The Right of Passage E-Book

Julian Beecroft

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 538

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'The Right of Passage makes visceral and intimate – and all the more meaningful – the story of the Holocaust and a family's struggle to escape its unspeakable evils.' - Ken Burns, filmmaker, director of The US and the Holocaust How much could the victims of the Holocaust have known of what awaited them? How much should they have known? In this sobering account of a German-Jewish family in flight for their lives, The Right of Passage reveals the difficult, often desperate dilemmas in which they found themselves as they looked for safe passage away from the Nazi regime. Inspired by a cache of abandoned negatives that show an idyllic pre-war Europe, the book draws heavily on letters and telegrams newly translated from German. These exchanges among leading thinkers of the period vividly record an intellectual culture in flight, in which even the finest minds found it difficult to grasp what was coming. Most of the family's members found safety in England, Ireland or America, some only just in time. But the logician and philosopher Kurt Grelling, exiled in Belgium, was arrested when the Nazis invaded. Deported to France and interned by the Vichy regime, despite the efforts of friends and colleagues to help, Grelling's attempts to find passage to America were hindered by forces beyond his control. But his letters speak across the decades, urging us to remember the impossible predicament faced by millions in the same position.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Right of Passage

‘Sometimes the dates and numbers of the past obscure the individual human dramas that comprise our history. Fortunately, The Right of Passage makes visceral and intimate – and all the more meaningful – the story of the Holocaust and a family’s struggle to escape its unspeakable evils.’

Ken Burns, filmmaker, director of The US and the Holocaust

‘An evocative and urgent reminder of the perils of being a bystander at a time of burgeoning threats to democratic freedoms around the world. ... The Right of Passage is a work of meticulous research and rare devotion. What began with a serendipitous discovery of a cache of negatives in a rubbish bin in Massachusetts almost half a century ago became the book you hold now in your hands: one-part gripping detective story, one-part page-turning tragedy about the untold potential lost to antisemitism and the Holocaust. ... a work of great historical importance with deep resonance for our current moment.’

Kelly Horan, author of Devotion and Defiance

‘What begins with a box of abandoned negatives and notebooks yields a thrilling piece of detective work and the revelation of a family history shaped by flight, tragedy, and exile.’

Joseph Pearson, author of My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War

‘A well-researched reconstruction of how a gifted German-Jewish logician had to flee to Belgium but finally ended up in the Nazi camps. The reader can follow, in Grelling’s own words, how even during difficult times friendship and love and even intellectual exchange was not destroyed by the brutality of Nazism.’

Frank Caestecker, Professor of History, University of Ghent

‘Snapshots of an unbroken but acutely endangered belief in the power of reason … the painstaking and detailed research reveals an important insight: as the number of contemporary witnesses continues to dwindle, our knowledge and future generations’ understanding of the Nazi reign of terror and the Holocaust depends on the rescue, careful research and publication of letters, diaries and other personal documents that document human behaviour in inhumane times, but which are largely not yet kept in archives. One such accidentally preserved collection of letters and photographs forms the basis for this extraordinary and exemplary book.’

Joachim Schloer, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Southampton

‘The fate of the Grelling family kept me spellbound. Their brilliance and resilience in desperate times told through letters, photographs and personal reflections is moving and a must-read in a world that is still grappling with one of history’s darkest chapters.’

Helene Munson, author of Boy Soldiers: A Personal Story of Nazi Elite Schooling and Its Legacy of Trauma

‘This book tells the story of one Jewish family’s experience during the Nazi era in Germany ... a detailed and engrossing examination of one extended family’s travails during that dark time. But it is impossible to read it without recognizing how enormously relevant it is to today ...

Sheila Suess Kennedy, J.D., Professor Emerita Law & Public Policy

O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs,

Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis

‘The Right of Passage is a meticulously researched book that is both intellectually fascinating and deeply moving. Although subtitled One Jewish Family’s Struggle to Escape the Holocaust, it tells a broader story about the fate of German Jewry under the Nazis and their willing accomplices in Vichy France, a fate made worse by the unwillingness of western democracies, sometimes driven by home-grown antisemitism, to accommodate refugees fleeing genocidal tyranny. … Assembled from a treasure-trove of family correspondence, interviews, private memoirs and photographs, The Right of Passage is a must-read for anyone interested in Holocaust studies.’

John Jay, author of Ninette’s War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France

‘The Right of Passage is an intimate Holocaust narrative that conjures full lives from fragments – letters, photographs, interviews and archival materials. … There is heroism in the devotion of Kurt Grelling and his circle of European intellectuals to their work and to one another, in the resilience of the Grelling family, and in many small acts of kindness at the story’s edges. There is also a grand and pitiless combination of human forces that corrupts or pulverizes all it touches. However dramatic, this is a history of individuals and small communities, memorialized as they must be if we are to remember the many millions.’

Noah Chafets, Cyril O. Houle Chair, Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, University of Chicago

Cover image: The C.G. Francklyn (aka the Rügen) in the harbour at Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, August 1929. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive).

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Julian Beecroft & Sheri Blaney, 2025

The right of Julian Beecroft & Sheri Blaney to be identifiedas the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any informationstorage or retrieval system, without the permission in writingfrom the Publishers.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 706 3

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CONTENTS

GERMANY

Discovery

The Gypsy Life Isn’t Beautiful

An Irretrievable Separation

BELGIUM

A Man of Letters

J’accuse!

The Invariant of Transpositions

Everything Is a Risk

Letters from America

Many People Are Disappearing from Brussels

FRANCE

The Camp on the Beach

The New School

A Book of Essays

A Man in My Position

How Nerve-shredding this Constant Waiting Is

On Love Alone

The Choice

Stolperstein

Afterlife

Acknowledgements

Text Credits

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

‘A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society merely as a man, without money, name or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothinghas less weight than his human qualities.’

