I was inspired to write this memoir after my siblings and I found my father’s relatives in the Netherlands in 1996. I had always missed having an extended family as my parents emigrated to this country in the 1920s and left most of their family behind. As I was growing up there were family secrets that puzzled me.    

    My father, Herman Josef Loewenhardt, came from a large German-Jewish family of Oberhemer, Germany. He met Elizabeth Henrietta Ring sometime after his arrival and they married and settled in Detroit. Herman converted to Catholicism, the religion of his wife. He kept his Jewish background a secret and this was one of the family secrets of my childhood. Elizabeth came from the small town of St. Ingbert, Germany and left behind her three year old daughter. In 1935, my half-sister joined our family and her presence became another one of the puzzling secrets of my childhood. My Tante Hanny, Dad’s sister, was another puzzle—we were Catholic, but I suspected that my Dad’s sister was Jewish. My parents were part of the thriving German-American community in Detroit and this helped make up for the loss of family. My father always had a job even during the depths of the depression.    

    I was born in a small house on the East Side of Detroit in 1934, the first of four children in our family. I attended a parochial grade school, until 1944, when I contracted polio during one of the worst epidemics of that decade. The war together with polio became an overwhelming dark presence in my young life as I feared the worst happening to my faraway relatives. I also felt great fear for myself and my family when the 1943 riots took place, and thought the war had come to Detroit.

     I learned that my mother had breast cancer as I was nearing graduation from high school. After her death in 1953, my father urged me to continue my education and I graduated from Mercy College of Detroit with a nursing degree in 1955. My college education was a gift that came as a result of polio. Vocation Rehabilitation of Michigan paid the tuition and all expenses of my college education. This was a bright spot during this very sad and traumatic time of my life. Part I of the memoir ends with the death of my father and his sister, Johanna, only one month apart, in 1972. 

    Part 2 tells the story of our search for any living relatives of my father’s Jewish family. My siblings and I had little hope of success, but to our surprise and joy, we found Loewenhardt cousins through the internet in 1996. Over the past two decades I have visited my cousins in the Netherlands many times and they have come to see us in America.

    Through this bittersweet saga, I have come to love my cousins deeply and cherish them as siblings. My memoir explains how their parents survived and tells the stories of some the Loewenhardt relatives who perished in the Holocaust. 

In the epilogue I revisit the Detroit of my childhood and show what has changed and what still thrives.    

    My memoir is significant for several reasons. It illuminates the day-to-day lives of a German-American immigrant family in the city of Detroit in the middle of the last century. It also shares details of the lives and brutal deaths of specific individuals, my aunts, uncles and cousins murdered in the Holocaust. In spite of many volumes with similar stories, my story is unique in the way that it evolved. It also depended on access to the internet, because without it, the story may not have happened  My beloved family members are now more than names on a list.