Facing the Enemy

featured guest:
Holocaust survivor Werner Salinger

july 30, 2021

Werner Salinger was was born in Berlin, Germany in 1932. As a child, he experienced Nazi racial oppression and the violence of Kristallnacht.

On January 12th, 1939, his family fled Europe and arrived in the United States aboard the HollandAmerica ship ms Zaandam. Their immigration made possible by movie mogul Carl Laemmle.

Twelve years later Werner arrived back in Germany as a USAF Intelligence officer (NCO), and while there he fell in love with his wife, Martha. It was the height of the Cold War and the Korean War; Since Werner was expecting to go to war with the Soviet Union at any moment, his job was to interrogate former German POW’s who had recently returned from Russia.

At the same time, Werner struggled to introduce his wife Martha, the daughter of a Nazi family, into the midst of a German Jewish refugee family. His presentation will focus both on his experiences as a child in Nazi Germany and his efforts after the war to reconcile this past with a new postwar reality.