Featured Speaker
Anna Rosmus was awarded the highest honor of the German Jewish Community, the 1995 Galinski Prize. Her recent work was the subject of the documentary film, The Nasty Girl, which was shown throughout Germany, and in America in English. Twice, Anna Rosmus was featured in a “60 Minutes” profile by Morley Safer. Anna Rosmus sponsored 50th anniversary commemorations in Germany, bringing survivors and liberators together to preserve this memory and to restore the defaced names to the monument in Pocking featured in “60 Minutes.” She succeeded.
Professor Robert E. Herzstein writes in The Journal of The Historical Society II:
Senior German historians wrote dense prose devoted to leaders and institutions, to structures, and to cumulative radicalization. It was all appropriate — and impersonal. In the constructs and the textbooks, there was little room for inquires into local crimes and perpetrators, even when the unnamed bodies were buried near one’s home and the killers lived a few blocks away. In this fog of oversight, Anna Rosmus’ remarkable studies of the Passau region in Bavaria stand out as the rare exception. Despite the opposition of her teachers and of the people who ran Bavaria’s educational establishment in the late 1970s, Rosmus decided to examine the history of the town of Passau during the years of the Third Reich. She has never stopped, and in the process has found the bodies and identified living culprits.
Anna Rosmus represents the legacy of the Holocaust in memory, education and action in the continuing struggle against bigotry and anti-Semitism. Winner of numerous awards for her efforts, she was chosen by the American Society of Journalists and Authors for their Conscience-in-Media Award, presented in a special program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; she received the Sarnat Prize from the Anti-Defamation League for those who fight anti-Jewish bigotry, the coveted Tucholsky death mask and the Holocaust Survivors & Friends’ Holocaust Memorial Award. The D.C. Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Law Foundation honored her with the Immigrant Achievement Award as a “distinguished immigrant who through her extraordinary endeavors has made a substantial contribution to the United States of America and is a proud reflection of the values of this nation.”
As a free lance writer, Anna Rosmus has contributed numerous essays to various magazines and newspapers, such as La Pensée et les Hommes, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The New York Times, The European and Aufbau.
–Courtesy of Jodi Solomon Speakers
