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How much could the victims of the Holocaust have known of what awaited them? How much should they have known? The Right of Passage reveals how different members of a single German-Jewish family tried to flee the Nazi regime. The discovery of a cache of photographs leads to the hundreds of letters on which the book is based. Newly translated from German, these exchanges among leading thinkers of the period vividly record an intellectual culture in flight, though none could grasp the nature of the evil that was coming. Most members of the family found safety in England, Ireland or America, some only just in time; the logician and philosopher Kurt Grelling, exiled in Belgium, was arrested when the Nazis invaded. Deported to France and interned by the Nazi regime, despite the efforts of friends, Grelling's attempts to find passage to America ultimately came to nothing. But his letters speak across the decades, urging us to remember the impossible choices that millions were facing and in doing so to walk in their shoes.victims of the worst mass atrocity in history.
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Reviews
"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, The Civil War
"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 gr
Kelly Horan, deputy editor of The Boston Globe Ideas section/author, Devotion & Defiance