While I am about four years younger than you — I graduated college in 1973 — my parents were adults when they fled Germany in 1939. They both came from Germany’s upper middle class, lost many if not most of the family and took along the exact same thing as your maternal grandfather: 2 Leica cameras! (I learned on them and still have both.)

As the story goes, they also fled to Holland where they expected to spend a few weeks with an uncle of my mother. No sooner had they arrived than the police came knocking on the door telling them that they had to leave the country so as to allow for more Jews to enter.

I now practice architecture — something my father who died in 1959 was not encouraged to pursue — and one of our specialties is designing facilities for the broadcast media. The story came full circle when I heard that you were in the studios of Hawaii Public Radio; when I was designing a new facility for Cox in Honolulu a few years ago, I called Michael Titterton who was then GM for HPR. We spent part of a morning together trying to strategize how they could possibly move/upgrade. (They may have done so already.)

Regards,

Peter