When I disembarked at the Freistadt train station in October 2021, I was greeted by an empty platform and the twinkling of lights far in the distance. There were no taxis in the small Austrian village at eight P.M. on a Sunday, so, carrying my suitcase and laptop bag, I walked to my hotel in town, guided by the light of my phone’s map.
Herr Heinz Hueber greeted me the next morning. Tall, gray-haired, and distinguished-looking, Heinz is the great-grandson of Albert Ballin, the managing director of the Hamburg-American Line. Ballin, a German-Jewish business wizard who rose from a childhood of crushing poverty, helped facilitate the mass exodus of at least 1.5 million Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States in the years before World War I and is part of the story I tell in my new book, The Last Ships from Hamburg.
