This D.C. statehood activist just got full voting rights — in Austria
Bo Shuff finally got full voting rights — something he’s spent years fighting for as a D.C. statehood advocate.Because the country in which he will finally have a full say is Austria.
He was born in Fairfax County, raised in California, then moved to the District in 1991. “I’m looking at these citizenship papers I got, all in German,” said Shuff. “And I’m, just floored about what happened.”It’s more than a happy hour, isn’t-that-funny, wonky punchline for Shuff. It’s painful, because Shuff has invested so much of his life, his emotion, his career in the D.C. Statehood movement for nearly a decade as the head of D.C. Vote, fighting for D.C.
And yet Shuff found all of that with the quick filing of paperwork and submission of some family records to become a citizen of Austria in less than a year.His grandfather, Otto Elmer, was actually Otto Epstein. He was an Austrian Jew who left Vienna with his two brothers in 1938, escaping the Holocaust and leaving behind everything the Epstein family had built.“We never knew we were Jewish,” Shuff said. His grandfather was even a leader in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Akron, Ohio.
He was one of thousands of German-speaking Jews who helped interrogate prisoners of war, interpret and translate documents. Their discoveries helped catapult fields of American science.
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