Max Horkheimer, from‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics’, 1937

GERMANY

DISCOVERY

This book began with some notebooks and a cache of old negatives, offered as a gift one summer evening more than forty years ago. The images were taken by a talented but unknown photographer first identified by Sheri Blaney, without whose original research this story would not have come to light. Sheri has worked with and been fascinated by photographs her entire life. But, even so, the negatives she was given, once she had found the time to examine them, were quite unexpected in what they revealed: a forgotten world of freedom, of travel and friendship and family ties, during the brief period after the end of the First World War in which democracy flourished in many parts of Europe. Slowly, she found living descendants of the people in the photographs. From what they told her, a picture emerged of a notable family of German Jews, including scientists and intellectuals whose influence on national life had been significant, before the madness that took hold of Germany in 1933.

Having found a lot of valuable information, Sheri approached me for help in developing her brief early manuscript into a full-length book. In the course of further research in university archives in the USA and western Europe, I found collections of extraordinary letters in various languages – in English and in French but above all in German – that reflected the cosmopolitan background of those who wrote them. As my wife Ulla and I began translating them, it was clear, almost from the start, the scope of the story that was there to be told and needed to be told.

At the centre of most of the letters, either writing or receiving them or else being written about, was Kurt Grelling, with whose fate this book is mainly concerned. A distinguished logician, mathematician and philosopher of science, the German translator of several works by Bertrand Russell, Grelling was a friend or colleague of some of the most important thinkers of the time, members of the Vienna Circle and in particular the closely related Berlin Group, in which he was a leading light. Beginning in 1934, the letters tell a story of how democratic freedoms, which had flourished across large parts of Europe since the end of the First World War, came increasingly under threat. Grelling’s frank exchange of views with fellow philosophers, especially Jewish figures such as Otto Neurath and Paul Oppenheim, shows how Nazi ideology had impinged upon their freedom of thought, forcing them to reckon with the rise of antisemitism as a political issue that for Jews was existential. Most of his friends and colleagues were among the hundreds of thousands who were able to emigrate, mainly to the USA, though often by the skin of their teeth. Grelling was not among them. From the summer of 1940, stuck in a French internment camp, frustrated by the US immigration system, which grew increasingly hostile to Jews, Grelling’s letters turned more desperate, as the efforts of friends to secure him a visa and passage on a ship finally came to nothing.

Sheri could not have known any of this back in 1980, when her friend had given her the notebooks and the various sheets of negatives. He had found them lying on a pavement outside a house in Arlington, Massachusetts, not far from where she was living at the time. As she wrote in her original manuscript: I had already worked for many years in the field of publishing, copyright, and photography, which has been my professional specialty ever since. My friend was working on construction at the house and discovered them out front on the sidewalk. He imagined that the new owner had found them, left behind by the previous occupant in an attic or closet, and put them out there so that anyone with enough curiosity might pick them up. Knowing my interests, my friend brought me what turned out to be a treasure trove of fifty-year-old images: 400 medium-format, black-and-white negatives, plus a dozen or so strips of the more modern 35mm negatives which I put to one side, assuming they were of no importance or had no connection to the older-format negatives.

Along with the medium-format negatives there were several notebooks. Three of them contained handwritten, brief – almost cryptic – numbered descriptions written mostly in German, dating from the years 1929 to 1935, corresponding to about 250 of the numbered negatives. Nowhere was there any contact information that would have enabled me to return the material immediately to its owner, as I would like to have done. So, to preserve the negatives, I transferred them from their original glassine sleeves to archival pages, hoping one day to have the time to fully appreciate them; to find the people – perhaps a family – who had owned them, and to share with them the lives the images portray so intimately.

After four busy decades in which Sheri had sometimes wondered about the negatives, in 2020, when the Covid pandemic confined everyone in their homes, she suddenly had the time and attention she had always promised she would give them.

Several of the negatives and notebooks that were given to Sheri in 1980. (© Sheri Blaney)

I woke up thinking about the negatives, fearful that my children might toss them out after I was gone, and that once again they would end up on a sidewalk for the landfill. Being semi-retired already, with extra time on my hands I started to examine the notebooks and negatives, to scan any images that seemed arresting enough to reproduce, and to research the people and places they depicted, with no real idea of what I would find.

It seemed unlikely that any of the people who appeared in the photographs would be alive today, but very likely they were someone’s parents, grandparents, relatives, or friends. Was there a friend or relative out there who could shed light on these mysterious photos or could tell me who had taken them?

The photographs themselves were sometimes of a rare beauty and narrative scope. From their unity of style, it was clear they were the work of someone with a keen eye, technical competence and, in some of the more artful shots, an awareness of trends in the photography of the time. They were carefully composed and accomplished across a wide variety of situations, including everything from lakes and snowy mountain landscapes to thoughtfully posed portraits and amusing snapshots of people in period clothing, engaged in travel or activities of one kind or another, or often just relaxing at home. There was a woman on the telephone and another one listening to the radio. There was someone operating a MADAS machine (a manual, mechanical calculator) and a family standing by a 1930s LaSalle sedan, both state-of-the-art technologies at the time. There was a large number of outdoor shots showing people enjoying their pets or skiing or sitting in a café, a girl of college age smoking a pipe and a group of young men in swimsuits clowning around. But there were also other kinds of studied or documentary images – still-life interiors, parades on the streets of a city, and European scenery and architecture photographed with great skill. The range of subjects and the recurrence of certain people across different sets of photos suggested that these were not the work of a professional but that of a gifted amateur with a natural feel for the use of light and an instinct for composition.

