Behind the Reel: The Documents That Saved My Family

My speaker's reel contains many fleeting moments that are really significant to me, so I'm elaborating on them in a quick series of posts.

At 2:52 in the reel you'll see this image:

These are three key documents among many that I'm lucky to have, which tell a piece of the story of how my maternal grandparents escaped Berlin just before World War II started, saving my Mom and uncle. Taking steamships from Hamburg to the Caribbean, they brought the family to Bolivia, where they settled, and where almost 20 years later my parents met.

First, a note: One of the mistakes both sides of my family made was not telling me the hard part of their histories. I'm super fortunate that my grandparents kept a treasure trove of documents that offer a trail of stories and evidence of their journey. An interesting complication is that after the war, my grandparents applied to the West German government for reparations. This resulted in a stack of letters typed on onionskin (carbon copies of those sent and originals received), in which my grandfather ("Opi" to me) explained their hardships in ways he never told me in person. I wouldn't know that history if he hadn't filed for reparations.

A second note, the plot twist I haven't revealed yet: When I was 24, my Mom revealed that Opi was born in a Jewish family (in Czernowitz, now in Ukraine but then part of Romania). There are other stories about how they knew they had to leave, which I'll tell later. But in 1930s Berlin, this caused problems.

Now back to these three documents (I've put them in this Google Drive).

The first, in Spanish, is from the Bolivian consulate in Berlin, dated October 24, 1938. Bolivia was one of the very few countries that opened its doors to refugees as war loomed, and it appears Opi worked the Nazi bureaucracy at every turn to get the family out of Germany. This document gives them permission to emigrate to Bolivia permanently.

The second, in German, is a certificate of good conduct — one of many documents they had to present to prove they were good citizens and had no debts — from the Berlin police department. At the bottom is a stamp with a swastika.

The third, in English, is hard to believe I even have. It's three tickets on a steamship (Royal Netherlands' "Costa Rica") from Hamburg to Amsterdam, then transiting to the Caribbean, where I've lost the trail. Why three? Maybe because Omi (my grandmother) was Lutheran, so she went with the children on one ship, while Opi went on another. How they met up in the Caribbean, in the time before cellphones and American Express, I'll never know. I don't know what Opi's ship's name was, but I think I have several pictures with him taken on that crossing.

The steamship tickets I do have are dated June 3. Germany attacked Poland on Sept. 1. The ill-fated MS St. Louis sailed from Hamburg on May 13, before the Costa Rica. I am one lucky person.

So in the reel, when I say my parents met in Bolivia, there's a bit of a backstory there.

#speakersreel, #familyhistory, #escapestories

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This article is cross-posted on Substack here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.

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