A Poignant Anniversary

Kristallnacht is an example of how information can be used and manipulated. The Nazis pretended that the violent riots were a spontaneous reaction to the November 7 killing by a heart-broken Jewish teen, but the response was well-orchestrated. As the mobs torched and smashed everything touched by Jewish hands, police and firefighters were ordered to do nothing – unless there was a threat to Aryan-owned property. In the days to come, over 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. In the ultimate irony, the Nazis imposed an “atonement tax” of one billion Reichsmarks on the Jews to help pay for sweeping all that shattered glass and debris from the streets.

Bettie DennyNovember 9, 2024Comment

If Salmon Can Do It..

In the Wake of MadnessBettie DennyOctober 22, 2024Salmon, Election 2024, VoteComment

It’s A Jungle Out There

At the risk of sounding hopelessly naïve, I thought those horrors and stupidities, the outrageous lies and manipulative propaganda aimed at one group or another were relegated to history or, at least, to a shrinking segment of society. And yet, here I am, listening to the Republican presidential candidate blame Jewish voters if he loses. Here I am, scratching my head as white supremacist Neo-Nazi groups cheer on a former US President and his VP pick as they reiterate an old racist fallacy that immigrants eat pets, with real-world consequences for Haitians trying to build a better life. Here I am, watching an engineering genius, justly credited with the success of Tesla and Starlink, promote the “great replacement theory” that there’s an international conspiracy, led by Jews, to overrun white countries with minorities. Really? Really?

To Pause and To Ponder

One of the biggest surprises of my recent visit to Omaha was the discovery of the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center, a little-known gem with a big mission. Bak is an artist who blends history, symbolism, and personal experience to create layered, thought-provoking paintings. He is also a Holocaust survivor whose haunting memories and unanswered questions inform all of his work.

Remembering My Mom

I’ve written so much about my mother, spent so many years reviewing her photographs and her life, I often quipped to my husband that I won’t have much time left to live my own. While I’ve chronicled the years before I was born in some detail, I rarely talk about my personal memories - the simple times we shared as mother and daughter.

Bettie DennyMay 15, 2024 Comment

Strangers in a Strange Land

Monday marks the beginning of Pesach – always my favorite Jewish holiday, rich in both tradition and meaning. While an important piece of the Passover story is the Jews’ escape from 430 years of slavery, the celebration is not just about freedom but immigration - much like my family’s escape from the Nazis.

In the Wake of MadnessBettie DennyApril 21, 2024Pesach, Passover, immigration Comment

Book News on a Beautiful Day!

Bettie DennyMarch 30, 2024Comment

When Dad Turned 36

On February 20, 1939, New York City’s Madison Square Garden wasn’t filled with hockey fans or boxing enthusiasts but with members of the German-American Bund – more than 20 thousand of them who gathered to support the Nazi cause. Safely in neutral Belgium, my Jewish father celebrated his 36th birthday while Nazi sympathizers railed against the Jews more than 3600 miles away. To this day, I wonder if he would have been shocked by such sentiments infiltrating the land across the Atlantic – the place he hoped would one day offer refuge.

It's Official!

In The Wake of Madness: My Family’s Escape from the Nazis is now on sale everywhere! Ebooks on Amazon.com. Paperbacks can be ordered at your favorite brick and mortar or online bookseller. Special thanks to my advance readers!

In the Wake of MadnessBettie DennyJanuary 31, 2024In the Wake of Madness, Holocaust bookComment

Holocaust Remembrance

When I was growing up, I thought of my parents as the lucky ones. So many had perished during the Holocaust that I did not associate that term with them. After all, they had never been carted off to a labor camp or death camp. They were hunted, but they were not caught. Did that count? Clearly, the upending of their lives was traumatic but not equivalent to the tragedy of whole families and whole communities – be they Jews, Romi and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBTQ, disabled, political enemies like German Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats, or members of the Resistance – exterminated systematically. That’s a long list of “others,” isn’t it? When one group is persecuted in a Fascist regime, they are usually not alone for long.

A New Year

Thoughts for the New Year

Bettie DennyJanuary 2, 2024Comment

Book News & Giveaway!

You can now pre-order a digital copy of In the Wake of Madness: My Family’s escape from the Nazis. Paperbacks coming soon! Goodreads Giveaway of 100 Kindle copies open on Dec. 30

Bettie DennyDecember 24, 2023Comment

1938

Bettie DennyNovember 2, 2023In the Wake of Madness, Kristallnacht Comments

A Tribute to Bryce

It is a simple matter for scientists, explained by the geology of millennia,

layers of sediment stacked like pancakes, laced with

one mineral or another, a bit of iron oxide here, and there, a bit more.

Sandstone, limestone, shale hiding snail fossils and trilobites,

clues in the long game of time, prizes scattered in

Utah’s Crackerjacks box of ancient sand left behind by

a vast inland sea, dehydrated into desert, then rearranged

as plates shifted – contracting, expanding, crashing, twirling,

slipping like dancers coming together and pulling apart,

closing the show with one exquisite, cockeyed lift.

Bettie DennyOctober 6, 2023Bryce, Utah, southern Utah, nature poem, Bryce Canyon Comments

L'Chaim! To Life!

Bettie DennySeptember 17, 2023Comment

Impossible Without Hope

Henk Pander’s haunting childhood memories of the Nazis on Dutch soil were the source of a compelling series of paintings that draw you in with their artistry and, then, the recognition of their fiery history. They were painted toward the end of Pander’s life, intended as much to highlight present-day concerns as document the past.

Hauntings of the Past

Two stories - one of hope and one of hate - sit side by side in my inbox.

Bettie DennyMay 7, 2023Comment

Remembering the Righteous

Because my parents survived the Holocaust, I have thought endlessly – and not very productively – about how so many otherwise decent people did nothing. But the other side of the coin is this: If I were witness to such terror, could I find the courage in myself to act?

There are so many who did find the courage to help in whatever way they could. Non-Jews who put themselves in harm’s way have been dubbed The Righteous Among the Nations. I came across some of their stories while researching my family’s escape from the Nazis for my upcoming book, In the Wake of Madness.

Finding Balance

I have a good friend who loves the familiar. If she finds a good breakfast spot, she wants to go there again and again. In the spirit of the TV show Cheers, she enjoys a place where everybody knows her name. I, on the other hand, can hardly stand walking the same two square miles week after week. I crave change and newness, but I am my best self when I can find that delicate balance between that which is comfortingly ordinary and that which is disconcertingly different.

Bettie DennyMarch 31, 2023 Comment

To Women!

By 1971, my heroes, US Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, embodied all I thought would come to pass. “The test of whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes,” said Bella. It was so profound and yet so obvious that it astonished me that it needed to be said aloud. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” Shirley Chisholm advised, “bring in a folding chair.” I was planning to have a closet full of folding chairs.

Bettie DennyMarch 7, 2023International Women's Day Comments

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