JANUARY 7 • 2021 | 13

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speech Otto was to give on Feb. 14, 1945,
to the Detroit Women’s Division of the
American Jewish Congress.
The letter about Otto’s parents’ deaths —
the transport of numbers of 61 and 62, my
great-great-grandparents, from Malines to
Auschwitz — was postmarked by a Belgian
government official that very same day.
When I shared the article with my grand-
mother, she remarked at how happy her
father looked in his headshot. That photo
represented an Otto that my grandmother
never knew. That was Otto while he still
believed his parents were alive.
Though my grandmother was 3 at the
time, she still remembers the sadness
that enveloped Otto. “It changed him,
”
she said of the burden he carried for the
rest of his life.

EARLY LIFE
From my grandmother’s files, I learned
that Otto’s earliest memory was of
watching German Emperor Wilhelm
I declare the beginning of World War
I. He and his father stood among
a crowd of Berliners outside the
Imperial Palace that day, unaware that
the nationalism he was witnessing
would eventually overtake German
politics and tear Otto’s family apart.
As a student in Austria, Otto was at the
top of his class. He was Vienna’s high school
chess champion and became one of Vienna
University’s first six doctoral economics
graduates.

In a letter to my grandmother about his
early life, Otto spoke of the antisemitism
he faced. He speculated that he was inten-
tionally passed over for academic positions
because he was Jewish.
In 1936, Otto moved to Brussels with his
father. He was soon offered a job at L
’Avenir
Juif, a Belgian Jewish newspaper. After a
year, L
’Indépendance Belge, a daily Belgian
newspaper, reached out with a tremendous
opportunity. Otto could return to Austria as
the paper’s Viennese correspondent.

At the time, Austria’s Chancellor Kurt
Schuschnigg was struggling to hold Nazism
at bay. Otto and his editors knew Otto’s
Jewish identity would put him in danger
from Nazis. They issued him two press
passes, one under his real name and one

under a Belgian-sounding pseudonym,
“Marcel Legrand.
”
Otto kept the real press pass for the rest
of his life.
From my grandmother, I learned that
Otto spent his American life believing his
reporting was lost. In a way, Otto believed
“Marcel Legrand” (his pen name) was the
first relative he lost to the Nazis.
But in late 2019, I found copies of this
reporting in New York City, just 35 miles
from my home in Bedford Hills, N.Y. I went
with my mother, father, sister and grand-
mother to the New York Public Library over
Thanksgiving to rediscover our family’s
forgotten legacy.

BODY OF REPORTING
The reporting career of “Marcel” was
varied in the beginning. He reviewed a
Viennese cultural festival. He wrote about
minor trade agreements. He chronicled
the mourning of Engelbert Dollfuss, the
Austrian chancellor who was assassinated
by Nazis in 1934.
As the months wore on, Otto’s reporting
became bolder. In an article that hinted
at his Jewish identity, Marcel explored the
effects of Britain’s Palestine mandate on
Jews throughout Western Europe.
“The surge of antisemitism coming from
Hitler’s Germany did not spare other Jews
of Central and Eastern Europe,
” Otto wrote
as Marcel. “This will undoubtedly be the
scene of dramatic struggle the subject of
which is ... the fate of several million Jews.
”

LEFT:

Researching

Otto Schirn’s life

at the New York

Public Library:

grandmother Vivian

Schirn, Sammy

Sussman, sister Gabi

Sussman and mother

Rebecca Sussman.

BELOW:

The passport that got

Otto out of Europe.

COURTESY OF SAMMY SUSSMAN

COURTESY OF REBECCA SUSSMAN