My research started by interviewing my family to get a more personal story about why

people moved. When talking to my grandma, Carole Strobel, she started off her life somewhere
in New Haven with just her and her mother. She and her mother traveled to only two places for
the first few years of her lives. It was her house and the hospital. My grandmother was diagnosed
with a disease called Rickets. Rickets is a lack of vitamin D and nutrient, so your belly swells up
and your legs bow. As a result of her physical health and her mother’s incapacity to being the
proper mother, she needed to be; Carole had was put into an orphanage. From there she went to
some foster home, for a short while. Then she to Highland Heights Orphanage where she stayed
for a while, but not knowing exactly how long. Next, she went to a foster home in North
Branford named The Halls. By this time in her life, she still had Rickets and yet had never been
adequately treated, but when staying with The Halls till she was six-years-old, her foster mother
took charge of the health conditions she was in and got her to a proper doctor that saved her life.
Asking my grandmother why she had to be taken away from her actual mother made her think.
Being so young, she did know was that she was a single mother that she didn’t have much
income. She was a housekeeper, but when she took my grandmother back to the hospital and the
doctors saw the type of condition she was in, with rickets, and they decided to take her away
from her birth mother. Then when she was six almost seven-years-old when she was adopted by
Lina and Herman Munck and lived on 41 Spring Road, North Haven. She stayed with them till
she was in her 20s to then proceed to never go to college but went straight into the workforce at
Seacole's and Rockbestice Wire and Cable. She worked at Seacole's maybe 2-3 years, then
worked at Rockbestice for five years. It’s then when she met her husband Milton Strobel and
lived on Mixed Ave. in Hamden. Then she was expecting her first kid, so her and her husband
moved to Humphrey Street. And then they stayed there for three years. Almost done with all the
moving in her life, she moved up to Enfield because her husband got a job in East Granby; where
they stayed for nine years. From there, they decided to move to 265 Pine Tree Drive, Orange CT.
She and her husband have been living there ever since.

Growing up I always called my grandma “Oma,” which means grandmother in German,

but the irony of me calling her that is, all my life we don’t know if she is German, but we do
know her birth mother was Jewish. She was born in the thick of WWII that happened from 1939
to 1945 which involved the vast majority of the world's countries, one of them being Germany.
On her birth certificate it says her father was from Mexico, but when trying to trace that back, the
result was inconclusive. When she was adopted by her birth mother to the Munck family, she
changed her name from Ramona Juanita Masquef to Carel Nancy Munck because her adoptive
family said it was too heathen and too Spanish from her parents going to South America and
Mexico before migrating to New York. So by changing her name to Munck which was of
German descent, growing up, she thought she was German, but a factor into her childhood was a
German living in America while the battle of WWII was going on.
 After doing further research about WWII, I decided to investigate the lead up to WWII
and how that could have affected people moving. There was a threatening political atmosphere
for German Jewry. Economic depression, radical nationalism, street violence, fear of
communism and dissatisfaction with democracy drove many Germans towards fiercely anti
semitic attitudes. As a result of all of these things, hostility mounted dangerously. And I then
proceeded to look at how was the economy and government was like during pre-WWII in
Germany? Also, as a result of the economy, what was the food ration like before the war? Next,
why was being Jewish the focal point of leaving Germany? And lastly why for some, was South
America the key to escaping Germany? When thinking about these questions, I did further
research that took me to my first website that explained how The German economy, like those of
many other western nations, suffered the effects of the Great Depression with unemployment.
When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, he introduced policies aimed at improving the economy,
but the changes included privatization of state industries, autarky, and tariffs on imports.
However, reduced foreign trade meant rationing in consumer goods like poultry, fruit, and
clothing for many Germans. And also Hitler and the Nazis said the Jews were responsible for
huge events like losing World War One and the economic crisis. That’s why the need to flee
Germany was crucial to guaranteeing Jewish people’s lives. Overall, it was necessary to move
out or flee Germany to assure the security of human lives.