Category: Characters – Ashes and Ruins
The Phoney War
Waiting for the Blitzkrieg ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1939, ENGLAND declared war on Germany. Shortly after the radio announcement by the prime minister, the first air-raid warning siren of WWII blared across London. In my historical novel, Ashes and Ruins, Edith’s entire family—Edith, her husband, her mother, her brother, and her infant daughter—rushed to their stone-lined…
Three Waves of Emigration: Three Visas
Roads to Safety for German-Jewish Refugees AFTER THE RISE OF THE NAZI REGIME, life in Germany became difficult for citizens of Jewish heritage. Some Jews, like my father, fled immediately after Hitler came to power. Others, like my grandmother, waited, trying to accommodate their lives to the new reality. As conditions for Jews became increasingly…
Schlaraffia, A Beacon of Laughter in Nazi Germany
After I wrote my three-part article about Jewish life in Nazi Germany, I began to wonder if there was any way for an assimilated German-Jewish man in the 1930s, a man like my grandfather, Hugo Lang, to escape his worries and concerns for an evening. A way to inject some fun into his serious life.…
The Long Path to Auschwitz – Part 3
Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes Part III: 1939 to 1941: Kristallnacht to the Final Solution Kristallnacht: A Nazi Pogrom On the night of November 9–10, 1938, a nationwide anti-Jewish riot swept across Germany. Twenty-four hours of state-sponsored terror ensued. Synagogues were burned while firefighters watched, Jewish-owned shops were vandalized…
The Long Path to Auschwitz – Part 2
Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes: An Article in Three Parts Part II: Summer 1935 to 1938: The Nuremberg Laws, Aryanization, Emigration, and the Anschluss. The Nuremberg Laws: A biological solution to assimilation. Less than a month after the closing ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics, the eighth annual Nuremberg Rally…
The Long Path to Auschwitz: A Three-Part Article
Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes Prologue WHEN I WROTE ASHES AND RUINS, the historical novel based on the true experiences of my grandmother Clara, I knew some regular readers of Holocaust novels would be puzzled by the absence of terror and misery. The majority of books about the Jewish…
How German Jews Lost Their Birthright Citizenship
Originally published as Loss of Citizenship the Nuremberg Way on May 29, 2015 on my personal blog, this article has been slightly modified to make it more current. Also published on kathrynslattery.substack.com on 05/09/2026 * In the second chapter of Immigrant Soldier, Herman speeds toward home on his motorcycle, his mind a swirl of thoughts.…
Policing a Police State
Some weeks ago, I wrote about the Nazi SA and promised to follow up with a discussion of the SS (the Schutzstaffel) and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei). * AFTER HITLER CAME TO POWER, Germany became a totalitarian state that used a complex and brutal system of policing to enforce its policies. The SS was soon the…