Author and artist Maurice Sendak, who narrates his own book in the video below, died today at age 83. In this interview from 2006, he recalls his father telling stories.

[Sendak] says he was greatly influenced by his father, who told the sickly child stories when he was bedridden. They weren’t pretty stories — they were real-life and vividly imagined tales from his father’s life as a boy living in a little Jewish shtetl in Poland. “What I liked about his stories … they were real and true, and he could tell us them without cleaning them up.”

Sendak says he closely identified with children who died in the holocaust, because if his parents hadn’t immigrated to the United States from Poland, he would have been one of those children. “‘I always felt it was a total miracle that I had been born here.” All of his father’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust, Sendak says, and many cousins his own age did not survive,” writes Frank Rizzo of The Courant.

“Most of my important books are threaded with the Holocaust. I try not to make it obvious and bang the drum, but it’s there. My whole life was the Holocaust, unfortunately. And Brundibar seems to be maybe the place where I can stop and bring peace to myself and the subject. It’s the perfect subject: of children who lived through the worst things, who were tough, who sang and then were sent to Auschwitz to die.”