Yesterday, my mother and I video conferenced with a book club in Basel. Amazed by the technology, Mom turned to me in the middle of our conversation and asked: “Are we really talking to a book club in Basel, Switzerland?!?” When she came to this country, she couldn’t call her parents — who had the first phone in her village, Stockstadt — because the lines were unreliable and expensive.
Some book club members had memories of the war. One woman remembered German Jewish children crossing the border into Switzerland, knocking on the door, and asking for food.
