Chilean Chronicles, Part 92: Pure Joy as Jon Arrives and Family Time Begins

There's nothing else like it.

The feeling you get around those who knew you when, the people with whom you shared the most formative, embarrassing, meaningful and ordinary moments of your lives.

Those with whom you grow up and whose progression through the life cycle helps you mark your own life journey.

Your family.

Our time here in Chile has been an extraordinary one for many reasons.

One of the most important of these is that Dunreith and I are sharing this adventure.

That we sold our house the day before we left only heightens our sense of carving this chapter together.

Late last month we had the pleasure of spending five glorious days with Dad and his partner Lee in Argentina and Uruguay.

They'll be coming here next Thursday after a 17-day tour that has them heading down to the continent's southernmost point before making their way up Chile to Santiago.

They'll also be here with my brother Jon, who arrived in Santiago this morning for a two-week stint during which we'll do a journalistic project.

It promises to be a period of intense activity. I've been exerting a lot of energy calling and emailing to make sure we take full advantage of the opportunity.

I'm optimistic that we'll do just that with a hard push.

And, mostly, I feel tremendously fortunate not only that we have this time together, but that we're able to collaborate on work that we love.

Jon's arrival marks the beginning of our final seven weeks here in Chile.

Dad and Lee will stay until November 21.

Aidan, who set off for Bali today after finishing his expansive semester in New Zealand, lands a few days later.

He'll be here for a month.

During that time we'll travel to northern Chile to see the desert and to the south to spend time in Chiloe and Patagonia, a place Dunreith first wanted to visit in 1977 after reading Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia.

We'll also spend close to a week in Peru, including several days in legendary Incan site Machu Picchu.

Time with any family member is something to be treasured, particularly since we no longer live near each other.

Having that time with Aidan, especially in places where none of us will have access to the Internet, feels even more so.

Dunreith, Jon and I met at our place after I had finished with teaching and meeting and interviewing and planning.

We all walked to our favorite Peruvian restaurant, where Jon had his first dinner on Chilean soil as well as his Peruvian pisco sour. We made plans for what we'll do tomorrow and the weekend and as much of the next week as we've got lined up at this point.

We savored the three types of ceviches, feasted on the classic Peruvian dish of aji de gallina and devoured the crepe-covered ice cream and the tres leches cake.

After dinner we took the Metro down to La Moneda, the presidential palace that was bombed on Sept. 11, 1973, the day on which Salvador Allende delivered his famous final speech to the Chilean people.

The massive Chilean flag that is so often unfurled and waving in the wind during the day was still.

The palace was surrounded by a wall marking it off as a construction site.

Dogs lay on the sidewalk, looking, and perhaps even being, dead.

O'Higgins Street bustled with activity.

The three of us walked to the site to get a better look at the front of the palace.

A statue of Diego Portales, one of the nation's most critical political figures, loomed in the distance.

We strolled past the parking garage and into the cultural center and saw a large, open space where workers were packing up chairs and speakers from a performance.

We went out the back and saw a statue of Allende standing above words from his final speech, "Tengo fe en Chile y su destino."

I have faith in Chile and his destiny.

We headed back to the Metro.

Jon stopped every few steps to take pictures of the dogs, of the political posters, of the artwork in the station of Chilean geography, and, after we got off at the Pedro de Valdivia stop, of a yellow public service announcement telling people to register their guns.

On one level, Jon's setting foot in Chile bring just a tiny hint of sadness because it means that the finish line to a remarkable time in our lives is visible, if only faintly.

But that wasn't what I felt tonight.

It was pure joy.

A Special Kristallnacht Anniversary

This year marks 75 years since the pogrom later known as Kristallancht, or “Night of the Broken Glass.”

The two-day rampage saw homes, businesses and synagogues ransacked in communities throughout Hitler’s Germany. After taking the pulse of world opinion, the Nazi government fined the Jewish community for the damage it had suffered.

It also led to the death of close to 100 Jews and many more being injured.

One was in our family.

One of the few childhood memories that my father retained from his years in his homeland was of the Gestapo coming for his father Max, a World War I veteran and the descendant of a family that had lived in the area for close to 150 years.

He returned weeks later, bruised and badly beaten. My father often wondered if the physical abuse contributed to his father’s later deafness.

Grandpa Max’s incarceration and public abuse convinced my grandfather that the country he had served was no longer his.

