How 10,000 pages of documents sent me on a journey through Germany’s dark past.
I leaf through the images, noting how expressions migrate with the year of the photo. Felix in a family picture from 1934 is beaming. By the time of his Reisepass, he looks grimly determined. Two years into exile, posing in a rumpled white linen suit with colleagues, next to a locomotive in the trainyards where he worked in Quito, I can see the deep fatigue, his face darkened and haunted. Pictures of my mother show the same progression. The kid posing with her rucksack on the first day of school is the girl who wanted to be a doctor like her famous grandfather Rudolf. A decade later, she’s sixteen and looks utterly battered, her face that of the young woman exposed at school for being half-Jewish, attacked, humiliated, cast out, gone into hiding, lucky to be alive. Her bruised expression carries the weight of every day she’s spent alone. But it’s also the face of the woman she would become as a result, who would meet my father in Guayaquil, have five kids and raise them in Venezuela, emigrate to Canada, to Vancouver, where she’d break down sobbing in the family Volvo at the sight of searchlights over the Pacific National Exhibition, as we drove down Hastings Street, all of us kids watching wide eyed from the back seat as my father tried to comfort her.