THE LIVES OF A GERMAN JEWISH FAMILY THROUGH THE CENTURIES, UPENDED AND FINALLY REBUILT IN AMERICA AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Available September, 2026
For the Sake of Our Elders
Robert L. Stahl, M.D.
Available September, 2026
In August 1939, three weeks before the outbreak of World War II, a German Jewish lawyer and his wife fled Nazi Germany.
Hidden away among their belongings were troves of family photographs and documents dating back generations. The couple had already sent their two children out of harm’s way – their son to safety in Switzerland and their daughter on the Kindertransport to England. Their passports stamped with a big J, they considered themselves lucky to have managed to get out.
Forty years after escaping her homeland, the wife of the lawyer – by then the eighty-five year old grandmother of the author – sat down and recorded more than six hours of family histories, retracing the lives of her elders centuries back in Germany, conveying remembrances of individuals who had not only served as leaders of their Jewish communities, but had manifested a civic mindedness that compelled them to advance the common good as they sought an embrace into German society.
Sharing vivid memories of those who had risked their lives and had spilled their blood fighting for the Fatherland in the First World War, she also provided a first account of the rise of Hitler and the descent of Germany into a fascist state, an account culminating with an arresting portrayal of the horrors of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
Against memories of living through the Blitz as an immigrant in England, are painted the stories of family, including her mother, who perished in the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust, and of her eventual journey to America.
