It is a small yellow vase. And it is the only object from Europe that I still possess.

The vase was given to my grandmother, Dora, from Dortmund, Germany, on the occasion of her engagement to my grandfather, Saul Birnberg, born in Kolomaya and raised in Hamburg, in the late 1920s. It began as a simple gift marking the start of a life together in a Europe where Jews, despite growing unease, still believed they belonged.

That belief did not last.

Like so many Jews of their time, my grandparents became what history would later call “Wandering Jews,” though there was nothing voluntary about their movement. From Dortmund, they fled to Liège, then Brussels, part of a broader pattern of German Jewish displacement in the 1930s when the beginnings of the Holocaust were percolating. With them, they carried very little. Among those few items was this small yellow vase.

The Nazi occupation of Belgium erased any illusion of refuge. My grandfather was arrested in Brussels and deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. He had been turned in by a fellow Jew, Jacques the Musser (traitor) a detail that sits uncomfortably in my family story. No one knows what Jacques was thinking as he went around Brussels with the Gestapo pointing out Jews but we do know at the end, his wife and children were murdered by the Nazis too.

The pretty vase,........

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