How My Grandma Became a Holocaust Celebrity and I Emigrated from Israel to Berlin

[This essay is part of the book A Place They Called Home — a collection of 12 personal essays written by Jews who reclaimed German citizenship.]

I have never been a famous person, nor have any other living members of my family. But after I obtained German citizenship and came to live in Germany, I started noticing that my grandmother, who died in 1987, has become quite a celebrity in German society and amongst visitors to Berlin.

“What?? You are the grandson of Alice Licht?!” was the response of a tour guide I met during my first month in Berlin when I told him my grandmother’s name. He spent the next twenty minutes excitedly barraging me with questions about Alice’s post-Holocaust life. “I have introduced your grandma’s story hundreds of times,” he said. “She’s like the star of my tour. I can’t believe Alice Licht’s grandson is right here in front of me!”

Alice’s post-mortem journey to Holocaust fame was ignited in the late 1990s, when a group of students from Berliner Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft collaborated to create an exhibition about Otto Weidt, a Berliner who risked his life to hide Jews during the Nazi era. The students, who wanted to show there are Germans that dared to resist the Nazis, told the story of Weidt, a semi-blind man who ran a workshop that produced brooms and brushes for Germany’s armed forces and protected Jews from deportation by providing them with secret hideouts, forging documents…