Michael Moritz with Adam Lashinsky

Michael Moritz joins us with his deeply moving family story of displacement and otherness in the wake of the Holocaust—a legacy that must be heeded today.

About the Book

Sorting through papers and photographs after his mother’s death, Michael Moritz uncovered the history of close family members murdered by the Nazis. Although his parents managed to escape from Germany, exploring their journey took Moritz into a past of grief and dark shadows cast on Jewish life by the Holocaust.

Moritz’s parents arrived as child refugees in London before settling in Cardiff, Wales, after the war. But a sense of alienation haunted the family for nearly a century: the feeling of being an outsider, or Ausländer, passed from his parents to Moritz himself during his childhood and even in his adopted home of California, where he has become one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated investors.

“As the shadows of Trump lengthened, the refrain I had heard from my parents rang ever more loudly... ‘If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here.’”

Both a haunting elegy to his family heritage and a disturbingly relevant clarion call to resist fascism, Ausländer shows what can happen to anyone, anywhere, when ordinary people grant license to despots–and the trauma that remains for those who survive their reign.

About the Speakers

Michael Moritz was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954. A former TIME journalist and regular contributor to the Financial Times, he is the author of several books, including The Little Kingdom, the story of Apple's years as a private business. He was a partner in Sequoia Capital for 35 years and led the business between 1995 and 2012, becoming one of the most successful investors of his generation. Together with his wife, the author Harriet Heyman, he formed Crankstart, a San Francisco–based foundation devoted to helping those who might otherwise be left behind.

Adam Lashinsky is a city columnist for The San Francisco Standard.…