Rita J. Kuhn (b. 1927)

Abstract

The daughter of a German Jewish father and a Lutheran mother who had converted to Judaism, Rita Kuhn lived in Berlin through both the Nazi regime and the war itself. She and her immediate family owed their survival to her mother’s ‘Aryan’ status and to her devotion which prevented their deportation and presumable death. After the war, Kuhn emigrated to the United States, where she pursued her education, earning a master’s degree in classical literature and a PhD in comparative literature. She lives in California, where she is completing work on her memoirs. The following excerpt is taken from that work in progress.