I tell of the historic road leading to my great-grandparents Max and Hella Flesch’s deaths in the Terezin concentration camp ten years later. Max died 82 years last week (May 6), 17 days after Hella. www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/p...

I discuss the kidnappings, renditions and imprisonment without due process in detention and concentration camps. Here is a Nazi propaganda photo showing my relative Hans Flesch's arrival at the Oranienburg concentration camp in August 1933. (Hans is in white suit).

I describe the harms my family suffered under the Nazis due to those capitulations, losing professions, academic affiliations, and freedom of speech, as experienced by my great grandfather Max Flesch, pictured above with my great grandmother Hella.

In it, I lay out parallels between Hitler’s January 1933 and Trump’s January 2025 rises to power and their regimes' actions in the first 100 days. I discuss the capitulation of civil society groups - universities, medical organizations, law firms - to the regimes.

My German Family History Makes U.S. Current Events Excruciating to Watch As the granddaughter of German Jews persecuted under Nazi rule, I see terrifying echoes of my family’s past in the Trump administration’s assault on civil institutions, academic freedom and human righ...

The op-ed is here: msmagazine.com/2025/05/15/g...

Read my op-ed released today: “German Family History Makes Current Events Excruciating to Watch”
about chilling parallels between Hitler’s 1933 and Trump’s 2025 rise. Message me if you are also interested in using family storytelling to illustrate dangers of attacks on democracy.