By Anne Levin

It wasn’t until high school that Carlson learned that she was Jewish, that her parents had fled the Holocaust, that Albert Einstein was her cousin and had saved her family during World War II, and that her mother had lived in Princeton in 1939. These and other discoveries are the subject of “Einstein’s Gift: How Albert Einstein Saved My Family and Why History Matters,” a presentation Carlson will give on Monday, January 12 at 6:30 p.m. at Princeton Public Library.

“I didn’t even know my parents were survivors,” Carlson said during a phone interview this week. “My mother was from Ulm [birthplace of Einstein], and was very proud of being German. She had lots of memorabilia. You might say that the Danube flowed through our house.

But that was it. It was a kind of culture of silence.”

One year on Yom Kippur — considered the holiest of Jewish holidays — a teacher asked 13-year-old Carlson why she was in school that day. When she got home, her mother told her that her father had stayed home from work, but didn’t say why.

Another day, she came home from school and took her traditional place at the table to do homework. “There was a small envelope there, addressed to me,” she said. “The stamp was a picture of Einstein — it was March 14, 1966, the first day it had been issued. I opened the envelope, but there was nothing inside. I asked my mother why, and she said, ‘Oh well, I lived with him when I first came to America. Let’s put it in the strong box and one day you’ll be glad.’”

Carlson’s parents finally sat her down for a serious talk when she turned 18 and told her she was Jewish. They gave her a folder with a five-part series her grandfather had written for a San Francisco newspaper describing the family’s escape from Germany. She learned that her mother had come to Princeton, courtesy of Einstein, on August 30, 1939.

“She was on the ship when the war came,” Carlson said. “But when my grandparents came, the war was raging.”

Carlson’s grandparents had to travel through Berlin, Moscow, Siberia, China, Korea, and Japan, before finally sailing to San Francisco. Because of their famous sponsor, they were met by reporters.

Carlson was bewildered by all of this information. “I didn’t know what to do with this. I ran off to Mexico and became a bilingual teacher,” she said. “Then in 1978, Germany started to do reparations, and track the Jewish community to come back. They started doing these reunions. My mother went to three, and I went with her to the third. I saw that my mother had had such a hard time being Jewish. I learned more from other people than from her. It was very difficult for her. I was very angry for a long time. But I realize now how she suffered. She must not have felt safe for a long time.”

In ensuing years, Carlson traveled to Germany a few more times. She attended a celebration in Ulm marking Einstein’s 125th birthday in 2012. Six years later, she was invited back to give a talk about her family’s connection to Einstein.

“I had just retired for the fourth time,” Carlson said, referring to her 40-year career as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and more. She holds a doctorate in education and social policy from Northwestern University and serves on a variety of boards including that of the Princeton Einstein Museum of Science, which is in development.

The 2018 trip back to Ulm, with her husband, “started an intense journey to learn about Einstein and my family,” she said. “We’ve been to 14 countries looking for roots.”

In 2024, Carlson helped open a museum in Germany dedicated to the Jewish community of Ulm. She is currently working on an Einstein discovery center in that city. And she is writing a memoir about her journey, titled Einstein’s Gift.

The discovery that the famed physicist had provided the lifesaving sponsorship and crucial financial support to rescue her mother and grandparents from Hitler’s Germany has clearly changed the direction of Carlson’s life.

“I have learned so much,” she said. “And I am constantly learning more.”