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BOOKS BY RITA

Broken Glass Broken Lives

A Jewish Girl's Survival Story in Berlin, 1933-1945

ISBN-978-0983296065

In “Broken Glass, Broken Lives,” Dr. Rita Kuhn recalls her unique experience of living as a young girl and adolescent in Berlin, the capital of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, from 1933 to 1945. The people she loved disappeared from one day to the next and left no messages, no farewells, no forewarding addresses. They were as silent as the graves they never had. Their memories remain engraved within her heart.

 

Dr. Kuhn, too, was marked for death due to the Nuremberg racial laws, promulgated in 1935. However, Germans of mixed Jewish-Gentile families, like that of Dr. Kuhn (whose mother had converted to Judaism in 1925), were often allowed to live in a state of semi-freedom. Nonetheless, Dr. Kuhn witnessed first-hand the Nazis’ harsh labor laws and detention centers.  Dr. Kuhn’s story includes her detention in early 1943 at Rosenstrasse 2-4, where Gentile women protested on the street for the release of their Jewish husbands and children held by the Gestapo, in preparation for deportation to the East. This was the only street protest by Germans for Jews during the Third Reich, and it saved the lives of Dr. Kuhn, her father, and the others imprisoned with them at Rosenstrasse.

 

Barany Publishing (February 25, 2013)

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שברי זכוכית, שברי חיים

משפחה יהודית בברלין , 1945-1933

I(2020) מסת"ב: 978-965-308-621-0

​אדום ונטפו כדם נועדו גם לי [...] כבר איני סתם צופה מן הצד בחורבן שלפני, אלא אחדמקורבנותיו. [...] בבוקר נובמבר האפור והצונן הזה הסתיימה ילדותי והושלכתי אל עולםהמבוגרים, עולם של כאב ואימה. ב־ 10 בנובמבר 1938 יצאה ריטה קוּן בדרכה ללימודיה בבית הספר ונחשפה לחורבן שהותירו הפורעים בליל הבדולח. ריטה, ילידת נובמבר 1927 , הייתה בת לאב יהודי ולאם גיורת  וגדלה בזהות יהודית מובהקת. על־פי החקיקה הנאצית היו ריטה ואחיה הקטן בני תערובת, מישלינגֶה, ואולם בשל בחירת ההורים בדת היהודית נחשבו הילדים ל"יהודים על־פי חוק". ריטה גדלה בצל הפחד מהנאצים, ועם בני משפחתה וכלל יהודי גרמניה סבלה מהגזרות שהוטלו על היהודים בימי המשטר הנאצי. ריטה ואביה נאלצו לעבוד בעבודת כפייה קשה, אבל בזכות מוצאה הארי של אם המשפחה ניצלו בני המשפחה מהנורא מכל — הגירושים למזרח, והם שרדו בברלין עד סוף המלחמה. ריטה חוותה אפוא על בשרה אירועים מרכזיים בתולדות העיר ברלין ובתולדות יהודי ברלין שהתיאורים שלהם נדירים ביותר בזיכרונות שכתבו יהודים שכן התרחשו לאחר שמרבית היהודים כבר לא היו בעיר ובהם אקציית בתי החרושת ומחאתן של נשים אריות למען שחרור בני זוגן היהודים מבית המעצר ברוֹזנֶשטרָסֶה. בזיכרונותיה שזורים איִמי השואה וסיפור התבגרות של חברה נאמנה ובת למשפחה אוהבת — חורבן ליל הבדולח, הטלאי הצהוב, עבודת כפייה, אקציה ומאסר, ימי הדמדומים של המשטר הנאצי, סיפורים מימי בית ספר, יחסיה עם בני משפחתה היהודים והאַרים ועם חברותיה ואף רגעי חסד משפחתיים. לאחר המלחמה היגרה ריטה לארצות־הברית, והקימה שם את ביתה. ריטה היא דוקטור בספרות השוואתית, אם לארבעה וסבתא לחמישה.

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Another Ruth

ANOTHER RUTH begins in 1920 Berlin when an unlikely young couple meets and falls in love. It takes the reader through the tumultuous and dangerous changes of 1930s Germany and ends in the very different Berlin of 1948. The novel depicts the flourishing love of two young people against the backdrop of the deepening shadows of anti-Semitism that was to erupt in the conflagration of the Shoah (Holocaust). Twelve years of Nazi domination failed to destroy the constancy of their steadily growing bond. Their fictional names are Klara and Lev, but the couple is based upon the author's real parents, Fritz and Frieda Kuhn. Their social, cultural, and religious backgrounds could not have made for a more unlikely match.

 

Frieda Krüger's parents were raised as Lutherans, and were working-class people, whereas Fritz Kuhn came from a long line of upper-middle-class German Jews who were affluent bankers.

 

Before their marriage in 1926, Frieda chose to convert to Judaism, free of coercion, compelled by conviction. The title of Dr. Kuhn's novel is in honor of the Jewish ancestress Ruth; Frieda followed Ruth's sublime words at every step, unflinching in her devotion and fortitude to her Jewish family during the deadliest of times. “Where you go I will go, where you lodge, I will lodge; your God shall be my God; where you die, I will die.”

 

Cactus Moon Publications, LLC (March 11, 2018)

www.cactusmoonpublishing.com

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A Wonder Rabbi in Limbo

(Ein Wunderrabbi in Der Vorholle)

​ISBN-13: 978-8080600440

 

Author: Leo Kohut

Translated from German by Rita J. Kuhn

 

Published by Edicia Judaica Slovaca (2000)

BOOKS ABOUT ROSENSTRASSE

Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany 

Author: Professor Nathan Stoltzfus

ISBN-13 : 978-0813529097

In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."

Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.

The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."

Rutgers University Press (February 1, 2001)

http://rosenstrassefoundation.org/

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich

Author: Alison Owings

ISBN: 0813522005

What were the women of Germany doing during the Third Reich? What were they thinking? And what do they have to say a half century later?

In Frauen we hear their voices––most for the first time. Alison Owings interviewed and here records the words of twenty-nine German women who were there: Working for the Resistance. Joining the Nazi Party. Outsmarting the Gestapo. Disliking a Jewish neighbor. Hiding a Jewish friend. Witnessing "Kristallnacht." Witnessing the firebombing of Dresden. Shooting at Allied planes. Welcoming Allied troops. Being a prisoner. And being a guard. The women recall their own and others' enthusiasm, doubt, fear, fury, cowardice, guilt, and anguish.

Alison Owings, in her pursuit of such memories, was invited into the homes of these women. Because she is neither Jewish nor German, and because she speaks fluent colloquial German, many of the women she interviewed felt comfortable enough with her to unlock the past. What they have to say will surprise Americans, just as they surprised the women themselves.

Not since Marcel Ophuls's controversial film The Sorrow and the Pity have we been on such intimate terms with "the enemy." In this case, the story is that of the women, those who did not make policy but were forced to participate in its effects and to witness its results. What they did and did not do is not just a reflection on them and their country––it also leads us to question what actions we might have taken in their place. The interviews do not allow for easy, smug answers.

Rutgers University Press; Second Paperback Printing edition (February 1, 1995)

Light in the Shadows

Author/Artists: Barbara Millman

ISBN: 0824604016

Five Holocaust stories are told via an unusual collection of haunting black-and-white prints. Using stark images and simple prose, artist Milman shows how a few courageous and lucky Jews escaped Hitler's "Final Solution" and how a handful of brave Gentiles helped many of the Jews who did survive.

Rutgers University Press; Second Paperback Printing edition (February 1, 1995)

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