Growing Up in a Twice-Nuclear Holocaust-Refugee Family
Dr. Michael Goldhaber – Growing Up in a Twice-Nuclear Holocaust-Refugee Family • May 31, 2020
Michael Goldhaber beside a hundred-year old portrait of his grandmother, mother and aunt.
Photo courtesy of Michael Goldhaber
My mother and father met as students at a physics lecture in Berlin Germany, pre-Hitler, though they only married in exile, on the sidelines of the US nuclear-bomb project. Most of my mother’s extended family scattered to the far corners of the earth, but her own parents were murdered early in the Holocaust—a fact I learned as a very small child, right at the end of WWII. When my mother died in 1998, I came across letters in German written by her mother, in the late 1930’s. The Gerlind Institute recently translated some for me—the first time I had any real sense of my grandmother’s own thoughts.
Over many years I only slowly learned of the devastation to my my father’s family. While his parents and siblings survived the Nazis, practically all of his numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins did not.
I grew up surrounded more by scientists—quite a few world famous—than by relatives, who were far away if alive at all. That led me early to be aware of world geography and world affairs as well as the latest twists of science. I followed the family “business,” becoming a physicist too, but soon found myself focussing more on deep socio-economic questions.
If you would like to view our archive video of the presentation, contact Dr. Marion Gerlind for access.