Saying goodbye at the train station in Basel, Switzerland, c. 1935. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

A busy street scene in Geneva, Switzerland, c.1934. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Nebelmeer (sea of fog), Rigi-Kaltbad, Switzerland, December/January 1932/33. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Hikers at Mer de Glace, Chamonix, France. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

A man posing with his two dachshunds. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Skijoring, a winter sport showing a woman on skis being pulled by a horse and rider, Adelboden, Switzerland, 1934. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

A woman working at a MADAS machine. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Mutti on the telephone, Berlin, early 1930s. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

A group of young men clowning around, Switzerland. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

The Swiss Alps with tourists enjoying the view, c.1934. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Women listening to a guitar player, Salève, Saint-Claude, Jura, eastern France, August 1932. The note for this photo is simply Heimatklange (sounds of home). (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

As each negative emerged as a positive image through my photo scanner, I was intrigued to see pictures that for nearly a century had been hidden away. I found it strangely moving to view this forgotten world, and my own instinct told me that others would find it as fascinating as I did. I noted the photographer had taken time to organize the negatives and record dates, events, and some names that might offer insight into the lives of the people in the photographs. But there was not enough information to address the many unanswered questions I was left with. Above all, I wondered who had taken these photographs, how they had come from Europe to New England, and why they had been left behind for the trash back in 1980.

Sheri turned to the notebooks for clues. Each notebook contained pages for handwritten notes with individual columns for dates, locations and descriptions, followed by bound glassine-sleeved pages that held the corresponding numbered negatives. Most of the text was in German with a few English and French words, depending on where the photos had been taken. The photographer was clearly a very methodical person; the written record they had kept would have crystallised any memories that might be triggered by seeing these images sometime in the future. But the records were also incomplete. Many of the negatives lacked the corresponding written notes, leaving little clue as to whose faces were captured, or where and when they were taken. But through a bit of research and by matching up some of the faces to people already identified in the notebooks, Sheri was able to make a few connections, although even at the time of writing, more than three years later, many mysteries remain.

Some of the place names in the notebooks were unfamiliar, where one-time German names had now been changed. But she realised that Stettin meant Szczecin, once in German East Prussia on the Baltic coast but a part of Poland since the end of the Second World War; one photo depicted a bascule bridge in the city, the central section of the Bahnhofsbrücke or station bridge that spanned the River Oder, a rare image of a structure that is no longer there. Reval was even more obscure but turned out to be the old German name for Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a newly independent republic after the Treaty of Versailles. And Helsingfors is the Swedish name, and the old German name, for Helsinki, the capital of Finland, another young democratic nation a few hours by ferry across the Baltic Sea.

These were just the first few images in one of the books. All were taken in August 1929, the earliest recorded date. Whoever had shot them had clearly been making a journey. The image from Reval was of a ship, which we have since identified as the Rügen, the name given in the notebooks to describe the image. The Rügen had entered service as a mine-laying ship in the Baltic in late 1914 and served as a hospital ship in the early 1940s. But the records Sheri found contained no information about the ship’s activity during the years 1919 to 1939. As she wrote in her manuscript, I had already noticed that the smokestacks bear the letters ‘C’ and ‘G’, and at one point discovered that the C.G. Francklyn, a Cunard ship whose profile matches the one in the photograph, was sailing out of Stettin in the late 1920s. It certainly looks like a passenger ship in the photo.

The bascule bridge, Stettin, East Prussia (now Szczecin, Poland), August 1929. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

The next several images, a dozen or so, are light-damaged or underexposed, like most of those that were taken on this first trip. But together they confirm the impression of a journey going north across eastern Finland, through the region known as Karelia. This remote territory had a long border with the Soviet Union, which invaded soon after the outbreak of the Second World War; the often-forgotten conflict was ended with Finland ceding territory in Karelia to its much larger neighbour – territory that remains in Russian hands. But these were images of a peaceful world in which people at leisure could go wherever they pleased and did so with a lust for life that was heightened after years of war and the economic hardship which had followed. The Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, one of the most cosmopolitan figures during that brief window of European freedom, said as much in his memoir The World of Yesterday. ‘There was never so much travelling as in those years’, he wrote of the peaceful period between 1918 and 1933: ‘was it the impatience of the young to make up for what they had missed when countries were cut off from each other? Or was it, perhaps, a dark foreboding, a sense that we must take our chance to break out of confinement before the barriers began coming down again?’1

There is little sense of dark foreboding in these photographs of the trip to Finland or in most of the images that the mystery photographer took over the next few years. Whoever this person was, they were clearly exercising not only a freedom to travel but a sense of adventure in the way they experimented with the camera, as if seeing the world, or at least the places they were shooting, for the very first time, as we now realise was almost certainly the case. There are atmospheric images of Finland’s largest lake, Lake Saimaa, including a silhouette, taken facing the sun, of a woman standing at the deck rail of a ship. In fact, there are several pictures of the same woman in this brief travelogue, and Sheri also noticed that the woman appeared in many more images taken in various locations across Europe over the following few years. Referred to in the notebooks as Mutti, the German word for Mummy, she is still quite young, no more than early middle age. On this evidence, it seemed likely that the photographer, presumably the woman’s child, was no more than a teenager when these images were made.

Mutti in Florence, at the Basilica di San Lorenzo, spring 1935.(© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

View from the belltower of the Transfiguration Monastery, Valamo, Finland (now Valaam, Russia), August 1929. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

The journey through Finland seems to have taken them at one point to the Orthodox Transfiguration Monastery on the island of Valamo (today Valaam) on Lake Ladoga, an enormous body of water, north of St Petersburg, that covers an area of almost 7,000 square miles. Both lake and island now lie wholly within the borders of Russia, but at the time, the monastery was the most important in the Finnish Orthodox Church. There is even a sweeping panorama taken from the top of the bell tower of this building, the Glockenturm referred to in the notebook entry for this image. Clearly, the photographer was making the most of their freedom.

