Shedding Our Stars: The Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine

by Laureen Nussbaum, Karen Kirtley

Overview

During the German occupation of the Netherlands, 1940 to 1945, all Jews were ordered to register the religion of their grandparents. The Reichskommissar appointed the young lawyer Hans Calmeyer to adjudicate “doubtful cases.” Calmeyer used his assignment to save at least 3,700 Jews from deportation and death, dwarfing the number saved by Schindler’s famous rescue operation. Laureen Nussbaum—née Hannelore Klein—owes her life to this brave German official. In Shedding Our Stars, she tells how Calmeyer declared her mother non-Jewish and deleted her and her family from the deportation lists, saving them from death. She goes on to interweave his story with her family‘s tale of survival, as well as with that of her boyfriend and, later, husband, Rudi Nussbaum. Since in Amsterdam the Kleins were close to the Franks, Anne Frank and her family also figure in book. Going beyond the liberation of the Netherlands to follow both Calmeyer’s and the author’s story to the end of their lives, Shedding Our Stars is a story of courage in the darkest of times, and of the resilience of the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631526367
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Born in 1927 in Frankfurt, Laureen Nussbaum was the middle daughter of the Klein family. When she was eight, the Kleins left Hitler’s Germany and settled in Amsterdam, close to Anne Frank and her family, old friends from Frankfurt. When Hans Calmeyer, the German official in charge of “dubious cases,” decided in favor of their petition to be considered non-Jews, and Nussbaum’s mother and sisters were allowed to shed their yellow stars, her father, living in a “privileged mixed marriage,” was not deported. In 1957, Nussbaum and her husband, Rudi, moved to the United States and eventually, settled in Portland, OR, where Rudi joined the faculty of Portland State University(PSU). There, Nussbaum went back to school and subsequently got her PhD in German Language and Literature at the University of Washington. She joined the faculty of PSU, published dozens of academic papers, and eventually retired as a full professor. In 2012, after her husband’s death, she moved to Seattle.

Karen Kirtley is a freelance editor and writer and avid music lover. She served as editorial director of Amadeus Press for several years, where she helped journalist Richard Newman put together the breathtaking biography Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz (Amadeus Press, 2000). Kirtley lives in Portland, OR.

Table of Contents

Introduccion Ted Koppel 13

Preface 17

Chapter 1 Early Childhood in Frankfurt 19

Chapter 2 Hans Calmeyer 26

Chapter 3 Settling in the Netherlands 37

Chapter 4 The First Years of German Occupation 44

Chapter 5 An Official at the Reich Commissariat 49

Chapter 6 Wearing the Star of David 53

Chapter 7 Different Destinies 64

Chapter 8 Roundups 70

Chapter 9 Sabotaging Hitler's Final Solution 77

Chapter 10 The Tide Is Turning 87

Chapter 11 Bolting Out of Reach 92

Chapter 12 Barograph 101

Chapter 13 Hunger Winter 106

Chapter 14 Liberation 113

Chapter 15 In Detention 118

Chapter 16 New Beginning 126

Chapter 17 Denazification 132

Chapter 18 Where to Fit In? 139

Chapter 19 Uncharted Future 146

Chapter 20 Restoration 154

Chapter 21 Embracing New Life 160

Chapter 22 The World Is Open 168

Chapter 23 Slightly Eccentric 176

Chapter 24 Too Little, Too Little! 185

Chapter 25 Academe and Real Life 194

Chapter 26 Wrestling the Past 200

Chapter 27 Preparing for Death 208

Chapter 28 A Circle Closes 215

Chapter 29 A Devastating Loss 219

Chapter 30 Fulfilling My Promise 225

Sources 230

Notes 233

Acknowledgments 242

About the Authors 248

Photo Credits 251

Editorial Reviews

2019 Best Book Awards Winner in Biography 2019 Best Book Awards Winner in History (General) “What is the price of integrity? In occupied Holland, the German bureaucrat Hans Calmeyer (1903–1972) saved at least 3,700 Jewish lives and protected 9,000 more in mixed marriages. After 1945, some Germans saw him as a traitor, or self-serving. The author Laureen Nussbaum, who grew up with Anne and Margot Frank, was among the lucky ones able to remove the yellow star thanks to Calmeyer. Nussbaum’s account proves we need eye-witness testimony to take heed of the past and its legacy in the present.”
—Dr. Penny Milbouer, translator of Between Persecution and Participation: Biography of a Bookkeeper at J. A. Topf & Söhne

“Hannah Arendt has called the destruction of Dutch Jewry ‘a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country,’ a disaster comparable to the extinction of Polish Jewry. From mid-July 1942 until the end of the war, 93 trains carried some 104,000 Jews to their death, out of a total Jewish population of roughly 140,000. But for Hans Georg Calmeyer, the German official operating within the Nazi killing machine in occupied Holland, the toll would have been even higher. The story of this Righteous Among the Nations is told in compelling and touching detail by one of the rescued, Laureen Nussbaum. Powerful, humane.”
—Dr. Jack Boas, historian, author of Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork

