Thread by @elmunc

Of #Kristallnacht and #MIGRATION: a🧵
My dad asked to be buried with his passport.
This was the one wish he expressed after his cancer diagnosis in May. We honored it when we buried him at the end of September.
Passport in his inner jacket pocket.
Strange, no?
Let me explain.

In the summer of 1938, my grandparents took my dad & aunt from their home in Frankfurt to Switzerland on vacation.
That should have been impossible. Jews had been issued passports stamped with a big red “J” (for “Jude,” or “Jew”). They couldn’t just waltz out of the country.

Due to some administrative snafu, my grandparents’ passports hadn’t gotten the “J” stamp yet. So they could travel to Switzerland unimpeded. They spent a few weeks vacationing in the gorgeous alpine village of @Adelboden_ch.

And then, come September, they went back home.
Yes, that’s right. This Jewish family, tucked safely away in the Alps, returned to Frankfurt. In September ’38. Unbelievable, right?
Well, my dad had to start school, y'know?
(German Jews were like this.)

Anyhow, that was a bad move. Two months later -- 84 years ago tomorrow night -- Frankfurt's synagogues burned.

My dad was awakened in the middle of the night by pounding at the door and watched the Gestapo take my grandfather from their apartment. A little while later they came back and pulled the telephone wire from the wall.

My grandfather spent several weeks incarcerated at Buchenwald (@Buchenwald_Dora).
This is a photo of thousands of arrestees lined up for roll call in November of 1938. He might be in there somewhere.

He was released at the end of November & told to be gone by year’s end or risk recapture. He headed back across the Swiss border w/my dad & aunt on 12/30/38. A Swiss friend pulled some strings to get them in. They returned to Adelboden.
This time, definitely not vacation.

My grandmother stayed behind in Frankfurt to tie up whatever loose ends she could. She joined the family in Adelboden late in February of 1939.
Realizing their chances of arranging migration from a little town high in the mountains were slim, they decamped to Geneva.

Two years later, passports tightly in hand, they boarded a train from Geneva to Lisbon, then a ship, the S.S. Exeter, from Lisbon to New York. They arrived on April 1, 1942. Their migration odyssey was over.

When my dad told me the one thing he wanted to be buried with was his passport, he was smiling.
I figured he was just playing with the absurdity of the idea.
Smiling back, I said, “Your passport, Dad? Do you really think you’ll need that where you’ll be?”

He looked me in the eye.
“You never know, Eric. You just never know.”
He'd been secure in the United States for 80 years, but he was a #refugee to the end.

And he was right.

You just never know.

He was released at the end of November & told to be gone by year’s end or risk recapture. He headed back across the Swiss border w/my dad & aunt on 12/30/38. A Swiss friend pulled some strings to get them in. They returned to Adelboden.
This time, definitely not vacation.

My grandmother stayed behind in Frankfurt to tie up whatever loose ends she could. She joined the family in Adelboden late in February of 1939.
Realizing their chances of arranging migration from a little town high in the mountains were slim, they decamped to Geneva.

Two years later, passports tightly in hand, they boarded a train from Geneva to Lisbon, then a ship, the S.S. Exeter, from Lisbon to New York. They arrived on April 1, 1942. Their migration odyssey was over.

When my dad told me the one thing he wanted to be buried with was his passport, he was smiling.
I figured he was just playing with the absurdity of the idea.
Smiling back, I said, “Your passport, Dad? Do you really think you’ll need that where you’ll be?”

He looked me in the eye.
“You never know, Eric. You just never know.”
He'd been secure in the United States for 80 years, but he was a #refugee to the end.

And he was right.

You just never know.
end of 🧵