Agency of the Ignored
Reclaiming Agency: One Family's Return to Frankfurt After the Holocaust
In the early 1930s, Germany was beautiful—like Paris, next to Paris. Then came a man of average height, mediocre build, and a strange mustache, freshly released from prison, yelling about Jews, communists, and trade unionists, blaming them for losing the First World War. This man was Adolf Hitler of München (Munich). Originally Austrian, he lived in Munich.
To appease his followers and silence him, President Paul von Hindenberg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. Soon after, Hindenberg died. Hitler rose to the presidency, and with the passage of the Enabling Acts, consolidated the powers of the presidency and chancellorship into one office, calling himself Führer (“Leader”).
By 1942, the Nürnberg Laws were fully enforced. On January 20, fifteen members of the SS and representatives of other ministries met in a grand villa in Wannsee, a neighborhood in the inner suburbs of Berlin. The meeting’s purpose: to discuss the Endlösung der Judenfrage, the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
The session was cold, bureaucratic, clinical—they might as well have been reviewing quarterly marketing spreadsheets. Hannah Arendt captured this chilling normalcy in The Banality of Evil. In about 90 minutes, fifteen people had decided the fate of millions.
I emphasize this because among the victims was my great-grandmother. My grandmother and mother always taught me: never be tied down, and never surrender your agency to anyone or anything. Always stay in control.
Travel, for me, is reclaiming freedom and agency—even as the United States exercises similar control through ICE. Where the SS had trains, ICE has ICE Air. The difference is nominal; the principle is the same.
In Frankfurt, Germany, there is a wall of 12,000 names—the city’s Jewish residents who were marked for erasure. My family’s names are there. They were sent to Dachau, treated as mere cargo on transport lists.
Today, I am moving back to Frankfurt to reclaim the future they were denied. I am choosing an apartment ten miles from the world’s most powerful aviation hub because I refuse to be “trappable.” I am taking the German language, the German system, and the German sky, and turning them into my tools of agency.
History tried to erase my family in Frankfurt. In 2027 or so, I am returning to Frankfurt-am-Main to lead it.