Subsequent sets of photos, in 1931 and 1933, record trips to southern England, to the cities of Winchester and Bristol among other places, where the photographer seems to have had relatives or friends; and in almost every year from 1930 to 1935 there were visits to different parts of Switzerland around the cities of Zurich, Bern and Geneva and the Jura region of eastern France. The photographer is alive to the drama of natural light in the stark images of snowy landscapes captured in different parts of the Swiss Alps, a technical but also an aesthetic achievement that becomes a feature even in some of the interior shots taken later on.

The arches of the understorey of the Vasari Corridor, Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy, 1935. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

The final trip, to Italy from March to May 1935, may well have been the longest. These photos are aesthetically more daring, with striking images such as an abstract shot of the understorey of the Vasari Corridor in Florence, a vanishing tunnel of arches whose unknown destination induces a sense of unease. But there were also more named individuals among the notebook entries for this trip, including someone called Tante Grete, suggesting time spent with family and friends in cities such as Florence, Siena and Perugia, but also at a place called Villa Incontri, though what that was, and where, was still a mystery. And then there were more images of Switzerland – of Zurich and Bern and Lake Lugano – whose date was unknown, as there were no more notebooks with information on when and where they were taken or what their subjects were. But their technical competence suggested a date that came later than the summer of 1935.

Then one day, looking more closely at one of the negatives, Sheri discovered an important clue. In the photo of the woman listening to the radio there appears to be a drawing or a print of The Star of David partially visible on the wall, to the right of the radio, which I only happened to notice with the help of my Schneider 4X Lupe, a jeweler’s magnifier that was used in the printing industry to examine photographic film before the advent of digital photography. Had I not had this tool to view it, and had I not been raised by Jewish parents, I might have missed this familiar symbol of Jewish identity. But even having found this out did not tell me who this woman was. I could find no information for the negative. Based on the span of years recorded in the notebooks, but also her clothing and the wireless radio, the photo was likely taken between 1929 and 1936, though I couldn’t say what relationship she had to people in the photos I had already scanned, or even who had taken the picture. Was it the same woman who had travelled so extensively, or had the photo-maker now become the subject? Whatever was the case, since much of the handwritten content of the notebooks appeared to be in German, I suspected the woman and her family were of German origin and almost certainly Jewish.

Encouraged by this discovery, Sheri kept looking. The unknown photographer’s habit of shooting home interiors offered further clues to the family’s background and identity. In one negative Sheri noticed a print of a Käthe Kollwitz image of a mother and child, Mutter mit Kind from 1933, hung on a wall.

Having been a Kollwitz fan since my teens, I immediately recognized her style of drawing. Kollwitz was a Berliner, a fiercely political artist who despised Hitler, war, and the devastation it brought, which she had seen first-hand in the conditions that existed in the capital city at the end of the First World War. When I visited Berlin after the Wall came down, I had sought out Kollwitz’s neighborhood and went to the park, Kollwitzplatz, where a sculpture of the artist was installed in her honor. I was now beginning to feel more closely connected to these mysterious negatives which had landed serendipitously in my lap over forty years earlier.

After concentrating for several months on the older, large-format negatives, I began examining the strips of 35mm negatives. From the dates on the documents, and markings on the negatives, I determined that they were photographed in 1941, using Agfa film, with a Leica camera. To my surprise, these apparently unrelated strips held important clues to the photographer’s identity as well as that of several other family members. These images were not only of people, but for some reason known only to the photographer, contained several shots of the same young woman as well as various documents, including an employment letter, a tax payment and other bank information for a Marion E. Samter living at 165 Coolidge Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. The employment letter stated Marion’s yearly salary of $1,041, paid to her by the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in Boston. Also shown are copies of a few of the documents this woman would have photographed, presumably as proof of employment for some official purpose, including a letter from the Franklin Savings Bank, again based in Boston.

Marion by the radio, and the Star of David on the wall, undated. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Could I assume that Marion E. Samter was the photographer who had taken all those earlier images at so many locations across Europe, as well as these mundane bureaucratic shots? Certainly, the woman sitting on a wall in one of the 35mm negs was very likely the same woman listening to the radio with The Star of David in the background. She wasn’t facing the camera in the earlier shot, but the hair, the general physique, and the profile seemed to indicate that the same person was the subject of both pictures.

It was a fair supposition, but without clear evidence Sheri couldn’t be sure, so she turned to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, searching their online database for a Marion E. Samter. Finding some matching records, she contacted the society’s Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center, from whom she was given some additional information. The documents she had on the film were an exact match with online records as well as others that came up for a Marion E. Samter of Brookline, close to Boston. These new records included a ship’s manifest of ‘alien passengers’, her social security application and a ‘HIAS’2 case file from August 1941.

I felt like I had found the woman I was looking for, but still I had no definitive proof that Marion E. Samter of Brookline had any connection to the older negatives and notebooks going back to 1929. I needed to find a living relative who could identify the person in the 35mm negatives and confirm that she was the same woman as appeared in the earlier European shots. By digging into Ancestry.com, I was able to find the child of a Marion E. Samter, a daughter named Anita who lived in Oregon. I telephoned her, not knowing but hoping that she was indeed the daughter of ‘my’ Marion, the young woman in the photos.

Marion’s professor in front of a blackboard with various mathematical equations, Bern, 1935–38. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

Anita was thrilled to hear of the existence of the negatives and notebooks. She exchanged photos and documents by email with Sheri and had soon confirmed that her family and the one in the images that Marion had taken were one and the same, that the woman standing by the radio was indeed her mother Marion, at home in Berlin, and that Mutti was her grandmother Else. Anita also said that Marion was an avid fan of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose artwork is on display in the family home. She added that members of her family tree included an accomplished writer, a scientist and a logician, each with an international reputation.

