History in the world: Alum forges connections with the descendants of a lost Jewish community

Familie-Einstein-Straße is a tree-shaded street in the German city of Augsburg, its name carrying the weight of absence and memory: Einstein Family Street.

The Einsteins in question weren’t related to the famous physicist, as far as the family knows. Rather, they were part of Augsburg’s Jewish community, slain or scattered by the Holocaust. Among them was Diane Fischer Castiglione’s mother, Liese Fischer, who fled to Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport.

A 1982 graduate of Harpur College, Castiglione has been deeply involved in the history of Augsburg’s Jewish population since retiring from a 32-year State Department career in 2017. A dual major in history and political science, she later attended Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Her interest in history began years before she studied the subject in earnest, including at the kitchen table in her family’s Long Island home.

“I vividly remember asking my mom about her family in junior high, and scribbling notes on a little memo pad. I still have those pieces of paper,” she said. “When I retired, I wanted to do the family tree.”

She got a jumpstart on the project, thanks to a connection with the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia. But first: a bit of the family history she compiled.

It turns out her father had a story similar to her mother’s; he and his parents fled Breslau—now Wroclaw, Poland—also in 1939, living first in Panama for 18 months before their American visas came through. While Castiglione’s mother worked in Manchester as a nurse, emigrating to the United States in 1947, her father joined the U.S. Army and worked as a prisoner of war interrogator. The two met on a blind date in New York in the 1950s.

In 2012, Castiglione’s mother was invited to Augsburg’s Jewish Museum to talk about her family history. Fast-forward five years later, when the city’s main synagogue was celebrating its 100th anniversary.

“I had suggested to all my cousins around the world that we could turn this into a family reunion,” Castiglione said.

The museum turned that idea into the Descendants’ Reunion; 99 descendants of Augsburg’s pre-war Jewish population attended, 23 of them from her mother’s family.

“My mother, at this point, was not able to travel, but it was a remarkable experience because I was meeting a lot of these relatives for the first time,” she said. “Because of the Holocaust, my mother’s family dispersed to Scotland, South Africa and Israel, and then to Canada and Australia.”

The momentum continued and, in 2018, Castiglione helped start a twice-yearly newsletter for the Jewish descendants of Augsburg. A recent issue focused on food culture: what Augsburg’s Jewish community typically ate and how they kept kosher, for example.

“Are these stories rigorous papers written by historians?” she asked. “No. They’re people writing about their family, but these stories are so important.”

The descendants have worked not only with the museum, but with the city and mayor’s office on events such as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. During the pandemic, the city asked the group to send a video for an online commemoration; they’ve been providing one every year since 2021. The group is now working with the museum to set up a second descendants’ reunion in 2026.

Now, the Einstein family has its own street, which Castiglione and her son visited after its official renaming in 2021. It was once called Langemarckstraße, named for a bloody World War I battle often cited by Nazis for propaganda purposes.

Ultimately, the Jewish descendants of Augsburg have four main goals: to build community among the descendants; to preserve history in an accessible way; to conduct outreach; and to support Augsburg’s Jewish Museum.

“Our parents and grandparents probably all knew each other in the 1930s, but people either didn’t survive or left,” she said. “That community was completely disrupted.”

The State Department

Castiglione’s Harpur College experience enabled her to do more than delve into her family history; it shaped her career. While Fletcher is one of the main schools that has traditionally fed into the foreign service, the Maryland resident passed her entire assessment process before she finished her first year at graduate school.

She joined the foreign service in 1984 as an economics officer. Her first assignment was in Cairo, where she first served as a consular officer and then as staff assistant to the ambassador.

Foreign service positions typically last two or three years, jockeying between different countries and stateside. Castiglione’s second position dealt with aviation negotiations, after which time she did a 9-month intensive course on economics. Then, it was off to the Philippines, where she primarily worked on energy issues. Back in Washington, she helped conduct orientation programs for new State Department employees and then worked in recruitment.

This work sparked her interest in the department’s organizational side — and also gave her a path to the civil service. When her former boss in recruitment left the agency, she encouraged Castiglione to apply.

“That was the lightning bolt I was waiting for. I resigned from the foreign service on Friday, and on Monday, I reappeared as a civil service employee of the State Department without the obligation to serve overseas,” she said.

She served as recruitment director for eight years and then became deputy executive director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs — the same bureau in which she had worked multiple times as an economics officer.

The skills she honed at Harpur — research, analysis and writing — proved invaluable during her time at the State Department, she said. The influence of history pops up in unexpected ways — for example, the Philippine government’s hesitancy in raising gas prices in tandem with world events. If you do a deep dive, you’ll discover a connection between increased pump prices and coup attempts in the island nation.

“I’ll tell anyone who asks that I attribute whatever success I had in my career to Binghamton and my experiences there,” she said.