Right of Passage
'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
How much could the victims of the Holocaust have known of what awaited them? How much should they have known?
In this sobering account of a German-Jewish family in flight for their lives, The Right of Passage reveals the difficult, often desperate dilemmas in which they found themselves as they looked for safe passage away from the Nazi regime.
Inspired by a cache of abandoned negatives that show an idyllic pre-war Europe, the book draws heavily on letters and telegrams newly translated from German. These exchanges among leading thinkers of the period vividly record an intellectual culture in flight, in which even the finest minds found it difficult to grasp what was coming.
Most of the family’s members found safety in England, Ireland or America, some only just in time. But the logician and philosopher Kurt Grelling, exiled in Belgium, was arrested when the Nazis invaded. Deported to France and interned by the Vichy regime, despite the efforts of friends and colleagues to help, Grelling’s attempts to find passage to America were hindered by forces beyond his control. But his letters speak across the decades, urging us to remember the impossible predicament faced by millions in the same position.
JULIAN BEECROFT has written 10 works of narrative history in the fields of art and culture, as well as features, reviews and travel pieces for the Guardian, the Telegraph and 1843 (Economist magazine). He has lectured on 20th-century music history at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. SHERI BLANEY, who hails from a Jewish family, ran her own stock photo agency in Boston for 21 years, and currently works as a freelance IP copyright consultant. She has been an invited judge for The Boston Globe and The Griffin Museum of Photography contests.