It also allowed him to listen to his wife and to take the seemingly impossible step of sending his children away to save them.

In the wake of the devastation, the British government established the Kindertransport program that allowed about 10,000 Jewish children ages 4 to 17 from Germany, Austria, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia to find refuge in England.

Dad and his older brother Ralph were two of them.

Dad boarded a train in the spring of 1939, shortly before he turned 5 years and just weeks after he had had his appendix removed.

His father, a World War I veteran who lost the unfettered use of his right arm and much of his hearing in the trenches, took his ailing son from doctor to doctor throughout the town.

None would operate on a Jewish child.

Eventually, my great-grandfather Joseph, the patriarch and the man for whom I am named, found a non-Jewish colleague to perform the surgery on his kitchen table.

Dad and Uncle Ralph lived under the watchful care of Ruth Stern, a Cambridge-educated headmistress, for close to a year and a half. In late 1940, they were reunited in the United Steas with my grandparents, who had managed to escape through Genoa, Italy after the war began.

As a result of the British government’s generosity and my grandparents’ courage, Dad and Uncle Ralph’s survival has always been linked to the memory of the Kristallnacht atrocities.

This year, the connection is a special one.

That’s because of the relationship we’ve developed in the past couple of years with Gabriele Thimm, a remarkable educator in Dad’s hometown who is fiercely committed to her students’ learning the truth about their nation’s genocidal history.

In the fall of 2011, Gabriele contacted me after reading an article I had written in 2004 about searching for our family’s roots. She said that she was organizing a memorial ceremony for the Jewish community of Essen, and that one of the stops would be at my great-grandfather’s house.

She invited us to attend.

We could not make the event, but we sent pictures and a statement in which we expressed our gratitude for what they were doing and our hope that we would meet them in person soon.

Six months later, we did just that.

Along with Dunreith, Aidan, my brother Jon and Dad’s partner Lee, Dad set foot in his hometown for the first time in 73 years.

Gabriele organized a series of events throughout the time we were in Germany.

We visited Dad’s former apartments.

We met a non-Jewish family whose parents had held our family bible for years during the Holocaust.

We visited the old Jewish cemetery and a farm house our ancestors had owned.

We held a surprise 78th birthday party for Dad.

We also attended a pair of Cermonies of Life that Gabriele had organized with her students.

The first was held at the Great Synagogue that was destroyed in Kristallnacht and has since been reopened as a cultural center.

The second took place at the school where Gabriele teaches.

The students read, sang and showed documents that told the story of the Jewish people, the Jewish community in Essen, our family’s history and the devastating impact of the Nazi regime.

At the school ceremony, students came forward and pinned the names of individual Lowenstein family members in the shapes of leaves on a green paper tree, eventually building a seven-generation family tree.

At the end, Dad rose and spoke.

He answered students’ questions, but before he did that, he announced that we were creating an award in our family’s name to honor young people who acted for Tolerance and Justice. (Part of the funds for the award came from an honorarium that the town had offered Dad.)

This year, Dad, Lee and I returned to Essen, where he presented the awards to the winners who had been selected from a panel of three people that Gabriele had spearheaded.

A class of art students had built a bright, multi-colored mural with the words “Tolerance and Justice” made out of puzzle pieces.

A group of students performed a rap they had written about the family.

A video that other students had made showed black and white images of forlorn children on the Kindertransport, numbers around their necks as they prepared to depart from their parents.

The video explained that Dad and Uncle Ralph were on the program.

Language that said Dad had returned to the community after many years scrolled across the screen, followed by a color picture of Dad speaking to the community at the Great Synagogue the previous year.

Dad gave the awards to the winners after reading in a statement he had written that told the young people they represented the future.

Months after the ceremony Gabriele told me that the leader of the cultural center had asked her to speak about our project at this year’s Kristallnacht commemoration.

She accepted.

A couple of days Gabriel wrote us that a television was recording a segment about our family.

Her students who had made the rap were going to answer questions and show photographer, the mural paint and the plaque that bears the award winners’ name.

The crew also wanted to see the family tree and Papa Joseph’s house.

The next day the students were going to record the rap on a CD.

And we’re talking about how to expand the project to other schools.

It is important not to overstate the extent and impact of what has happened, to use Gabriele’s extraordinary commitment and energy to put an excessively happy ending to a story of death and destruction or to look away from the intolerance that still exist in the community.

