And the train starts up and pulls your hand from mine, and your face, sad and pale, floats above me, and I see in it a weariness that’s bound up in our overall fatigue, and I feel it’s high time you get away, away from all this horror, before you understand it completely, fully understand it.

  And finally, finally, I can turn around and cry as the train tolls out of the station behind me: away, away. Past, over. . . .

  Now I realize what I wanted so desperately to say to you in those last seconds by the train, when the lump in my throat wouldn’t let me: “Get us out, take us away from here, soon. . . . Only over there, in another country, can we find a common language once again!”

  I get off at the train station in Fürstenberg an der Havel, halfway between Berlin and the Baltic, and follow a path I imagine prisoners walking seventy-five years ago. The route comes way-marked for tourists now, with ideograms painted on the sidewalk­—­concentration-camp stripes here, a filament of barbed wire there. It’s a bit more than a kilometer from the station to the camp itself, but even without the blazes I could have found my way at the final fork in the road, where Ravensbrücker Dorfstrasse veers off to the right. That’s where a lilac bush in full bloom spills over a fence to cast shade on the sidewalk. After a fall and winter I’ve spent immersed in my father’s family, spring is here, with the scent of my mother on the breeze.

  In 2016, a historical novel called Lilac Girls began an unlikely climb up US best-seller lists. It tells a story of three young women: a German detailed to the Ravensbrück concentration camp as part of a team of Nazi doctors carrying out grotesque medical experiments; a Polish prisoner on whom those procedures are performed; and a well-born American actress-turned-philanthropist, who after the war learns of the plight of the camp’s victims, champions their cause, and brings them to the United States for treatment.

  The German doctor was a historical figure convicted at the Nuremberg trials. The Pole is the novelist’s invention. And the American, Caroline Woolsey Ferriday, appears in the book as herself. The first cousin of my mother’s father, she cultivated the lilacs of the novel’s title at her country estate in Bethlehem, Connecticut, between her bouts of activism.

  Caroline, shown here around mid-century, shared the social status, physical stature, politics, and restless spirit of the countess in Saint-Lary. Though barely twelve at the outbreak of World War I, she was moved to write a relative that the kaiser had gone “rank mad.” Caroline’s father, Henry McKeen Ferriday, along with her aunt, Henry’s sister and my great-grandmother Elizabeth Ferriday Neave, spent several of their formative years in France, and Henry passed along to his only child a Francophilia that would last her life. Caroline had learned French from private tutors and was volunteering at the French consulate in Manhattan when the Nazis invaded France. After the war she led fundraising appeals to benefit the families of Free French fighters who had lost their lives.

  Caroline never married or had children, but she recognized in my mother—her cousin Alex’s daughter Mary—a kindred spirit of the next generation. After being told as a teen that she couldn’t take a Jewish friend swimming at the family’s country club, Mary Neave let her WASP parents know that “it’s just not done” was no good reason. As an adult my mother lived a defiantly private life, believing one’s name should appear in the paper three times only, upon birth, marriage, and death, but that didn’t keep her from leaving a public footprint. Whether playing the piano for shut-ins, or recruiting and training volunteers to teach adults how to read, or dragging us to services after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, one child in her arms and another clinging to her skirt, she drew her line and made clear on which side she stood. As she grew older she gave to many of Caroline’s causes, and not just because her lilac-cultivating cousin had left her some money to do so. And my mother made sure we knew that her grandparents came from Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and that northernmost Southern town, Cincinnati—places that together made for a weighty historical inheritance in their own right.

  Upon reaching the grounds of Ravensbrück, the only camp the Nazis built exclusively for women, you see the old SS quarters first—a scatter of vernacular villas with pitched roofs set amidst pine trees. Near them sits the modern visitors’ center, from which you can catch the shimmer of Lake Schwedt, where the Nazis dumped the ashes from the crematorium. The first structure to interrupt this idyll is the main administrative building, the Kommandantur; beyond it rises the massive camp wall, with its main gate issuing directly on to the Appellplatz, the roll-call square, where prisoners stood to be counted, humiliated, beaten, and selected for work or mutilation or death.

