How do you know when it is time to leave?

At a book talk a while ago I was asked by a journalist how you know when it is time to pack your bags and leave. The context was the re-surfacing Anti-Semitism and the fast growing support for right-wing xenophobic political parties that could be observed in many places around Europe.

As I did not know how to answer, I told the journalist the story of my grandfather’s sister-in-law Ruth who grew up as one of five children in a well-to-do leafy suburb of Berlin. The family lived what must have been a good life. They had a big house with maids, went on nice holidays and had many friends, Jewish as well as non-Jewish. Having been in the country for generations, they saw themselves as nothing but Germans.

Maybe that is why no one in the family but Ruth took the growing Anti-Semitism of the 1920s seriously. Not her mother, not her older siblings and not her uncles and their families. She was the only one who thought that this was not a country you could live in as a Jew, and as an eleven year-old she asked her mother if she could join a Zionist organisation that had emigration to Palestine as its goal. The whole family thought the girl was completely mad. No one else was even close to being a Zionist. They were Germans and this was their home.

Even when Hitler came to power and the first anti-Jewish laws were introduced they simply could not believe that this silly little girl wanted to leave. These bad times, they told Ruth, would not last for long. So much hate and evil could not exist in the hearts of men. No, Hitler would soon be gone. And, they added, if he didn’t and things ended up getting even worse they still would not leave until it was absolutely necessary – with the last train that left the station.

Ruth did not listen to them, and when she no longer was allowed to go to school she joined a Zionist movement and started working the lands to prepare herself for a life in British Palestine. The Brits, who wanted the area turned into farmland, had promised to give out visas to those who hade the skills necessary to make this happen, and as a consequence Ruth and many other would-be academics left the cities and lived as farmers in Kibbutz-like dwellings in the German countryside. This was how she met her husband Heinz and his brother Ernst, my grandfather.

Four years they worked their way around the countryside without getting a visa and then, on the Night of Broken Glass, Gestapo came and smashed up their house and took all the men to Dachau concentration camp.

But they were in luck. Through fortunate coincidences and more than a little gutsiness Ruth succeeded in getting all of them temporary work permits to Sweden, and thus managed to get them out in time.

Her uncles and their families, all those people who said they would not leave until it was absolutely necessary, were not as lucky. Sure, they did end up taking that last train out, but it did not take them to freedom but to their deaths.

So how do you know when it is time to pack your bags and leave?
I have absolutely no idea. Nor do I understand how come the only one who got it right the last time things went straight to hell was a silly little eleven year-old girl.

Do you?