Symbolized by a three-hundred-year-old Seder plate, the religious
life of Fred Behrend's family had centered largely around Passover
and the tale of the Jewish people's exodus from tyranny. When the
Nazis came to power, the wide-eyed boy and his family found
themselves living a twentieth-century version of that exodus,
escaping oppression and persecution in Germany for Cuba and
ultimately a life of freedom and happiness in the United States.
Behrend's childhood came to a crashing end with Kristallnacht (the
Night of Broken Glass) and his father's harrowing internment at the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp. But he would not be defined by
these harrowing circumstances. Behrend would go on to experience
brushes with history involving the defeated Germans. By the age of
twenty, he had run a POW camp full of Nazis, been an instructor in
a program aimed at denazifying specially selected prisoners, and
been assigned by the U.S. Army to watch over Wernher von Braun, the
designer of the V-2 rocket that terrorized Europe and later chief
architect of the Saturn V rocket that sent Americans to the moon.
Behrend went from a sheltered life of wealth in a long-gone,
old-world Germany, dwelling in the gilded compound once belonging
to the manufacturer of the zeppelin airships, to a poor Jewish
immigrant in New York City learning English from Humphrey Bogart
films. Upon returning from service in the U.S. Army, he rose out of
poverty, built a successful business in Manhattan, and returned to
visit Germany a dozen times, giving him unique perspective into
Germany's attempts to surmount its Nazi past.
General
Imprint: |
Purdue University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies |
Release date: |
July 2017 |
Authors: |
Fred Behrend
• Larry Hanover
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 25mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Cloth over boards / With dust jacket
|
Pages: |
232 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-55753-784-3 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-55753-784-4 |
Barcode: |
9781557537843 |
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