Rebuilt from Broken Glass: A German Jewish Life Remade in by Fred Behrend,Larry Hanover,Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer,Hasia K.

Symbolized through a three-hundred-year-old Seder plate, the non secular lifetime of Fred Behrend's relations had established mostly round Passover and the story of the Jewish people's exodus from tyranny. whilst the Nazis got here to energy, the wide-eyed boy and his kin came upon themselves residing a twentieth-century model of that exodus, escaping oppression and persecution in Germany for Cuba and eventually a lifetime of freedom and happiness within the usa. Behrend's adolescence got here to a crashing finish with Kristallnacht (the evening of damaged Glass) and his father's harrowing internment on the Sachsenhausen focus camp. yet he wouldn't be outlined by way of those harrowing situations. Behrend might move directly to adventure brushes with heritage regarding the defeated Germans. by means of the age of twenty, he had run a POW camp packed with Nazis, been an teacher in a software aimed toward denazifying especially chosen prisoners, and been assigned by way of the U.S. military to observe over Wernher von Braun, the dressmaker of the V-2 rocket that terrorized Europe and later leader architect of the Saturn V rocket that despatched american citizens to the moon. Behrend went from a sheltered lifetime of wealth in a long-gone, old-world Germany, living within the gilded compound as soon as belonging to the producer of the zeppelin airships, to a terrible Jewish immigrant in manhattan urban studying English from Humphrey Bogart movies. Upon coming back from carrier within the U.S. military, he rose out of poverty, equipped a winning enterprise in big apple, and again to go to Germany a dozen occasions, giving him precise point of view into Germany's makes an attempt to surmount its Nazi past.