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Dear President Trump: Our Grandparents Were

Refugees. This Is Their Story.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, its worth actually remembering the
Holocaust.
01/27/2017 07:42 pm ET | Updated 9 hours ago

3k

Rachel Baumann
Student

Nick Baumann

Senior Enterprise Editor, The Hungton Post

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TRUMP'S FIRST 100 DAYS
SEGALL FAMILY

Max Horst Segall and Frieda Esther Lopatka Segall survived the Nazis, but still had to wait to come to the U.S.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that makes it much
harder for refugees to enter the United States and eectively bans refugees
from Syria from coming here at all. He did this on Holocaust Remembrance

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Day, which honors the victims of that atrocity many of them refugees who

address@email.com

tried to ee to the U.S. but were turned away.

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Our grandparents were refugees.

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DearPresidentTrump:OurGrandparentsWereRefugees.ThisIsTheirStory.|TheHuffingtonPost

Max Horst Segall and Frieda Lopatka were born in Germany in 1916. They grew
up down the street from each other in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of
Berlin.

2M

1.08 M

466 K

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When they were teenagers, they fell in love.

Max and Frieda were both raised Jewish. Frieda, however, was born to a

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Christian mother, which meant under Jewish law, she wasnt Jewish. But in
1936, Frieda chose to formally convert to Judaism so that she could be with
Max. At that time, she also received her Hebrew name Esther, after the
clever and resourceful Jewish hero who saved her people from extermination
while they were living in a foreign land.
In the late 1930s, the German government was obsessed with protecting its
citizens from Jews, who were portrayed as an internal threat. Citizenship in
Germany was based on your fathers birthplace. Because Maxs birth father was
born in a disputed area between Poland and Germany, Max was never able to
obtain citizenship. After his birth father died, his stepfather, who had fought for
Germany in World War I, adopted him. But Max still couldnt get documents
proving that he was German. He was treated as a stateless person an illegal
immigrant.
On Oct. 28, 1938, in the middle of the night, he was arrested in his parents
apartment in Berlin, interrogated, beaten and deported rst to a
concentration camp and later to the Warsaw Ghetto.
By August 1939, with war looming, Esther had obtained two visas one to
Peru and one to Chile. By that point, many people outside Germany knew that
Jews were suering horric persecution under the Nazis. But most nations,
including the U.S., never opened their doors more than a crack. The perverse
logic of the Nazi regime meant that Esther, with her Christian mother, was able
to get permission to emigrate. But she never used her visas. She wanted to be
with Max. She stayed in Berlin.
This is her passport:

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SEGALL FAMILY

Soon enough, the government came even for the Jews whose German
citizenship was unquestioned. On Nov. 1, 1941, Esther was taken to Grunewald
train station. Most people brought there at that time were deported to
extermination camps and gassed, or simply shot in the forest and buried in
mass graves. Esther, along with Maxs parents, was deported to the Warsaw
Ghetto. There they were able to nd Max again.
In 1942, before the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto, Sgt. G-, a Nazi
soldier, helped Max and Esther escape. They were both caught and returned to
the ghetto. The Nazi soldier helped them escape again, and they hid in the
countryside. During this time, Max joined the Polish Resistance and fought with
them from 1942 until 1944.
On Easter Sunday, 1944, our grandparents audaciously returned to Berlin by
train, carrying fake papers. Max gured that Berlin, which the Nazis had
declared free of Jews in May 1943, was the last place the government would
look for them. They hid in an attic. It was searched several times, but they were
never found.
The war ended, and Max and Esther were reunited with their surviving family
members. Although they had been married in hiding, they wed again in a civil
ceremony on June 4, 1945, just weeks after V-E Day. They wanted to emigrate
to the U.S., not Israel. Wed had enough excitement already, they said later.

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But even after the horrors of the Holocaust, the U.S. still refused to open its
doors to Jewish refugees. So Max and Esther did what most refugees spend
huge periods of their lives doing: They waited.
Slowly, the door cracked open. President Harry Truman permitted some 35,000
to 40,000 displaced persons, most of them Jewish, to come between 1945 and
1948. In 1948, Congress passed a law allowing more Jews to reach U.S. shores.
In late 1949, our grandparents arrived. The next year, they received a letter
from Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson:

Dear President Trump: Our Grandparents Were Refugees. This Is T

SEGALL FAMILY

A few years ago, Rachel won a fellowship and traveled to Germany to learn
more about Max and Esther. Through archival research, she found testimony
given by our grandfather after the war and the address where they had
hidden in the outskirts of Berlin. She went to that house and knocked on the
door. The people who had lived there in the 1940s no longer did. But the
current residents had records of the previous owners, a family named B-.

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DearPresidentTrump:OurGrandparentsWereRefugees.ThisIsTheirStory.|TheHuffingtonPost

Two brothers, by then in their late 70s, had lived in the house as boys during
the war. Rachel set up a call with them. The older brother didnt remember
anything other than that they had been forbidden to enter certain parts of the
property when they were little. But then the younger brother revealed
something he had never told his sibling before. In their mothers last years, she
had confessed to him that during the war, she and his father had sheltered a
young Jewish couple.
On Maxs application for U.S. citizenship in 1954, the government asked him
whether he had, in the United States or any other country, been arrested, been
charged with a violation, broken any law or ordinance, or been ned or
imprisoned. He checked yes. Then he wrote this:

1938: Concentration Camp, Germany. Outcome of Case: Deported to

Poland.
1941: Concentration Camps. Oense Involved: As a Jew. Outcome:
Returned to Ghetto.
1953-1954: Oense Involved: 2 parking violations. Outcome: $3 ne paid,
each.

Our grandparents died when we were young. They loved this country. They
were deeply grateful to the U.S. and the other nations that fought and won the
war against Hitler. But when we went through their things, we found many
valuables stored away in unexpected places. They spoke only rarely about
their early lives and usually to their son-in-law, not their daughter and they
never felt totally safe. They knew how fast a country could change.
We miss them. We think about them a lot these days and the people who
chose to help them, and the people who chose not to.
Pay attention.

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Read Max Horst Segalls testimony about his Holocaust story (in German)
below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jewishrefugeesholocausttrump_us_588bbb21e4b08a14f7e5e7ca?89nnsodw48mwpnwmi&ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

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SEGALL FAMILY

Dear President Trump: Our Grandparents Were Refugees. This Is T

More:

Donald Trump

Refugees

Germany

Nazi Germany

The Holocaust

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Dear President Trump: Our Grandparents Were Refugees. This Is T

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