Exploring how personal inheritances of the Holocaust—the Shoah—shaped particular familial silences, I show how they created a need for philosophy and social theories that helped grasp the truth of what remained unspoken. As my parents’ generation insisted on having exclusive ownership of the past, while tacitly contracting that children create futures that can redeem their survival, I was concerned with learning how to live a meaningful human life. I was drawn to feminisms and sexual politics that focused upon the quality of everyday experience in ways that both Marx and Kant—quite differently—remained tied to traditions of Enlightenment rationalism. While it has taken time to face these traumatic histories and their legacies, they have also shaped my sense of the significance of moral learning and theories of moral development that engage with the evils that were perpetrated, while also ensuring, as much as we can, that they are not repeated.