  Just off the Appellplatz lies the site of the old Revier, the infirmary, where the Nazis turned a cordoned-off ward into a torture chamber. Doctors deliberately wounded the legs of prisoners selected for their youth and health. They introduced pus, soil, glass, or splinters into exposed areas to induce infection, which they treated with sulfonamides—although some prisoners in a control group received no treatment at all. Of the seventy-five women subjected to these experiments, all but one of them Poles, at least five died as a result and another six were killed at the conclusion of the protocol. The rest were left to hop around the camp on one good leg. Repurposing as a badge of honor the German term for laboratory rabbits, Versuchskaninchen, they called themselves “the Rabbits.”

  The Nazis didn’t fully appreciate that some of their captives, imprisoned in the first place for resistance activity, knew the arts of espionage. Using a camera smuggled into the camp on a prisoner transport from Warsaw, inmates surreptitiously took photographs of the Rabbits’ wounds and deformities, then hid the film until a released prisoner could smuggle it out. With a urine-based invisible ink, they wrote on envelopes of letters home what was being done to whom; by applying a hot iron, family members could read each message, whose gist the Polish Resistance relayed to the world beyond. An August 1943 edition of a Polish underground newspaper carried the headline HORRIFIC ATROCITIES IN RAVENSBRÜCK and detailed the experiments, even naming the doctors involved, including the one featured in Lilac Girls, Hertha Oberheuser. Not until April 1945, in a deal brokered with the Nazis by the Swedish Red Cross and the Danish government, did a fleet of white buses transport the surviving Rabbits to neutral Sweden.

  Caroline learned of the Rabbits from women of the French Resistance who had been imprisoned at Ravensbrück and became her friends after the war. For years she and others tried to exact reparations from the West German government. But Ravensbrück was liberated by the Red Army, not the western Allies, so the Rabbits’ story remained little known in the west. Bonn claimed it had no influence because of its lack of diplomatic ties with Poland, now in the Soviet Bloc. And a camp for mostly non-Jewish women didn’t fit neatly into the Holocaust narrative the world had been processing since the end of the war.

  Caroline finally won a breakthrough in 1958, when she prevailed on Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins to write about the Rabbits’ plight. In response, readers donated enough money to bring thirty-five of the victims to the United States that December. Those who needed surgery or therapy received it, and Caroline hosted four of the women at her Bethlehem home over Christmas. In the meantime she engaged Benjamin Ferencz, who had prosecuted leaders of the Einsatzgruppen at the Nuremberg trials, to lean on the Federal Republic of Germany. As the Rabbits generated steady publicity during their US tour, the West German government finally agreed to help cover the cost of their treatment. Five years later the Germans paid out reparations too. Upon learning that Dr. Oberheuser was practicing as a pediatrician in northern Germany—she had been released only five years into a twenty-year sentence—Caroline successfully led a pressure campaign to strip her of her medical license.

  Among the ancestors my mother and I share with Caroline is a slaveholder named William Calvin Ferriday. He took possession of four-thousand-acre Helena Plantation in Louisiana’s Concordia Parish as a gift from the family of his bride, Helen Catherine Smith, of Natchez, Mississippi, upon their marriage in 1826. One of their sons, J.C., granted rights-of-way through the plantation to a succession of railroad lines before his death in 1894, and soon this depot carved out of the family landholdings took the name Ferriday.

  According to a census J.C. himself conducted on the eve of the Civil War, the Ferridays then held in slavery 149 people. Two years later J.C.’s brother, William Calvin Jr. (Caroline’s grandfather and my great-great-grandfather), an ordained Presbyterian minister who had gone north to study at Lafayette College and Princeton Theological Seminary, volunteered as a chaplain with the Pennsylvania 121st Infantry. He did so in defiance of the family’s several generations of investment in “the Southern way of life.”

  Unsettled by her slaveholding ancestors, Caroline drew instead on the righteous heritage of her grandfather, as well as the abolitionism championed by a long line of Woolseys on her mother’s side. Her activism doubled as atonement for the actions of her forebears. In taking inventory of Caroline’s contributions to the black freedom struggle—from helping to found the first African American–owned bank in Harlem; to providing financial support for civil rights organizations and historically black colleges; to supporting racial justice in the Louisiana town that carries the family name—I can hear Kurt’s injunction to Maria: Whether someone is as young as you or as old as I, our lives will hardly be long enough to complete this task, and how long we get to engage it is up to God’s grace.

