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CONTACT: RUTH WISEMAN, 973-922-0283
HEADLINE: MEMOIR OF A JEWISH GIRL’S RESCUE FROM NAZI DEPORTATION RAISES YOUTH AWARENESS
BERKELEY, CALIF. – Survivor of forced labor and persecution in Nazi Germany, Dr. Rita J. Kuhn, speaks at San Francisco Bay Area schools to raise youth awareness of the horrors of WWII, as well as the uncommon courage of a group of Gentile women who saved her family from certain death.
In her presentations, Dr. 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. Dr. Kuhn 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.
During her decades of speaking to Bay Area schools, Dr. Kuhn has touched the lives of thousands of middle and high school students, educating them on the power of standing up against totalitarianism, racism, and violence. Many of the youth to whom she speaks are from impoverished circumstances and have never heard about the Holocaust. One boy in particular stands out in her memory, “He wrote to me after I spoke,” tells Dr. Kuhn, “to inform me that hearing my story dissuaded him from joining a skinhead group that was recruiting him.” And, most recently she spoke at Antioch High School, where 350 students listened respectfully during her presentation, then filed in line to hug her and speak personally to her. Dr. Kuhn remarked, “Never, in all my 25 years of speaking had I such an affectionate reception as on that day in Antioch.”
Dr. Kuhn has just released a memoir of her experiences, "Broken Glass, Broken Lives," in which she writes with great feeling and compassion about a time when “evil overpowered goodness.” It will be available for free digital download from July 22 to July 26 on Amazon. The book is also available in paperback. http://bit.ly/BrokenGlass-BrokenLives
Contact:
Ruth Wisemanbgbl2012@gmail.com
973-922-0283