But it’s also important to know that stories of repair matter a lot.

Examples that permit young people to move forward knowing about what has come before and also carrying with them the belief that they can act in a different way can make a difference.

This Saturday and Sunday I’ll be thinking of Kristallnacht’s destruction

But I’ll also be thinking of Gabriele’s courage, of Dad’s character, and of my great fortune to be a part of this journey that has already brought tremendous meaning and joy and is not over yet.

That’s worth remembering, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 91: Becky Simpson's Counsel and a Full Life

In the nearly quarter century that I knew her, Becky Simpson, known to many as the "Mother Theresa of Applachia," taught me many lessons. She taught me that visions can come true after she had had an image of a mountain of food, a mountain of clothing and a molehill of money-and all three happened at the Cranks Creek Survival Center she co-founded with her husband Bobby.

She taught me about how far a sense of righteous indignation at society's inequities and a seemingly bottomless well of compassion and giving can flower and touch people from around the world.

She taught me that fierce and gentle can exist in equal measure in the same person.

She taught me that meaningful moments shared cut across all kinds of lines.

She also taught me about how people can endure and move through unimaginable suffering and come out bruised, but intact, on the other side.

This last lesson came after I asked her how she had been able to survive so much-a third grade education, the death of her younger brother and one of her six children, a profoundly damaged back, the most grinding of poverty, Bobby's blindness, floods that wiped out her home and a devastating car accident are only among the most noteworthy-and still continue both to extend an open hand to help those who needed it and to fight for justice.

How do you do it? I asked as we sat around the kitchen table where we spent many, many hours talking.

I was waiting for a lengthy explanation of social justice tactics.

Becky gave me nothing of the sort.

Rest and try again, she said, her clear blue eyes filled with hard-earned wisdom.

I'm trying to draw on Becky's counsel these days, when things are popping on many fronts, to put it mildly.

I'm working to pull my Data Journalism course together for the final month and to work with potential replacement Daniela Cartagena to make sure that she has what she needs to feel oriented and to continue the burgeoning tradition we're starting to establish at the University of Diego Portales.

I'm coordinating a presentation of my research into the impact of the landmark 2009 Transparency Law on the country with Antonio Campana, Yunuen Varela, and the rest of the folks at the Fulbright Commission.

I'm writing one post a week for Hoy in both Spanish and English, and working to maintain a similar pace with the Huffington Post in English.

I just sent off tonight an 8,000-word chapter that Dunreith, Gabriele Thimm, Dad and I wrote about our trip in May 2012 to Dad's hometown in Germany for a book based on the Engaging the Other conference at which we presented in South Africa in December 2012.

Dunreith and I are working out the logistics for trips that we'll take to Peru, the desert in northern Chile and the glaciers in the southern part of the country during the month that Aidan is here.

After receiving an email from high school friend Tamera Coyne-Beasley about the possibility of our class holding a 30th reunion, I reached out on Facebook to classmates to see if there was any interest in having such an event. This sparked a chain of events that has led in the past two weeks to the formation of a Facebook group with more than 150 members, the discovery that our class has had $559 since our tenth reunion in 1993, and the impending delivery of a class directory courtesy of the Brookline High School Alumni Association.

I'm gearing up for my brother Jon coming here for a couple of weeks for us to work on a journalism project, all the while trying to keep this space going.

This says nothing of following up and making plans to learn from and collaborate with, the talented, dedicated, courageous and inspiring journalists I met at the Global Investigative Journalism conference last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

And I'm trying to keep my writing going here and in another book project.

I don't offer this list either to brag or to complain.

It's hard for me to express how fortunate I feel on so many levels to be with Dunreith at this point in our lives and in the nation's history.

Rather it's to say that tending to all of these varied projects can leave me feeling alternately drained and scattered and to my head swirling with the myriad details to which I need to attend.

Which brings me back to Becky.

This afternoon Dunreith and I slogged through about three hours worth of checking out websites, reviews and options for each of the three trips we're taking starting at the end of this month.

My eyelids were starting to hang heavy as we sat on the lower level of the Starbucks on Pedro de Valdivia Street.

My response time and accuracy was diminishing, my irritability rising.

I've got to head back to the apartment, I told Dunreith, who was feeling the same way.

