The Kaumheimers were about to make it out of Italy alive. It was 1939, and the family of six had already left their German hometown of Stuttgart three years earlier when conditions for Jews worsened there. Now Julius and Selma were seeking to escape to the United States with their children Hans, Fritz, Ruth and Margaret.
“My mother didn’t want to leave,” Margaret Kaplan recalled in a 1990 interview with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project. “But my father convinced her.”
So leave they did, but not without a price. Italy’s Hitler-aligned fascist government would let them out only in exchange for their collection of roughly 69 porcelain figurines from 18th-century Europe. They had almost made it with their treasures, but the movers who came to pack up their possessions tipped off the Italian authorities.