Introduction: “Shards from the Explosion”

Abstract

“Scattered about the globe, all these years later, we are shards from the explosion,” Robin Hirsch writes in Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski (1995) (4) to account for the absence of family members at his circumcision following his birth during World War II. His parents had moved from Berlin to London; his grandfathers had died in Berlin earlier, but his grandmothers had been deported and had perished in concentration camps. His father’s brother had fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where they were overtaken by the Nazis. One of his cousins survived in Israel, another in Argentina.