On Germany

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 ...

https://www.nwherald.com/2019/01/14/author-to-tell-mothers-holocaust-survival-story-in-woodstock/ab0613h/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/deerfield/news/ct-dfr-author-visit-schumer-chapman-tl-1220-story.html?fbclid=IwAR34MeI6MacOTtmx-zNMtoSl-LZRVj0x4IHKdudSF_DTNrzQgBy-wxiZ3KU

Presentation at Deerfield High School. Students read IS IT NIGHT OR DAY? and we discussed how the book resonates with today's issues -- restrictive immigration, unaccompanied minors, and anti-Semitism. Thanks to English teacher Stephanie Martin for organizing the event.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/27/opinions/anti-semitism-holocaust-education-intl/index.html?no-st=1543583357&fbclid=IwAR2W9gLlBv20M5NVPyd6rvHwn3EFvg0IvBctjOEeQWc0KCpWWuPZ4T-pFlc

Today is Totensonntag in Germany -- The Sunday of the Dead, a religious holiday in the German Evangelical Church dedicated to the memory of those who have passed away. Each year, a friend and her son remember my family by visiting the stolpersteine memorial stones that were installed in front of the old family home in Stockstadt am Rhein. Here is the picture she sent me today.