An Obligation: Keep the Memory Alive At a recent book event: Giving Voice to the Victims of the Nazis, an audience member asked Rudi if writing our novel Stumbling Stone and telling the story about his Uncle Gerhard had helped … Continue reading →
Depravity is Hard to Conjure People often ask us how much of our novel Stumbling Stone, which is based on our real life stories, is true. We usually explain that most of it is fact but the part about Gerhard … Continue reading →
How Will We Recognize a Despot? In the past few months, many people have commented on what might happen if Donald Trump were to be elected President of the United States. German relatives and friends, hearing some of his rhetoric, … Continue reading →
What if the Dead Had Survived? Just a few days ago, we were reminded that June 8 was an anniversary we might want to remember. In 1944 on that date, the invasion of Normandy – and the winding down of … Continue reading →
“Here There was a Fight” June 1 is the anniversary of the publication of Stumbling Stone, our historical fiction book based on our true life stories and the experiences of one German who resisted the Nazis. It’s been a year … Continue reading →
My Grandfather’s Watch has a Story My Grandfather Hermann Raab ( in our novel Stumbling Stone he is the character Gustaf Schmidt) was drafted into the German Army when World War I broke out. He was sent to the western … Continue reading →
We Can Thank the Fuehrer for This Mother’s Day this year coincides with the official end of World War II – May 8. And on May 16 of that year, eight days after the war ended, Stumbling Stone author Rudi … Continue reading →
My Mother’s Ring Raises Questions At a trip to a local jewelry store last week, I was asked a question that took me back to another century and another country. A few week ago I began to consider what to … Continue reading →
We Can All Bear Witness Recently a non-Jewish physician who did his residency at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Canada, described his profound and moving experience working with a group of Holocaust survivors. Writing for the Bay Area News … Continue reading →
It Survived the Bombing During this past year, one bonus from publishing Stumbling Stone has been the authors we’ve met, some with stories similar to ours or in some way related to the same time period. Mani Feniger wrote in … Continue reading →
May 1, 1945 In Part II of the novel Stumbling Stone, Karl Schmidt’s father tells reporter Sara Schmidt and Karl about the day he was captured by the Americans at the end of World War II. That account is based … Continue reading →
Today Meets Yesterday In our novel Stumbling Stone, we tell the story of Gerhard Schmidt, a young man growing up in Nazi Germany. In one scene that takes places in Leipzig, Germany in 1934, Gerhard listens to his father and … Continue reading →
Don’t Tolerate Racism A film I saw recently reminded me that there are still powerful lessons to be learned from the past about the importance of speaking up when we see something intolerable. Jack Adler, the subject of the film … Continue reading →
Will History Repeat Itself? Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Julie and I went to eastern Germany. We slowly drove our rental car on cobblestone streets through Weimar on our way to the site of the … Continue reading →
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same Julie’s mother, Mathilda Gruber Conan, wrote many letters from Germany from 1948-1951, where Mathilda, Julie, her father Abraham Conan, and her sister Laura lived while Abe Conan worked on the … Continue reading →
Letters – and Photos – Reveal Secrets Even though our book Stumbling Stone is fiction, it is based on our true life stories supplemented with research we did to learn more about Germany during World War II. We visited the archives … Continue reading →
Beauty and Brutality in Hidden Works This week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened an exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin of 100 works that were clandestinely created by 50 Holocaust-era artists. Of the group, half were killed by … Continue reading →
Can We Hope for Never Again ? On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler, leader or Fuehrer of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party), as chancellor of Germany, following Hitler’s stunning rise to … Continue reading →
What would we have done? At the close of our reading and presentation at the San Francisco Jewish Community Library (which was co-sponsored by the Goethe Institut) last month, Rudi was approached by an elderly woman, who said with accented … Continue reading →
Making new friends, hearing amazing stories When we held the first copy of Stumbling Stone and looked at the cover, felt the pages and smelled the print, we felt like proud parents of our new baby. We felt that we … Continue reading →
The Pain of Lost Childhood A new friend, Robert Heller (author of The Unlikely Governor), sent us a link to an essay written by Ina Schulz entitlted The Lost Children of Europe. Published by the American Institute for Contemporary German … Continue reading →
The Story Behind One Family The title of our novel Stumbling Stone is a reference to the memorial plaques placed in Germany and other countries to commemorate the victims of the Nazis. Our website designer Nick Despota recently returned from … Continue reading →
Rootless Refugees Hoping for a New Life Today’s San Francisco Chronicle (front page) has a story about Syrian refuges on the Greek Island of Lesbos. Volunteer Amy Rao, a tech executive “shudders as she hears the debate (about admitting those … Continue reading →
Skinheads at the Ovens A while ago, we wrote about the oath people took in 1945 at the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp to ensure the Nazi atrocities were never forgotten. With all the anti-immigrant talk and xenophobia that we are … Continue reading →
New Documentary Film Evokes Stumbling Stone Issues We’ve been getting messages from folks calling our attention to a new documentary What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy, which opened recently in some theaters. We actually saw the movie a few … Continue reading →
