JANUARY 7 • 2021 | 15
(Council of Jewish Associations). He rep-
resented Belgium at the last World Jewish
Congress before the war.
One of his duties was to help Belgian
Jews determine the fates of their Polish
relatives. He met my great-grandmother,
Yvonne, when she came to his office for
help finding her Polish aunts and uncles.
Months later, they were a happily mar-
ried couple on honeymoon in the Belgian
countryside. Yvonne never learned what
happened to her Polish relatives.
Belgium was overrun in May 1940, and
the couple fled to France. The Nazis were
soon there, too.
As an Austrian refugee, Otto was placed
in the French Saint-Cyprien concentration
camp by the Nazi-controlled authorities.
While Otto suffered under conditions he
later described as “atrocious,
” Yvonne plead-
ed with the camp commander for Otto’s
freedom. She told the commander she was
pregnant, and Otto was a young father.
After a few months, the commander
relented. Otto was set free. He never learned
what happened to the others in that camp.
My research indicates most were murdered
after being transported back to the Reich.
FLEEING TO AMERICA
Another early childhood memory I carried
into my research was of my family’s visit to
the Ellis Island museum.
As we left the museum, my mom told
us her family’s story: Otto and Yvonne fled
Lisbon in one of the last ships to the U.S.
At the time, I gave no thought to the
many miracles Otto’s life represented. He
was my mother’s beloved “Bonpapa” — his
survival seemed preordained.
I never understood how many times Otto
came close to death. They traveled through
Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal at the
height of the war. I never thought about the
thousands of other refugees who had no
relatives eager to learn their stories.
Otto’s press pass, refugee card and
Belgian passport gave some insight into this
fraught journey. For five decades, he kept
these ties to Europe in the upper left-hand
drawer of his desk.
Looking through the pages of that pass-
port, I get a sense of the desperation Otto
felt. He obtained over 20 visas to various
countries throughout the war. At one
point, he pursued visas to Switzerland and
Thailand — anything to flee the impending
crush of the Third Reich.
Over the past 75 years, my family has
grappled with the meaning of this history.
We’ve let Marcel Legrand’s memory fade
while fighting to keep Otto’s story alive.
Otto dedicated his American life to sim-
ple acts of remembrance and prevention.
For 30 years, he served on the American
Zionist Council. He promoted investment
in the young State of Israel, believing this to
be the fulfillment of his Jewish faith.
Otto also helped found the Los Angeles
Holocaust memorial: six black pillars rep-
resenting the six million Jews lost, perma-
nently installed behind the city’s Holocaust
museum. For years, he served as president
of the American Survivors of the Holocaust.
Otto remembered how Marcel’s reporting
failed to halt the rise of Nazism. He dedicat-
ed his life to making sure his adopted coun-
try never went down the same path.
Soon after immigrating, Otto traveled the
United States giving lectures about antisem-
itism, the Holocaust and Jewish history.
This work brought him to Detroit in 1945.
It continued throughout the rest of his life.
Following in the footsteps of Dr. Stephen
Wise, his friend from the World Jewish
Congress, Otto became an advocate for civil
rights. He began lecturing on the impor-
tance of civil rights and racial equality in
the early 1950s.
In his most public moment of activism,
Otto spoke on NBC’s The Joe Pyne Show to
urge the ratification of the United Nations’
Convention on the Prevention of the Crime
of Genocide. (The U.S. Senate ratified this
convention in 1988.)
GENERATION TO GENERATION
My grandmother was the first family mem-
ber to shoulder Otto’s legacy. In graduate
school, she wrote a paper summarizing his
life. It was through interviews for this paper
that I was able to learn most of Otto’s story.
My grandmother’s master’s thesis
dealt with the trauma felt by families of
Holocaust survivors, using her own family
as an example.
My mother was the next bearer of family
history. She wrote about her “Bonpapa” for
a college history course, analyzing how his
experiences informed and influenced his
American identity.
“There was an air of sadness about
him,
” my mother told me recently. It was a
sadness no measure of postwar happiness
could ever undo.
Now it’s my turn. What lessons can I
draw from an 80-year-old story? What can
I learn from my family’s brave activist and
what from our courageous journalist?
I’ll always remember the first photo in
my grandmother’s album. It featured five
people in formal, 19th-century attire. They
look at the camera with no recognition of
the relatives who would stare back at them
through history’s one-way mirror.
Above them are notes in my grand-
mother’s handwriting. “Otto’s grandmother,
”
reads one. “Otto’s mother,
” reads another.
It took me a while to recognize the mean-
ing of those words. I thought this research
would bring me closer to my grandmother,
but she needed those notes to recognize the
grandparents she never met. She was no
more connected to them than I was.
I continue to struggle with the reality
of Otto’s life. It seems impossible that he
exhibited such bravery; it seems unthink-
able that he had to experience such tragedy.
I view Otto’s life as a story of the “two”
men, whose articles, photos and memo-
ries my family has clung to for so many
years. I view it as a reminder of the past, a
cautionary tale what might come without
brave Jews like Otto and brave reporters like
Marcel.
University of Michigan music student Sammy Sussman
is an accomplished bassist/composer and an inves-
tigative reporter for The Michigan Daily newspaper
who helped uncover years of sexual misconduct and
harassment by an instructor/associate dean at U-M.
A photo of
Otto in 1992.
COURTESY OF SAMMY SUSSMAN