"Because They Needed Me": Rita Miljo and the Orphaned Baboons of South Africa

In May of 2007, noted American poet and novelist and son of Holocaust refugees Michael Blumenthal went to South Africa to volunteer at C.A.R.E., a rehabilitation center for orphaned and injured baboons founded by Rita Miljo. Rita was a Lithuanian-born childhood member of the Hitler Youth who had gone on to have a life as adventure-filled as Beryl Markham’s in West With the Night.

“A lot of people have asked me whether they could write ’my book,’ Rita wrote to Michael shortly thereafter, “an...