"My grandmother's childhood in Weimar Germany was, at least as she described it, idyllic. She grew up in Grunewald, a leafy section of Berlin, swimming and boating in the district's many lovely lakes. Her parents, though Jewish, threw elaborate Christmas parties and hosted birthday celebrations at which their three daughters were expected to recite poetry."
"She and my grandfather had been 'lucky' because the only difficult choice that they'd had to make was to flee, and that choice had, in effect, been made for them. History had taken a host of fraught decisions out of their hands."
"In the opening pages of 'Stay Alive,' he recounts the story of his father, Leo, whose experience was, in key ways, the m[...]"
Ian Buruma's book 'Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945' documents everyday life in wartime Berlin through the voices of various inhabitants including students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and resistance members. The narrative opens with the author's reflection on his grandmother's experience in Weimar Germany, where she lived an assimilated, privileged life in Berlin before immigrating to New York before Kristallnacht in 1938. The grandmother considered her family fortunate because they escaped Germany, avoiding the difficult moral choices that faced those who remained. Buruma, who grew up in the Netherlands, uses personal and historical accounts to explore how ordinary people navigated survival and decision-making during the Nazi occupation of Berlin from 1939 to 1945.
Read at The New Yorker
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