20 September (2022), Rachel Lavin (friend) and Francine Pease (sister), Patrice and I visited Freiburg im Breisgau with a side trip to Patrice’s family (father’s side) to their pre-WWII home in Kippenheim, Germany.

There, on 22 October,1940, the Nazis rounded up the Maier family––Patrice’s great-grandparents, grandparents, father and uncle––and the Jewish population of Baden-Wurttenburg to deport to Gurz, France. I shan’t repeat a  story better told in the book, The Unwanted. Through a series of harrowing miracles, the family Meier escaped the holocaust and thus, Patrice is my wife. Most Baden-Wurttemberg Jews perished in Auschwitz. I had previously described Kurt Meier’s  telling the story of Shoah in the German State Library (Frankfurt-am-Main) will honor him with a reading room in his name with a holographic interview ).

Stoppelsteinen, or Stumble Stones, remembrance markers placed before pre-genocide German-Jewish residences.