 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

