Finding Rose: The Search for My Grandmother - Paperback

by Andrew a. Dahl (Author)

I never met my grandmother Rose Liepmann Oppenheim, but a telegram she sent from Nazi Germany confirms that she knew that I had just been born in Shanghai. "Finding Rose" chronicles the persistent efforts of my mother, then in China, and her two brothers, one in Palestine and the other in the United States, to save their mother Rose during the Holocaust.

From Rose's origin as a descendant of long-standing German-Jewish families, I describe the inexorable deterioration of her personal condition under the Nazi regime including the forced bankruptcy of her family business, the seizure of her home, the confiscation of her possessions, and her deportation with her sister, a lifelong companion, to the Izbica transit camp in Poland.

I recount my uncle's desperate search for his mother Rose. Sent to the United States as a teenager in 1937, he joined the U.S. Army as a "Ritchie Boy," becoming an interrogator of German prisoners and General George Patton's jeep driver. Immediately after the War ended, he drove through the Russian-occupied zone with the hope of finding his mother alive.

My mother and her brothers never were able to "find" my grandmother. However, thanks to hundreds of letters from Rose to her children and other family documents carefully stored in old leather "suitcases of sadness" for 80 years, I have come to know her.