The Uncle They Never “Sent Away”
My grandparents and their son, Joe, arrived in the U.S. from Germany in 1939. Grete, the cousin who had sponsored them, took one look at the child and told them to send him away.
“You ’ll never make it with this child. Why don ’t you give him up?” they later told us she said. Grete recommended the Vineland Training School in rural New Jersey, where Pearl Buck’ s daughter, Carol, lived. Carol Buck was one of its more famous residents, but the institution also had a more nefarious connection: Hitler had learned about eugenics in part from Vineland’ s director of research, Henry Goddard, and Goddard’s book The Kallikak Family.
For the time, Grete was just being practical. A child like that would be a burden.
Joe’s birth had been traumatic. He was born with forceps, which wasn’t unusual for the time, but is now known to sometimes cause brain damage. Doctors gave his mother, Ilse, a medical cocktail of scopolamine and morphine called “twilight sleep,” which assured she did not remember any of it; however, doctors later ascribed some of his disabilities to “birth trauma.”
On that very day in 1936, Hitler and Mussolini formed the Rome-Berlin Axis, in which they promised to support each other in a war. Hitler had already passed the Nuremberg Laws (1935), which declared that Jews were enemies of the state and could no longer work as civil servants, doctors, or lawyers.
Before that, the 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” sought to sterilize people with physical or mental disabilities. Later, people with disabilities would be institutionalized and then systematically killed. A Jewish child with disabilities had two strikes against him in Nazi Germany.
As a toddler in Germany, Joe was malnourished and suffered from rickets due to a lack of vitamin D or calcium. He was not alone: The height of children is considered a general indication of the quality of nutrition and health; public health data from Germany shows that children’s heights stagnated between 1933 and 1938. During that period, the government encouraged people to eat bread and potatoes as the mainstays of their diet because food, especially meat, was scarce.
Rickets can cause bone deformities, such as bowed legs, an irregular skull shape, and weakened teeth. A child with rickets may be shorter than average and have delayed motor skills, muscle weakness, and an increased susceptibility to infection. Joe was a good, undemanding baby, but suffered from all these outcomes; moreover, he did not walk or talk until nearly two years old, far later than typically developing children. He rarely made eye contact. By the time Grete met him, sending Joe to an institution seemed like a realistic solution. But my grandparents, both trained as teachers, didn’t heed her or anyone else’s advice. Whereas many families sent away children who had disabilities or mental illnesses, my grandparents chose to keep their son at home.
Joe was an enigma to clinics and schools; they gave him many labels, but very little help. When the school refused to educate Joe after eighth grade, my grandfather, Walter, quit his job to teach his son. Later, Walter opened a newspaper and candy store in their small town of Roosevelt, New Jersey, so that Joe might have a livelihood.
Meanwhile, my grandmother, Ilse, worked to build social circles big enough to include Joe. As a volunteer for The Arc, she developed musical programs for Joe and his peers. In an era in which psychologists blamed autism on “refrigerator mothers,” Ilse got her master’s degree in education so she could better understand how to help her son. When she read about a group home opening in their county, she cut out the newspaper article, setting her sights on it as Joes future home.
Together, my grandparents created a world in which inclusion was the only answer for their oldest child.
They unapologetically included Joe in our family and their community. My mother, their first American child, became his advocate too. My sister and I learned to accept Joe for who he was, our uncle. She became a music therapist; I, a developmental psychologist. My daughter, at five years old, knew that Joe was different: He liked chocolate cake, and she, vanilla.
As I read “The Ones We Sent Away” by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic (Sept 2023) and “The Uncle Who Was ‘Sent Away‘” by Laura Chauss Savin in Lilith (Winter 2025), poignant accounts by writers paying tribute to an aunt and uncle they never knew, I recognized how fortunate I was to have grown up knowing Uncle Joe.
When he turned fifty, Joe moved from his parents’ home to a group home, but he was never far from our family. Joe influenced four generations of our community who knew him.
We learned that everyone fits in if you make the circle wide enough.
Margaret Jelinek is a psychology professor and emerging author based in Houston, Texas. She is working on a book about her uncle.
