It started with a phone call I almost didn’t think twice about. A historian with the U.S. Department of State had been researching an article on two American diplomats who worked in France during the Second World War. One of them, she told me, was my grandfather, Myles Standish. She’d found our family tree online while chasing down details for her piece, and she had one simple request: did the family happen to have a photograph of him?
I remember standing in my kitchen, phone against my ear, saying something like, “I’ll have to check with my aunt.” I hung up expecting that to be the end of it. A photo, sent off, a polite thank-you, and back to my normal life.
It was not the end of it.
The Man I Thought I Knew
Growing up, my grandfather was Pooh, a formal man in a three-piece suit who made seafood paella on Sundays and had opinions about nearly everything. He was charming, a little vain, endlessly certain he was right. He was Grandpa, in other words. Not a historical figure. Not someone you’d expect a State Department historian to be researching decades after his death.
So when that call came in, my first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was confusion. What could Myles Standish possibly have done that anyone in Washington would still be writing about?
I called my Aunt Melanie. She mentioned, almost in passing, that her sister Nicole had a trunk of his old papers and photographs, letters, documents, things nobody had really gone through in years. I asked her to send whatever she could find of a photo. What arrived instead was an invitation into a part of my grandfather’s life I hadn’t known existed.
What Was In the Trunk
I want to be honest: I did not open that trunk expecting to find a book. I opened it expecting a photograph, maybe a few sentimental letters, and I planned to hand a printed photo over to a historian and move on with my week.
Instead, I found consular records. Correspondence. Documents referencing visas, refugees, an internment camp, and a version of my grandfather’s job that had nothing to do with the polished diplomat I remembered from family dinners. There were references to a woman named Miriam Ferrar, a name that meant nothing to me at the time, and to a role he’d played at the American Consulate in Marseille in 1940 that sounded, frankly, unbelievable.
I remember sitting on the floor of my aunt’s house, papers spread out around me, feeling the strange vertigo of realizing that a person I thought I knew completely had lived an entire chapter of his life I knew nothing about.
A Photograph Becomes a Promise
I sent the historian her photograph. That should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t, because I couldn’t stop thinking about what else was sitting in that trunk, half-forgotten, slowly deteriorating with age.
So I went back. And then I went back again. Trip after trip to Rhode Island, where the family records were kept. Days spent at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, tracing my grandfather’s name through State Department cables and War Refugee Board files, trying to understand what he had actually done, and why almost no one, including his own family, had ever really talked about it.
What I found was a version of Myles Standish who, at thirty-one years old, sat behind a desk in Marseille with a line of more than two thousand refugees stretching around the block outside his window, and chose, again and again, to give them more than his own government wanted him to.
That discovery is the reason this website, and the book Rescue in the Holocaust, exist at all. Not because I set out to write about him. Because I went looking for a photograph, and found a man I felt obligated to bring back into the light.
