Portland State Magazine Fall 2019

22 apartment and into the homes of various non-Jewish families. Already the “errand boy,” Nussbaum took to delivering the daily meals to Rudi that his mother had cooked for him. While Rudi had to worry about being targeted by the Nazis, Nussbaum largely escaped such scrutiny and was able to remove the hated yellow star, a symbol that identified one as Jewish, from her clothing in mid-January 1943. Because Nuss- baum’s maternal grandmother wasn’t Jewish, her family was able to successfully plead its case to the highest civil authority in the Hague and Nussbaum and her sisters were declared not “fully” Jewish in the eyes of the occupiers. The man who reviewed and adjudicated their case, Hans Calmeyer, helped thousands avoid the bane of being labeled Jewish and is the subject of Nussbaum’s new memoir. After the family won its case with Calmeyer's help, life re- turned to relative normalcy for Nussbaum, considering it was still wartime. But there were still terrifying close calls with Nazi police and little time for fun and frolic. “I grew up very fast and started taking on responsibilities very, very young,” Nussbaum remembers. “As I’ve traveled and spoken to many students in America as an adult, invariably they’ll ask, ‘What did you do for fun?’ There was no time for fun. We had to survive. That was our focus.” AFTER the war, Nussbaum completed her high school diplo- ma, became a fledgling journalist for a while, and spent time at a Quaker school learning Latin and improving her fluency in English. Rudi also continued his education and they ended up back in Amsterdam together doing coursework in chemistry and physics. It was that training that set the stage for Rudi’s eventual career as a nuclear physicist. After Rudi completed his Ph.D. in December 1954, the fam- ily moved to the United States. Following stints in Indiana and California, the Nussbaums decided in 1957, to take a chance on an emerging new school in the Pacific Northwest—Port- land State College—the precursor to Portland State Uni- versity. They loved the climate in Portland and the unusually collaborative faculty vibe they found in the physics department. Nussbaum went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Washington in 1976, commuting between Portland and Seattle while raising a family and teaching German part time at Portland State. “Those were tough years,” she remembers. Eventually, she secured a full-time, tenure track position in 1978. “Learning a new language is so valuable because any language and every language is full of metaphors,” she says. “Metaphors enrich your view of life and help you understand the thinking patterns of people from other cultures.” Nussbaum’s language expertise has helped in her endeavor to get Anne Frank’s authentic text published and the well- known childhood author’s literary potential appreciated. Her father, Otto, the only member of the Frank family to survive the war, had made editorial decisions when he first published The Diary of Anne Frank , which is so widely read today. So far, Liebe Kitty has only been published in German in the countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland due to copyright restrictions. “Anne’s work was an epistolary novel, not just a diary,” says Nussbaum. “And it’s remarkable. How a 14- or 15-year-old had the literary prowess and stamina to be writing with such an eye for what it takes to create literature is really amazing.” HEARING the voices and perspectives of immigrants, minorities and anyone “othered” is critically important to Nussbaum, who sees ominous parallels in today’s immigra- tion debate in the United States to the plight of the Jews in Europe during World War II. To her, there’s no difference between the immigration detention centers along the United States/Mexico border of our time and the ways that Jews and other undesirables were marginalized during World War II. “Concentration camps are what they are,” she says, referring to today’s immigrant detention centers. “I know it. There are no two ways about it.” Yet, she still holds hope. Her husband, Rudi, passed away in 2011 and she now lives in Seattle and enjoys the company of her grown children and grandchildren. She swims regularly and stays involved in advocating for immigrant rights in her community. And all along, she sees the learning of multiple languages as critically important. “Learning another language gives Americans a healthy respect for the struggle many immi- grants who come to the U.S. experience learning the English language,” she says.  Kurt Bedell is a staff member in the PSU Office of University Communications. Laureen Nussbaum will give the talk “Resistance as a Viable Option, Exemplified by Hans Calmeyer, a German Official During World War II” on the Portland State campus Monday, October 14, at 3:30 p.m. in Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 238. The event is free and open to the public and is part of Portland State of Mind, the campus’ yearly festival of arts and culture. Nussbaum's language expertise has helped in her endeavor to get Anne Frank's authentic text published and the well- known childhood author's literary potential appreciated.