The Right of Passage

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'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.