Anita also recalled that her mother, Marion, had attended college in Berlin. But, with increasing Nazi persecution of the Jewish community, in 1935 – the same year as the Nuremberg race laws were introduced – she had gone to Switzerland to finish her education, obtaining a PhD in Actuarial Mathematics from the University of Bern in 1938. The chronology of the photographs certainly fits this timeline of growing oppression, with the last of the European trips documented in the notebooks, the one to Italy, being made in the spring of 1935, when things were already difficult for German Jews but travel abroad was not yet impossible. Thereafter, the photos seem to be of places in Switzerland, including a shot of a lecturer at a blackboard graffitied with advanced equations, taken perhaps surreptitiously from a desk several rows back in the classroom. It strongly suggested that she was living there to pursue her doctoral degree. It was certainly a move that made sense.

The impact of the new laws, which downgraded the rights of Germans of Jewish background, forbidding them from marrying non-Jews and turning them from citizens into ‘subjects’ of the state, had the effect of sending Jewish Germans into internal exile within their own country. Jewish university students had already been barred from studying for ordinary degrees, let alone doctorates, so Marion’s decision to develop her talents abroad was one that many in her position would have taken given the means. She needed to become as attractive as she could be for any country that would have her as an immigrant; clearly, there was no going back.

Having few options inside the German-speaking world, of those available, it seems likely that her familiarity with Switzerland, as shown in the annual visits she had made to every region of the country, made it the obvious choice. Given what was happening in Germany during the years she spent in Switzerland, Marion may well have been reluctant to come home. She may already have left when, in the summer of 1935, her mother Else moved into the top-floor flat in a house she had jointly bought with her brother, Kurt Grelling, at Wilhelmstrasse 13 in Lichterfelde-Ost, a suburb in the south of Berlin; Kurt, his non-Jewish wife Greta and their two children all lived in the ground-floor flat. Anita doesn’t recall her mother ever speaking about the property, though for brief periods Marion must have stayed there. She often mentioned the multiple times she came back to Berlin to gather up her documents and belongings. This must have been in 1938; her studies had ended and her choice to emigrate to America had been made. At that point, the USA had not yet tightened its immigration laws to the extent that would later present such difficulties for other Jewish academics – among them her uncle Kurt – with far greater experience and reputation than a young woman who had only just finished her PhD.

Marion in ski clothing with her camera, Switzerland, 1935. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

In October that year, she returned to Berlin one last time, to collect her last belongings and also her passport. Official Nazi policy at this point was still to encourage Jews to emigrate, though with most no longer able to work or study, with businesses being confiscated, and with Jews racially vilified as a group by public officials, she must have wondered how long it would be before even this was forbidden, as soon it would be. As later became clear in the correspondence of other members of the family, especially that of Marion’s uncle, Kurt Grelling, with his friends and colleagues – and as famous accounts like the private diaries of Dresden professor Victor Klemperer bear out – German Jews were very aware of the growing threat they faced. The range of places and situations in every continent where they looked for refuge during the later 1930s was a measure of how bad things became, both in Germany and in the many countries that, increasingly, would not take them in.

America was the place where most Jews wanted to go. But for most of the world’s people, the land of immigrants had been hard to get into for many years. The Johnson–Reed Act (aka the Immigration Act), passed by the US Congress in 1924, had set maximum annual quotas for immigrants from each country. Informed by the rise of scientific racism in the early twentieth century, whose bogus scientific claims made racial bias a politically respectable creed, the act saw quotas assigned to people from countries in western Europe, and especially northern Europe, that were far larger than the quotas given to other places. Prospective immigrants could only apply for a visa for the country of their birth, not their country of citizenship if the two happened to differ, out of a need to define them by race. There was no official US asylum or refugee policy, just these very particular immigration quotas, with by far the largest – 65,721 per annum, a very specific number – allotted to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the UK. Germany had the second-largest quota, but this figure – at 25,957, less than half the British quota – was applied to a population almost half as large again. US immigration since the turn of the century had come mostly from what the framers of the law regarded as ‘less desirable’ nations in southern and eastern Europe. With the goal of preserving the existing balance of ethnicities in America, the new law set quotas for those places that were derisory at best. When war broke out, these paltry amounts and the quotas in general effectively barred most of the large numbers of Jews from all over Europe who wanted to escape.

For German Jews, demand soared after the pogrom of 9 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. That night of murderous terror in cities and towns across Austria and Germany took place the month after Marion had come back to Berlin that one last time. Even before this had happened, in September that year, the list of German Jews waiting for a US quota visa had grown to 220,000, more than a third of the Jewish population. Kristallnacht and its aftermath would soon swell that number. Assuming that she had acted quickly and applied for her US visa on returning to Switzerland, Marion had probably just got ahead of the flood of applicants that would follow over the next two and a half years, among them her mother, her aunt Charlotte and her uncle Kurt.

But even this piece of excellent timing was no guarantee of success. Prospective immigrants needed to get hold of many different documents within a short window – some were valid for a limited period, some dependent on possession of the others. With quotas running out toward the end of the year, obtaining a visa involved a tricky combination of administrative dexterity, timing and luck. Marion was certainly lucky, in part because she had taken the decision – presumably with Else’s blessing – to emigrate without her mother. Else would have to find her own way of getting out.