A Vow to Destroy Nazism at its Roots Our Stumbling Stone editor Elizabeth Rosner (her new book is Electric City) shared with us the material she and her father Carl H. Rosner received when they attended the 70th anniversary of … Continue reading →
Who Gets to Define History? Having dinner recently with friends who had just visited Berlin, we were again confronted with the question of who is allowed to define history. (Rudi blogged about this recently) They toured the Checkpoint Charlie Museum … Continue reading →
Do you get to choose which parts to embrace? A historian once said that history is a description of the path a country took to become itself. The problem with this thinking is that no country remains static. Things change … Continue reading →
When did the Germans find out about Auschwitz? Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a movie review by Mick LaSalle. “How the Germans found out about Auschwitz” describes the film “Labyrinth of Lies”, a German movie that chronicles a young prosecutor’s … Continue reading →
An Excerpt from Stumbling Stone Today’s newspaper has a story about the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here is an excerpt from Stumbling Stone that describes police officer Karl Schmidt’s reaction as he and reporter Sarah … Continue reading →
What did Mathilda know? After I posted the blog about my mother’s (Mathilda Gruber Conan) notes to me as she was dying in a hospital in New York, my cousin Peter Burmeister (Burelli Farm in Vermont) wrote me this recollection. … Continue reading →
Connecting with Silent Voices Recently we were interviewed on a radio show called VoiceAmerica Good Grief. Cheryl Jones, the host, focuses on how grief can transform and present opportunities for new growth. Preparing for the show and for blogs on … Continue reading →
I came across a letter today written by my father, Abraham Conan, to my aunt, Clara Gruber. He was in Hamburg, Germany; she was in Bronx, N.Y. It was July 31, 1950 and he had been recently transferred – as … Continue reading →
An Excerpt from Stumbling Stone A few posts ago, we asked you whether stories from post-war Germany about survivors of the Nazi atrocities still needed to be told. An extraordinary number of people read the post- four times as many … Continue reading →
Julie’s Mother Writes About Displaced Persons In reading through my mother Mathilda’s letters to her sister Clara in the Bronx, written when we lived in post-war Germany, there are many that deal with everyday life. My teen-age sister’s unhappiness with … Continue reading →
Letters and Postcards from Rudi’s Grandfather During my recent visit to Germany, my sister gave me the last installment of my father’s papers, which were promised to me upon his death almost 21 years ago. The papers fall into two … Continue reading →
Flying Over My Father’s Past Last week I was in Germany for the occasion of the 70th birthday of my cousin. While I was there, I took a flight in a single engine airplane along the rim of the Alps. … Continue reading →
So Many Years of Waiting The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival showed an appalling documentary filmed by the Allies as the concentration camps were being liberated after the war ended in Europe in 1945. The film presented a graphic story of … Continue reading →
To the Victor Belong the Spoils? When Julie’s family moved to Germany in 1948 so her father (Abe Conan) could supervise the resettlement of concentration camp survivors and other displaced person, they moved from a two bedroom apartment in a … Continue reading →
We have this picture on the back of our Stumbling Stone novel and we’ve had a number of questions about why we’re holding teddy bears. Here’s the story. From 1948-51, Julie lived in Bremen and Hamburg, Germany, where her father’s … Continue reading →
My father’s diary describes his days in the American prisoner-of-war camp. This excerpt from Stumbling Stone was gleaned from the diary and interviews with my father. “How long did you stay in that prisoner-of-war camp and what was it like … Continue reading →
Matty’s Letter When my mother, Mathilda Gruber Conan, my older sister Laura and I went to live in Germany in 1949 —where my father Abe Conan was working to resettle concentration camp survivors— I imagine my mother must have felt … Continue reading →
June I have recently been looking through my father’s diary from 1945. It is a small paper booklet and contains writing in faded pencil. Some of it is written in the old German script which is almost impossible to decipher … Continue reading →
Trudy’s Story This week we announced the publication of our book and here is something one of our friends, born in Germany as the war was ending, shared with us. “So heart warming to read what you posted. I looked … Continue reading →
Much has been written lately about the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps—Buchenwald, Auschwitz and others—and about the horrors the liberators came upon at those sites as the war ended. Lately I’ve been reading letters my mother wrote when we … Continue reading →
“Ingrid continued to talk about her flight from Dresden, describing the panic she felt, fleeing on foot, carrying her possessions on her back, dragging her children after her, artillery shells flying overhead. She talked about the terror she and the … Continue reading →
Rudi’s father, who like Der Alte in Stumbling Stone, was captured by the Americans just days before WW II officially ended “It was May 1 and I was leading my unit south into Bavaria, hoping we could elude the Allied … Continue reading →
Rudi’s Story I remember the times I lived in Kiel at the Baltic sea. The town had been destroyed during many bombing runs and survivors had to become creative with living space. In 1947 we lived in what had been … Continue reading →
I was born eight days after the unconditional surrender of the German Reich to the Allied Forces. My mother had walked a long distance – for nine days – to escape the advancing Russians and to get to her parents’ … Continue reading →
People ask us what we remember about the post-war years in Germany. Of course, Rudi and I have different memories. My father was part of the Allied High Commission – the occupation forces. Rudi and his family were the “occupied.” … Continue reading →
