The Cost of Courage: The 2 Couples Who Rescued My Family From The Nazis

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November 14th, 2018

Gert Berliner’s Swedish ID card with which he eventually entered the U.S. in 1947. He lived in Berlin until he was 14 years old. Gert escaped the Nazi death camps because his parents got him on a children’s transport to Sweden in 1939.

Jacobia Dahm for NPR

In recent months, I’ve learned that my life is bound together with two families who took enormous risks to save my father and my grandparents from the Nazis.

What I have discovered about the rescuers is both wondrous and bleak. One family, the Furstenbergs, has thrived; another, the Mynareks, is gone, seemingly without a trace.

My father, Gert Berliner, was 14 years old in 1939, when he escaped from the certain death of Nazi Germany. He left via the Kindertransport, a rescue train organized to take Jewish children away from harm and place them with families in other countries.

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