  Readers of Lilac Girls know a fictionalized Caroline—a woman who has an affair with a married Frenchman and, when she discovers her paramour’s lost daughter in an orphanage after the war, only grudgingly reunites the girl with him and his Jewish wife. A novelist might be excused these plot devices to keep a character from coming off as too saintly to be believable. But Caroline lived a real life beyond the pages of that book. She really did say her prayers before breakfast each morning. Born just before midnight on a July third, she celebrated each Fourth of July as if patriotism were congenital.

  If we’re looking for character flaws, there would be plenty to count. We could start with stubborn and be sure to include “impatient,” a word one Rabbit, Stanisława Sledziejowska-Osiczko, employed to describe Caroline, explaining, “She wanted to change the world in one day.” But if indeed “our lives will hardly be long enough to complete this task,” that’s surely the tempo we should adopt, every day.

  What Caroline did, what my mother did too, is nothing more than complete the transit to adulthood. As Susan Neiman puts it, “Growing up involves sifting through all the things you couldn’t help inheriting and figuring out what you want to claim as your own, and what you have to do to dispose of the rest of it.”

  There is no better staging ground for this exercise than the city I now board a train to return to. Berlin, Neiman adds, “makes ethics a grounded, constant presence; any concrete slab or bullet hole could remind you of moral questions.”

  Ten

  Chain Migration

  Niko, 1948 to 1952

  On August 5, 1948, the SS Ernie Pyle, a converted cargo ship, left Southampton for New York. Its passengers included hundreds of Americans returning from visits to the United Kingdom, a handful of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, and my father. The western Allies had introduced currency reform only a week earlier, which made virtually worthless the 10,000 Reichsmarks, once worth about $1,000, that Clara Merck had long ago bequeathed to her then eight-year-old grandson. Thus Niko carried ten dollars in his pocket and, with no formal German government to claim citizenship of, was listed on the manifest as “stateless.”

  Assigned to the lower deck, he took a bunk beneath a young priest from New Jersey who had been visiting relatives in Germany. The priest practiced his German on Niko, who tried out his English in turn. One night Father Joe introduced him to that foundational rite of American Catholicism, bingo, the lone entertainment on board. Niko began playing the twenty-five-cents-per-card minimum with his grubstake. He quit one dollar in, after finding himself ten dollars ahead. “My first investment,” he would call it.

  It was five a.m. and still dark when the Ernie Pyle, captured by my father in the photograph here, sailed into New York harbor after eight days at sea. Niko stood on the foredeck, bathed in the humid air of an August dawn. The tip of lower Manhattan loomed like the prow of another ship. To his right lay a line of lights, cars already thick on the Brooklyn Bridge. Then, above the outer boroughs, a huge orange orb—the sun rising to illuminate the skyline on this dawning Friday, a Friday the thirteenth. The welter of sensations left him feeling as if he were under the spell of a fever.

  For my father, who had turned twenty-seven one month earlier, this was his very own Stunde Null, or zero hour, as Germans would come to call the reset brought by the Allied occupation. His father had been a man in a hurry: Kurt went into publishing at twenty-one and founded his own firm five years later, marrying in between. But Niko’s childhood had been jolted by divorce, his adolescence disfigured by Nazism, his adulthood stayed by war. Because of armed conflict, disease, or death in captivity, half of his demographic cohort, German males born shortly after World War I, failed to survive their twenties. In 1773 the political philosopher Johann Georg Schlosser wrote a letter to one of my ancestors, the writer Johann Heinrich Merck, with a few lines Kurt liked to cite: “There is still something between joy, suffering, and indifference. I do not know what to call it, but whatever it is, I know I would like to find it. It’s something like a child’s life.” For Niko, precisely this kind of ordinary existence—the life Kurt knew he wanted more of and the one I would take for granted—could at long last begin.

