When author Lev Raphael was a child, he said "I imagined that I was a superhero with X-ray vision, and I could use it to cut Germany out of the map of the world."

Raphael knows the atrocities of the Holocaust firsthand, or rather through the eyes of his parents, who both survived the Holocaust.

"My parents were from Poland and Czechoslovakia, who came to New York in the 1950s," Raphael said.

He has written many of his 14 published books about his childhood growing up among Holocaust survivors.

Raphael presented the program "Writing a Jewish Life: The Holocaust As a Personal History" on Wednesday night as part of MSU Museum exhibit "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945." He currently is promoting his new novel, "The German Money."

Raphael received his doctorate degree from MSU in 1986 and has taught several writing classes at the university.

During the program, Raphael talked about how he was able to track the journey of his mothers' trips through concentration camps.

"The Nazis' obsession with keeping things organized and numbered allowed me to use the numbers she was given and track her through the system," he said.

He said he knows his mother did slave labor in a munitions factory that was run by the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. But he doesn't know very much about his father's time in the concentration camps, except that he spent time in Bergen-Belsen. He knew his parents met in a refugee camp in Brussels after their camps had been liberated.

"When you're Jewish, there are these huge gaps in your family history," Raphael said. "I knew only that I didn't have grandparents, and I knew that in my family it was best not to ask too many questions."

Raphael also remembers the paranoia that his parents felt about living in the United States.

"I was warned to never sign petitions because my parents were afraid the signature might be used against me," he said. "My parents criticized me for not sealing envelopes tightly enough because they were afraid that they might fall into the wrong hands. My parents lived in a misery museum."

He attributes much of this to the fact that "in the years after the war, no one wanted to hear the survivors' stories."

But now Raphael believes there is new interest in the Holocaust because "there are so many survivors' individual stories that no one ever knew about."

Exhibit curator Kris Morrissey believes that the museum's emphasis on lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender peoples' role in the Holocaust has uncovered issues that haven't been discussed.

"Sometimes those voices aren't heard," he said. "What we tried to do with this exhibit and program is to explore the many cultural voices in the Holocaust."

Raphael believes in the end that "my talent was forged of my parents' pain and confusion in the war, and my success will never redeem their pain."

Raphael said he plans to donate the uniform his mother wore in the munitions plant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.