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Every family has its secrets, its stories. I discovered ours one beautiful July weekend when my family gathered at a hotel in Hamilton, Bermuda, ostensibly to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. When the sun went down that first evening, my parents surprised us all as they began to tell us for the first time what had happened to them 50 years ago. Amazed and astonished, we listened to them recount the details of their escape from Europe during World War II. Listening to these adventures, I was like a child entranced by a bedtime story. The heroes became more than my parents. They were Alfred (who was Jewish) and Laurette (who was Catholic), a young couple in love, whose world was suddenly blown apart the day the Germans invaded Belgium. Alfred was forced into a crowded cattle car and hauled off to an internment camp while Laurette remained behind in occupied Brussels with no idea of the whereabouts of her husband. The story of how the couple survived– how Alfred escaped from the camp and Laurette left her family and everything she owned to join him in France, how they hid in a brothel in Lyon, escaped across the Mediterranean by freighter only to be detained in Morocco— all this was beyond my imagination. My father had chosen Hamilton, Bermuda as the place to reveal their tale because it was the first harbor in the New World where he and Mom had landed after their long ordeal of running from the Nazis. As we were to discover, however, the landing in Bermuda was by no means a safe ending to their journey…