We loaded up our computers and cords and adapters into my red backpack, walked down Providencia Avenue, greeted the doormen and gratefully laid down on our bed.

The pain in my jaw that accompanies my starting to meditate began its inexorable rhythm.

My breath grew deeper.

My thoughts started to slow down.

I woke up forty minutes later.

My head was groggy, and, within 20 minutes, it started to clear.

After an hour, I felt fully recharged.

I kept contacting people to interview for the project.

Dunreith and I had dinner and watched the latest dark episode in the third season of Los 80, Andres Wood's look at a pivotal decade in Chilean history through the eyes of a middle-class family.

I called mentor and friend Paul Tamburello and filled him in on my doings.

I went downstairs, pumped away on the exercise bike and stretched on the rug-covered floor.

I came back up to write this piece.

It's close to 1:00 a.m. and I'm starting to fade again.

It's time once to more to heed Becky's words.

It's time to rest.

And, in the morning, to try again.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 90: Stumble Stones and Schools in Argentina and Germany

Dad noticed them before I did. The three square and rectangular plaques on the ground outside of the Nicolas Avellaneda school in Buenos Aires' Hollywood Palermo neighborhood.

Lacquered red, blue, green, orange and yellow tiles surrounded the bronze-colored capital letters.

Aqui estudiaron, they said.

Here studied.

Then came the names of the students who had attended there followed by a date.

Mauricio Borghi, September 26, 1974.

Jorge Daniel Argente, July 17, 1976.

Horacio Elbert, December 8, 1977. (Dirt covered the bottom part of the "R"in his last name.)

The third plaque explained row-by-row who they were and what had happened to them.

Popular Militants

Disappeared and Detained

By the Terrorism

Of the State

Neighborhoods, Memory

and Justice

Dad, his partner Lee, Dunreith and I had just come from consuming a parillada, heaping plate full of beef, sausage, chicken, and sausage that was so large one of my friends from high school declared on Facebook that she had gained five pounds just looking at it. (To be fair, Dunreith had very little, if any, of the meat.)

Jenny Manrique, an accomplished Colombian journalist and a friend from the Dart/Ochberg community, was our guide.

Although our bellies were more than full, we were strolling down the street in search of ice cream when we discovered the plaques.

Stumble Stones in Essen-Steele

Their placement in the street reminded us of the five square, bronze-colored Stolpersteine, or stumble stones, we had seen last year outside of my great-grandfather's and namesake Joseph Lowenstein's house in the Essen-Steele community in Germany.

In simple letters they spelled out the names, year of birth, place of deportation and death location for five of our relatives who had lived at the house before being killed during the Holocaust.

Papa Joseph, as my great-grandfather was called, had his medical training acknowledged before his name on his stone.

So did his son, Dr. Rudolf Lowenstein

Rudolf's wife Margarethe Lowenstein, born Katzenstein, and their children Clara and Klaus Martin.

Two simple words were engraved above each name.

Hier wohnte.

Here lived.

Along with my brother Jon and our son Aidan, the four of us had gone to the home with Gabriele Thimm, a Germany teacher who is unflaggingly committed to her students' knowing the truth about their country's genocidal history.

It was the first time Dad had been there in 73 years.

The last time he had been there was as a four-year-old child in desperate need of having his appendix removed.

His father Max, a disabled World War I veteran who had lost the full use of his right arm, and, later his hearing, had taken his younger boy from doctor to doctor in the town where his family had lived for nearly a century and a half.

None would operate on a Jewish child.

Papa Joseph, Max's father, apparently prevailed upon a non-Jewish colleague to perform the operation on the kitchen table in his home.

Just weeks later, Dad was sent on a train called a Kindertransport, or child transport, to England, where he joined his older brother Ralph.

They lived there for more than a year before rejoining their parents, who had very fortunately escaped after the war began, in the United States.

Dad's silence about his childhood when I was growing up had left me hungry to know him and that time.

In 2004 I had visited the stately, banana yellow, three-story building that Papa Joseph had owned as part of that quest.

The stones had not been placed there yet.

That happened in 2006, when Gabriele and her students participated in the laying of the stones for Joseph, Rudi, Margarethe and Clara, who among them represented three generations of Lowenstein family members. (The students’ parents sponsored Klaus Martin's stone.)

In the colors and words and names of Buenos Aires I saw the reflection of our German relatives.

