‘A refugee to the end’: Holocaust survivor asked to be buried with his passport

Avi Bajpai
Fri, November 12, 2021

It was the middle of the night in early November 1938 when Gestapo officers pounded on the door of the home of a Jewish family of four in Frankfurt, Germany.

Jim Muller was just 7 years old when he saw the officers take away his father, Felix, and send him to the Buchenwald concentration camp several hours away. When Muller’s father was eventually released and returned home, his head was shaven, he had lost a lot of weight, and he had bruises all over his body.

Years later, Jim Muller would remember how his father would sit at home and stare into space without talking. Meanwhile, his mother, Alice, was “frantically” trying to get her family out of the country.

As for Jim, while he was a young boy on the night known as Kristallnacht, the traumatic episode of fleeing his home and leaving everything behind stuck with him for the rest of his life, according to his son, Eric Muller, a law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

This week, ahead of the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, Eric Muller decided he wanted to share his family’s story. On Tuesday, he wrote a series of posts on Twitter that offered a detailed account of his father and his family’s experience that night. He recounted their escape from Germany into Switzerland, and three years later, their arrival in the U.S., but also why that history remains relevant today.

And at the center of the story was his father’s passport, a document that showed how the Holocaust had shaped him in a profound way until his death this September.

“I loved my father, and he just passed away six weeks ago, and it’s one way of remembering him and of letting people know who my dad was,” Muller said in an interview with The News & Observer.

Jim Muller was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May, and died on Sept. 28 at the age of 90.

In the Twitter thread that was shared more than 150 times and liked more than 400 times, Muller also wanted to remind people of the “human impact” of the brutal attacks on Jewish people in November 1938.

“It’s easy to look at the pictures of the shattered glass windows and the stores and the burning synagogues, and think about it as something that happened to buildings,” Muller said. “Rather than something that happened to people.”

‘Night of Broken Glass’

Violent mobs incited by Nazi officials began destroying synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria during what the Nazis referred to as Kristallnacht (German for “Crystal Night” or “The Night of Broken Glass”). Nearly a hundred Jewish people were killed, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

One of those men was Jim’s father, Felix, who was let go just weeks later. Another was Jim’s uncle, Leopold, who was killed at some point after being deported and sent to a concentration camp.

Eric Muller remembers stories about the family’s experience in Germany in the late 1930s were “much more on the factual side of things” and less so the emotional side.

His father and grandparents frequently talked about the history and gave their accounts of what happened during Kristallnacht, but there were things that weren’t talked about, including his grandfather’s experience in Buchenwald, or his great-uncle, who did not survive.

A pedestrian looks at the wreckage of a Jewish shop in Berlin Nov. 10, 1938, the day after the anti-Jewish pogrom that was labeled “Kristallnacht” — the “Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis among them many ordinary Germans, terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria.

Eric learned how his father’s childhood had affected him when he went into his closet shortly after his death. He was looking for a belt, and found several, maybe eight, with zippers on the inside to carry money and important papers on his person at all times — such as a passport.

Jim had showed his son one of those belts when Eric was younger, and encouraged him to get one just like it. But, Eric said, he had no idea his father had so many of this kind.

“That’s a person who thinks they might need to be on the move on a moment’s notice,” Eric said. “There were these small ways in which he just kind of seemed to think you might just have to leave. You might just need to up and go.”

A young Jim Muller and his younger sister Beatrice Muller in Geneva, Switzerland, in either 1939 or 1940. The Mullers immigrated to the United States in April 1941.

Buried with his passport

Jim immigrated with his parents and sister to the United States in April 1941. He pursued his education here and studied law at the University of Pennsylvania before settling down with his own family in southern New Jersey, where he practiced commercial, bankruptcy and real estate law for six decades.

Even though he lived a comfortable, prosperous life in the U.S., and loved the country which had saved his family and enabled them to succeed, Jim “never left behind that sense of contingency and the possibility that what seems like security could slip away from you very quickly,” Eric said.

Eric Muller, right, next to his father Jim Muller, left, on Father’s Day in 2021. Jim Muller, a survivor of the Holocaust, died of cancer in September 2021.

After his cancer diagnosis, Jim told his son with a smile that the one thing he wanted to be buried with was his passport.

“I figured he was just playing with the absurdity of the idea,” Eric wrote on Twitter.

“Smiling back, I said, ‘Your passport, Dad? Do you really think you’ll need that where you’ll be?’” he continued.

“He looked me in the eye. ‘You never know, Eric. You just never know.’” he wrote. “He’d been secure in the United States for 80 years, but he was a #refugee to the end.”

At the end of the Twitter thread, Eric wrote that his father was correct, and included a photo from a white nationalist rally from Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly in 2017.

In the final tweet, Eric posted a photo of Afghan refugees arriving in the U.S. in August following the collapse of the Afghan government, and wrote: “You just never know.”

“This is a time when there’s a great deal of controversy about how welcoming our country should be to refugees, and to people seeking asylum,” Eric said. “My dad felt, very strongly, that giving refuge to people who are in danger was a very important thing.”