 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

