"My father tells stories of how occasionally he would leave the city and go to a farm area. And someone would allow him to work for them in exchange for food. And he would sleep in the barn. And he said that happened to him a couple of times.…

"Right. [My grandfather Alexander] had a sister Frieda, a brother Gustav, and another sister Gertrude. In 1942-1943 they were all taken. And nobody really knows their fate. They were taken and never seen again. And also his mother, Johanna…

"I believe [my father's family] thought that this would all pass, you know. Because there had been anti-Semitism before. It was kind of underlying in the culture, but no one ever thought that this would really come to pass. And their…

"The family made plans to separate when it became clear that their lives were in danger. They found friends that they could stay with separately. They set up times to meet. And they would never all be together the four of them. They would pass…

"My grandfather was a very quiet man, kind of passive. He always kind of had that glint in his eyes like he had a joke he wanted to tell but never got permission to do it, and my grandmother who was maybe five-foot-two, five-foot-three, she…

"They met by accident. Kurt and Alexander, my grandfather, were walking out of their store at lunchtime, and they saw a woman trapped between two electric cars, or electric streetcars, down the road from where they were working, and she was…

"[Alexander Jacobi, my paternal grandfather,] was born in a small town in what was then Prussia called Schönlanke. It’s now Trzcianka in Poland. I don’t know that much about what his family life was about. I know that he had an older brother…

"My father was born in December of 1924 in Berlin. They were fairly well-off economically. He was one of two children. He was the older of the two. His sister, Ruth, was born a couple years later. My grandfather was a leather maker-- at…

"[She decided to immigrate] about three years [after she and my father met]. In 1957, she came to stay and seek employment here, and then they were married in ’59. She did not [become a citizen], and she was very proud of that fact. She had…

"...[My mother and her siblings] were relocated from London. She and her two brothers were all separated and moved into the countryside, and stayed with various families who were all assigned to keep children away from London during the Blitz.…