Full Circle: A Story for Yom HaShoah 2025

Berlin, 1928

Margit lies in a hospital bed on an open-floor maternity ward, remembering the birth of her first child four years earlier. Then, she had labored in the familiar surroundings of her native Budapest, where everyone spoke her language, and her own beloved parents waited at home to welcome her and her baby. She was practically a newlywed then, having married handsome Adolf the previous year. Everything had happened so quickly. Too quickly, she thinks now.

Brilliant but quixotic, Adolf had only one true passion: chess. A master of the game, he considered it only natural that the universe should enable him to play without subjecting him to the indignity of earning a living. For several years, he had held a sinecure with a Budapest bank that sponsored him in high-level tournaments. But eventually, the management thought better of it. Having lost the bank’s support, and finding himself with a young family and no living, Adolf appealed to a wealthy relative in Berlin, who agreed to take him into the business. Before long, Adolf, Margit, and their firstborn decamped to Germany.

Which is why, just a few years later, Margit finds herself delivering a second child in a Berlin hospital, where the nurses speak only German, and she has no family or friends nearby other than her unreliable husband and her young son. Aware that she has not made the most advantageous match and is bringing another child into a life of poverty (Adolf’s job with the wealthy relative having evaporated when he raised objections to working for his pay), she feels scared and alone. Then, as if by some small miracle, she hears something familiar from the far end of the ward: “Yoy! Yoy!” Someone is groaning — in Hungarian! The sound comforts her.

Later, after both women have delivered, Margit meets the Hungarian woman and they become friends. She will repeat this story to her son Michael many times in the decades to come, and he will in turn tell it to his children.

New Jersey, 2020

Surrounded by stacks of cardboard boxes and piles of manila folders, I sit on the floor, glass of white wine in hand, and get back to work.

Dad’s been gone five years; Mom, 11. Ever since, I’ve been putting off the Herculean task of sorting through their files and delivering them to the archives that are eager to have them. It’s astonishing how much paper two professors of philosophy could accumulate over their lifetimes. If not for the Covid lockdown, I might never have started the job. But now, stuck at home with nothing much to do, the boxes are more of a welcome distraction than an unpleasant chore. I’ve hauled them up to the spare bedroom and made a start.

On this day, I happen upon my favorite kind of box, filled with family history rather than article manuscripts and lecture notes. I find a folder marked, simply, “Michael.” The documents inside are old, written in German. I open Google Translate and point my phone at the top sheet.

“Geburtsurkunde. Birth Certificate. In the Hospital of the Jewish Community, Margit Wyschogrod, born Ungar, wife of Adolf Paul Wyschogrod, on 28 September 1928,  gave birth to a boy who was given the name Jacob Michael.”

That’s odd. Jacob Michael was my great-grandfather. My father was Michael Jacob. He was always called Michael, even as a small child. I know this not just from family lore, but from documents like his German vaccination certificate and school registration form. It occurs to me that Grandma, still recovering from the birth, had probably left the paperwork to her husband, who’d botched it.

Berlin, 1935

Little Michael plays on the street in front of his building, a few doors down from the grand Neue Synagoge, when he spies a troop of Brownshirts marching down Oranienburgerstrasse. This isn’t an unusual occurrence. He knows it’s in his best interest to avoid attention, so he ducks into a doorway until they pass, making himself as small and unremarkable as possible. As the men reach the corner of Artilleriestrasse, he sees that one unfortunate Jew has somehow failed to clock their approach and remains standing on the sidewalk. He is filled with dread. Even at his young age, he is aware that a Jewish man standing in the way of a column of uniformed Nazis spells trouble. He doesn’t yet know exactly what kind of trouble, but he’s about to find out.

As he watches in horror, the first few Brownshirts knock the Jew to the ground. Then, one by one, each Brownshirt kicks him viciously in the head and gut as they march past, without so much as breaking step. By the time they’re done, the wretched man is a bloody mess. Other Jews, who have been hiding in the shadows watching the scene play out, emerge and carry the injured man into a nearby building.

Terrified, Michael runs upstairs to tell his mother what he saw. She is upset, but doesn’t forbid him from going back out to play in the street. After all, she thinks, the Brownshirts wouldn’t harm a little boy.

New Jersey, 2024

Trump and his MAGA movement, which is built on the same paranoia, bigotry and supremacism that created the worst chapters of modern history, fill me with horror and dread. I reassure myself that he’s not going to win again. Who could possibly vote for the “immigrants are eating the dogs” guy, especially after the attempted January 6 coup?

Eight years earlier, the first election in which two of my three children voted made Trump president of the United States. That awful night, they called me from their college dorms, in tears. The beautiful world into which I had believed I was sending them was crashing down around us, and I was at a total loss. I couldn’t comfort myself, let alone them. How often had I told them they were lucky to live in a country where we can make things better with our votes? That a free press protected us from the pernicious effects of propaganda and conspiracy theories? That, while still deeply flawed, our nation was heading in the right direction, and that they would live in a more just world than their parents and grandparents had? How was it possible that a venal, avaricious, orange dolt had made a liar of me?

Now, here we are again. I can barely stand to read the news.

“We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

“The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”

I google “German citizenship” and find a page titled, “Naturalization of victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants.” I begin to read.

Berlin, 1938

One early October morning, the family is awakened by banging on the apartment door.

By now, no Jew in Berlin is foolish enough to believe that insistent banging on the door bodes anything but ill. They may not yet have imagined the full horrors to come, but Nazism has become a fact of life, and it’s clearly very, very bad for the Jews. That’s why Margit and Paul (Adolf goes by his middle name now, because a Jew bearing the name of the führer is just asking for trouble) have been pleading with a relative in America to do whatever he can to get them visas.

At this moment, the dream of America is far away. There is a door to be answered.

The police are not brutal or violent, but they are also in no mood to listen to the family’s pleas. They have come to arrest the man of the house, and they go about the job efficiently, handing him an official document and giving him a few minutes to pack a small bag before taking him away. Margit is frantic, not knowing if she will ever see her husband again, or what will become of her and the children.

As it turns out, they will be among the very luckiest. Paul is not taken to a concentration camp, but deported to Poland. A few months later, they will learn that the American relative has performed a miracle, securing them US visas. The family is destined to reunite and sail into New York Harbor on July 4, 1939, a mere two months before Germany invades Poland. They will never again see any of the family and friends left behind in Berlin.

New Jersey, 2025

I slowly leaf through the pages of the packet I have spent months carefully assembling, making sure I have forgotten nothing. It’s all there: my grandparents’ marriage certificate; Dad’s birth certificate, school registration, and vaccination certificate; German tax documents; my grandparents’ registration with the Berlin police; Grandfather’s deportation order; my birth certificate; my children’s birth certificates; four applications for German citizenship.

In the news, I read about people being snatched off American streets and sent to horrific prisons in Louisiana and El Salvador. Some are immigrants who are here legally: students, professionals, refugees. According to government propaganda, some of these abductees are being targeted for allegedly antisemitic sympathies, a charge weaponized by the Trump administration in the wake of protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. Ironically, as a Jew, this only makes me feel less safe. I know that it’s only a matter of time before Jews become more useful to them as scapegoats than as fig leaves.

I carefully slide the papers into a large envelope, which I seal and address. Because you never know when you might need to get out.

N.B. – Michael Wyschogrod’s papers are now archived at Seton Hall University; Edith Wyschogrod’s papers are archived at Rice University.