Anita provided Sheri with copies of Marion’s passport and the handwritten note she had written in her late eighties, describing her last trip back into Germany from Switzerland. Re-entering the country where she was now regarded as something less than fully human, she was strip-searched. The passport, dated 15 October 1938, may not have been newly issued but instead an existing one crudely altered by a new measure that gave clear evidence of the Nazis’ direction of travel. Following the Decree on Passports of Jews that came into force on 5 October, all new or existing passports for Jewish-German nationals had to be stamped on the front with a big red J. So, on her last trip home, one way or another this act of conspicuous branding was applied to Marion’s passport under the new law. In fact, while the Nazis would have needed no encouragement, negotiations with the Swiss federal government, increasingly reluctant to take in Jewish refugees, had persuaded them to adopt the new rule, emblazoning the scarlet letter on the passports of German Jews. This single measure saw an immediate change of attitude towards her when Marion returned to the Alpine nation. As she later wrote, That stopped me from being admitted back into Switzerland after a brief stay in Berlin for the purpose of packing some more stuff. How did I finally manage to get back into Switzerland? A Swiss friend of mine, the widow of my math professor, purchased an Albanian visa for me so that the Swiss felt safe that they could kick me out to Albania when they wanted to get rid of me.3

Marion Samter’s German passport from 1938. (Courtesy of Anita Savio)

The teacher in the photo that Marion took of the maths class may well have been the same professor whose widow would later help her to get the visa she mentions in her note. But whoever it was, she soon had the documents she needed, including the prized US visa that so many Jewish refugees were hoping to obtain. Securing a berth on the steamer SS Noordam, she left the Dutch port of Rotterdam on 18 February 1939, bound for New York City. The ‘List or Manifest for Alien Passengers to the United States Immigrant Inspector at Port of Arrival’ records her as passenger twenty-four out of twenty-four. The document as a whole is something of a group portrait of the range of people fleeing the coming storm, with one defining thing in common.

All are listed as reading German, though under the heading of ‘Nationality’, one family of five is given as Polish, the remaining nineteen being German. Under the next heading of ‘Race or people’, all are listed as ‘Hebrew’, a racial designation that persisted in US immigration policy until 1943. The ages range from 2 to 85 years old; there are several families, and there are five children under 16. Most of the men are merchants, but there are also two physicians and one professor. Marion is listed as ‘Dr. Phil.’; the other women are without profession.

The majority of the twenty-four were born in various cities in Germany, with the remaining passengers from Poland, Czechoslovakia and even, in one case, Australia. Next to the serial number of their individual immigration visas is the place where each was issued. In Marion’s case this was Zurich, on 3 February 1939; the same city is also given as her last residence or address. Her mother Else is listed as living at Wilhelmstrasse 13, Berlin, in the flat above that of her brother Kurt, his wife Greta and their children, where by that point only Greta remained. Marion’s final destination is given as New York. The form confirms that she has paid her own passage and possesses more than the minimum sum of $50 required to enter the country. As in every case where the word ‘MORE’ has been written in this column, a handwritten figure has been scrawled over the top, which in her own case appears to be ‘250’.

Every passenger has stated their intention not to return to their country of origin, to remain in the United States and to become a US citizen. Each one gives the address of the person they will live with upon entering the country, which in the case of Marion is someone she lists as an acquaintance: Frida Schoenfeld of 615 Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, NYC. It is possible that Ms Schoenfeld acted as the financial sponsor that every immigrant needed to secure a visa. She may have been an old colleague of her father Victor during his time at the Merrimac Chemical Company, based in the state of Massachusetts. Anita is sure that Else had kept in contact with his colleagues after the death of her husband, though it’s unlikely that she had met them in person.

Whoever this woman was, Marion would be safe in America. But her mother was still in Berlin, with many documents to get hold of before she herself could leave. The hardest part was to find a country that would take her. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, America now seemed impossible, despite Marion having arrived there so recently. But there was family in England – a nephew and a niece – and her sister was now in Ireland. So, with great reluctance, Else bent her efforts to what seemed a more attainable goal.

THE GYPSY LIFE ISN’T BEAUTIFUL

The woman in the photographs referred to as Mutti is elegant and self-possessed, the product of an affluent background which had cushioned her from the hardships of the Weimar years. Her maiden name was Else Grelling. Her parents were both Jewish: her father, the writer and lawyer Richard Grelling, and her mother Margarethe, whose family, the Simons, were very wealthy indeed. Her parents’ marriage had ended in divorce when Else was 10. But, from the evidence of Marion’s photos of so many foreign trips in the early 1930s, Else had sufficient income that she and her daughter could afford to live comfortably, despite Else being a single parent with no history of earning a living that Marion ever mentioned. She seems at ease in front of the camera, amused and possibly flattered to be the subject of so much attention. To all appearances, her affluence made the difficulties of life without a husband less of a burden than otherwise they might have been. But the self-portrait that emerges from the few letters of Else’s that survive is rather at odds with the air of confidence of the woman in the photos.

Else sitting at a café table, Friedrichshafen, Germany, August 1930. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

It may have been the setbacks in childhood, the bitter quarrelling of her parents that ended in divorce; or the body blow of early widowhood and the social isolation of being a single parent at a time when German society was indifferent to the fate of widows: by 1918, war had made so many. Most likely, it was different factors combined that made Else, by her own admission, very awkward in the company of people she didn’t know well. And by the early months of 1939, there was also the unavoidable reality that, like every Jewish German, her standing in society had been degraded by six years of Nazi rule. Even living as discreetly as she did, whenever she left the house – whenever she had to go out – she may have wondered if her sense of style and the confident demeanour she was able to project was sufficient to conceal her Jewish background; whether she could still come across as a German of the upper middle class. It was something she had hardly had to think about until the Nazis had taken over, since when they had tried to make her think of nothing else. A card in the Berlin archives from the population, occupation and business census of 17 May 1938, in which Else is among those listed, each with a horizontal row of their own, has columns for forename, family name, date of birth, place of birth. But there are also four individual columns under the general heading: Was or is any of the grandparents of the Jewish race (yes or no).1 In each of the four columns in Else’s row, the answer is yes. So, in early 1939, whenever she went to the shops or took the S-Bahn into central Berlin, to speak to lawyers or bureaucrats about her plans for emigration and the sale of the house, appearing to be what she had never had to think that she was not may have taken an effort of will that one dark look or a pointed remark could have quickly undone.

