This moving and tense Holocaust memoir is a fitting tribute to a remarkable and courageous husband and wife whose lives ended in the most appalling circumstances, and who might otherwise be forgotten
October 24, 2025 16:32
Another week, another Holocaust memoir. And that’s a good thing. For each new volume chronicles the lives of men and women whose lives ended in the most appalling circumstances and who might otherwise be forgotten.
One reason for the stream of new books is that the last Holocaust survivors are dying out. In their cupboards and attics, their descendants are finding caches of letters, photographs and documents that have gathered dust for decades, possibly by design, for many survivors preferred to suppress their awful memories.
Another factor is the internet. With a few clues from letters and documents, connections can be made to other victims or survivors and to the growing number of libraries and research institutions that have accumulated Holocaust material, much of it accessible online.
Not all such historic documents are cared for. The genesis for The Right of Passage by Julian Beecroft with Sheri Blaney was some notebooks and 400 photographic negatives dumped on a pavement in Arlington, Massachusetts. They might have ended up in landfill but fortunately were passed on to Blaney, who worked in publishing and ran a photo agency.
The photographs were of excellent quality and taken in the 1930s all over Europe, often showing members of a wealthy family, while the notebooks, mainly in German, appeared to refer to about 250 of the pictures. It was not until the Covid lockdown that Blaney had the time to investigate further. Her detective work led her to Anita Savio, in Oregon, who was able to identify her mother, Marion Samter, who took the photographs, and grandmother, Else Grelling, German Jews who had escaped from the Nazis just before war broke out.
As more information emerged about the family and their friends and colleagues, Blaney enlisted British author Julian Beecroft to pull the story together. It is a familiar one, of Jews’ desperate attempts to escape to safety as the Nazi persecution of them remorselessly increased.
It is a story with a relatively happy ending for many of those involved, as they managed to find exile in the US, the UK, Ireland, Australia and Palestine.
But the two people who form the centrepiece of the book, Else’s brother Kurt Grelling and his non-Jewish wife Greta, were not so fortunate. Grelling was a highly distinguished mathematician, logician and philosopher, associated with the school of thought known as logical positivism, who served in the German foreign office and army in the First World War, translated four of Bertrand Russell’s books into German and even had a famous paradox named after him: the question of whether “non self-descriptive” is, in fact, self-descriptive.
As the Nazis tightened their grip, Grelling found it impossible to get work in Germany but his fellow philosopher – and logical positivist – Paul Oppenheim found him a post in Brussels.
Grelling’s extensive correspondence with his family and friends has been preserved and reveals a man who, like so many, found it hard to believe they wouldn’t be safe in Europe until it was too late. He then tried to get an American visa, but that depended on getting a promise of a job in the US. His lack of a university teaching background counted against him, although influential friends who had made it to the US worked hard to find him something – anything.
The Grellings managed to move their two young children to neutral Switzerland, where they were to survive the war. But after the Nazis occupied Belgium, Kurt was deported to southern France. He was interned in a series of camps, although for a time he was able to travel reasonably freely as he kept trying to get a US visa and a passage out via Lisbon. When that failed, Greta left Brussels, where as a non-Jew she was relatively safe, to join him in an extraordinary display of selflessness. Her reward was to end up with him in Auschwitz. Both perished soon afterwards.
This is a moving, tense and harrowing story, meticulously researched and well told, which serves as a fitting memorial to a remarkable and courageous couple. There are many such Holocaust stories still to be told, and they all deserve to be recorded.
The Right of Passage: One Jewish Family’s Struggle to Escape the Holocaust, by Julian Beecroft with Sheri Blaney
The History Press
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