I met Martin Ostwald in 1996, shortly after I became friends with his son David, whose son was in the same kindergarten class as mine. By then, Martin had retired from his position as a classics professor at Swarthmore, where he had taught for many years. On holidays and long weekends, he and his wife, Lore, would sometimes drive from Pennsylvania to see their son and his family in New York, and it was on one of these visits that David arranged for us to meet over dinner. I immediately took a liking to this elderly gentleman with a thick German accent who wore a jacket and tie, always with a tie clip, David said, even to rake leaves or shovel snow, and whose Old World tact and bonhomie made him so beloved of his former students that many had emulated their mentor, becoming university professors themselves.

According to his son, Martin would walk every day to the library, where he had his own cubicle, come home for lunch, and then return to the library until it was time for dinner. In the evening, Lore listened to classical music on headphones so as not to disturb him. Martin had his private study, his books, his pipe tobacco—a scholar’s nest in which he immersed himself in his latest project, on moira, the concept of fate among the Greeks.

Lore, also retired, had worked with autistic teenagers after graduating with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Now, despite a severe case of macular degeneration, she spent her time pursuing her lifelong passion, art history. When I told her that my wife and I would be visiting Siena that summer, Lore urged us to go to the Cathedral, where, a few steps from the Piccolomini Library inside, there is a Beccafumi cartoon on the floor. It was, she said, easy to miss.

Martin Ostwald in the Judean Desert, 1996. Photograph courtesy David Ostwald

Over dinner, Martin and I soon discovered that we shared a love for Thucydides, and Martin, who was in all likelihood the last in a long and prestigious tradition of German philologists, explained Pericles’ funeral oration to me as I’d never heard it explained before. I instantly understood why those who’d studied with him idolized him. There was no donnish fussiness in his manner, just knowledge, which he was happy to share.

Not being a scholar of the ancients, I would turn to Martin repeatedly in the coming years with questions about Greek literature and history. One morning, I had a query about a word in Heraclitus; the answer came in the late evening. I could tell that Martin had pondered my question all day, in order to render the most thorough opinion. Later, I had a question about a short passage in German; again, by the evening, the translation arrived, with annotations, in case they proved useful.

By the time I met the Ostwalds again, for a dinner at The Mermaid Inn, on Amsterdam and Eighty-eighth Street, they knew about my work as a memoirist and I knew more about moira than I’d ever suspected there was to know. The couple told me that they were flying to Israel that summer to stay with their eldest son, who was a Hasid. Martin and Lore were observant, but not Orthodox, Jews. As Martin explained to me, his father had been more interested in Ancient Greek than in Hebrew, though he insisted that his son learn both languages. Martin paused for a moment, then told me that his father’s very last words to him were not in German or in Hebrew but in Ancient Greek, from Homer’s Iliad: “The day will come when sacred Ilion shall perish as well as Priam of the ashwood spear and his people.” Then, he added, with his way of framing ideas and facts that did not need to be entirely spelled out, “I don’t know if David told you, but my father died in Theresienstadt, under circumstances that should not be unfamiliar to you.”

Martin Ostwald’s German passport, 1938. Photograph courtesy David Ostwald

It was the first time the subject of the Holocaust had been raised between us. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” had recently been published_, _I asked Martin if he had read the book. Yes, he replied, and something in his tone told me that he had reservations. Despite Goldhagen’s compelling evidence and arguments, Martin said, he himself could not hold all Germans responsible for the slaughter of Jews; Germans were simply “slavishly obedient to authority.”

Martin had evidently seen enough brutality to want to put all the horrors of Hitler’s Germany behind him. In his memoir, which David showed me a few years later, Martin describes being sent with his brother Ernst to the internment camp at Sachsenhausen, for two months in 1938. But in the wake of Kristallnacht, later that year, their mother managed to have both of her sons shipped to England; the British government’s Kindertransport effort had made it possible for ten thousand Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to be offered asylum with foster parents, and at schools, farms, and community organizations. Most of them arrived unaccompanied, and would never see their parents again.

Ernst Ostwald (left) and Martin Ostwald (right) with their cousin Eva Jonas, who was murdered at an extermination camp in Riga, Latvia, in 1941. The photograph was taken in Dortmund, Germany, in 1935. Photograph courtesy David Ostwald Photograph courtesy David Ostwald

By 1940, complications arose for Martin and Ernst in Britain, as they had turned seventeen. Although they had been welcomed to Britain as Jewish refugee children, they now fell under the peculiar category of “friendly enemy aliens.” Martin was shipped to an internment camp in Quebec, where he began to study for a high-school diploma and started teaching Latin and Greek to other inmates, while Ernst was sent to the Isle of Man. He shared a room with a young man named Freddy Gottschalk, and it was Freddy who told Ernst that he ought to encourage his older brother in Canada to write to Lore Weinberg, a beautiful young refugee who was living with her close family in England.

Lore and her family were more fortunate than the Ostwald boys, and were able to move to England, and later to the U.S., with the help of their relatives the Wallerstein family, who were already settled there. But Lore could not forget, she said, the night in 1936 that her uncle Franz Reyersbach was sent back to his family from Sachsenhausen, on Christmas Eve, in a nailed coffin. His widow, Grete, and her brother Wilhelm later died in a concentration camp near Riga, Latvia, and her sister Else died in Theresienstadt, in 1943. In 1938, her brother Paul committed suicide, as did his wife Friedel, in 1940, in New York, on facing deportation to Germany, having been denied an extension of her visitor’s visa.

“Schweinehunde, that’s what they are,” Lore said of the Germans. While Martin had returned to Germany several times, including to his parents’ homestead in the village of Sichtigvor, in 1995, Lore had accompanied him only once, with great reluctance. When Germans called to interview her husband, Lore would prohibit Martin from speaking to them; she even tried to prevent her son from visiting Germany on tour with his jazz band. I had noticed that Martin and Lore seldom disagreed, but on the matter of Germany they were at odds. Over dinner at the Mermaid, it seemed that they were having an old argument. Martin wished to build a bridge to today’s Germany; Lore refused to cross it. He still yearned to teach in a German university, even for a while. “When they bring back your mother,” she said.