  Upon disembarking from the Ernie Pyle, many of the Holocaust survivors were met by family members who worked in the diamond trade on Forty-Seventh Street. Niko could count nineteen dollars to his name as well as American family to fetch him at the pier. He was about to benefit from what would one day be contemptuously called “chain migration.”

  Kurt and Christian escorted him to the apartment on Washington Square. A week later, with Helen, they took a train north to Albany, where they were met by Kurt’s exile friends Richard and Editha Sterba, pupils of Freud’s from Vienna, who drove them to their summer home in Shaftsbury, Vermont. Gaining altitude, feeling the humidity fall away, watching the sky get bluer and the landscape greener, Niko marveled that a place so much like Bavaria could be among the United States.

  The Sterbas spent the rest of the year in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, charging auto executives a steep hourly rate for space on their couch. But every summer they relocated to Vermont with their two daughters, a cook, a housekeeper, and several horses. A parade of friends filed through their compound, with its wood-clad buildings and swimming pool, mostly fellow refugees, many of them musicians, including the pianist Claude Frank, who might join Richard, an amateur violinist, to play after meals. With music, nature, three meals a day, and enough spoken German to keep him from feeling lost, the setting cushioned my father’s landing.

  Before leaving the Sterbas at the end of that summer, Niko was driven the ten miles to the Bennington office of the Vermont DMV, where his Luftwaffe-honed skills behind the wheel proved sharp enough for him to pass the state driver’s test. Over Labor Day weekend he drove Kurt, Helen, and Christian back to Washington Square in Kurt’s 1948 Ford, which would ordinarily be garaged at the Sterbas’ property over the winter, but Niko would now use to shuttle between Princeton and Manhattan on weekends.

  In addition to helping his son get that position as a graduate student, Kurt had worked his exile connections to find Niko a place to live—in the shambling home off Nassau Street of Erich Kahler, a German Jewish cultural historian who had come to America in 1938. Kahler held a position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where he was friendly with Albert Einstein, who held the mortgage on Kahler’s house. On these several floors Kahler re-created the Prague in which he had lived before the war, hosting a cast of regulars and boarders that came to be known as the Kahler Circle. At one time or another the group included the logician Kurt Gödel, the painter Ben Shahn, and the art historian Erwin Panofsky. With his broad interests and love of good conversation, Kahler presided at mealtimes. His wife, Lili, prepared breakfast and dinner for anyone in residence. The germophobic Gödel supplied his own cutlery.

  Into this Old World biosphere dropped Niko, who was assigned a tiny bedroom-bathroom suite on the top floor. Its previous occupant had been Hermann Broch, who holed up there to finish The Death of Virgil, the epic begun in a concentration camp and just published by Pantheon in a dual-language edition. Here Niko passed through a way station Broch captured in that book with the paradoxical phrase noch nicht und doch schon—not yet and yet so. In the morning my father would walk down Nassau Street, then left up Washington Road to the Frick Chemistry Lab. Lectures there demanded that he learn on two tracks—chemistry, to be sure, but English too, as he tried to separate the New England honk of this professor from the Southern twang of that one, and both from the Schweinerei of English spoken by the Delphic Dr. Furman. Soon fellow grad students began tearing him away from the books, which he’s seen with below, to take him across Nassau Street for a lunch of a pork roll sandwich and a vanilla shake. Then it was back to duty in the lab, where twice a week he taught a course in exchange for a tuition waiver. Niko wearied quickly of the premeds who wanted to know how little they could do and still get a passing grade.

  One February night in 1949, my father drove Kahler in that Ford to the Institute for Advanced Study for a lecture by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Robert Oppenheimer introduced the evening’s guest, while Einstein sat in the audience. To Niko, Bohr’s forty-minute presentation on quantum mechanics and epistemology was incomprehensible. Afterward, asked to give Einstein a lift home, my father panicked. What if the Great Professor wanted his opinion of a lecture Niko hadn’t understood? My father realized he had only one recourse: to ask Einstein first what he thought. It seems Niko hadn’t missed a thing. Wenn der Bohr redet, kommt nur Blödsinn raus, Einstein replied. Er soll lieber beim Schreiben bleiben. When Bohr speaks, nothing but nonsense comes out. He should stick to writing.