Book Reading & Eyewitness Account

Before reading a few passages from her book "Zwischen uns ein ganzes Leben", German author Melanie Levensohn gave the audience a little insight into her personal family history: Writing the novel was inspired by her husbands French grand cousin, who was murdered in Auschwitz and whose namesake she became by marriage.

Holocaust survivor AnneMarie Yellin put the fictional story in a historic context. She talked about her life specifically her childhood in Chemnitz, Germany, how she experienced the November Pogrom and how she had to flee Nazi Germany. Her father had survived Buchenwald but the family had to split up and AnneMarie had to hide in a catholic convent in Belgium and eventually left Europe to go to the United States in the late 1940th.