PORT ANGELES — Seattle-based writer and academic Laureen Nussbaum was at Peninsula College to share excerpts from her 2019 book “Shedding Our Stars: The Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine,” about how she and her family were saved from Holocaust by a mostly unknown German official.
“There were good Germans besides Oskar Schindler and his now-famous list,” Nussbaum said Thursday, referring to the German businessman who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust and was made famous by the 1993 film “Schindler’s List.”
Nussbaum — born Hannelore Klein in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1927 — spent most of her early life in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where her family had fled following the rise of the Nazis in 1933.
When Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands in 1940, anti-Jewish pogroms followed, but Nussbaum and her family were spared the terrible fate of Nazi death camps by a single German lawyer: Hans Calmeyer.
“Hans Calmeyer saved the lives of more Jews than Schindler. Among many others, my family and I owe Calmeyer great and unpayable debt,” Nussbaum said, reading from her book.
“I fervently hope that this book, which grants my family’s story with his, will help to bring him the international recognition he is due,” she said, stating that Calmeyer was responsible for saving more than 2,500 Jewish lives.
Nussbaum and her family were one of many Jewish families who had fled Nazi Germany and ended up in Amsterdam. Some of her family’s friends and neighbors included the Frank family, including the young Anne Frank, whose diary — published posthumously by her father, Otto, as “The Diary of a Young Girl” — is one of the most famous pieces of Holocaust literature.
There are memories of the Frank family coming to visit the home, but Nussbaum said she was more familiar with the older sister Margot and regarded the younger Anne as something of a “pipsqueak.”
After moving to America and becoming an academic, Nussbaum wrote several essays about Anne Frank and her legacy.
But where the Frank family went into hiding, Nussbaum and her family were able to live out the war years in the open thanks to the bureaucratic maneuvering of Calmeyer.
After serving briefly in the German army, Calmeyer — a lawyer by trade — found work in the German occupation government located in the Hague, where he eventually became an adjudicator over whether or not people must be considered Jewish by the Nazi authorities.
When the Nazis declared in 1941 that all Jews had to register with the authorities, they issued several qualifications for who was to be considered Jewish, including those with three or more Jewish grandparents and those who had been members of a Jewish religious congregation.
Calmeyer was able to convince his superiors that people should be able to refute the assertion that they were Jewish and was soon able to accept sworn testimonies claiming that someone’s grandparents were not Jewish.
For Nussbaum, whose mother was raised Catholic in Austria, this proved to be the exception that saved her and her family’s lives. Ironically, Nussbaum said, it was her grandmother’s bigotry that saved their lives.
Nussbaum’s mother was born out of wedlock, the result of her paternal grandmother’s disapproval of her son marrying a woman who wasn’t Jewish. Because Nussbaum’s Jewish grandfather wasn’t officially listed as her mother’s father, Calmeyer was able to argue to his superiors there was no way of knowing who the real father was.
“That’s when we got to take off our yellow stars,” Nussbaum said, referring to the yellow Stars of David Jewish people were made to wear under Nazi rule. “That’s how we squeaked by.”
Born in 1903, Nussbaum said Calmeyer was never a supporter of Adolf Hitler and his regime and only served in the army after being pressed into service.
When Hitler came to power, for Calmeyer, “from the beginning, it was a nightmare,” Nussbaum said.
“He was not at all a Nazi. He was anti-Nazi,” Nussbaum said. “He was a very cultured person who loved to read, loved all the arts.”
After the war, Calmeyer stayed in the Netherlands for a time before returning to his native Osnabrück in Germany and even spent some time in a Dutch prison under suspicion of having worked with the Nazis.
Calmeyer would live out the rest of his life as a recluse, Nussbaum said, haunted by the belief that he could have done more to resist the Nazis and save more lives.
Nussbaum’s book also recounts the early life of her husband, Hudi Nussbaum, who spent the war in hiding, trying to find a way out of the Netherlands and overlooked by the Nazis thanks to excellently made false identification documents.
Nussbaum and her family would eventually emigrate to the United States in the 1950s, first to California and then to Oregon, where she and her husband became professors at Oregon State University.
In 1992, Calmeyer was posthumously recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, an honorific bestowed by Israel and its official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem for non-Jewish people who risked their lives to save Jewish lives during World War II.
However, despite the accolades, for some Calmeyer remains a controversial figure. In 2020, more than 200 people submitted a petition to the German government to oppose plans to name a building in Osnabrück after Calmeyer, arguing that, while he did indeed save many Jews, he was still part of the Nazi regime and sent many other Jews to their deaths.
Nussbaum said she was aware of the criticism but didn’t agree with that characterization of Calmeyer.
“The naysayers won, much to my chagrin,” Nussbaum said of Osnabrück’s decision not to name the building after Calmeyer. “I still feel that he did something very unique in a way that was exemplary, and I’m not too pleased with the arguments of the naysayers.”
“Shedding Our Stars” was published by She Writes Press and is available in both paperback and ebook editions.
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Reporter Peter Segall can be reached at peter.segall@peninsuladailynews.com.
