This is the first account from a new project called “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series by The Times that will document lesser-known stories from World War II. Though much of the project will focus on the end and aftermath of the war, our first dispatch takes us back to 1939, when Andrea N. Goldstein’s family fled Nazi Germany just weeks before Adolf Hitler invaded Poland.

My grandmother Marianne spent her entire life telling the story of how she, her parents and her three brothers escaped Nazi Germany. At Thanksgiving or during Jewish holidays she would recount the same memories over and over, seemingly still traumatized by the violence she had witnessed and the hatred she saw from her German friends and neighbors.

The story she told, preserved in her unpublished memoirs — a combination of her own reflections and meticulously compiled correspondence and records related to her family’s escape — detailed the changes that came as authoritarianism slowly gained power, incrementally at first, so that people became accustomed to them. Writing about her childhood in Pirmasens, Germany, in the years following Hitler’s rise to power, Marianne recalled her non-Jewish friends turning their backs on her, her brothers being beaten up at school by classmates in the Hitler Youth and watching as other Jewish classmates in her public school disappeared, until she herself was no longer permitted to attend. She recalled lighting Sabbath candles on Friday nights in her family’s apartment, with the sound of the Nazi storm troopers’ boots marching past on the pavement, as they sang songs about violently murdering Jews. Six million Jewish people and millions of others were ultimately murdered by the Nazi regime.

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Marianne’s immediate family had no illusions about the threat that Nazism posed, though many other relatives thought that it was a phase that would pass, like other waves of anti-Semitism that had preceded it. While my great-grandfather, Dagobert Nellhaus, a rabbi, was not prepared to abandon his congregation, he had already taken some measures for the rest of his family to leave Germany, if necessary. In 1936, after the Nuremberg laws went into force and effectively stripped German Jews of citizenship, one of Marianne’s older brothers, Gerhard, was sent to live in the United States. He became the foster son of a Jewish family, the Blumbergs, in Terre Haute, Ind.