The Right of Passage
One Jewish Family's Struggle to Escape the Holocaust
Published on 9. October 2025
288 pages
978-1-80399-706-3 (ISBN)
Description
'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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
'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 <i>The US and the Holocaust</i> and <i>The Civil War</i> '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 <i>The Boston Globe</i>, Ideas section and author of <i>Devotion & Defiance</i> '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 <i>Boy Soldiers: A Personal Story of Nazi Elite Schooling and Its Legacy of Trauma</i> '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 <i>Grandfather's Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War</i> '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 <i>Ninette's War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France</i> '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 ChicagoMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Stroud
United Kingdom
Illustrations
50 Illustrations, black and white
File size
14,05 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-80399-706-3 (9781803997063)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Julian Beecroft | Sheri Blaney
The Right of Passage
One Jewish Family's Struggle to Escape the Holocaust
Book
10/2025
The History Press Ltd
€31.50
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Persons
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.
