Path to the USA

My mother found the West German passport that got my father through Ellis Island in 1951.
Six years after the end of WWII, he achieved his goal to emigrate to the US and begin a new life.

Those six years included eyewitness to the brutal Russian occupation of Berlin that ended the war. My father chose not to talk about what he saw.

This powerful 1945 diary of a 34-year old German journalist bears witness to the atrocities:

A Woman in Berlin