PORT ANGELES —Laureen Nussbaum will offer a reading from “Shedding our Stars: The Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine” at Peninsula College’s Studium Generale lecture series on Thursday.
The free reading will be from 12:35 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. in the Little Theater on Peninsula College’s Port Angeles campus, at 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd. The event also can be livestreamed via Zoom at http://pencol-edu.zoom.us/j/82308557946; meeting ID 823 0855 7946.
During the German occupation of the Netherlands, 1940 to 1945, all Jews were ordered to register the religion of their grandparents, according to a description of the book on Amazon.
Hans Calmeyer was appointed to adjudicate “doubtful cases.” He used his assignment to save at least 3,700 Jews from deportation and death.
Nussbaum — née Hannelore Klein — tells in her book how Calmeyer declared her mother non-Jewish and deleted her and her family from the deportation lists, saving them from death.
She weaves Calmeyer’s story with her family’s. Since in Amsterdam the Kleins were close to the Franks, Anne Frank and her family also figure in the book published in 2019.
Nussbaum is a professor emeritus of Portland State University.
She has published some 50 academic articles, several concerning The Diary of Anne Frank, according to the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, which said that after the death of her daughter and her husband, she moved to Seattle to be closer to her two sons.
