92-year-old's memoir tells the forgotten story of a German official who sabotaged Nazi deportations and saved more Jews than Schindler

Hans Calmeyer was a left-wing German lawyer -- his law license was temporarily suspended when he was accused of being a Communist -- who was inducted into the German army under the Nazis, who put him in charge of an office that determined which Dutch people would be deported to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation.

Calmeyer used his position to sabotage Nazi deportations, accepting obviously forged documents that proved that Dutch Jews had non-Jewish grandparents, and slow-walking document processing to keep Jews from being deported. He is estimated to have saved 4,000 Jews from the camps (he was imprisoned as a war-criminal after the war, but released when his actions came to light; he later worked on reparations claims by victims of the Nazis).

One of the people whom Calmeyer saved is Laureen Nussbaum, who married her boyfriend -- another Jew who went into hiding during the occupation -- and moved to the USA after the war, where she became a German language professor at Portland State University.

Nussbaum is now 92 and retired, and has just published Shedding Our Stars, a memoir that weaves her life-story in with Calmeyer's and that of other survivors (Ursula K LeGuin helped advise her on how to frame the story).

Calmeyer's story has been lightly recounted in German and Dutch literature, but Nussbaum's piece marks the first English book on the subject. Nussbaum says it took her so long to write in part because so many of her friends discouraged her from talking about her experiences during the Holocaust. Read the rest