The sense of jeopardy was never easy for anyone to cope with, even less so when you had suffered the losses that Else had known. Her parents’ marriage had been unhappy, but, as a young woman on the threshold of adulthood, Else would have hoped her own life would be different. In her teenage years, after her father had left, and then once her sister and brother had gone, she had lived with her mother and stepfather, the banker Richard Landsberger, and Eva, her stepsister, the offspring of that marriage, who was very much younger than her. Then at some point around 1910, when Else was 20 years old, she met Victor. Marrying him should have been her route to a bigger world and perhaps a lasting happiness. In the photo of her grandparents that Anita still has, Victor and Else certainly look the part. But like those of so many women of that generation, Else’s hopes would be dashed.

Victor and Else Samter, 1912;

Victor with baby Marion, 1913. (Courtesy of Anita Savio)

Victor Samter was more than ten years her senior, an experienced research chemist with a growing reputation. He had trained in Germany, spent several years at Merrimac in the USA, then returned to Berlin in 1907, expanding his knowledge of patent law and writing books on aspects of industrial chemistry inspired by the more dynamic methods of production and vocational training he’d encountered in America. Anita recalls her mother telling her that Victor had been involved in the development of early plastics, namely Bakelite, invented by a Belgian called Leo Baekeland. This almost certainly referred to the job that Victor took in 1911 with the Berlin firm of Rütgers-Werke, which had gone into partnership with Baekeland’s firm. That same year Victor married Else Grelling. The couple had soon moved to an apartment in the Schöneberg district of south-west Berlin. It was here in 1913 that Marion was born, as a photo of Victor holding his baby daughter confirms.

Then war broke out. Else always told her daughter that Victor didn’t support it, but like so many Jewish Germans – around 100,000 who saw themselves first and foremost as Germans – he felt it was his patriotic duty to fight. He enlisted as an ordinary soldier and was sent to the Eastern Front, where the Russians had attacked in the weeks after war was declared. Victor was unlucky to be wounded in the opening battle, at Stallupönen, a place in East Prussia just 7 miles from the village where he was born. He appears to have lingered on for some time in a hospital in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), but on 13 November 1914 he died, leaving Marion without a father or even memories of a father.

Grelling family photos on a sideboard, Berlin, undated. (© Sheri Blaney, Samter Archive)

At 24, Else was a widow with a 1-year-old daughter to raise in a society that would soon become more liberal but also more volatile, more combustible, than she had ever known it. She never remarried but brought up her daughter by herself, albeit with financial support she almost certainly received from her mother, to supplement the war-widow’s pension she was paid by the state. Anita recalls Marion, her mother, telling her that she and Else had lived for many years in an apartment in a multi-storey block on Landshuter Strasse in Schöneberg; it may have been the same home her parents had moved to before she was born. Marion had memories of standing on the balcony as a girl of around 12 years old, dropping stones onto the hats of people coming into or going out from the block. One visitor subjected to this treatment was her own aunt Charlotte. Luckily, everyone wore hats in those days!

Another memory Marion often mentioned was of Albert Einstein. From 1917 until his exile in 1933, the great physicist lived in an apartment in Haberlandstrasse, just across the street from Else and Marion. Young Marion would watch him every morning as he walked along Landshuter Strasse on his way to teach at Berlin University in the centre of the city. By 1925, the Jewish population of Berlin numbered 170,000, around a third of all German Jews. Einstein was one of many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals drawn to the heart of the German-speaking world. During the 1920s, the city was perhaps the most vibrant in Europe, with a culture of licence and experimentation that only Paris could rival. But these qualities were also a measure of political instability, which often led to violence, especially toward Jews. Even before the terrible outcomes of the First World War, Einstein had always been alert to the undercurrents of nationalist feeling and where they might flow. As a prominent pacifist he had opposed the war from the start; in 1913, when the Prussian Academy of Sciences had approached him to give up his position as the newly appointed professor of physics in Zurich and come to Berlin, he agreed, but only on condition that he could keep his Swiss passport. And by the time that Marion Samter was old enough to fully appreciate who the great man was, the sight of whom so thrilled her every morning, perhaps she had her own misgivings about the way things were going.

The young may have more natural reasons than the old to be optimistic, but, even as a young person, like every other Jewish German Marion would instantly have been affected by the Nazis’ rise to power. The ban on Jewish students in higher education was just the most obvious example. But anyone looking at the photos she took would never guess at the growing threat. Perhaps, for all sorts of sensible reasons, she tried to ignore it; she certainly avoided taking the kinds of exterior shots of German cities she seemed to revel in abroad, perhaps wary of drawing attention to herself as a Jew. Her German images are mostly of domestic interiors and of people she knew well.

In later life in America, Marion’s political awareness expressed itself through volunteering in support of women’s right to vote. But, even before the Nazis had come to power, at the age of 18 or 19, she spent a summer in the mining valleys of South Wales, delivering a programme of education for the benefit of the people who lived there. Long before that, her own education would have been partly a lesson in moral survival in a climate of unrest in which every new upheaval – the humiliation of defeat in war, the revolutionary violence of the winter of 1918–19, the punitive conditions of the Versailles Treaty, the hyperinflation of 1923, a further economic collapse and the huge rise in unemployment that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the chaos that followed – was blamed on the Jews.

