When Donna Swarthout was a little girl growing up in New Jersey she remembers asking her grandparents about the country they, as Jews, had fled more than two decades before. What, she would ask, what it was like in Germany?
They had made new lives for themselves in New York. Her grandfather drove a cab, her grandmother made clothes for dolls. Their son, Donna's father, had graduated from City College and was an engineer. They didn't want to talk about their lives in Altwiedermus, a village near Frankfurt where the family had owned a tannery. Or about the years they spent in Frankfurt trying to escape Nazi persecution by blending into the larger Jewish community there.
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