“This is an inspiring story of quiet resistance from a German lawyer, Hans Calmeyer, who, while playing his role as a loyal German in the ‘dejudification’ of the Netherlands, maintained a rescue operation that saved thousands of Jewish lives, more than Schindler. Among them was Laureen Nussbaum, whose account in this remarkable biography/autobiography is like that of Anne Frank, her friend, in rendering the feel and texture of living in Amsterdam during the war. Nussbaum’s account goes further than Frank’s, however, to describe growing up in the Weimar Republic, living through the ‘Hunger Winter,’ and the challenges of reassembling lives after the war, hers and Calmeyer’s, when Germany was in denial. Gripping and revelatory.”
—Dr. Gayle Greene, author of The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation and Missing Persons: A Memoir

“If you loved Anne Frank’s Diary, you must read Shedding Our Stars, Laureen Nussbaum’s compelling account of how her family was saved from the Nazis by Hans Calmeyer—along with 3,700 other Jewish people. This intertwined family memoir and Calmeyer biography gives a unique take on a familiar story. It reads like a novel, showing how two people managed to resist the Nazis in their different circumstances: a fourteen-year-old girl who was helping her boyfriend in hiding and a German bureaucrat who was saving lives under constant scrutiny. You’ll see the world of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in more intimate detail than ever before—and unlike a novel, you’ll see what happens to the author and Calmeyer after the war. We need this book now, for its example of two people of unimpeachable integrity in the worst of times and for its warning.”
—Mary Fillmore, author of An Address in Amsterdam

“Thanks to Ursula LeGuin I came aboard this powerful vessel: an inspirational story largely unknown, of the Jews of Holland, and the incredible role of the young German official, Hans Calmeyer, and the many thousands of lives thereby saved. Stories of Anne Frank’s family, and Laureen and Rudi Nussbaum’s own stories. Even a story of my own family. Of all our families. I was in tears again and again.”
—Dr. Tony Wolk, Professor of English, Portland State University. author of The Parable of You and the Lincoln Out of Time trilogy

“Beneath the facts and figures that help us come to grips with the Holocaust lies a world of individual life stories. This impressive study of the role of the German jurist Hans Calmeyer reveals how—in the midst of dilemmas over collaboration or resistance, remaining or fleeing, going into hiding or hoping for the best—Jews were saved from the Nazi killing machine. Laureen Nussbaum was one of them, in contrast to many of her neighbors and friends such as Anne and Margot Frank. This book is therefore as much a tribute to a man who saved lives as a commemoration of those who did not survive the war.”
—Dr. Ronald Leopold, Executive Director, Anne Frank House, Amsterdam

“In the midst of the Holocaust, quietly, against protocol and orders, people like Hans Calmeyer, a German bureaucrat, saved uncounted thousands by getting them the right paperwork. Calmeyer did so for this author’s family, as we learn through her richly detailed, intertwined stories (the family also knew Anne Frank). The young Calmeyer had years before reflected in his journal that ‘there are ridiculously small things that are possibly bigger than great heroic deeds.’ We yearn for heroes; this book helps us rethink what real ones look like in this, our modern world of job holders—and that may help us when we, at our desks, also make choices.”
—Dr. Elizabeth Minnich, Distinguished Fellow, Association of American Colleges & Universityies, and author of The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking

From the Publisher

2019-10-02
Debut author Nussbaum, with Kirtley (co-author: Alma Rosé, 2000), considers the work of a German lawyer who helped Jewish people escape the Holocaust in this mix of biography and memoir.Hans Calmeyer may not be a household name like Oskar Schindler, but through his work as a lawyer in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, he was able to save several thousand people from concentration camps. The Nazis ordered all Jewish people to register their grandparents' religion, and Calmeyer—whose job was to interpret German registration laws in the Netherlands and decide who'd be considered Jewish, half-Jewish, or "Aryan"—used considerable discretion to label as many people Aryan as possible. These fortunate ones included the author and her parents, whose new, "Aryanized" designation allowed them to live out the war in their Amsterdam home—even as their friends and neighbors, including Anne Frank and her family, were forced to go into hiding. With this book, the authors seek to tell the story of the little-known Calmeyer, whose early career included involvement with a student militia during Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch, which transformed his political views. They interweave his story with that of Nussbaum's family and of her future husband, Rudi Nussbaum, before, during, and especially after the war, when the extent of the Holocaust became clear. A group portrait emerges of ordinary people attempting to survive however they could and of small decisions that reverberated for decades to come. The prose is crisp and full of wonderful, small details: "Since my mother had been part of the Wandervögel (birds of passage) movement as a teenager in Vienna, she was quite progressive with regard to girls and boys going on weekend hikes together in the countryside." Calmeyer comes across as a very human figure, which makes the significance of his work all the more striking. The inclusion of Nussbaum's family's story only highlights the importance of Calmeyer's actions, as does the fact that so much of the book is set after the war rather than during it. The result is a narrative that eschews hagiography in favor of reportage.

An affecting, well-constructed account of an undercovered aspect of history.

Kirkus Reviews