Laureen Nussbaum tells the story of a righteous German official during the Holocaust in this live presentation from the Memorial Union on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis in 2022.
Laureen Nussbaum was born Hannelore Klein in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1927. The year before, Margot Frank had been born, also in Frankfurt. In 1929 Margot Frank's sister Anne was born in the same city. The Kleins and the Franks knew each other in Frankfurt and resumed their friendship in Amsterdam, where both families sought refuge after the Nazis came to power in Germany.
The girls shared many experiences: cheerful ones before the Netherlands was occupied by Hitler’s military; increasingly frightening ones thereafter. However, as the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands progressed, the two families suffered very different fates. Of the Franks only Anne’s father, Otto, survived the war, while the Kleins made it through intact. A major reason for this contrast was a German, Hans Calmeyer, a lawyer. In 1941 he was appointed an official in the German Occupation government of the Netherlands. It was Calmeyer’s responsibility to determine whether people who were registered as Jews but claimed they were of Christian descent had a legitimate case. Time and again, Calmeyer decided in favor of the petitioners, which saved them from persecution and deportation. Among the families that he rescued in this way were the Kleins. For his crucial aid to thousands of Jews, Calmeyer, who died in 1972, was in 1992 declared “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
After the war, Laureen Nussbaum taught for many years at Portland State University. She also published extensively, focusing for two decades on literary works that had been written in the Netherlands by Jewish refugee authors, among them Anne Frank. Recently, as a tribute to the man who saved her and her family, she published a biography, Shedding Our Stars: The Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine.
Dr. Nussbaum's talk was part of Oregon State University's observance of Holocaust Memorial week.
https://holocaust.oregonstate.edu/Note: This video has been auto-captioned and may contain errors.