Words and images on the wall

The marking of those who had been killed by the state was the first, but not the only, similarity between the two places.

Images of 10 pencils, arrayed like hour signs in a clock, were painted in the same colors bordering the plaque around a multi-colored equal sign.

Cursive letters framed the pencils with the words:

In the Public Schools

the rights

education identity

justice recreation

liberty

are equal for everyone

Painted onto a dirty white wall, the words are a creed, a call to go beyond the act of remembering who had been there during the dictatorship to endorsing and transmitting values to young people now in the same school so that such abuse of the citizens by its leaders not happen again.

Ever.

A mural in Germany

Dad's return trip to Germany had many memorable moments.

We visited both of his former apartments.

We met a non-Jewish family with whom our family had maintained a friendship and correspondence for more than 80 years.

We went to the Jewish cemetery, where generation after generation of Lowensteins had been buried. The graves and the burial ground were intact, even though half of the Jewish community had been murdered during the Hitler years.

We were welcomed into Papa Joseph's home by the Fuchs family who showered Dad with gifts and kindness.

We attended a surprise birthday party for Dad, an event during which we learned that our family had owned property at a nearby farm called Hemmerhof.

But perhaps one of the most memorable experiences was attending the two "Ceremonies of Life" that Gabriele had spent months organizing with some of her students.

The young people read, sang, and showed documents as they took the audiences through the history of the Jewish people, the Jewish community in Essen and our family before explaining how all of them were impacted by the Nazi regime.

At the end of the presentation, Dad rose and spoke.

He had agreed to answer questions, and he did.

But before that, he read from a statement in which he announced that he was not accepting the honorarium he had been offered by the community.

Instead, we had spoken as a family and had decided to create the Lowenstein Family Award for Tolerance and Justice.

This June, Dad, Lee and I returned to Essen for the first presentation of the award.

The event took place during the school's tenth birthday celebration.

Principal Elvira Bluemel greeted us and showed us around the building on the way to the ceremony.

She also showed us a mural the school's art teacher had worked on with his students.

Painted against a mustard-yellow background, individual puzzle pieces, which were in many of the same bright colors as on the Argentine school, spelled out the words "Tolerance"and "Justice."

The interlocked puzzle pieces had been placed there by a group of stick-like figures who were underneath the words, suggesting that each person had a role to play in creating and maintaining the values espoused in the award and identified on the wall.

Just having the words was not enough, Frau Bluemel told me. We have to act in accordance with the ideals.

Thus, thousands of miles away, separated by time and culture and language, citizens and educators in both lands had made the decision to create memorials for those among them who had been killed during a dark time as well as to articulate the beliefs to which we all need to aspire to act and to instill in our young people.

Returning to Dad's hometown with him was one of my life's most powerful experiences.

It furthered my faith that we can structure our lives around our deepest dreams and most basic values and that it is possible to connect across all kinds of divides.

Perhaps even richer, realizing the dream in the context of Gabriele Thimm's tireless work with her students and the Essen community played a critical role in converting a personal journey of family return into a forum of public healing for both sides.

In so doing, it created the opportunity for us together to write a new chapter to the old story.

A chapter based on an open acknowledgment of the past and the commitment that it not be repeated.

A chapter that lets the youth know we are there for them and that they can choose a different way by acting in accordance with the values painted on the school in Argentina and on the wall in Germany.

I don't yet know the people from the Nicolas Avellaneda school in Buenos Aires.

But I will.

Soon.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XVII: Maria Eliana and Humberto's Many Gifts

Maria Eliana Eberhard and her husband Humberto gave us many gifts during our leisurely, languidly unfolding nine-hour afternoon and evening of eating, drinking, talking and driving on Saturday.

They gave us unhurried time and unselfconscious generosity.

They introduced us to their new friend David Rojas and his lovely wife Maria Luz, whom they had met during a month-long tour of Eastern Europe that was headed by a former priest from Spain named Faustino.

They took us our first vineyard in Chile, the venerable Santa Rita vineyard that was founded in 1880 by Don Domingo Fernández Concha, and that has continued to grow and expand in the ensuing 130 years.

They gave us the gift of a delicious lunch in a long, cool dining hall of a hacienda with high ceilings and a red stucco roof.

We missed the 3:00 p.m. tour by a full two hours, but we got plenty of education.

