The research for this book began with Jutta Levy’s oral history and her personal documentary materials, but it did not end there. The historical events that Jutta recalled in her interviews—from the appearance of anti-Jewish signs in Hamburg storefronts to the Queen Mary’s arrival in New York harbor on November 17, 1938—were confirmed and, if necessary, corrected by reference to a variety of other sources and materials. These included interviews and memoirs of other individuals; news articles from the time period; records of government and nongovernment agencies; academic articles; and books.

This research frequently took me, as research will, in unanticipated directions. For example, a simple Google search on the name of my mother’s French cousin, Guy Gotthelf, yielded—to my great surprise—a digital map of “Rue Guy Gotthelf” in the town of Yerres, France. I made contacts in Paris who followed up by unearthing handwritten records from the World War II–era archives of a committee of the French Resistance. The records, dated September and December 1944, indicated that Guy was a member of the Resistance who died that year at the age of twenty-one on a mission against France’s Nazi occupiers. The records further reflected the committee’s decision to honor Guy by naming a street in Yerres after him. And so Jutta’s brief encounter with her cousin in 1938, when she was twelve and he fifteen, as Europe’s turmoil propelled them into their vastly dissimilar futures, took on a deeper meaning than I could have imagined.

What follows is a selection of the sources consulted in researching The Year of Goodbyes.