The Right of Passage

How much could the victims of the Holocaust have known of what awaited them? How much should they have known? The Right of Passage reveals how different members of a single German-Jewish family tried to flee the Nazi regime. The discovery of a cache of photographs leads the authors to hundreds of letters, on which the book is based. Newly translated from German, these exchanges among leading thinkers of the period vividly record an intellectual culture in flight, though none could grasp the nature of the evil that was coming. Most members of the family found safety in England, Ireland or America, some only just in time; the logician and philosopher Kurt Grelling, exiled in Belgium, was arrested when the Nazis invaded. Deported to France and interned by the Vichy regime, despite the efforts of friends, Grelling's attempts to find passage to America ultimately came to nothing. But his letters speak across the decades, urging us to question our unconscious attitudes to the millions of victims of the worst mass atrocity in history.

Julian Beecroft has written 10 works of narrative history in the fields of art and culture, as well as features, reviews and travel pieces for the Guardian, the Telegraph and 1843 (Economist magazine). He has lectured on 20th-century music history at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. Sheri Blaney, who hails from a Jewish family, ran her own stock photo agency in Boston for 21 years, and currently works as a freelance IP copyright consultant. She has been an invited judge for The Boston Globe and The Griffin Museum of Photography contests.