“Summons to Berlin” recounts the full story of Joanne Intrator, whose family was forced to relinquish their Berlin textile business in 1938 and flee Nazi rule to the United States, where her grandfather died one day after arriving in New York City. With the assistance of Louis Wonderly, CEO of Paladin Associates, she was able to determine that the two purchasers of her family's substantial business -- at one time Realitas GmbH was the third largest textile producer in the country -- had been members of the Nazi Party, and who were making claims to the property after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Investigation also revealed that these Nazi Party members had also agitated against the Intrators in the mid-1930s on account of their racial identity in order to confiscate the business and building in the heart of Berlin.

Horrifically ironic, the investigation discovered that after obtaining the Wallstrasse 16 building through a forced auction on racial grounds in 1938 that the Nazi Party members who purchased the building had also produced the infamous Judenstern or yellow Jewish Star in the building. The Jewish Star was an almost certain mark of deportation and death for German Jews who were required to purchase and wear it in public, including Joanne Intrator s grandparents, the former founders and owners of the company in the building before fleeing Germany. Yet the fight for Wallstrasse 16 did not end in 1938 but lasted all the way up until the present, with the family of one of the Nazi Party members making claims to the expansive building. With the burden of proof in German law on the Jewish victims to demonstrate that they were persecuted, "Summons to Berlin" is the story of Joanne Intrator s decades long struggle to not only reclaim her family's property and history, but also come to terms with Germanys past and its present. Buy Here