Introductory Dedication

Dear Reader,

My name is Alisa (əliːsə), and this is the story of my father's family.

This blog is hereby dedicated to Stephen Fry.

An odd way, I know, to start a blog dedicated to tracing my family's past, but I have him to thank for what has inspired me to begin these writings.

I was watching the BBC show, Who Do You Think You Are? During the episode featuring Stephen Fry's tracing his mother's family back through the Holocaust, there is a moment where he goes on the Yad Vashem website to find records of relatives who may have been in the concentration camps, and he becomes very emotional because, despite knowing logically that he would find what he did, actually seeing it made it so much more real and poignant and devastating. It reminded me very strongly of how I felt when I was perusing Ancestry.com a couple of years ago and I found copies of the official documents rescinding my grandfather's German citizenship. I knew that it had happened on a purely factual level, but actually seeing the document right there in front of me was like getting kicked in the gut. I've long, long, long adored Stephen Fry for his wit, intelligence, wry humor, and dry sarcasm, but in that moment I felt completely and utterly connected to him on a very emotional level and I wanted to hop a TARDIS and transport myself through time and space to sit there and hug him and tell him I felt that way, too.

After watching Fry's search, I was inspired to go on Yad Vashem's Shoah Names Database. (Shoah, for those unfamiliar with the word, is Hebrew that translates literally into "catastrophe" but is used now almost exclusively to refer to the particular holocaust that people think of as being The Holocaust.) I began looking up my father's paternal grandfather, though ultimately I didn't find very much because the closer members of that side of my family fled Germany before the pogroms began in earnest and so were not in camp records. Then I looked up his maternal grandfather, who has a fascinating history I shall recount in detail over future posts. The Yad Vashem's final record on them was that they'd been sent to the death camps and no more, but I know that they survived through extraordinary measures and wished to update their records. I went on Google to look up their death dates since the records I have on my computer are incomplete... And was blown away by the number of articles there are on my great-grandfather.

Dear reader, I urge you to pause for a second and watch this particular clip from Who Do You Think You Are?

It's important that you watch that so that you understand the panoply of emotions - exhilaration, sorrow, pain, pride - that crashed through me when I clicked on a link. One single, fateful link. On this website a story is told. There are, oh, so very many things to write about that will have to wait until another time for me to write them because this now is the story of why I'm writing my story. But on top of the page are two pictures:

HERE LIVED

DR. SIEGFRIED

PELTESOHN

BORN 1876

DEPORTED MARCH 17, 1943

THERESIENSTADT

FREEDOM TRANSPORT

FEBRUARY 1945

SWITZERLAND

SURVIVED

source

HERE LIVED

ALICE PELTESOHN

NÉE MAAS

BORN 1887

DEPORTED MARCH 17, 1943

THERESIENSTADT

FREEDOM TRANSPORT

FEBRUARY 1945

SWITZERLAND

SURVIVED

source

On a street just a few blocks from the Berlin Zoo, as a part of a larger memorial project I knew nothing about, there is a pair of stepping stones honouring my great-grandparents.

It was like the wind had been knocked out of me. If you skipped past the clip I posted above, I encourage you to go back and do so, because that barely begins to encapsulate how I felt. Were it not for my current state of disability/unemployment/not being rich, I would have bought plane tickets right then and there to go to Berlin and touch them and make them truly real in my mind. But that was not the picture that hit me the most and pushed me to finally, after years of hemming and hawing, start up my family research again and create this blog.

It was this:

Family Portrait

source

From left to right, that is my great-grandmother, Alice (ɛliːzə); my Uncle Peter (piːtɝr); my grandmother, Edith (iːdɪθ);  my dad, Ralph (rælf); and my great-grandfather, Siegfried (siːgfriːd). And Siegfried is sitting on... A tricycle. And my mind exploded, because I spent many, many, MANY happy hours as a child riding around on my grandma's tricycle at their summer house on Shelter Island. I quickly went scurrying through a collection of old family photos I'd taken cell phone shots of when visiting my parents last summer and I found this:

Me at around age 11 on my grandmother's tricycle hauling my little brother around the Island.

As you can see, it's not the same tricycle (looking at the original photo, it's probably a toy for my uncle or my dad), but that isn't the point. Nor did it in any way diminish the sense of awe and amazement I found while looking at the c. 1950 photo. The point is that I found this profound connection to my family's history right then and there. My great-grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon -> he never rode a bicycle because it caused so many horrible injuries -> my grandmother wasn't allowed to ride bicycles -> there was a tricycle in their summer home so my grandmother could get around -> a strong association for me between my father's family and tricycles. Something I myself have ridden, have touched with my own hands, have spent hours enjoying in blissful ignorance of its threaded connection to the tapestry of my family's history. A tangible way of understanding my place in something much, much bigger.

So, dear reader,  that is what has inspired me to write this blog as I research the truly amazing people in my family.

At the risk of sounding like I'm giving an Oscar acceptance speech, I suppose in reality there is a grand list of people to whom I should dedicate this: To the 11 million people who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps; to Jean-Marie Musy, the President of Switzerland who, despite pro-Nazi leanings earlier in life, successfully negotiated with Heinrich Himmler for the safe release of 1200 Jews from Theresienstadt, my great-grandparents included; to my parents for raising me in full awareness of my family's past and providing me with a world-class education which has given me access to the research skills I will need to continue on my quest for information; and to every person in the world who seeks with compassion to help those in need and to spread love and tolerance in order to prevent such an atrocity from ever again happening. If I'm to take it all the way back from a Buddhist perspective, I dedicate this to the Big Bang, which created matter which create the sun which created the solar system et cetera et cetera et cetera.

But mostly I will dedicate this to Stephen Fry. Because, to crudely paraphrase a line misappropriated from Doctor Who, this exact actor had to be this exactly profoundly moving, in that exact show, so that this precise cold could keep me in my precise bed and let me watch that exact episode. And if just one of those tiny things never happened, I'd never have started this. And that makes him the most important actor in my blog's history.

Be well, dear reader. And be lovely to everyone.


(P.S. Stephen Fry, if you ever actually read this... I adore you. Truly. Not in the celebrity-fan-worship sense; it's more of a you're-intellectually-stimulating, I-want-to-have-prolonged-conversations-while-basking-in-your-wit thing. Please be lovely to yourself. You are amazing.)