As with friend and colleague Alejandra Matus, Dunreith and I were treated to a virtual seminar in Chilean history during the past four decades.

We covered the key role Jose Toribio Merino played in the 1973 coup, the current presidential contest between Evelyn Matthei and Michelle Bachelet, the impact Pinochet had on the nation, whether they voted Si or No in 1988 to end Pinochet´s reign and the legacy of the Chicago Boys for the country.

The talk wasn´t all political, either.

Maria Eliana and Humberto shared humorous travel misadventures in Mexico and England, while David´s face glowed with pleasure as he talked about two of his three sons working with him in the same clinic where they are all neurosurgeons.

They talked about Chile’s emergence from a more isolated and less self-confident nation to one whose people are more assertive and forthright. (At the same time, they made it abundantly clear that whatever gains in self-confident have been made, the levels they demonstrate still pale in front of those exhibited by Argentinians).

Everyone laughed when I suggested that Dunreith has an Argentinian heart.

They welcomed us into their home and offered "the elevens", an expanded version of tea time, complete with more than a dozen tea choices, mashed avocado that looked like guacamole, ham and crunchy wheat bread in small, circular slices.

Humberto shared his passion for music, his face expanding with joy as he talked about Arthur Rubinstein´s virtuosity and played for us a song that evokes a smaller Moldovan river merging into the larger, crashing body of wáter, the music rising in a crescendo as the piece progresses.

Yet the biggest gift in all the extraordinary generosity they showed us was not about Chile.

It was about my father.

In 1984, Maria Eliana and Humberto packed up their belongings and their two young boys, took the money they had saved and the nanny they had hired, and moved to Boston for a year for training in their respective medical professions. (Maria Eliana is an anesthetist, while Humberto is a cardiologist.)

Maria Eliana worked in the laboratory of Warren Zapol, one of Dad´s closest friends.

Humberto did not work with Dad, but talked about meeting him.

“Did your father have a small office?” he asked.

I said that he did.

Humberto described how he had entered the area before Dad’s office and seen his two secretaries, the notoriously straight-laced Ilse Kaprelian, a German woman who was married to an Armenian motorcycle rider named Gil, and the wisecracking Louise Hotz.

Humberto explained that he felt intimidated for a number of reasons.

He was not in the same field as Dad.

His English was limited.

And Dad was a professor.

With trepidation he opened the door.

What he saw astounded him.

There were papers and books everywhere, stretching all the way up to the ceiling.

On the desk.

On the couches.

On the seats.

Then he met Dad, who had apparently just come from the operating room.

Humberto knew this because Dad was wearing a puffy blue hat that Humberto was more accustomed to seeing on the head of a Chilean woman.

This was the professor? He wondered.

Dunreith told the table that, before he left Massachusetts General Hospital, Dad was given stationary with a cartoon version of a glasses-wearing Dad being buried in a sea of paper over the words, ¨From the desk of Ed Lowenstein.”

But then Humberto talked about how friendly and down-to-earth Dad was, how he treated him with dignity and respect and welcomed him into the community of doctors at one of the world’s most prestigious hospitals..

Maria Eliana echoed the same sentiments.

I´ve come to learn in life that the family that we know in our homes is only a part of them, and, more than that, that we leave parts of ourselves with people with whom we interact and share meaningful moments. .

Although the time has long since passed since I have hungered to know Dad, that was indeed the case for many years. One of the greatest benefits of working in his laboratory for two summers during college was that it gave me an opportunity to see how he was at work and what he meant to the people there.

Your dad´s a regular guy like us, my colleagues would say quietly. He´s not like a lot of those other doctors who think they´re better than us.

He takes public transportation, another told me.

One man, a Hungarian immigrant, told me about how Dad stuck up for him when he was working on an experiment and a doctor said that he was doing it wrong. Your father said, Joe is right, the man told me, his stocky body suffused with gratitude.

Nearly 30 years after I worked in the blood gas lab, I have a better sense both of the impressiveness of Dad´s accomplishments as well as the importance of what he gave to Humberto and Maria Eliana.

Dad came to the United States after fleeing Nazi Germanny on a program called the Kindertransport, I told the group. He never forgot what it was like to be a refugee in a new and unfamiliar country.

The conversation passed and we moved on to five more hours of the marathon visit.

But the gift of letting me know my father in just a slightly different way, remained.