He made a magazine, 95 issues, while hiding in the attic from the Nazis

“A few times he read at dinner parties,” she said in an interview, “but I didn’t understand German at the time.”

But many years later, Simone’s daughter, Lucy, became interested in the magazines, not only as family memories but also as markers of history. She received a research grant to travel to Germany, where she could delve deeper into her grandfather’s history. Simone then spent years searching for a way to increase public awareness of the magazines, one of the few previously undiscovered literary efforts documenting the Holocaust in Europe.

This led to the production of a book, “The Underwater Cabaret: The Satirical Resistance of Curt Bloch”, by Gerard Groeneveld, which was published in the Netherlands earlier this year. There will also soon be a museum exhibition: ‘My verses are like dynamite.’ Curt Bloch’s The Underwater Cabaret,” which is expected to open in February at the Jüdisches Museum Berlin.

“Any time an almost completely unknown work of this caliber comes to the fore, it is of great importance,” says Aubrey Pomerance, curator of the Berlin museum exhibition. “The vast majority of the writings in hiding were destroyed. If not, they have come to public attention before. So it is extremely exciting.”

Pomerance and Groeneveld’s research for the exhibition and book has helped to illuminate many aspects of Bloch’s life that had not previously attracted much attention. Born in Dortmund, an industrial city in western Germany, Bloch was 22 and working in his first job as a legal secretary when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Anti-Semitic violence in Bloch’s hometown escalated even before official anti-Jewish measures were imposed.

After a colleague threatened his life that same year, Bloch fled to Amsterdam, where he went to work for an importer and trader of Persian carpets. He hoped to find refuge there before fleeing further west, but his plans were foiled when the Germans invaded in 1940, closing the borders and spreading the nightmare to the Jews there too.