Grandparents Going Through Tough Times?

leah377
Tue, 23 May 2006 23:24:07 +0000

My grandmother, a German Jewish girl, escaped from Berlin at the age of 8 in late 1938 and came to America with her family. She tells tons of fascinating stories about her childhood in Nazi Germany and is in the process of writing her memoirs. I drink up every word I hear about my grandmother and the unfortunate fates of many of her family members, some of whom died in concentration camps and others who escaped to Brazil, Australia, and Turkey.
She remembers wearing a yellow Star of David, her mother’s arrest, the burning down of her synagogue on a morning when her older sister was playing soccer there for her Jewish league, and a beating from a Nazi teacher after he learned that she, smart, blonde, and blue-eyed, was a Jew. She remembers a brave Christian housekeeper telling SS men that she was washing “filth” off of her physician father’s professional sign after it was vandalized and spray painted with a Star of David.
Stories like these are ones I’ll never forget, in the hopes that none of us ever forget, especially when similar horrors are taking place in Darfur right now…