Motherland

Honored that my book, THREE STARS IN THE NIGHT SKY, is included on this 7th grade required reading list for 2019-2020 at Maui Waena Intermediate School in Kahului, Hawaii! A 2018 Junior Library Guild selection - At the age of 12, Gerda Katz fled Nazi Germany and came to America all by herself as an "unaccompanied minor." Gerda's story of family separation reflects the dislocating trauma, culture shock, and excruciating ...

https://www.amazon.com/Unwanted-America-Auschwitz-Village-Between/dp/1524733199/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+unwanted&qid=1561777121&s=gateway&sr=8-1 (Five stars) The Unwanted is my family story, too. I have come to know the people in my mother's small town in Germany -- Stockstadt am Rhein -- where our family lived for over 200 years. My mother and her sister escaped Germany, but the Nazis murdered my grandparents. Families of both victims and perpetrators continue to wrestle with the legacy of the Holocaust. I've written about this subject ...

When my mother was a little girl living in Stockstadt, Germany in the 1930s, storks made their large nest in the bell tower of the old Rathaus. My mother remembers that she could recognize each bird and she would name them. When the weather turned cold, the birds would migrate to Africa to have their own babies. Every spring, she would wait for her "friends" to return. On the first ...

Marking the end of a year of wonderful school visits, fifth graders at Oak Ridge Elementary School present roses to my mother and me.

https://thechroniclesofmiddleschool.com/?fbclid=IwAR3Vo-OZQgnvCB-x16rGfX2Lb44y_uUS17hc3Ja0oKC2CLYgFixOVyFPV9Q

Just received this beautiful thank-you note from Chatham High School students in Chatham, NY. After they read STUMBLING ON HISTORY, I SKYPED with them last month. They showed me their projects of atonement for our national crimes. Very moving!

Students have changed my mother. At school speeches, they have listened to her story of fleeing Nazi Germany at 12 all by herself. They have asked her tough questions: What did you do? Why do you blame yourself? How could you think your parents didn't love you? They have born witness and have helped her to live more comfortably with her past.

Chapman, Fern Schumer. Three Stars in the Night Sky: A Refugee Family’s Odyssey of Separation and Reunion. Illus. by Tom Greensfelder. Lake Bluff: Gussie Rose Press, 2018. 54 pp. $17.99. (9780996472548). Gr. 7-12. The author shares the biography of Gerda Katz, who fled Nazi Germany at the age of 12 and came to America by herself. Like the author’s mother, who befriended Gerda on the boat to America with the One Thousand Children ...

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20190126/crystal-lake-eighth-graders-learn-history-firsthand-from-holocaust-survivor

Last Thursday, as part of the Woodstock Fine Arts Association Creative Living Series, award-winning author Fern Schumer Chapman captivated the audience with an inspiring presentation. Fern shared the emotional story of her mother, Edith Westerfeld, who painfully fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and journeyed to America as an unaccompanied minor refugee. Fern then described Edith’s return to her small German hometown in 2014 to witness the installation of a memorial ...