About four years ago, Robbie Kaplan began looking into her family’s ancestry “just like everybody else.”
“I had always been told that we didn’t lose family during the Holocaust, but when I did my genealogical research, I found a great-great-uncle that had remained in what was Austria at the time while his brothers immigrated to the U.S.,” the author and member of Temple Rodef Shalom said.
Kaplan’s great-great-uncle had 12 children, some of whom were murdered along with their families during the Holocaust. She also discovered that her grandmother had “well over” 50 first and second cousins honored on the Holocaust memorial in the Polish town of Nowy Sącz.
She did further reading about Nowy Sącz and the nearby town of Nowy Targ, and learned that “when Holocaust survivors returned to these two towns, they were murdered and worse by the Polish people in town who didn’t want them back and didn’t want to give their synagogues and homes back,” Kaplan said.
For this reason, Kaplan is unsure about visiting Poland: “I’m struggling with whether or not I want to confront that part of my family’s past.”
However, her close friend Renee Andrews — the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors — told Kaplan a few months ago that she had obtained German citizenship for herself, her four children and seven grandchildren. In June 2021, the Bundestag — Germany’s national parliament — granted descendants of Holocaust victims a legal right to German citizenship.
“I was so incredibly shocked that she would want German citizenship after what her family went through,” Kaplan said.
Intrigued by this history, Kaplan will bring the voices of fellow second- and third-generation survivors to Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church on Nov. 9, the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Three speakers will tell their stories of obtaining citizenship by descent in the countries that their families narrowly escaped.
Andrews is one of the panelists, along with her husband, Bill, who worked to reclaim property seized from her family during the Holocaust and prepared the family’s documents for citizenship.
Like Andrews, Melani Spiegel, the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, obtained citizenship in Germany.
Anne Hand, the author of the memoir “Austrian Again,” will share her journey to uncover her family’s hidden Holocaust history and navigate Austria’s reparation citizenship process.
The Austrian Citizenship Law, passed under the Nazi regime’s influence, led to the persecution and denaturalization of many citizens, especially Jewish Austrians. This displacement also affects descendants’ eligibility for citizenship, so in 2020, Austria began granting citizenship to descendants of Holocaust victims.
“Their stories are extremely interesting,” Kaplan said. “We’re hoping that [by] hearing their stories, it will open up the possibility to others that there are pathways to obtain citizenship that they might be considering and realize that there are real possibilities to that.”
Descendants of Holocaust survivors differ widely in their opinions about claiming citizenship by descent.
“Each story, just like every Holocaust story, is so unique,” Kaplan said. “Each one of these presenters are unique. … They’re very different.”
Spiegel obtained German citizenship because of her grandfather, who had been 7 years old when his family emigrated to the United States. Her grandfather was surprisingly welcomed back in Bünde, the German town where he’d been forced to flee. Spiegel returns to Bünde regularly and has fostered connections with the next generation.
Others are not as keen on returning to the land.
“[Renee Andrews’] parent would never step foot back in Germany and actually destroyed her personal documents that were German,” Kaplan said. “Another panelist reclaimed [Austrian citizenship] for her great-great-grandmother — so you have very different stories, different pathways.”
It’s important and necessary to share these personal narratives so that today’s generations know about the challenges that Holocaust survivors endured, Kaplan said.
Getting citizenship by descent is a relatively new, unexplored facet of Holocaust history. “If it weren’t for the Holocaust, we wouldn’t have people reclaiming citizenship from countries now offering this as a way of reconciling,” Kaplan added.
Kaplan plans to continue to keep this legacy alive by telling her children about their family’s experience fleeing Europe and how they fared in the U.S.
“I think it’s always important to talk about Jewish history because I don’t think we can forget what has happened within our families and within our experience as Jews,” she said. “I think we talk about it so that we can pass on that information to the next generation so that we don’t forget, we don’t become complacent. We’re aware.”
Kaplan is working on a narrative of her grandmother’s family: “I think it’s important that we share those stories and that we all understand those challenges.”
