"There were letters carefully tied in a ribbon," said Hoerlin, 72. "It was clear they were love letters."
There were 500 in all: 400 written by her mother and 100 by her father from 1934 to 1938, while she was living in Berlin and he in Stuttgart.
Hoerlin began reading.
They filled in the blanks of a story that her parents would not discuss. Hoerlin was determined that it would not be forgotten.
She chronicled their experiences in her recently self-published book, Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey From Nazi Germany to America.
"This is a story embedded in history: the rise of Hitler," said Hoerlin, who taught public health at the University of Pennsylvania and Haverford College and was acting health commissioner for Philadelphia in the 1980s.
"Those letters were a document of that, and my parents' love story."
It took Hoerlin four years. She spent hours in her study translating the letters from German. She traveled abroad to scour German archives. She interviewed historians.
Hoerlin's book uncovers what historian Frank Mecklenburg described as an "unusual constellation" of events and people in Nazi Germany.
The story is "sort of typical in a way, and also not typical," said Mecklenburg, director of research at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, a research library and archive on the history of German-speaking Jews.
Commonplace, in some ways, was Schmid's background as a Jew who did not grow up in an observant household and later converted to Catholicism when she married. Her first husband, Willi Schmid, was a well-known literary and music critic.
Until 1933, German society was characterized by a "push toward" and a secularization of the culture, Mecklenburg said. Religion was secondary.
But Hitler began to change that. On June 30, 1934, known as the Night of the Long Knives, his troops rounded up and killed people they viewed as government opponents. Willi Schmid was slain in a case of mistaken identity.
