October 9, 2009

Confronting a Difficult Past:
Germans Wrestle with the Legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust

Location:
Mabel Brown Room,
Young Student Center,
Keene State College, Keene, NH

Roundtable discussion partners:

• Rena Jacques:
  born in Breslau, lower Silesia in 1925. As a teenager she grew up in an anti-Nazi Catholic family. By war's end she had moved to Berlin where she discovered and helped her sister's work with the German resistance.
• Stephan Lewy: born in Berlin, Germany in 1925. Survived Kristallnacht, escaped to France in 1939 and the USA in 1942. He served in the U.S. Army as a "Ritchie Boy" in Patton's 6th Armor Division during WW 2.
• Ursula Mahlendorf:
  born in Strehlen, Lower Silesia in 1929. Joined the Hitler Youth (BDM) and became a squad leader and ardent follower of Hitler. Her escape from a group suicide pact in the wake of Hitler's suicide was a first step in her denazification and eventual acceptance of her culpability in the Holocaust. As a young teen, she was a bystander; if she had been old enough, would she have been a perpetrator?
• Abraham Peck:
  born in 1946 in a displaced persons' camp in Landsberg, Germany, the city where Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. He is the son of two Holocaust survivors who survived the Lodz Poland ghetto and the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Stutthof, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. As a Jewish history and Holocaust studies scholar, he has been actively involved in numerous programs devoted to meaningful dialogue and creative social action programs between members of the American and international Jewish communities and members of the Christian, African American, German and Polish communities.
• Martin Rumscheidt:
  born in Leuna, Germany in 1935. Living a privileged life in Nazi Germany, he would discover after the war that his beloved parents were important Nazi industrialists and perpetrators. His father had visited Auschwitz to recruit slave labor and Martin's playmates were the children of the commandant of Auschwitz-Buna. Martin has ever since wrestled with his parents' responsibility and facing his own individual shame.