The Right of Passage

Sometimes the dates and numbers of the past obscure the individual human dramas that comprise our history. Fortunately, 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, The Civil War,

An evocative and urgent reminder of the perils of being a bystander at a time of burgeoning threats to democratic freedoms around the world. ... The Right of Passage is a work of meticulous research and rare devotion. What began with a serendipitous discovery of a cache of negatives in a rubbish bin in Massachusetts almost half a century ago became the book you hold now in your hands: one-part gripping detective story, one-part page-turning tragedy about the untold potential lost to antisemitism and the Holocaust. ... a work of great historical importance with deep resonance for our current moment.

Kelly Horan, deputy editor of The Boston Globe Ideas section/author, Devotion & Defiance,

The fate of the Grelling family kept me spellbound. Their brilliance and resilience in desperate times told through letters, photographs and personal reflections is moving and a must-read in a world that is still grappling with one of history's darkest chapters.

Helene Munson, author of Boy Soldiers: A Personal Story of Nazi Elite Schooling and Its Legacy of Trauma,

What begins with a box of abandoned negatives and notebooks yields a thrilling piece of detective work and the revelation of a family history shaped by flight, tragedy, and exile.

Joseph Pearson, author of My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War,

The Right of Passage is a meticulously researched book that is both intellectually fascinating and deeply moving. Although subtitled One Jewish Family’s Struggle to Escape the Holocaust, it tells a broader story about the fate of German Jewry under the Nazis and their willing accomplices in Vichy France, a fate made worse by the unwillingness of western democracies, sometimes driven by home-grown antisemitism, to accommodate refugees fleeing genocidal tyranny. … Assembled from a treasure-trove of family correspondence, interviews, private memoirs and photographs, The Right of Passage is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in Holocaust studies.

John Jay, author of Ninette’s War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France,

A well-researched reconstruction of how a gifted German-Jewish logician had to flee to Belgium but finally ended up in the nazi camps. The reader can follow, in Grelling's own words, how even during difficult times friendship and love and even intellectual exchange was not destroyed by the brutality of Nazism.

Frank Caestecker, Professor of History, University of Ghent,

Snapshots of an unbroken but acutely endangered belief in the power of reason… the painstaking and detailed research reveals an important insight: as the number of contemporary witnesses continues to dwindle, our knowledge and future generations' understanding of the Nazi reign of terror and the Holocaust depends on the rescue, careful research and publication of letters, diaries and other personal documents that document human behaviour in inhumane times, but which are largely not yet kept in archives. One such accidentally preserved collection of letters and photographs forms the basis for this extraordinary and exemplary book.

Joachim Schloer, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Southampton,

This book tells the story of one Jewish family’s experience during the Nazi era in Germany ... a detailed and engrossing examination of one extended family’s travails during that dark time. But it is impossible to read it without recognizing how enormously relevant it is to today ...

Sheila Suess Kennedy, J.D., Professor Emerita Law & Public Policy O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis,

... an intimate Holocaust narrative that conjures full lives from fragments – letters, photographs, interviews and archival materials. … There is heroism in the devotion of Kurt Grelling and his circle of European intellectuals to their work and to one another, in the resilience of the Grelling family, and in many small acts of kindness at the story’s edges. There is also a grand and pitiless combination of human forces that corrupts or pulverizes all it touches. However dramatic, this is a history of individuals and small communities, memorialized as they must be if we are to remember the many millions.

Noah Chafets, Cyril O. Houle Chair, Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, University of Chicago,