Books / Forgetting was the best defence for the Kindertransport refugees |
Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!’ at a torchlit rally in Virginia. Understandably, Moritz is alarmed by the tide of anti-Semitism today. His Jewish parents narrowly escaped death in Hitler’s Germany when they came to the UK on the Kindertransport. The 71-year-old Moritz now asks the question: how long before the iron-studded jackboot returns to Europe?
Ausländer (meaning ‘alien’ in German), half memoir, half anti-Trump harangue, unfolds in present-day America where Moritz has worked for half a century, first as a journalist, then as a director of Google, PayPal, LinkedIn and Yahoo!. In it he examines a trove of family documents, including swastika-stamped identity cards, in an attempt to ‘make sense’ of his past and the sorrowful legacy left by Jewry’s destruction. His father, Alfred Moritz, lost both his parents to the Nazi death camps; they were taken away, with yellow........