was tender with us. He hugged us. He showed his love directly, without words, the way he did everything that mattered to him.

After his education he met my mother. When my oldest brother was born he fell into a deep depression and was hospitalized for six months. I never knew about this until I was grown. It left no shape I could see in our family. But I have thought about it since. He had survived the camp, the streets, the military. And then a child was born — new life, the future — and something in him collapsed. As if joy was harder to hold than suffering.

He loved my mother deeply. When she became ill he was at the hospital every day until late, sitting by her side. She died at fifty-nine. He was four years older. He died at sixty-six, from leukemia, two years after her. I think he did not want to stay much longer without her.

My brothers and I were in the room when he died. They had given him morphine. His lungs were filling with liquid. We watched him struggle with his last breaths.

The boy who had been sent to the camp at ten. The man who made the numbers come out right. The father who came home on Sundays with gold in his hands.

I felt a sorrow beyond words.

Even now, writing this, my tears are flowing.

From my book  The Kitchen Buddha