From as early as 1920, Einstein himself, the man whom Marion had watched from her window every morning, had had to put up with antisemitic students at Berlin University disrupting his lectures with racist harangues. Thirteen years later, Einstein was among the first of the thousands of Jewish intellectuals who sought refuge in America, including many who feature in this story. He was in California when the Nazis seized power and would never go back to his native land. But after he had dared publicly to criticise the new Nazi government, a bounty of $5,000 was placed on his head. In March 1933, returning to Europe, he settled on the Belgian coast. But by the end of the summer, credible threats of assassination had forced him to flee to Britain. He would soon return to America.

Einstein’s books were among those burnt in a pyre in Bebelsplatz in central Berlin on 10 May that year, having already been banned from the curriculum at German universities, dismissed as ‘Jewish physics’. The same banning order was slapped on the works of all other Jewish intellectuals, but the Nazis also targeted every other aspect of German public life in which Jews had an influence or a stake. Jewish public servants were forced to retire from state employment in April 1933 under the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service; among them was Else’s brother, Kurt Grelling, who was forced to resign his job as a teacher. Later, after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, the range of professions open to Jews was drastically reduced. This reversed a century or more of liberal reform, including more than sixty years since full emancipation, which had seen Jews find their place in many areas of German life from which they had long been excluded.

Boycotts of Jewish businesses had been a tactic of intimidation since the action carried out nationwide in April 1933. But in late 1937, the Nazis moved to expropriate those Jewish firms, including some of the biggest success stories of the German economy of the early twentieth century. This state-sanctioned theft directly affected Else’s nephew, Werner Sachs, but also Else and her siblings, too. Else’s stepfather, Richard Landsberger, was a banker whose business was based at 41 Jägerstrasse in the prestigious Mitte district of central (later East) Berlin; the property was finally restored to the family after the Reunification of Germany in 1990, a long, drawn-out process chronicled by Else’s great-nephew Peter Sachs. In 1906 Landsberger and Margarethe, Else’s mother, had purchased two properties in the same city block, including No. 40 as well as its numerical neighbour, and also two more around the corner at Oberwallstrasse 12 and 13. Margarethe died in 1934, some six years after Landsberger, and the buildings passed to her children: Else, Charlotte, Kurt, and their half-sister Eva Landsberger. This was done through an Erbengemeinschaft, an association of inheritance, similar to a trust, which was set up for their benefit. But in 1937, the buildings were commandeered by Himmler’s Kriminalpolizei, and the family was forced to sell them for 450,000 Reichsmarks. This may have been a fraction of their true value, but the issue in any case is largely academic: despite the veneer of legal process, no money was ever paid them for this fraudulent sale.

Dispossession, the legalised theft of everything they had, from employment to property to wealth; an erosion of ordinary freedoms and of any kind of normal social status that with each new measure seemed to have reached a new low of brazen contempt until the Nazis found yet another, deeper indignity to heap upon the Jews. After Kristallnacht, it seemed clear that there would be no low, no floor beneath which they couldn’t sink, though even the Nazis themselves did not yet know where that would lead. Aside from staying put, there was only one option for those with the means to take it. Else Samter’s surviving correspondence with her brother-in-law Hans Sachs, her sister Charlotte’s husband, dates from the early summer (May to July) of 1939. By then Hans and Lotte were living in Dublin, having managed with great difficulty the previous year to escape to England themselves. In these letters Hans urges Else to take the steps that would enable her to join them.

Else’s German passport from the time has not survived, but a document Anita does possess is the Kennkarte, the identification card with which, from July 1938, every German Jew was issued. Else’s is dated 5 January 1939. Its left-hand page is emblazoned with a big red J, and on the right, beneath the photo, she has the middle name of ‘Sara’, and not Clara, the middle name her parents had given her. The same name, ‘Sara’, in Nazi thinking a typically Jewish name, was imposed on every German-Jewish woman, just as the middle name ‘Israel’ was forced on every German-Jewish man. This decree on Jewish names became effective on 1 January 1939, just four days before Else’s Kennkarte was issued. A person’s name is perhaps the ultimate marker of who they imagine they are. Imposing a name in this way, like the big red J, was intended to emphasize to any German Jew that their personal identity was of far less importance than what the Nazis saw as their race. It was part of an escalating process of racial branding, and shaming, that would later be more publicly expressed in the odious yellow stars. By any standard of civilised behaviour, it was madness.

Else Samter’s Kennkarte. (Courtesy of Anita Savio)

The imposition in the Kennkarte of a racial middle name would also be applied to the passport Else needed to emigrate. It was a crude reminder of a kind of identity that, for the generation of secular Jewish Germans that Else and her siblings were part of, was of less significance than for any who had come before them. As a child, Else’s brother Kurt had even been baptised into the Protestant faith, just like his Jewish father Richard. The Grellings’ cultural milieu was one they shared with many other Germans of the upper middle class, whether Jewish or not. The family had long intergenerational memories of a style of life that was affluent and secure. Else’s maternal grandfather, Louis Simon, had become wealthy through cotton manufacture, a family business jointly owned with his brother Isaak. In the next generation, under the stewardship of Margarethe’s cousin Henri James Simon, known as James, and his brother Louis, it became the most important cotton-trading company in Europe in the decades before the First World War. As a mark of how comfortable the family felt among the well-to-do of German society, around the turn of the century James, by then a generous patron of the arts who funded archaeological digs in Egypt and the Near East, became a close confidant of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In old age, James’s mother Ida was drawn by the German artist Ismael Gentz. John Cooke, Else’s great nephew, possesses a photo of the drawing and remembers asking Else about it in the 1960s. He recalls that she at once said that the picture was of Ida Simon in the sitting room of her apartment overlooking the Tiergarten in Berlin, and that when Kaiser Wilhelm II rode by, he would look up to her window and salute her, because the Simon family were so-called ‘Kaiserjuden’, acknowledged by the Kaiser for their good works in Berlin.2