toby sonneman
When I discovered the contents of the grey folder, years after my parents died, I was fascinated by the stories they told and the mysteries they suggested. As I dove into the secrets of and beyond the grey folder--scouring archives in the U.S. and Europe, traveling to France and Germany in search of unearthed memories--more questions and mysteries, along with some answers, emerged.
A PLAIN GREY FOLDER, the paper kind with metal prongs, held yellowing documents and letters from the late 1930s and early 1940s. My father, who had escaped Germany in December of 1938, and later helped rescue his parents from the Nazis, had saved documents and letters from these times, and tucked them away in this unassuming binder.
THE GREY FOLDER PROJECT is the story of my search and the often surprising details of what I found. It is not a genealogy of my family, but rather a narrative of my discoveries as I looked at the ways in which the Holocaust impacted one family, especially with attempts at rescue which met with both successes and failures.
I plan to turn the Grey Folder project into a book, also tentatively titled The Grey Folder.
Read a short essay about one part of this work in In Search of Names, published in The Jerusalem Post, May 1, 2019.