HISTORY What do I intend to do?

The easy answer is to write another book. Since I have written two books already that should not be very difficult, right?

Why now?

This year the Leo Baeck Institutes are presenting a daily online chronicle of the events perpetrated on their Jewish population by the government of Germany in the year 1938. It is called The 1938 Projekt. There is also a physical exhibit of the project at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Since 1938 is my birth year and since my grandparents lived in Germany at that time, as well as my parents, aunts and uncles, I tuned in. Although I know this history, its relevance to the political events of this year are striking . Of utmost concern to me, is the complicity of the population and the lack of resistance to these anti-Jewish edicts.

The presentation is in the form of  original documents and letters written by the authorities to the Jewish doctors, lawyers, sportsmen, students, etc and by them to relatives and friends.

I realized I am in possession of some of the original documents written by my paternal grandfather, beginning in 1938 when he was imprisoned in Germany ostensibly for listening to foreign radio broadcasts.

I had always intended to donate these post cards and letters to the Leo Baeck Institute as Dr.Max Gruenwald, who was my rabbi in Millburn New Jersey where he taught the Hebrew High School courses and married me to my first husband, worked diligently with Leo Baeck when he began to collect the materials which form the archives that chronicle Jewish history from before during and after the war.

Now is the best time to donate these priceless letters. But first I will have them translated, I will find out more about his life and the lives of his parents, my grandmother, their siblings and  will once again trace the route my grandfather Salomon followed s he desperately tried to escape from the Nazi clutches.